Dream a little dream....

Let's talk about dreams for a second.

Not the sleep kind, where you're made of cheese and crackers are chasing you through the aisles at Starbucks.

(That might just be me.)

I mean the kind where you want something and you go after it.

For a while now, I've been in this weird phase where I was kind of devoid of most ambitions.  I thought it was depression, to be honest, because that's kind of what depression does, the bastard.  Sucks all the life out of you.

Turns out, I had a low-grade infection in my face.  Not even kidding.  I went to the dentist for a root canal, and two days afterward, all of a sudden, I WOKE UP.  It sounds kind of dramatic, and it was.  I went to bed feeling fairly normal (for me), and woke up like friggin' Snow White, with all the birds singing and normal human energy out of nowhere.

I asked the doc about it, because frankly, it was both exciting and a little terrifying, since I have one of those brains that immediately goes to you probably have a tumor, because people totally get an energy surge just before they drop dead, and I wanted to make sure to ask a pro before going all Web MD Warrior on myself.

Apparently, the infection in my jaw had been there for a long time, given the amount of (yes, gross, fair warning) necrosis in the tissue, and the way my jawbone had gone all spongey.  (They had to put in a titanium peg to give me a new tooth, even.  Sorry you'll have to think about that.  It really is as weird and icky as you think it might be.)

And living with a low-grade infection that's ever-so-slowly getting worse had been sucking out my body's will to live, apparently.  Taxing my immune system, causing me to live with a background noise of pain that I wasn't even aware I was fighting until it was gone and suddenly...I could think again.  I had no idea it was that bad.

It's been a month since the antibiotics kicked the crap out of my infected face.

I've literally done more in the past month than I have in the past year.  Things I wanted to do, but ultimately just meh-ed about because nothing seemed worth the energy to put into them.  Just before my tooth actually blew up, I'd even stopped dreaming about doing things.  I just thought I would wait out this depression monster sitting on my chest, and then, the ideas would start flowing again.

And now, they have.  And boyhowdy, have they been flowing.

My brain apparently saved up all the things it meh-ed over, and brought them back, with friends.

Thank all things holy.

So I've been working on things.  Big things.

• 100 Days is the name of a series of 100 zines (not daily, just in total) that I think I talked about in the last entry.  I had to take a break when I caught some kind of mutant cold and then immediately gave myself food poisoning with some rather unfortunate ham, but I'm back at it now.  I'm trying for one a day, but some are more complex than others, and I'm fine with them taking more than one.  Which led to....
• CUT & PASTE.  It's an online course about making creative one-page zines.  It's my first foray back into the world of teaching online, which I haven't done since 2003, really.  I'm learning all new software, all about video and video editing, and how to deliver content in an easy, accessible, FUN kind of way.  I missed teaching.  It's kind of where my strength is, and when I was giving classes in 2003, it was just too labor intensive -- everything was manual and required code and sixteen programs and a lot of tech issues.  Now, the tech's caught up, and this class is going to be awesome.  Which THEN led to two things...
• A supersecret project that's not quite ready for prime time.  I'll be letting the world know about it, though.  Soon.  Very soon.  It involves another thing I got away from, but loved doing very much.  I'm aiming for mid-June, or sooner, so there's not a long wait. AND....
• A whole LIST of online classes.  This first one's my learning curve.  I'm pretty sure once I get the hang of the editing and such, any subsequent classes will be much easier, and, of course, even better.  Which is probably why my brain went all sideways and made a list of about sixty more that I'd like to put out as soon as possible -- some re-releases of things I did before that are still relevant today, some brand new, some that I've had fully-fleshed-out outlines for for AGES and just didn't know how they were technologically feasible.

In other words, the dam broke, y'all.

Everything I've ever done well has been in one of two arenas (or both, simultaneously).  Teaching, or storytelling.

The fact that I didn't recognize this until now is baffling to me.

But with the suddenly-no-longer-infected clarity, I know now, and that's what counts.

I think I'm gonna need a few more hours in the day.

Get on that, Science....I got some dreams to chase.