Morning Madness

Recurring Dreams:

This morning I had a dream much like one of the recurring stress dreams I have had since I was 19. I was in a restaurant, waitressing on my first day of work, and had been given no training. It was a small place in a highway side place, somewhere in the middle of nowhere--and I think it was oddly morphed with a hair salon. As I watched the guy on the motorcycle outside the restaurant, I noticed that he was Val Kilmer, in disguise. He had a group of people with him, one of whom turned out to be Angelina Jolie. She came in and ordered an odd breakfast:

Vegetables, vitamins, and chocolate pudding. As I milled around the kitchen looking for gourmet vitamin capsules, I woke up to NPR.

Capit*a*l Christmas Tree:

Unfortunately, the story I awoke to was not stranger than the one in my dream. It was about this year's US Capitol Christmas Tree, a gift from the State of Washington: a majestic 65 foot Silver Fur.

The story narrated the difficult process of cutting, catching and transporting the tree--even ventured into cosmetic surgery for the decoration...

And all for the bargain price of a quarter of a million dollars. Yes, that's right. $250,000. How ridiculous can we possibly be? Well, the NPR reporter assures us, this is actually a bargain seeing as last year's tree cost a cool million. That's $1,000,000 in case you didn't catch that.

Reminds me of an A.L. Webber song: "Try not to get worried, try not to turn onto problems that upset you, oh...everything's alright, yes, everything's fine." Only this time the oil is not for Christ; we are anointing ourselves. I mean, the poor will always be with us, so why not?

Let them eat cake.

Incidentally, I missed the press conference in which Laura Bush unveiled the artwork for the White House Christmas invitations this week.