So yeah. I dreamed about the earthquake in China. The boyfriend thinks i'm nuts, but i know i'm not.
Yesterday morning i awoke from a dream about the worst earthquake imaginable happening. I was still living here in San Diego, i think, and hiking up a steep mountain trail to visit a nature preserve or something. Around a bend, there were some guys with a truck working on the road, and it appeared that my path was blocked. I was just starting to ask if it was possible to get through, when my words were suddenly swallowed up by the ground violently shaking and undulating. We were all knocked off of our feet, and suddenly the Earth literally rotated, somehow(!), so that down was up and all around. i found myself dangling into nothingness and grabbing clumps of dirt and grass, desperately trying to hold on and stay alive while everything around me moved and shook. Clods of dirt fell on my head, tumbled off my shoulders, and disappeared beyond my frantic kicking legs to the shoreline "down below", which seemed to be a million miles away... It was kinda like the ending to that movie Sunshine- did anyone see that? Time and space were all skewed and maniacal. It was terrifying.
Then the earth re-aligned, there were several, violent aftershocks and suddenly i was lying on the path gasping for breath and wide-eyed with fear. I looked around, but the truck and all but one of the road crew guys were gone. He looked scared. i told him i wanted to go home, and pointed down toward the beach, but he just shook his pale face at me and said "uh-uh. It's all gone, now. You can never go back." I was crying and crying because i knew i would never see Nat again.

Hm! Then i woke up, made coffee, and tried to shake the feeling of almost having died. I turn on the computer to check my email, and there it is. A story about a horrible earthquake in China, having occurred hours before. What in the hey? Did i feel it happening, somehow? Did i "predict" it? Was it just totally f***ing random??? I suppose i'll never know. I have lived through a terrible earthquake (the Loma Prieta, 7.1, in the Bay Area; i was almost eleven), so i suppose it is possible that this was merely a dream pieced together with the brain's natural detritus (memories/experiences). Bizarre, either way.

Obviously, i feel terrible for everyone there. As with all natural disasters, my heart goes out to them. i hope that soon they can get back to some semblance of normalcy.

In other news, because i hate feeling all heavy, i have been noticing lately in my news-reading YouTube-ing forays that an awful lot of folks are freaking out over being "FIRST!" in the comments to any given video (or article). Of course i find it to be extremely annoying, mostly because i feel like you would have to be one self-important son of a bitch to get your jollies that way. But then i began to notice another phenomenon: a growing number of "Frist!"s.
Now, generally someone later on in the comments will remark on the sorry state of the #1 commenter's life. They will point out that in their haste to be something so lame as "First!", they actually managed to spell the word itself incorrectly. And for awhile i would force a "fft" of bitter agreement out at these observations, until it dawned on me that perhaps this "First" phenomenon has actually (please forgive my use of the word) evolved. Maybe, just maybe, it has mutated much the way that leet speak has, into a purposeful misspelling. (See "teh" or "!!!11!!1!")
Seeking to further my knowledge on this subject, i typed "frist first comment" into my Blackle search bar and waited for the results. Hmmm... not much, to be honest! But i did find a farcical representation of a generic first-poster here, which was somewhat enjoyable. And the comments to that video itself were further illuminating. However, it looks like the post is from a year ago, which means i'm way behind on my internet trends. Not surprising. I guess if anyone were reading this blog, they're probably type "old" in the comments below, but that is a whole 'nother phenomenon. I'm sure the "old."sters and the "Frist!"sters are nothing but the best of friends; people who are just whizzing around, experiencing the internet as one would "experience" a book if they just held it open with one hand and flipped the pages quickly past their thumb with the other, not actually reading a thing but maybe picking up on some random, chaotic words.

In other news, there are wild parrots, crows, seagulls, and even the occasional duck flying by our windows at any given time of day. Lovely.