My dreams have been excitable and volatile, lately. Africa and planes and anxious meanderings, and distant friends, all figure prominently in the wrack and flotsam of my very late nights.

I'm preparing for a wonderfully intensive rehearsal process just about to begin. "Metamorphoses" with ART (for which I was called in to audition on extremely short notice) opens on the 8th of September, begins rehearsing on the 31st of this month, and I've already been writing long summaries and commentaries on Ovid as part of a dramaturgy package I also agreed to work on.

As I mentioned before, I haven't been this excited by a project in a long time. Not to say that I'm not proud of the work I've been doing recently; far from it. It's rather that it's been awhile since a project has looked to well-occupy so many of my passions; antiquities and verse, an intelligent theatre, and an imaginative theatre, and a physical theatre all at once.

Ovid in particular has long held sway in my heart of hearts, vying with Virgil and Catullus for my highest affections. I'm deeply steeped in his verse, fully immersed in his sense of wonder and numinousness.

When I dream I dream of running and cloudscapes and groaning trees. I dream of loneliness and panic and old, seamed faces. Occasionally there are horrors and nightmares that I half-consciously race through, willing myself even in my sleep to push past as much of the terror as I possibly can.

Today was a slow day at work. Heat and sunlight pushes my residents to the Library or to shaded parks by the water, anywhere but their non-air-conditioned rooms. I played poker with my residents, five card draw with a number of characters taken straight from Joyce's Ulysses, writ rather large.

I took my Mom out to dinner tonight, burgers and fries and a chain restaurant that she really likes. We poked fun at each other and complimented how well we both seem to age, and for all the world I felt like a tired sea bird, glad to have made landfall once more.