Do I wake or sleep?

My apartment complaints have been addressed, to some extent. After my last entry on the subject, wherein I stopped by the office in person to show them pictures of the Cabrini-Green mess into which my apartment was rapidly devolving, the property manager promised to send someone the next day (that is, Thursday) to take care of it. This didn't happen. I called them up Thursday evening and left a sharply worded message involving phrases like "I expect this to be taken care of" and "I pay a lot of money to live here." I gave them explicit instructions on where to go in the apartment (I think, re: the leaks, they've just been patching them up on the roof, which doesn't take care of the internal degradation. And it doesn't seem to help the leaks anyway--they're still dripping when it rains) and I left them signs on the door to the apartment, and up in the loft. Explicit, hard-to-miss sign, with arrows and highlight headers. It seems to have worked--they came on Friday and the loft looks much better. The other two problems were that the light in the foyer was out (after last fall, with that terrible rain, that has happened a lot--every time it rains for any length of time, lots of plaster comes fluttering down from the ceiling, and then it starts dripping, and of course the light shorts out). Sigh. This was fixed on the Friday visit. The third problem was that there was very low water pressure in the bathtub faucet, making showers a problem--this was not fixed, but they did promise to return on Monday.

I woke up this morning to the sounds of them stomping around on top of the roof. (I'd actually slept through the alarm so this was a good thing.) Poor Tibby was terrified; he was cowering between the futon mattress and the wall, shivering from the big clompy sounds. Precious baby, he's so fewocious around horrible feather toys but when it's outside his comfort zone he reverts to the kitten he still is. Tatia of course was all blase about the sounds, cleaning her paws demurely. I woke up, realized it was almost 10 am, and called the person for whom I'm working today who was supercool about it. She actually said to take my time, and I could even shower if I needed to (I did). I have such a hard time sleeping at this time of year, and last night it took me over an hour to fall asleep.

Speaking of--I had the most vivid nightmare Saturday night, about a plane crash right in front of me. I remember I was on a wide open space, like a tarmac, and it was dark and cloudy as though it were about to storm. Looking to the left I saw in the sky a jet streaking across the sky, and then it suddenly was plunging toward the earth, although at a diagonal and cutting this way and that, the way a flat object will fall underwater, but still moving very fast. It hit the tarmac very hard and was skidding very fast toward this building. I remember watching it, my eyes wide open and all around me people were saying "Oh my God!" and I was thinking "this is really happening--I am watching people die, I am watching a major disaster." I was shocked but not immobilized--I realized immediately what was happening (which is par for the ocurse--the few times I've been in emergencies I do not panic but am pretty calm). I remember running away because the plane hit the tarmac so hard, bits of the plane broke off, hit the building and rebounded and flew over the tarmac, and I thought it might hit me. Very, very vivid dream--I can still feel it. It would make a great image for a movie.

Tired.

More Shakespeare in Love insights: I watched the director's commentary track last night and he talked about the theme of sleeping and dreaming in the movie. I hadn't noticed that and I love that theme (in general, I mean). "I would sleep forever if I could dream myself into a company of players..." I've always been interested in people who are said to be dreaming their lives away--it's always been presented as a bad thing, as behavior to be avoided--but what if that's their reality (i.e., it feels more real)? What is real? One of Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books (the first sequel, I believe, A Wind in the Door) asks that question. I feel more real on stage sometimes than in some "real" situations.

None of the commentary tracks mentions a couple of inside takes I noticed. Will's fascination with the actor Thomas Kent (before he knows who s/he really is) and then when he does know--that could be a reference to Shakespeare's suggested homosexuality. Also, when Will first enters Viola's room she asks him "Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?" I believe that's a nod to the tempest regarding whether or not S-peare actually wrote his plays.

One of my new favorite moments in that movie is when the guy playing the Chorus goes out at the top of the show and can't get the lines out (because he has a terrible stutter). Will is dying backstage, the audience is sweating, all seems lost--and then he finds his stride, intoning those well-known words. "Two households, both alike in dignity..." It's just...wonderful. It brings tears to my eyes, it sends chills down my spine because yes, theater is about transformation; I felt the frisson of "oh God, yes. It happened."

I'd never noticed how Shakespeareanly deux ex machina (what a wildly awkward phrase!) Queen Elizabeth's appearance at the end is, but yeah, there it is. "How does this end?" Her appearances are also so symmetrical--her scenes are in the beginning, the middle and the end of the movie.