Last weekend, Aaron and I came home to find a flyer on our door, asking us to vote on the Pepsi Refresh website for a memorial playground in the open field across the street, which has been zoned as a city park for decades. Maybe it's selfish, but our first reaction was, "Hell, no."

Let me explain why...

I decided to be all domestic on Monday and bake some pasta for dinner. It's not as decadent as you might think, either: whole wheat rotini, low-fat Ricotta, fat-free milk, and only five Weight Watchers Points® per one-cup serving.

One thing I found funny was how driven I was to write down bizarre dreams that I remembered. I found pages upon pages of scrap paper covered front and back with detailed descriptions of my brain's nightly wanderings, as if I thought they held importance. Now, a few years later, I glance at them, recognize them, maybe remember them vaguely, then toss the papers in the trash.

I'm not nearly as driven to record my dreams as I used to be. Last night or the night before, though, I woke up from dreaming all tense, heart pounding — those are the kind of dreams that I'm inclined to record, just because they obviously touched some innate fear of mine that I might want to look deeper into.

The dream I'm thinking of started out as me and Aaron having just moved from our house into an apartment on the second or third floor of a building. I remember this because I was photographing a local parade, and kept forgetting things at home, necessitating multiple runs up a very long flight of stairs. At one point, I realized I'd left my camera on the front step of our apartment, ran back to get it, and noticed (though not right away) that the front lens element was cracked. Which, in true dream-world fashion, quickly became pretty much obliterated. Aaron and I then both ran up the stairs to find that our apartment had been broken into, our big-screen TV and gaming consoles and furniture all gone... and I could hear the culprits still in the bedroom, gathering more loot. In the dream, it seemed reasonable to me that a.) they must have figured out all the stuff we had by looking through the photos on my camera, and b.) I should react by yelling frantically and alerting the thieves to our presence.

This could go so many ways: privacy concerns (I'm all over the internets, of my own volition), excessive love of "stuff", or any number of more detailed analyses. There were, of course, more details in the dream, but the final scene was what stuck in my head when I woke.

The brain is a funny thing. Deciding whether it's just blowing off steam or trying to make sense of its own inner thoughts can be either immensely helpful or immensely pointless.