Books, Zombies, and Dreams

Last night I dreamed that my mom and my brother were zombies. The whole thing was quite strange, because I didn’t look like me, and my mom and brother didn’t look like my real mom and brother…..yet I knew that the person in my dream was me and that the other people were my mom and brother. Strange. It sure is awkward though when you’re trying to buy lemonade from a lemonade stand and all of a sudden your mom starts gnawing your fingers off. It’s even more awkward when you go to a movie theater to try and escape your sudden zombie-family and the employee is trying to sing karaoke while the previews are playing. But he was a pretty good singer, so maybe he should audition for American Idol or The Voice. Too bad my brother followed me and started eating everyone…..

I have really weird dreams. Trust me, the zombie dream is nothing compared to some of the stuff my sleeping mind has come up with. I’m pretty sure I could give Hollywood a run for their money in the “strange movie” arena with some of my dreams. Case in point: I once had a dream that aliens invaded the earth and drove around in those big white Astro vans, kidnapping people so they could study them and then locking them away in dungeons. Me and a group of friends were some of the only people left on the face of the earth that hadn’t been kidnapped. So naturally we decided to wait at McDonald’s for an elite group of alien hunters to pick us up in their mock-up alien Astro van so that we could join them in their quest to free mankind from their alien masters. I don’t know about you guys, but that dream is movie material. Seriously, if a movie like Independence Day can be so popular, then surely my dream movie could make me some money. (PS: if I see an Astro van alien movie come out, I’ll know you stole my idea and I will sue you. Haha.)

What’s so crazy is I don’t even watch alien or zombie movies. I mainly watch comedies, a few chick flicks, and TV shows like NCIS and Law and Order. So I guess I’m just super good at soaking in movie previews that play in the commercial breaks and turning them into dream-movies. Or my brain just gets really bored while I sleep so it decides to exercise its creativity. That means I’m a brilliant person like Einstein, right? Yea I know, it’s a stretch.

Not so related to my current topic whatsoever, but I chose last night to reveal a “secret” to my husband that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for quite some time. It was late and he was just getting ready to drop off to sleep, but the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey baby, you wanna know a crazy secret?

Him: Sure.

(Because who doesn’t want to know a crazy secret about their spouse? He probably thought I was about to tell him something really crazy about my awkward middle school days. Or my awkward high school days. Or my awkward adult days. Scratch that, he probably knew that I said “crazy secret” just to keep him interested long enough so he wouldn’t fall asleep while I was talking.)

Me: I’ve been thinking about writing a book.

Him: Do it. You’d be good at it.

Me: But I have no idea what I’d write about.

Him: You’ll think of something.

And then he went to sleep.

Shablam. So now all you people know my secret too. But I wasn’t kidding at all. I would love love LOVE to write a book, but I have no clue what I would write it on. I could just take all of my alien zombie dreams and put them into a book, but that could result in me being labeled as insane and placed in a straight jacket. I’ve also thought about some other topics, but it resulted in a brainstorming session that turned out like this:

Title: “How to Survive Being a Newlywed, Full-time Employee, Full-time Student, and Being Involved in Two Ministries without Going Crazy”

Manuscript: Eat lots of chocolate.

Title: “How to Lose the Fifteen Pounds You Gained from Eating all that Chocolate While Being a Newlywed, Full-time Employee, Full-time Student, and Being Involved in Two Ministries”

Manuscript:  It’s not worth the effort. Just eat more chocolate.

Title: “How Do You Deal with a Cat that Ate Jesus off the Family Bible?”

Manuscript: He’s a cat, there’s nothing you can do. Except don’t buy another Family Bible, because he’ll just eat that Jesus too. (Oh snap, that rhymed. Maybe I could turn this into a poem?)

I’m good at making stuff up, but I’m not sure I could come up with enough materiel on those topics to write a book. And then I would still have to take all of that made-up stuff and try to get a publisher to accept it. That would probably also result in me being labeled as insane and placed in a straight jacket. Or it would make a lot of publishers snort milk out of their noses from laughing so hard at my plight to become an author. Or both.

No really though, I would like to write a book. I just have no idea what it would be about. So I’m totally open to any suggestions if you have any. And in the meantime, I’m going to keep brainstorming and writing this blog. I’m sure if I’m meant to write a book then I’ll stumble on a topic one day that I’m passionate about enough to actually research and write about it.

That’s kind of my problem though, I’ve got a whole of things that interest me and I’m not sure what to do with all of those ideas that run through my mind. Here’s a taste of my thought process (you may want to eat some chocolate first before reading this maze of thoughts, because it may cause your brain to explode….)

“I really loved Spanish in high school. I also really loved going to Peru. Maybe God wants me to be a missionary to Peru one day. I should probably get back familiar with my Spanish, especially since there are a lot of Hispanic people in my community that I could be ministering to right now. That reminds me, I need to be educating myself more on the piano, since music is my current ministry. I haven’t really worked on that in a while. You know what else I haven’t done in a while? Spent time with my horses. I really really really really need to do that. I would love to have a farm one day with lots of horses. I would love even more to have a therapeutic horse riding facility for special needs kids. I love special needs kids. I love kids. I hope I start having kids soon so I can be a mommy. Except I want to be a stay at home mommy. But I can’t quit my job. Oooh! If I blog and write full-time and make good money off of that then I can be a stay at home mom and still have a good income. I could just be a teacher later on and teach at the school my kids go to. Then I would be able to be off on the same holidays and drop them off to school and pick them up too. But then I’d have to go back to school and get a teaching degree. Which means I would need to save up for school…..which means I need to stay in the job I have so I can earn money. OR, I could work full-time in ministry one day and just be able to home-school my kids and take them with me to church. That doesn’t require me going back to school, which is a lot cheaper. Speaking of cheap, I really need to find some cheap tires for my car….”

I can 100% guarantee that this thought process runs through my head at least once a day, usually more than that. And quite honestly, there are some days where it for-real stresses me out. I take that back, most days it really stresses me out. Which usually results in me praying something like this: “God, will You please just tell me straight up which direction You want me to go in? Because I have NO clue which path I’m supposed to take. Why does everything have to interest me??” So when I ran across an article titled “Stop Waiting for God to Tell You What to do with Your Life”, I immediately clicked the link to the website and prayed my computer would stop acting like a stubborn turtle and just display the stinkin’ page already. The article was written by Justin Zoradi and included all sorts of motivating statements and “aha moments” like this:

“We all want to do meaningful work and find our passion, but I can guarantee you this: Your purpose in life will never be written on the wall. And it will never be revealed to you in full.”

“You want to do meaningful work? Stop sitting on your hands waiting for God to tell you what to do.”

“I believe God joins us only when we take that initial risk. If you have a tiny twinge of passion toward anything, you have to jump right through it on your own. It is there that God will meet you.”

The problem is (as evidenced by my above thought process); I have all sorts of things that I am interested in. And there are even more things that I haven’t mentioned yet, such as: freeing girls from human trafficking, be an advocate for pro-life, be a stand-up comedian on a cruise ship so that I never have to leave said cruise ship (except that wouldn’t work because when I tell jokes I always start laughing before I get finished, which sort of ruins things), be a fitness trainer (my gym’s logo would say: come workout and then we can go eat chocolate), own a coffee shop, tour with a Christian band….. you get the point. So it’s hard for me to read that statement “if you have a tiny twinge of passion toward anything, you have to jump right through it on your own…” because there are literally about fifty things that I have at least a tiny passion for, and seeing as how I enjoy sleeping and I am unable to do all fifty things at once, I decided that my first pursuit would be the book-writing thing. I mean, I’ve been writing all sorts of stuff since I was first able to write, so maybe writing will just be my hobby. If it takes me somewhere, that’s great! If not, then I’ll just start producing movies based off of my dream. Oh, I kid. Besides, if writing a book is not what God wants me to do, then I’ll fail miserably and I’ll still have 49 other dreams to pursue. Sounds like a no-fail plan, huh? Well, unless I actually pursue each and every one of my 50 ideas and all of them come up short. Then that would be a fail. But at least I could say that I had a super interesting life, right? So then it would sort of wind up being a success.

At the end of the day, all I know is I’m just super glad I woke up with my right hand in-tact and covered with skin. Because it was weird for my dream-self to see my right hand with no skin, not to mention a little bit gross. And obviously, I’m glad that my mom and brother are actually not zombies and I’m definitely glad that theater employees don’t sing karaoke while working.  Oh crap, I just saw an Astro van outside of my house…..

“Don’t love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, ‘I will never fail you. I will never abandon you.’”    ~Hebrews 13:5