Flukt fra virkeligheten

My whole life I have been what you might call an escapist. Although I'm pretty pragmatic and goal oriented in lots of ways, I spend huge blocks of time living in a fantasy world. For the past six months or so I have had an elaborate fantasy that I enter as a way of getting myself to fall asleep. It has some standard elements (the location, what kind of person I am in the fantasy, two or three things that happen to the person during the course of the fantasy) that I elaborate on with all kinds of details, which differ slightly each time. A lot of those details have to do with what it looks like where she lives.

From a very early age I became fascinated with maps and houses. For me these have always been key elements of my day dreaming. I would draw maps and floor plans to illustrate my day dreams for myself. Nearly every time I got the chance to see the interior of an interesting house some corner or another would capture my attention and prompt me to design a house around that feature. It goes without saying that when I discovered the illustrations that Swedish painter Carl Larsson made of his home, I spent hours pouring over the details. I didn't really like the aesthetic per se (too pretty for me), but I loved the attention to detail and how evocative the images were. I have always adored novels with maps, particularly The Wizard of Oz. It's no accident that my second and third academic book projects have to do with the writing of space in literature.

Until now, I've never understood why my obsession with houses and interior decorating seems to have no impact on the state of the space I actually live in. It may seem paradoxical, but I want my space to be as neutral and minimalist as possible. If I didn't share my space with two other people it wouldn't be more decorated, it would be even more minimalist. Now I'm starting to see that the obsession is a feeder for my escapism, not something that I particularly want to put into practice.

I'm the same way about clothes--I always wished we could import the practice of wearing blue Mao jackets so that I could wear a relaxed uniform. I have a pathological aversion to clothing with labels and patterns and bright colors. I like blending into the background. I want people to hear me, not my clothes.

If I see a house I like, the process of going from "gee, look at that lovely house" to a full-blown, escapist fantasy of the life that I would lead (most often alone) in that particular house is incredibly short. Probably only seconds. KE steels himself for my squeals and sighs every time we're out driving and pass some dilapidated old house. Studio apartments, lofts, brick storefronts, cabins, RVs, row houses, bungalows, and classic farm houses all make my heart race.

I guess I'm thinking about this because I'm feeling really rotten today. I'm pretty sure E and I really do have bronchitis. It feels like what asthma sounds like. That shallow, tickling breathing, endless dry coughing, and a complete loss of energy. All I want is to be somewhere else, hibernating. E has had an awful day. He woke up vomiting--we think from swallowing so much mucous, and was incredibly crabby all day. Poor E, but even more so, poor KE, who was a total saint today. He puts up with so much. The worst thing with E in this state is that he's just not a pleasant or polite person to be around. We're really worried that he might actually end up being an obnoxious and rude person.