The trip home from Chicago was essentially uneventful. Until I was checking out of the car park place (it would be much more convenient and not much more expensive to park at the airport, but I had a car stolen from their garage a few years ago and can't bring myself to park there again). A black cat crossed in front of my car right before I pulled up to the little building where you hand in your ticket and are told how much to pay - this should have been a clue. Now, this is a heavily built-up area right next to the airport and I don't think I've ever seen animals of any sort in the vicinity.

I handed in my ticket with the magnetic stripe on it, my AmEx card and the discount card that gets me 10% off the parking rate. The guy at the cash register asked me when I parked my car. It was late, I was tired and my brain would not function. Plus, why wouldn't he know that from the ticket? I told him Wednesday and he asked to see my itinerary. At this point my voice became shriller and louder than usual and I told him it was in the back and I wasn't getting it out because he had that information on the ticket. He turned the ticket over and over, apparently trying to see the invisible writing that would tell him when I parked. It finally dawned on me that he didn't know the ticket needed to be read by a machine, not human eyes, in order to tell him the amount owed. How could he not have been trained on something so basic? My tolerance for fundamental incompetence grows thinner and thinner.

On another subject...
My father was a hypnotist. Not for a living, but not quite as a party trick either. He did entertain people with this ability, and helped a few friends lose weight or stop smoking, as I recall. My mother was his best subject. She could be effortlessly hypnotized and would take his post-hypnotic suggestions easily. I was skeptical of the whole thing and was never quite sure whether to believe it or not.

My father never used the gold-watch-on-a-chain method, rather he spoke quietly and calmly, persuading the subject with his voice that they were feeling sleepy and that they needed to close their eyes, but not fall so deeply asleep that they would be unaware of what was going on around them. He would ask the hypnotizee to hold up their arms and would tell them that their arms were too heavy to support, that there were lead weights attached to them, and that their arms would drop to their sides. With a good subject, such as my mother, their arms would drop and they would not be able to lift them up. You might see a small sign of struggle on their faces, even though their eyes were closed, as if some part of them knew that this lead weight (or light as a feather, or stiff as a board, depending on which method my father chose) business was hokum.

One time we were in our living room at home, and I have the sense that someone else was there with our family, perhaps a couple of my parents’ friends. He hypnotized my mother and gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion that when she awoke she would see a small dog in the room that was running around and barking in a frantic manner. When she “came to”, she did indeed see a small dog, yapping around our ankles, asking us why we couldn’t see it too. To her, the dog was real, and so was her confusion at our insistence that there was no dog.

My father could never hypnotize me. He tried many times, from when I was small through my teenage years. I think it frustrated him that he couldn’t accomplish this, because he was successful with so many other people. I'm sure this is linked with my need to control the environment around me, although I didn't realize that until many years later.

Cats: Hercules and Tabitha are all silky and fluffy after getting their mats removed, and Hercules teeth are shining clean. He seems a bit skittish about being around us, probably afraid we're going to jam him into another cat carrier. Tabitha is having some blood tests done, because she's lost a pound over the past year and she was only a little over 8 pounds to begin with. The vet doesn't know if she's sick or if the other cats are keeping her from eating or if she's losing weight because she's eating their diet food and she needs a different diet.

Dreams:
1. An old boyfriend was driving me through the backyards of old Craftsman-style houses, across their driveways and their lawns. He was trying to get us away from something unknown.
2. I was to receive a gray and white kitten in the mail, but was afraid I wouldn't be back in time to receive it.
3. I was in a college dormitory, where I was supposed to start living. The rooms were arranged around a square hallway and I walked through the halls, noting what the girls had outside their rooms. Many had odd telephone-on-a-stick contraptions. One of these was pale green plastic, shaped like a flower, with the numbers embedded in the end of each petal. I wondered why they had phones outside their rooms, and whether I'd have to get one.