Anxiety medley

In the dream, my car was already in the shop having some repair done. The owner found me at the library to tell me that my car could be painted for $61. Seemed odd because that had nothing to do with the operational repair I was having done. And yet, it was awesome because that was significantly less than what I knew it would cost just to have some scratches fixed. Better still, I could change the color.

We started talking about it and he was pointing to things for color references when I remembered I'd recently picked up a bunch of paint chips from a hardware store. I spread them out over half of a large table and started looking through them frantically. I liked the blues but set them aside with my default position: red is the best color for a car.

Staff that I knew from the library looked at me impatiently from the other side of the table. Apparently they wanted the whole surface even though I'd left lots of space to share.

All the red chips had only subtle differences, changing with the light from the windows, and I wasn't even sure the auto shop could match any of them since they were samples for wall paint, not for automobiles. I was determined to pick the right color though.

The auto shop owner was still waiting. I wonder if my car's been fixed yet and how much that's going to cost in addition to the paint job.

Terri, a girl a couple of grades behind me in high school, approached. She apparently worked at the library now, but was still high school aged. She had started working on the other side of the table but when she didn't have enough room, she offered to help me in the bubbly, friendly manner I remembered.

I handed her a stack of samples and asked her to find a larger sized one with three colors on it: two blues and one red. I thought it might be the red I was looking for, but I felt so pressured for time that I couldn't find it with everyone standing around waiting for me. Terri found it right away, but I still wasn't certain about the color under the mix of outdoor and incandescent light.

Going to the auto shop to look at colors they actually had seemed like a better idea at that point.


Surmised from this dream:
1. I was overly optimistic about painting my room the other day when I picked up a big stack of paint samples.
2. Being watched and sensing others' impatience reduces my functionality significantly. I hate making people wait.
3. My fine sense of color differentiation coupled with perfectionism is highly detrimental to decision making.
4. The scratches on my car door that my mom caused five years ago still irritate the fuck out of me.
5. I wish it was cheaper to paint my whole car than to fix some scratches because I never liked its color.


A year ago on TTaT: Behind the Harry Potter lines: redux