Home is beginning to take shape in my dreams. The freeway featured in last night's dream where a headphone and scarily accurate Google chat feature allowed Steph to voluntarily listen to me while I was going about my business. Also there was a receipt printer that would allow short stories to be prepended or appended to the takeout order, up to five programmed in at once. I had to wade through ankle high snow to get involved in the car collision that was the genesis of the idea.

When I was trying to walk home after that (IRL that would be a bad plan with my current body) someone waved me over to the other side of the highway-crossing bridge to try to recruit me for a voter outreach program, which mostly involved standing around in public places interacting with people. I allowed as how this would be a bad idea, medically.

Dude (looked a lot like an older Nate who had been through some rough stuff) started going into his own medical issues, and how he was on "a lot" of medication. (Insert hollow laugh in Spoonie here.) He was telling me about how much medication he was on in language that would be deliberately shocking to someone who had "never been sick a day in their lives" (roll eyes here) but to someone who sometimes gets two bags at the pharmacy the reaction was more "oh is that all". (I know, I know, disability is not a competition, except in the good ol' USA we make it one in order to make sure that anyone getting help has the "correct" guilty Protestant work ethic.) I started thinking about how to best phrase the fact that it's not that my meds knock me out, it's that my legs don't work right.

At this point one of "Nate's" compatriots stuck her head in (literally, she leaned over to get her head in the zone of conversation, and the dream gave me the beautiful visual of her waist-length straight black hair swishing) and said that HER rule to stay healthy was to never be on more than 50mg of anything.

I did not do a violence.

Instead I huffed off, complained to xinef, who was sympathetic, and headed to the art building to pick up a canvas and my paints. Because the way to show that ignorant so-and-so was, clearly, to paint my medication and title it "self-portrait". On the way I complained to Steph and started sketching the outline of a different self-portrait, one where I was wearing the pharmacy bag as a hat.

Naturally, the group who had formed because several of us were also heading to the art building overheard the complaints. One of them started giving her opinion on the art, saying that I should actually be painting the portrait of someone who liked hiking and had devoted his life to improving our woodlands. I didn't do a violence to her either. (Steph approved. More of my declining to get in trouble than my declining to do a minor violence.)

There was one last hiking obstacle between me and the building, which of course was the many-floored square building where some of the #cupcake guys had a fishbowl-type glass windowed office (architecture from a previous dream). The obstacle was an extremely sheer concrete-bricked cliff-hill. We started scrambling up it. The last few inches had bad grips and I couldn't make it over the top. So I scrambled down and used the (also extremely steep) handrailed staircase.

I hadn't actually started painting by the time I woke up, but now an acrylic painting of my meds as a self-portrait is on my list.

pharminatrix asked what the purpose of art in culture was. My not entirely coherent reply:

To express the things that are hard to express but are recognizable once they're expressed. To set down emotion in a lasting form. To commemorate. To show someone how it looks through the eyes of the heart, not just the eyes.

When I write down "I was driving through the city at night on the freeway and it smelled cold and sad" you don't feel what I felt. When I show how it was in words, my writing crowd was bowled over and felt if not the identical emotion, something similar.

It's a record of the intangible and the ephemeral. As a scientist, I was trained to work with the tangible and quantifiable and extract meaning from them. As an artist and magician, I was trained to manipulate the tangible and quantifiable to produce transcendence.

We are all shut in our little boxes of heads, and the moment of art is the reaching out between those and saying, "Yeah, I think I was there too." Art ties a society together beyond mere common memes.

There were four of us, back in college. Almost a full elemental circle. We had a slender quick-witted Fire with a caustic sense of humor, a large and solid Earth who could not be startled by anything, and two giggly gossipy Airs. We had an excellent time.

Only the three of us are still in the state. I'm the communications link. I keep in touch with all the other three...

Microsoft Paint is fun. I have drawn three of us standing together, 100x100, 28 color. The Earth, being taller, is standing in back rolling his eyes. The Fire and I are giving each other bunny ears, and will probably have started wrestling by the time the observer starts glancing away. We're all smiling. Well, the Earth is smiling, the Fire is smirking, and I'm looking goofy. Both of them need to shave, and I need a glasses upgrade.

I love Paint.

Before that, there were three of us, Fire, Air, and Water. I drew us, too. That was larger, took longer. Just as fun.