I finally interpreted my own dream. It was so obvious, I wanted to smack myself upside the head for not seeing it sooner. For the past couple of months, I've been having the same nightmare over and over of being lost. I arrive at a huge hotel or college dorm and find the room with my name on it. I put my stuff down and decide to go out and get work done. Then, for the rest of the dream, I can't find my way back to the room.

Last night, it was a college dorm room. I left my room to go to class, and then I couldn't find my room again. Everyone around me needed me to attend class, answer questions in class, turn in assignments, pay my tuition. But I couldn't concentrate on any of it because I couldn't find my room and didn't know where it was. My whole sense of security was gone.

In dreams where it's a hotel room, it's usually because I'm at an airport and I miss a connecting flight, so the airport puts me in a huge, skyscraper hotel with thousands of rooms. I find my room, and then I try to make another flight, but I miss it, so I have to go back to the room, but I can't find it. I can't get to business meetings or try to get another flight or do anything I'm supposed to do because I can't find my room anymore.

These dreams seem to go on for hours and hours. I wake up confused and scared.

The alarm woke me this morning as I was dreaming it again. I got up, turned off my night light, and said out loud to myself, "In these dreams, I need to find my place."

Bingo.

I need to know where I belong. I've lost my home. My center. I'm caught up in life -- work, phone calls, bills, errands, and everything else -- but I can't get focused and centered because I don't know who I am or where I belong.

I was scheduled to take vacation days off from work last month. I cancelled them. I'm binge-eating again since I've been off the meds. I can't seem to keep anything organized. I'm trying to get everything done while trying to find my way home at the same time, and that's just not going to work.

I need to go on a retreat. One where I turn off my phone and get away from my apartment. Just me, my journal, and God. No work, no computer, no TV. I need to know who I am when I'm not working or cleaning or running around. I need to find the room where my soul is waiting for me.

A couple of weeks ago, my cell phone rang at 2am. I don't have a land line, so I keep my cell phone on in case someone needs to reach me, or in case someone breaks into my apartment and allows me one last phone call before stabbing me to death and stealing the collection of magazines from the 80s that I've been too lazy to throw away.

As the ringing woke me up, I thought it might be Barack Obama again, calling to tell me about his latest cabinet appointments. He's gotten really clingy lately, still asking me for money and offering me things like fleece jackets with his name on them. The election is over, but he just can't seem to handle the breakup very well.

I answered the phone and heard an elderly woman's voice saying,"Yes, I'd like to request a prayer."

I had to have heard her wrong. "Excuse me?"

"I need a prayer for Edna Smalls."

I said, as gently as possible, "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you have the wrong number."

"No, I don't," she said. "This is the prayer line."

"I'm sorry, it's not. You have the wrong number." I said. She kept talking, so I finally had to hang up.

For the next two weeks, she would not leave me alone. She left long, rambling messages on my voice mail, asking for prayer requests for her family and all her friends. She called me on weekends, talking over me when I tried to explain that she had the wrong number. She would not give up.

Finally, this Saturday, I pulled up at a gas station to fill the tank. As I was struggling to get out of my seat belt and keep my wallet from falling under the seat, my phone rang again. I took one look at the caller ID and almost had an aneurysm on the spot.

I answered my phone with, "WHAT?!"

Same woman. "I'm calling to request a prayer."

I lost it. "Lady, I am sick and tired of this! YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER! THIS IS NOT A PRAYER REQUEST LINE!"

I gotta hand it to her, she was persistent. "But this was the number on the TV."

I was yelling. "You wrote the number down wrong! This is a private number, and you are driving me crazy with these calls! I AM THROUGH BEING NICE! STOP CALLING ME OR I WILL REPORT YOU TO THE POLICE!"

I freaked her out. As long as I was being nice, she figured I still might be the prayer line person, just telling her that she had the wrong number in order to test her faith and see how badly she actually wanted those prayers. But not even the Old Testament God would threaten to have the cops show up at her assisted living facility, padlock her to her wheelchair, and haul her off to be cellmates with hardcore felons. ("I'm in for triple homicide. What are you in for?" "I called a prayer line, and God yelled at me. Could you please stop popping wheelies in my chair? I need that to move around.")

She stammered an apology and hung up, and I haven't heard from her since. The thing is, she got what she wanted. I did say a prayer for her. I feel bad that I traumatized a God-fearing woman who will probably never go near a church, TV, or telephone again.

I threw out the rest of the hardcore eating disorder meds last night. They're not worth the side effects. I have been sleeping all the time, barely able to get anything done, and after some research I discovered that the combination of the antidepressant and the appetite suppresant were actually making me fatigued and depressed. The therapist claimed those symptoms were not being caused by the drugs and I needed to keep taking them, but I didn't get this way until I started taking them, and when I looked them up on WebMD, there it was. Both symptoms are a reported side effect of each medication, and I've been taking both of them.

I was also paying $50 per therapy session, which consisted of 20 minutes of the therapist insisting everything was fine and writing me prescriptions for more drugs, which were costing me $45 total per refill. For all this, I was losing half a pound a week and was depressed and sleeping 10 hours a night and all the time on weekends. And forgetting my words and zoning out. I have been too tired to jog, and I miss it.

Enough of this. I want me back.

All this because I'm fat. It's coming up on 40 years, and I have spent thousands of dollars, seen numerous doctors and therapists, read tons of self-help books, spent a couple of years in OA, did Weight Watchers several times, starved myself, over-exercised, taken pills, taken laxatives, become an alcoholic, and pretty much lost my mind. All because I'm fat.

That's it. I'm just fat. That's my only crime. That's what I've devoted the first half of my life to obessing over. The fact that I'm fat.

That's what I've been pursuing - a thin body. It's been the priority over my search for God, inner peace, the meaning of life, and personal companionship. What a waste. It's like spending your life obsessing over a paper clip or a vanilla wafer. It's just fat. I'm just fat. It's not a crime. I'm not going to hell for this. I'm just fat.

Yes, I'd like to look better in clothes and not run out of breath after climbing the stairs. But I don't have to sell my soul for that. I don't have to put my entire life on hold while I try to make those things happen first. I don't have to give my hard-earned money to therapists who are just see me as a walking dollar sign. I don't have to pour drugs down my throat that deaden my spirit, take my personality away, and make me sleep all the time.

For the love of dog, even the experts can't agree with each other. I've read literally hundreds of books about losing weight, and everybody thinks they have the answer. Every day, I get a new fad diet idea as spam email. It used to be something called Hoodia. Now it's something called Acai Berry. No matter what it is, Oprah loves it. If she's anything like me, she's done it all. If she's anything like me, she's crashed and burned and is moving on to the next thing, and soon I'll be seeing spam emails about the latest diet craze -- pulling the shoelaces out of your kids' sneakers and eating them like spaghetti. You'll see small kids tripping and trudging their way to school in floppy shoes with no laces while their teachers have multicolored strands hanging out of the corners of their mouths, waving to each other and yelling, "I SAW THIS ON MAURY POVICH! I'VE ALREADY LOST SIX POUNDS THIS MORNING! GRANTED, THAT'S BECAUSE I WAS THROWING UP. THESE THINGS ARE DISGUSTING. BUT STILL ... "

I have used my body as a walking test tube for every shrink, pharmaceutical company, and therapist eager to test out their new theories. They don't care about me. They care about making money off me. My low self-esteem and desperate desire to get thin is what is making them rich. They love it. And that's why they keep coming up with new stuff that doesn't work. They don't care if it doesn't work. After I crash, they want me to try something else.

Forget it. I am fat. And I'm dealing with it. You, World, are not getting another dime of my money or another smidgen of my mental health. I'm taking it all back. And I'm walking off proudly in my size 22W pants and 2X top from the JCPenney Women's Department. Goodbye.

Oh, you Catholic Church.  You will never make this easy for me, will you?  God called me back to you, and I thought it would all make perfect sense.  I thought the journey was over.  But no.

At Mass this Sunday, the Priest managed to dance along the line without actually crossing it.  He stood at the altar and told us what we needed to consider when voting for a President.  We needed to remember the sanctity of life - from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.  We were expected to keep that in mind in the voting booth, and there was a letter from the Bishop about this very matter in the bulletin, so we needed to remember to take one from the ushers at the end of Mass this morning.

He didn't come right out and say that we were expected to vote for John McCain, but it couldn't have been more obvious if he were standing up there with a McCain/Palin bumper sticker plastered across his face.  As if voting for Obama means that I don't value the sanctity of human life.  I wanted to scream, "That's WHY I'm voting for Obama!  Recognizing the value of human life doesn't stop at my view on abortion!  It's about how we treat poor people!  It's about social programs and giving everyone a fair chance and pretty much behaving the exact OPPOSITE of the way I've been watching Republicans behave for the past eight years!"

I realize that Democrats aren't perfect either.  And Obama's not perfect.  But the Catholic Church is telling me to vote for a political team that includes a woman governor who made her state's rape victims pay for their own rape kits?  Just because she and McCain are anti-abortion?  Are you @#$%ing kidding me with this??

And that's when I pulled away.  Yet, God called me back to this church several weeks ago.  There has to be a reason.  But God wants me to protect my soul in the process.  I haven't found the answer yet.  But the answer, for some strange reason, doesn't involve leaving this church.

I needed a physical church home, and the Catholic Church is the only one I feel at home in.  It's strictly a physical relationship.  I need to combine that with my solitary practice of Paganism and Buddhism, which I do miss.  I haven't been paying attention, and I let the ridiculous Catholic rules cower me again.  No more.  God is alive and vibrant and breathing, and the Goddess knows that LIFE is more than a decision on one issue. 

I need to prepare for a more active spiritual life.  My main concern is that I'm still tired.  These meds are wearing me out, and I feel overwhelmed by everything I need to do - clean my house, promote my book, and breathe life back into my spirit room.  I will do one thing at a time and sleep when I need to.  And I won't step back into the Catholic Church until this election is over.

I love October. This one especially. I love that my book was born in October. The cover art is now up on the page where it's being sold, so the whole thing looks really good. Check it out at https://www.createspace.com/3354043 . (Only $12! Makes a great Holiday gift! Buy now!) I also joined Facebook, so if you've got a page there, look me up under my real name, Jennifer Layton. Facebook's layout is a bit cluttered, but I am having fun with it.

I'm obsessed with books now. I just finished re-reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde, and now comes word that Director Oliver Parker is making it into a movie for 2009, starring none other than Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton. What a deliciously dark role for this actor! And Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian) who I would not have pictured in the title role, will be playing Dorian. Ben Chaplin is also in it as Basil Hallward. I have very high expectations for this film and can't wait for it to come out. From what I'm reading, they're still filming in England. That means it will probably come out in late 2009.

I was cleaning out my closet and found a box with some of my mom's college textbooks in them. They were books of plays that I have been meaning to read for years. I dusted them off and put them by my bed. I also saw an interview with Christopher Buckley, talking about a book he wrote called "Supreme Courtship." It really looks good. I put it on my Amazon wish list. I've been doing so much writing and obsessing over my own book, I haven't been reading much. I miss reading.

I voted early for Obama, and now I'm avoiding the news as much as I can. I just want this election to be over. And I'm preparing myself for the worst. I have been crushed by the last two elections, but this one could devastate me. I have to decide how I'm going to deal with it if Obama doesn't win. I have too much making me happy right now. Somehow I will just have to dust it off and walk away. I have a book to promote, plays to read, films to look forward to. And my hardcore eating disorder recovery is going very well. Let's hear it for drugs and therapy!

Hmmm... one of these drugs is an antidepressant. The night of the election, I may just take a handful. Then I won't even care if Joe the Plumber wins. If I had a haaaammer, I'd get really haaaaammered ....