Deliciously inebriated.

 A bottle of good, strong plum wine is a wonderful piece of stress relief.  That particular bottle of Choya Umeshu was sweet, intense, flavorful... and every individual percentage point of its 14.6% alcohol content kicked me in the teeth.  It had personality.  It had zanshin.  The plums themselves, however, tasted like pickled leather.  

Dreams.

 I like keeping track of my dreams, when I can remember them, whether they were pleasant or not.  And I just had a dream that packed a doozy of an emotional wallop, so....

My whole family was on the road, in a hurry, without much of a plan.  We were on our way to a funeral, but because of how disorganized everything was, I was worried that we might not all get there.  Only once we were there did the dream let me put together the pieces and realize whose funeral it was -- my favorite uncle, who, in the dream, had unexpectedly dropped dead of an aneurysm.  As everyone was filing past and paying their respects to the deceased, I felt overwhelmed and tried to slip out of line, but someone insisted that I stay there and do things properly, and I burst into tears.

It took until I woke up to realize properly what it meant that the person who had tugged me back into line was my grandmother.