April 15, 2001
The smell of lunch meat
I was rearranging my bedroom (which wasn't really my bedroom, as dreams sometimes go) so that a thin bookcase was going serve as the headboard of my bed, essentially. The bookcase was the width of a CD case laying flat and was actually being used as a CD holder. It was built out of toothpicks and held together with masking tape. It was falling apart and not very strong. I yelled at Mom and told her I needed a new dresser.
I was on the phone in my office, talking to someone who sneered, "You know whowgot that scholarship: Mack." So I told the person on the phone the true story of the time Matt, Jay, and I built a man out of bolgona and aerosol cheese and left it on his Jeep. One untruth that I believed wholeheartedly in the dream was that Mack gagged at the mere smell of lunch meat.
The Center agreed to run classified ads for a teacher to find a job at Collegiate.
I was in an elementary school library. Caryn was there. I was trying to remember all my favorite young adult authors (Paula Danzinger, James Howe, E. L. Koningsberg, etc.). I couldn't find Norma Fox Mazer and I couldn't remember what she had written either. (I still can't: I'm researching that in another browser window as I type). I just looked at her oeuvre and I can't remember reading anything by her. Anyway, I went over to the little kids' section and checked out Harold and the Purple Crayon. When I got it home, I noticed that all the pages had been torn out. I was worried that I would be blamed and charged for it even though I didn't do it.