I got sleep! Unfortunately, I dreamt about two of the Backstreet Boys. So are the cruelities of life.

Something about “Jenna, the best defensive player ever” was printed in the paper

Jay, his girlfriend, Traci from high school, Nick Carter and that Brian guy from the Backstreet Boys, Matt, and I were on a trip together in Texas. We went to some science museum. Traci and I wouldn’t go down the tight and scary curvy slide (it was as curvy as those “silly straws,” but you couldn’t see where you would end up), so we climbed down the stairs and went into the planetarium. They weren’t doing a star show, but the walls were like those awful 60s videos–full of moving lava-like patterns. There Traci and I just talked about all sorts of things (in reality, I haven’t seen her in six years, and this is first dream about her since then, at least): how stupid Brian is, how unfair that we have to babysit the Backstreet Boys, how awful and scary that slide was, etc. We then left and met up with the gang again. Nick was going quite insane, like he was on speed, and saying that I should sleep with him because then I could say I slept with a Backstreet Boy. I told him that really wasn’t a goal of mine. He then ran off, saying there were plenty of girls who would say yes. Traci and I looked at each other and shrugged.

I ran to McDonald’s to get food for Traci and myself, but couldn’t find her house. I looked in the phone book, but it was missing almost all the names it should have in there. I was around the Central and Maize area.

I was then at the Center, and helping clean out a room. A teacher stopped by and asked for some handouts, but noticed the yellow tissue paper in the bathtub: “When I call about a class project, that’s the paper I want.” I told her it wasn’t a problem. I went into the computer lab where Traci and Priya were cleaning and rearranging things for Traci’s government class. I helped out by changing the fonts to 6 point Courier (there were no other font options). I then remembered I had Traci’s lunch in my car and offered to go get it for her, saying that it hadn’t been “that long” since I got. She said not to worry about it. Matt came in and said he needed help with the room with the yellow tissue paper and bathtub. I followed, and asked where Linden was. Matt said he just didn’t know about him anymore. When we got the room, there was only one lamp on the corner. We piled everything into the bathtub and moved it into the hallway.

I was bedridden. My slate blue velvet drapes kept slowly falling off their hooks and rod. I called the Shapiro house for Dan. Caryn answered the phone, and I told her I was returning Dan’s phone call. Dan answered, and gave the phone over to his friend Zack (who reminds me an awful lot of Jack) after a few pleasantries. Zack said he was going to do some drawings for Seen, and I said okay. I didn’t see how had anything to do with me, but I was patient. I couldn’t go anywhere. I just kept looking out the window while Zack was talking, and I noticed the house next door was four stories tall. They had all the lights on and the curtains wide open, so I could see inside. They had awful starving artist oil paintings on every wall. I got off the phone with Zach, congratulating him for getting into Seen. My drapery fell completely off, and my black sheer drapes, completely at the sides of the window, blew in the light breeze. The guy next door looked like a mixture of Anthony Hopkins and Martin Van Buren. He appeared in the window of the third floor, and angrily pulled his draperies shut. He then peered out a small opening, saw I was still watching, and then stormed off, shutting off all the lights in the house. I couldn’t stop watching, but I also couldn’t move.

Mom, Dad, and I were on vacation, and we were driving to Eureka (not Eureka, Kansas, but somewhere else–straight east). We kept talking about what we would do after we got to the lake, where we’d go from there, and all that sort of stuff. I kept saying that it was okay if we didn’t drive all that way in one day. We stopped for the night, and Dad’s beeper went off. He was needed back at work immediately, so we had to turn around.

Something about a tamborine made out of chicken bones.

I got sleep! About six hours in a row!

I didn’t remember any dreams, but here’s a winner Jake had last night:

Tim Robbins was starring in a remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, and Burger King had promotional toys. He went there with his mom and stole a black ball that arms and legs folded back into it; the package had a very sleek and stylized font on it. Then he and his mother went to the fabric store.

I still can’t sleep for more than an hour at a time because of all my illnesses. (I’ve got two going at the same time right now, and the contraction of coughing really helps the other one make my life even more miserable than usual.)

I dreamt the Center moved to a nineteen-floor building, and I asked Howard not to move my office from the corner of the eighteenth floor. It had an attached bathroom and private bedroom, so it was heavenly. Then I went up to the nineteenth floor, and they told me that there had been a murder or a suicide attempt and no one was allowed up there. The doors were dark cherry wood and lined with burgandy drapes–very Victorian.

“Tell Matt I’m ready to go to Chicago now.”

I was entertaining some guy in my room by going through blaxploitation movie trading cards with movie review quotes on them.

“We kidnapped your new wife and made her a stewardess,” at least that was the message on the answering machine. I was trying to help this man find his brand-new wife. The kidnappers also left a poster of his wife dressed in a kimono advertising flights to China.

I was out at the farm and helping Grandpa find the right gloves for the job.

I had to hammer nails through a man’s shoes into his big toe through the tip of the shoe so they’d stay on. The man told me it didn’t hurt.

Something about visiting West Dallas. The note I scribbled as I was falling back asleep looks like “West Dallas nights.”

I got a backorder from CDNow consisting of eight cans of chicken and two college textbooks (one on medicine and one on accounting). I didn’t want to go through the hassle of returning them to CDNow, so I went to the university’s book buyback and tried to sell them there. The book-buyer-backer asked to see my college id, which I presented even though I hadn’t taken a class there since I graduated. He left and ran it through the computer. Then he came back, looking quite stern, and I started to cry.

“You’re not in the computer, you know why? When was your last class?”

“I haven’t been here since I graduated with my Master’s. That doesn’t mean I don’t still want to learn. Can’t a non-student buy textbooks and then sell them back? I bought them for personal enrichment.”

“Oh, are you reading Isaac Newton too?”

“Well, no . . .”

“Yeah, I knew it. We get a lot of you types in here.”

“I am reading Darwin’s Evolution of the Species.”

“Sure. We’re not buying your books. Get out of here.”

So I went back to work and had Caryn (our business manager) get me a copy of the invoice. It was for 9/08/99, so I immediately started to write a nasty letter asking them why they didn’t cancel that backorder 1 year and six months ago.

I should be heading to work soon, but The Third Man is on and Orson Welles is about to be all smug and smirky on the ferris wheel. I can’t leave before the cuckoo clocks.

Last night I dreamt that Mom, Dad, and I were going back to Boston. We fought about what day it was. I told Mom I needed to go to the bank. We then looked out the window at the “exquisite cottages,” a “quaint” shopping district full of cutsey crap: it was night, but we could still make out the image from all the Christmas lights. I pointed out that there was a reason we didn’t go.

Another dream: watching TV? Flashes of Queen Elizabeth II, Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, and Tucker Carlson. I think I was watching TV with Kathleen.

Mom, Dad, and I were some fancy-schmancy bookstore (somewhat like the Coop at Harvard). There was a cinemaplex attached, as I was wandering around there looking for the rest of the books, there came a voice announcing how many feet I was away from the theater doors. I assumed it was so you’d have to buy a ticket for the movies. I went to the ticket salesgirl and asked how to get to the rest of the books. She then pointed me in the right direction.

There was something about a movie called “Mandingo II.” Damn you Jon Stewart for bringing up “Mandingo” last night on the Daily Show.

Anne Carroll’s BBQ: Anne (a former professor of mine) had a barbeque and Matt’s last semester poli sci professor was there too. I asked Brooks where I should move the trash to — by the staircase to the basement apartment or by the door to the kitchen. I think the house was somewhat like Carmody’s backyard. He told me to just leave it, but I already had the bag in my hands. I got BBQ sauce on my fingers and was quite repulsed.

Then I was inside a living room not unlike Mimi’s (the grandmother who hated me). I was on the couch with someone, watching all these children come in and out the front door. I just remember thinking that I was glad they weren’t mine.

On one of my websites, the “administration” (webhosting company or service provider–I’m not sure) had lost one of my journal entries. Then they found it, printed it off, and photographed it at the bottom of a box with two snails in it. When I saw it, I was incredibly confused because I couldn’t figure out from where the snails had come.