Dr. Daugherty was having some sort of meeting at the Center after the movie. She was clicking through the gallery, and I immediately hid. I found Jake and told him that he was on his own this time.

Luckily though, I did not dream about Abe Vigoda.

I went to a restaurant with someone and then ditched her when she got up to talk to N*Sync. (She deserved it.) I was in New York with Kathleen and some other people. We were in a parking lot and Kathleen was a few aisles over from me. It was night, but I still screamed out “COLE! We must go visit Cole!” We then went up to our hotel room and got temporarily distracted by the unusual floor plan. (The main door opened directly onto the bathroom, which then led to the seating area and bedroom.)

I dreamt that the following scenes appeared on Saturday Night Live: Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler continually playing with hair, Will Farrell smearing grape jelly on his nipples (through his shirt), Oscar De La Hoya signing autographs, a discussion about race between Oprah Winfrey and a white separatist, and Bjork cursing at the end of the show. I was editing a spreadsheet about the show and started to cut some information. I was on the phone with Mari, even though she was on the show: I think I was watching a rerun. She accused me of lying on the spreadsheet by not including every single of information about the various skits. I told her I was summarizing.

Kristi G. and my mom shared a jewelry-making studio space. Kristi was showing Leslie her new work: one of her favorite pieces was a knitting needle with stones wrapped in wire around them. I gave her the idea of wearing knitting needles in her hair and selling them at the city-wide festival.

I went to a chamber music performance for some reason. I know that my tickets were right next to Howard and Nelda. I excused myself from getting cultured as they found their seats because I needed to get my laundry done. I had my big bag of dirty clothes with me and I went to the Bill Clinton Room on the mezzanine level. It was dubbed so by students who attended classes on him and his actions for the past eight years, but there was also a washer and dryer there that many students used. A sign on the door said that it was no longer the Clinton Room and that washing machines were not for students’ use. I went to the main level and found a washer and dryer in the swimming pool. I hopped in the pool, put my clothes in, and lined my canned goods up by the edge of the pool. Matt’s friend Adam was sitting behind a drum set, got out, whispered something in Brooks’ ear, and slid back into the pool. Brooks stooped beside the pool, “You know better than to put your canned goods there.” So I opened the washing machine and threw a few cans in. “That’s not what I mean. It’s very inconsiderate of you to display food in public like that. Some people have allergies.” I told him that I wasn’t making anyone eat anything and that I wasn’t even opening a can, releasing smells. Well, it turns out that Adam is severely allergic to tomatoes and just the visual appearance of a tomato printed on a can’s label could inflare his allergies. So I threw all the cans (still sealed) into my washing machine and just listened to them all bang together.

I was digging in the refrigerator for something to eat. I only had twenty minutes to get to my English 890 class with Brooks. I found a large, precooked hamburger patty (complete with the little grill lines). I added cheese to it, though about how it was a perfect protein diet meal and giggled, and ate.

Miscellaneous stuff about preschool meetings.

We were having a garage sale to raise money for the playground at preschool, so I donated a sack of clothes. I went through my closet with Debbie, an ex-co-worker, and couldn’t remember having most of those clothes anyway.

I dreamt that I was at the old playground in my old neighborhood, and one of the preschool kids almost got eaten by a crocodile. His mom came up to me and explained that there were caymans in the kiddie swimming pools and it just wasn’t safe at all. I agreed, but didn’t know exactly what to do, so we all stayed inside a lot from then on.

I had to go to back to the university for some reason and Mom drove me. We miraculously found parking spaces right in front of the building we needed to go to. Mom drove past the handicapped parking (which was full) and the “Professor of the Month” type parking stalls. We pulled into a free space on the other side of those reward stalls and we noticed that, instead of parking meters, they had actual policeman standing in front of each stall. We continued into the parking space and the policeman got out of his little tollbooth-type box. He told us we owed $7.00 to park there for one hour. Mom said that was a little high and she decided she’d just drop me off and pick me up later. The policeman got very upset and said it was $9.00 to refuse to park there. We quickly pulled out and Mom sped away. I remember thinking that I was glad that she had a handicapped tag so that her license tag was simply a line of five numbers instead of a more memorable combination of letter and numbers. She dropped me off and I realized how ill I felt. I went on a roller coaster and, while it didn’t help my headache, it still was neat.

I was making movies in a program similar to Flash. Persons could download the real music video to any song from a mysterious website, then fiddle with it, and upload it to share their modified video. I had a Christina Aquilera video to work with, and I immediately added subtitles and so on. Her video thankfully wasn’t of her, but images of Marlo Thomas from That Girl and other dated things. Then, towards the end of the video, a bunch of current-day teenage girls ran out of their high school and towards the woods. White italicized Helvetica text told me it was “a few years later,” and I changed that to something smartass. I was doing all this editing work in the old upstairs bathroom of the old house. I went to preview my video, but it had somehow gotten intercut with commercials starring Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. I was a bit upset that it was continuing past nine o’clock, but I don’t know why. Then I was going to take a shower, but I was bit by a spider on my right index finger. I ripped the spider from my hand–it was a tiny tan spider–and smashed him on the white porcelain sink. I saw the blood smear and thought about how it was really mine.

I went to a garage sale and bought several cookbooks for $2 each after debating whether I really wanted them that badly. I bought Beyond Parsley and the full, hardback, brand new version of The Joy of Cooking. Later, Mom called and told me that she had bought me James Beard and other cookbooks at the same sale.

You can always tell when I get a LOT of sleep, and that happened last night. I went to bed at about 1:30 am and woke up at 1:21 pm when the phone rang. I also woke up at 7:00 am, but I went right back to sleep. Even now, almost 3.5 hours later, I really just want to go back to bed.

I was both watching the Oscars. I was very confused, because I knew it wasn’t time for the Oscars. Yet I still watched. At one point near the beginning, I was onstage. I was upset because I couldn’t draw a box around me by rubbing my hands together and pretending to draw a box. My hands had bubble solution on them, so I wasn’t completely insane. It had worked earlier. Instead the bubbles just burst and were not editable. Christopher Walken followed me onstage (I was now offstage, watching it all on television) ad said that there would be “some humor, some singing, and some old-tyme musical theatre acts.” There were about eight pages worth of awards to hand out. I had the pages in front of me and they were for very odd things, like best use of a wa-wa pedal (or however you spell it) in a theme song (which went to a Wayans brothers’ movie). The best love song by a teenager for another teenager came from a guy named “Tyrell,” a white kid with deep chestnut eyes. The awards show played a clip from whatever movie it came from: as Tyrell sang, the love of his life, a female soccer player in a yellow jersey, was running in a meadow. She got up to accept the award for Tyrell, and she had her hair in two ponytails with big knots at the tops, somewhat like they do in Sailor Moon. Her best friend, a Japanese teenager, was sitting across the aisle, and they hugged and shrieked together. Then the awards production showed a clip from the Asian girl’s movie: it basically involved her sitting on a boat, very dramatically, much like early on in The Piano. Then the show moved on to some animal theme, and we watched a clip from someone like Tom Green singing a love song to a dolphin. I noticed we had only covered about one page worth of awards (they had paragraph-long descriptions for each winner) and we were an hour into the program. I knew it would take forever to give out all the awards.

Then I was ‘at work,’ but not where I usually work, watching the awards show. I began talking about how I had given scholarships to this semester with Howard, and we thought about putting their names in our newsletter. I had given $200 to a home-schooled student who was unlike most of them. In the dream at that point, I knew her name. I think it was Mia now, but I knew for sure then. Mia had won the scholarship by passionately defending Dar Williams in an essay. So Mia took that $200 and joined the ultra-secret, ultra-powerful, ultra-exclusive “Boys R Us” club. They tried to block her, but couldn’t since she could now pay the membership fee. Jon ran the club and started it for personal profit. He wrote out her check for her and made her sign it. The figure on the check was originally $700, then $100, and finally $200. With her generous membership fee, she was now an officer. Mia told Jon that I’d take over the website since I had five years of experience and would be vice-president of all of her committees. I took both of Jon’s hands and held them in mine. “This doesn’t change the state of our personal relations. Oh wait, there weren’t any.” I then giggled evilly, dropped his hands, and hugged Mia. I had no idea she’d completely destroy the Boys R Us club.

I then drove home from my parents’ house (in my dream) and walked around my apartment complex. I noticed eight cars that were up on blocks and their back wheels stolen. I was glad I had stayed at my parents’ house instead of coming home. I was amazed at how quiet it was though, and I took a walk since it was so peaceful. I knew it was early on a Sunday morning, and I was wearing a trenchcoat as I meandered down the street. Then I saw Holly fighting with the school’s network, trying to get into her room. “Tell me about the whole scholarship thing. I hear Jon’s determined to kill you.” I told her the whole story about Mia, although I couldn’t remember Mia’s name. I told her that I could in “the dream,” and we both knew the whole Boys R Us coup was a dream. We agreed it was a pretty funny dream.

Kathleen and I went to play slot machines, only they were more like those gift-dispensing machines at grocery stores. We played a game that was similar to Plinko from The Price is Right. Kathleen spent five dollars, and I spent one dollar playing the various games. I was much slower than she was: it always seemed that someone was in my way when I wanted to use the machine. I got gifts from another machine; someone had won trashy toys, but didn’t bother collecting them. There were four things: a rubber superball, a glow-in-the-dark butterfly, a statue of a prince, and a glow-in-the-dark salt shaker in the shape of a bird that hopped a little bit. I kept the salt shaker and gave the butterfly to Kathleen. “Don’t spill it,” she said. I, of course, did spill a little, but I just wiped it off with my hand and pretended it never happened. I then left Kathleen to finish her gaming, and I put a quarter in a different machine to play a trivia game. Three players would line up at the trio of machines and shout out answers to basic questions, then the first person to answer a follow-up question won. “Name an animal,” prompted the announcer. “Cat,” shouted the first person. “Frog,” I said, wanting to be the one who said cat. “Moose,” the third person said. “What is missing from the series?” asked the announcer, and the third person said, “Scuba gear!” That was the right answer, and since I couldn’t make sense out of anything anymore, I pressed the coin return button and got my quarter back. I also got an additional $1 in quarters and a bunch of CD-Roms: Spiderman Cartoon Maker (“I can always use another copy, I suppose,” I thought), Spiderman Summer Update, Windows 1.0.0 (“WARNING: This is highly unstable release” it said on the CD), “Chapters 1-3″ of Final Fantasy III (“free version”), and a few shareware games. I was happy, Kathleen had spent her limit, and we left. As we left, two secretary-types with big 1987 hair, were getting prizes from machines.

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.