The Miracle of the Windshield Washer Fluid

This week has been very, very cold. On Friday, the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there all weekend and into the week. On Saturday, my roommate and I were driving around in her SUV, and she mentioned that her windshield washer fluid was frozen. Apparently, you have to put in a special kind of cold-weather fluid, or it freezes. Who knew? I hoped mine was that special kind while guessing that it was not.

So last night, the temperature dropped to almost ten degrees. When I leave this morning, the big sign at the bank says it's eighteen. That's okay, though. The sun is out, the roads are clear; basically, everything is good. Then I hit Everett.

(On Monday, the entire Seattle metro area was hit by this huge snowstorm. Buses flipped, cars crashed, and a cargo plane even slid off the runway at Sea-Tac. It looked horrendous on the news. I had been planning to drive home yesterday afternoon, but the crazy weather prompted me to wait so I-5 through Seattle could clear up for one more night. Of course, nothing melted because it didn't get above freezing.)

Anyway, so this morning I reach Everett, the sun hides behind some thick gray clouds, and the road is suddenly filthy. It is only dry thanks to loads and loads of salt and sand coating its surface. This salt and sand start to shower my windshield as the vehicles around me kick them into the air.

I press the button for the windshield washer. Nothing comes out, but the wipers dutifully wipe the dirt across the windshield. It looks worse than before! I think. I let the dirt patter the windshield a little longer and then press the button again. The dry wipers smear the stuff across the windshield. Now I'm getting worried because I can't see very well. It's like looking through sunglasses, except it's cloudy. I wonder how long I can keep it up. Finally, really nervous about how obscured my view is becoming, I stop in Lynnwood right before entering Seattle.

The road right off the exit is rather covered in snow. I drive very, very carefully until I see a Chevron. I pull in and mince over the ice to the little Chevron store. Inside is a guy in a blue jumpsuit, which I find comforting. He even took the windshield washing stuff inside so it wouldn't freeze! I borrow a squeegee and clean my windshield. When I return the squeegee, I ask the guy what I can do about the fact that my washer fluid is frozen. I am hoping he will sell me something to fix it, but just he says hot water is the only option and not a very good one since it would just freeze up again. (It's now a balmy twenty-three!) I thank him and get back in my car.

Now I have to think a little bit. I have been driving with the front defroster on warm for about two hours, and my washer fluid is still frozen. This is a good sign that I can't rely on it to thaw any time soon. It had taken me twenty minutes from when I first hit the dirty part of the freeway for my windshield to get so bad that I had to stop. Twenty minutes should take me through Seattle on the express lanes, after which I can exit and clean the windshield at another service station.

After deciding on this plan, I slowly make my way to the freeway entrance and start again towards Seattle. I line up for the express lanes, which are fast because they have very few exits. No sooner have I entered the express lane, but the driver of the car in front of me turns on his windshield washer. Big drops of dirty water splash onto my windshield. That's not good, I think to myself. Then a big car-carrying truck pulls up on my left. Huge gobs of mud fly off the cars and splat, splat, splat on my windshield. It's as if a piece of cloth is covering the windshield. (I know this because when I was a kid I liked to put cloth over my face and marvel that I could still see shapes through it.) I concentrate on the white dashed lines on the road because I can barely see anything else. My heart races. We are going sixty miles an hour. There are no exits and will not be any exits until I reach the other side of the city. I am in a middle lane of four or five total because two more lanes have just joined the expressway on the left and right sides. The shoulders, could I reach them, are obscured by mounds of snow deposited by snowplows on Monday night. The sun, which had been hiding behind clouds, is starting to peek out again, threatening to illuminate the sand on my windshield and dazzle me.

White-knuckled, I consider my options. I could keep driving straight, guided by the white dashed lines, through Seattle, and exit as soon as I can. This is dangerous because my windshield continues to be splattered by sand, salt, and mud. By the time I get through the city (which I have just entered), my windshield could be completely opaque. As I am way too short to stick my head out of the side window and still reach the pedals as super-bad adventurers do in movies, I would have absolutely no way of navigating should this happen. My other option is to try the windshield washer one more time. This is dangerous because if the fluid does not come out, the wipers would smear the gunk all over my windshield and definitely make it opaque.

What if you said a prayer before you hit the button for the windshield washer? the Holy Ghost suggests.

Don't be silly, I reply. That only works for little kids who've lost their CTR ring.

C'mon, where's your faith? He admonishes. Don't you think your Heavenly Father can make your windshield washer work?

Yeah, but only if it's His will. And what if it's His will that I die in some horrible way because my wipers smeared dirt all over my windshield? What if He wants me to be a quadriplegic? I'm not sure I want to find out.

(Meanwhile, I drive onto the lower deck of the Ship Canal Bridge just as the sun bursts out of the clouds, and I narrowly avoid being blinded. Well, I am already nearly blind, but the sun would have made it worse.)

But if it were His will that you die on this freeway, you should just accept that, right? Just pray and press the button already!

Okay, okay, I tell Him. Dear Heavenly Father, if it be Thy will, please, please, please let my washer fluid work when I press the button, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. I press the button.

The dry wipers smear the dirt all over my windshield. I can't see anything.

"Argh!" I growl. Then I notice a little dark spot in the lower left corner of the windshield, as if the dirt there had been wet when it smeared. "Oh, please, oh, please," I breathe as I press the button again. (By the grace of God, I stay in my lane while fixating on the windshield washer and paying absolutely no attention to the road.) A little fluid spurts out of both nozzles so that the wipers clean the bottom third of my windshield. At least I can see something! I press the button again. The right nozzle sprays full blast, and the wipers clean the passenger side of my windshield. One more, oh, God, please just let my side work. I press the button one more time, and a glorious spray of washer fluid shoots out of both nozzles. The wipers do their thing, and the windshield is as clear as if it weren't there.

I have thanked God for many things in my life, but my thanks and praise to Him as I sat alone in my Ford Focus that morning were certainly more emphatic than usual. I knew He could make my windshield washer work, of course, but I was not sure that He would. I wasn't sure that He cared enough about my surviving a trip down I-5 to make the effort to unfreeze my washer fluid, but He did. He even had the Holy Spirit remind me how to get help. My Heavenly Father is just totally awesome!

And that's the miracle of the windshield washer fluid.

The Time I Sterilized My Eyeball

So this morning I was supposed to go to a community college to observe an ESL class for my TESL class. I was nervous that I was going to miss it, and I woke up like three times in the early morning because I thought it was time. When I finally got up, I started getting ready.

Now I have to explain how my contact solution works. I'm allergic to everything, so instead of having normal Renu contact solution that I just pour on my lenses, I have to put my lenses in this special case every night and immerse them in a hydrogen peroxide solution. The special case has this special piece of metal at the bottom that neutralizes the hydrogen peroxide over six hours, so in the morning, my contacts are sterilized and floating in a water solution.

This morning when I rooted under the sink for my contacts because I don't have a medicine cabinet, I noticed that the contact case had toppled over. This should have been my first sign that there was a problem. Next, when I opened the case, I heard something fizzle. This should have been my second sign. Instead of stopping to think about how the metal would not have been in contact with the solution when the case was upside down and about how water does not fizzle, I took out the right contact and stuck it in my eye.

Oh, the pain! It took me about fifteen to twenty excruciating seconds to pry open my suddenly swollen eyelids and fish the contact out of my streaming eye. My whole right eye was bright red and burning. I tried to pour saline solution in my eye, but my eyelids were pretty opposed to me inserting anything else. A few minutes later, I doused my eye with the redness drops I use for my allergy redness. It worked better than I thought it would, but I did pour in about half the bottle when the recommended dose is two drops.

However, my right eye is still red and stings a little. This is especially annoying because all last week, my left eye was red from a cold or something and I was all embarrassed. Over the weekend, my left eye cleared up, and I was so happy about my nice white eyes this morning. And now I look like a druggie again.

The Time I Kidnapped the President's Daughter

(I had this dream because I'd just watched Spooks.)

Last night I dreamt that the elder's quorum president and I were terrorists. We dressed in black and put on balaclavas and kidnapped the president's daughter. I shot a bunch of her bodyguards, but then one of them who was on the ground bleeding raised his arm and shot me in the hip. It hurt a lot and I couldn't move very well but I still heaved the president's daughter over my shoulder and limped to the car to stick her in the trunk. I was exercising my hip but pulling my leg from side to side. And then I woke up at 3:15 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep.

The Time I Was Attacked by an Alien Parasite during a Dead People Party near the Garden of Eden

  Last night I dreamt that I lived on a small, rocky island in the middle of a blue, blue sea. An old beige Eurovan flew down and landed in my side yard. Inside were three aliens who looked like people and spoke with English accents—a plump, white woman with long, light brown hair; a thin white man with a brown beard and long brown hair; and their eleven-year-old daughter.
  The aliens tried to pretend that they represented a very wealthy planet, but their spaceship/camper van was old. Inside the van were little crumbs, worn upholstery, and a sour milk smell. To prove to me that they really could teach me something about my own planet (which may or may not have been Earth), they took me up in the Eurovan and flew above a little barnacle-covered rock that I could see from the shore of my island. Two ugly mermaids perpetually sat on top of the white rock holding apples, and the rock itself was infested by electric blue sea snakes and neon green regular snakes. The sun was high and made the blue water glitter.
  "See," the alien woman told me, "this is where Adam and Eve came down from my planet." (Apparently my dream consciousness is Scientologist.)
  Then we went back to my house, where I invited the family in for dinner. I got the impression that they were running from their home planet, not representing it. There was something about how they disliked being out in the open and avoided questions about home.
  After dinner, we sat in my small living room (my house was more like a beach cottage) to chat. The man started singing "Libera Me Domine" in a deep baritone, and two older men with gray faces who were dressed in white suits and ties appeared beside him and started singing with him.
  "Who are they?" I asked the woman.
  "Those are men who are dead. My people can call up the dead whenever we want."
  All I could think was that they looked like Jacob Marley without the chains. The dead men smelled a little strange too—perhaps the sour milk smell from the van. Still, it was kind of nice because the men just looked like the really old men who serve in the temple—harmless.
  Then the woman did something and a lot more gray-faced people appeared in the room. Some of them weren't even human. One especially looked like Watto—Anakin's owner in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I did have to look that up.) He snarled rabidly. I asked the woman if all of these dead people/aliens were safe, and she assured me that they were. I figured that was because spirits, as I understand them, cannot actually touch a body.
  The Watto-like character ran up to me and scratched my palm with his sharp tusk. The mark turned red and bled a little. So much for intangibility!
  "Oh, no!" the alien woman ran to me and looked at my hand. The Watto snarled. "He's injected you with a deadly parasite."
  Whether from the parasite or from the news, I started to feel very weak and shaky. I fell to my knees on the carpet. The woman asked my dad (who was suddenly there) for a pair of tweezers. He took forever getting them as I felt sicker and sicker. Finally he returned with a pair of pin-nosed tweezers. The woman started digging into the flesh of my palm with them. The pain was excruciating. Finally she came upon something small, round, and yellow that looked like one of those antimicrobial microbeads that float in some hand soaps. Down in my hand, it also looked like a pocket of pus.
  "Just as I thought!" the woman cried.
  "Get it out! Get it out! Please, just get it out!" I screamed back. The dead guests had crowded around me, looking down at me on the floor, intensely curious.
  She applied pressure with the tweezers, and the thing popped out. She held it up with the tweezers to show me—it had a head and little legs, like a shiny yellow tick. Several seconds passed, and she was still staring at it on the end of the tweezers.
  "Kill it," I said.
  "We have to use something special—"
  "Squish it with the tweezers!" The thing was squirming free.
  She shook her head, "No, you have to get something from ___________." She said the name of the Watto who had started all of this, but I forget what it was.
  I got up to confront my attacker when everyone in the room yelped simultaneously. I turned around to see the yellow parasite leap from the tweezers to the floor and scurry under an armchair, and then I woke up.

The Time I Watched a Fire Truck Drive into the Pacific

This afternoon I dreamt that I was going to school in Hawai'i. To get to class, my friend Chrystal, another friend who was a Hispanic guy I don't know in real life, and I would cross a big concrete bridge from one island to another. (The islands were very close together.) The channel between the islands was very shallow, and a series of concrete seawalls and levees controlled the flow of sea water in and out of it. In the morning as we crossed the bridge, we saw that the local government had drained the channel down to only a few feet deep and had authorized a manufactured restaurant to be erected on stilts right in the middle.

My friends and I went to a Spanish class, where I found I could speak Spanish better than the teacher. My Hispanic friend and I had a long conversation in Spanish about who of our friends would get married next. I was especially proud of my use of past subjunctive during this conversation.

When class was over, all three of us started walking back over the bridge. My guyfriend said he'd like to move to Hawai'i next semester (which was confusing because I'd thought we were in Hawai'i already). As we crossed the bridge, we looked over the side and saw a large fire engine/ambulance on stilts in the middle of the water. The restaurant was gone. The red fire engine had its lights on, but not the siren. A bunch of paramedics sloshed around up to their necks in the Pacific. A huge crane hovered over the scene, explaining without words how the fire engine had gotten out there in the first place.

"What's going on?" I asked Chrystal.

"They're testing the emergency response in the middle of the channel," she said.

"Hmm," I said, and then I woke up.

The Time I Got Extra Bonus Points for Entering a Tongan Wedding Reception through the Kitchen

Last night I dreamt I went school shopping at a really nice mall Target in southern California. I looked at a lot of nice dresses, but I'm not sure I bought one. I did buy a cool ring and a charm bracelet with a teeny pencil and pencil sharpener attached.

After I bought the jewelry, I left the store. Outside in the bright sunlight were concrete paths leading through pristine grass to countless salmon-colored stucco buildings. Then I realized that I had left one of my purchases in Target, so I went back.

Inside the Target, a Tongan wedding was wrapping up. (By Tongan wedding, I simply mean a wedding in which the bride, groom, and guests were Tongan.) I stood behind the green carpet on which the ceremony was taking place and looked on. The reception was to be held in a Mexican/Tongan restaurant across the way in the mall. The restaurant was called something Spanish, like Muchas Gracias, with two Tongan words below it. (One of the words was haveli, which is Hindi and not Tongan, but I guess my sleeping brain thought it sounded like Havili, which is the Tongan last name of a USC football player who is related to my mission companion.) Basically, the restaurant was run by the owners of a local Mexican restaurant chain who decided to open a Tongan-themed location.


The wedding party proceeded to the restaurant. This blind white guy was standing near me trying to sign an order form for something the Target didn't carry. "Does anybody have a pencil?" he asked. I thought pens were better for signing order forms, but I still offered the tiny pencil from my bracelet. When the blind man reached for it to try to use it, the pencil and the sharpener broke off. I knelt on the floor to get them and the blind man tripped over me.

A bird appeared and told me that I'd get extra points in the game if I entered the Mexican/Tongan restaurant through the kitchen and talked my way into the private reception. I would have to use my Spanish skills because the kitchen staff were all Mexican and Guatemalan.

An evil white witch clouded over sky and zoomed down on a broomstick. She was coming straight for me. I went downstairs and zoomed through the food court labyrinth avoiding her. I tried to go into one restaurant, but I didn't have enough points yet so it just looked like an empty Jack in the Box. Finally I got enough points to jump through a magic well in a whirlwind of white sparkles that transported me to the back door of the Mexican/Tongan restaurant, and then I woke up.

The Time I Got the Most Out of the County Fair

Last night I dreamt that a friend, Kendra, from middle school—now grown up—and I were at the county fair. It was the afternoon of the last day the fair would be in town, so we rushed from booth to booth and from exhibit to exhibit making sure we had seen everything we wanted to see and bought everything we wanted to buy. Kendra was meeting her boyfriend later to do the exact same thing with him, but at this time she wanted do go through with another woman and look at the girl stuff.

For example, we both stopped for a very long time in the clothing section of the fair. Some of the clothes were so pretty and cheap and unusual. I had to keep reminding myself that I have no money.

Finally, in one of the more established stores, we ran into my mother and brother. My brother had bought presents for everyone in the family, which was very sweet, except that the presents were dragon designs made out of poor-quality gummy candy. He was trying to be nice, so I thanked him profusely.

Then we came upon a hat section. I've always liked the idea of hats and scarves even though my head is large and round and wearing things on my head just makes me look like a stumpy lollipop. Some Muslim women were there looking at these large gypsy headscarves that some of the carny women wore. The scarves were so pretty, with different layers of cloth textures. I wanted one.

I spent a while going through all of the possible color schemes—Kendra getting bored all the time—when I finally found one with blue calico and gold-patterned green. I tried it on and looked in the mirror. I looked horrible! A swollen, zitty face surrounded by a wimple that made my head look like one of the Pyramids. I took off the headscarf and found black specks in my hair.

"They're too small to be bedbugs. They're too small to be bedbugs," I told myself.

Then I heard my mother talking to Kendra about me: "I'm not sure I want her running around with stewed hair," my mom said. By which she meant she didn't want me to look Muslim and confuse people. And then I woke up.

The Time I Drove the Wrong Way after a Blizzard

Last night I dreamt that I was on a roadtrip, possibly with my family. It was winter—the sky was gray and cold and the world was brown. We had gone a very long time with clear weather, when we heard on the radio that a blizzard was coming like a hurricane. We stopped at a motel, which had brown blankets on the bed and windows on both sides of the room. We hurried to bring our bags inside before the snow started. My feet were bare, and I could hardly move fast enough. Finally we hunkered down in the room and watched the windows go white.


The next day the storm was gone, so this guy and I got in the car. The roads were clear. Everything was clear and snow-free. I was driving. At an intersection, I turned left. Suddenly I realized I had turned onto the left side of the median rather than the right. Cars sped around me going the opposite direction. I wanted to get over, but the median was in the way. Heart racing and brain panicking, I kept driving, hoping to find somewhere to turn off the road entirely. Finally a white police car appeared with lights blazing and siren screaming. Even though I knew I was in the wrong, I was more scared of getting a ticket, so I tried to turn around on the busy street in order to flee. The police approached me head-on, their bumpers drawing ever nearer to mine, and then I woke up.

The Time I Left a Bunch of Hypodermic Needles on Amtrak

This afternoon I dreamt that I lived on the East Coast and habitually rode Amtrak. I got to know this Italian family with a little baby and an older man with good stories. I also had these plastic boxes of hypodermic needles that I used for migraine medication and to counteract the effects of my bug bites. Since I traveled in the same car all the time, I started leaving all the hypodermic needles in my compartment, which was spartan, white, and cold, with gray benches.

Then suddenly my parents appeared and said I needed to get off at the next stop. I was still getting my bags together when the train stopped, so each of them grabbed a suitcase and exited the train. Leaving all of my hypodermic needles, I took one suitcase and followed them, but I was too slow and soon the train jerked and I fell down in the doorway and saw my parents rapidly retreating as the train sped down the Columbia (because we'd switched coasts for no reason).


I felt like I was going to be flung out the open doorway and under the train. It was very scary. Finally, I crawled back into the train to get my hypodermic needles. This young New Yorker Kirstie Alley character was in my compartment and offered to help me get my stuff off the train. She started packing my stuff up, and then the train stopped again but I wasn't ready. I pulled the yellow cord to tell the conductor I had to get off. At the next stop, the conductor actually came down and started yelling at me for not getting off the train fast enough. The New Yorker tried to soothe him because he was her boyfriend.

I jumped off without the needles, and then I woke up.

The Time My Roommate and I Were Eaten Alive

This one is ongoing. We have pulled up the couch cushions, inspected the mattresses, washed the sheets in hot water, vacuumed the house, and in all other ways obsessively searched for the fleas, bedbugs, or other disgusting crawling things that must be doing this to us. We found nothing. Nothing but itchy red bumps on our stomachs, arms, and legs that are multiplying. I even took my temperature to see if we have some sort of infection, but it was 96.5° at four in the afternoon, which is a problem in itself.

The Time I Was Vampire Santa's Little Helper

Last night I dreamt that I worked in this large Christmas-themed store. It was pretty upscale—there were real fir garlands and twinkling lights and big wired gold ribbon everywhere. Then the room lights started flickering, and everyone screamed and ran to the center of the store, where the entrance to the basement was. Some scary vampire in black robes rose out of the basement and said, "You will die!" pointing at some of my friends. Three of my girl friends and I locked arms for safety and said, "Don't let go! What ever happens, don't let go!" Then the lights went out for a long time and there was screaming and one by one my friends were torn away from me.

A voice whispered in my ear, "We left you alive because you can become one of us!" and then the lights came back on. My three friends were dead, and I was covered in their blood. This guy gave me a hug and said everything would be all right, but I was still afraid that the vampires would come for me. Something happened with a bus, and then I woke up.

Analysis: I'm stressed about school, so my brain thought up another annual situation that always stresses me out: Christmas.

The Time I Almost Got Detention

  This morning I dreamt that my family went to someone's middle school graduation (maybe my sister's?), and I wore my newish H&M business-like skirt and my green top. My parents were distracted because they had signed up to feed the missionaries that evening and felt bad that they just took some food over. My parents also kept talking about this spicy peach pie that they'd bought at Marie Callender's the night before. Anyway, my parents and brother went to find some seats on the bleachers, and I went to find the bathroom.
  I was doing my business in the flimsy middle-school stall when I heard someone come in. I could see enough under and around the stall door to realize that it was a male janitor. Feeling uncomfortable, I finished really quickly, tugged down my skirt, and rushed out of the bathroom. (I didn't wash my hands, but I guess they don't have germs in Dreamland.)
  "Hey!" a woman barked. I turned around to find a prototypical female gym teacher coming out from the glass-windowed resource officer's office, which was right by the bathroom. The male resource officer peeking out from behind her was kind of cute—which made what happened next even more embarrassing. "You can't wear a skirt above the knee! It's against the dress code!" the gym teacher hollered.
  I looked down at my skirt. It was a little twisted and bulgy because I'd come out of the bathroom so quickly. I smoothed it down. "This skirt is knee length," I told her.
  "What about that wrap part?" she continued, pointing to the pretty cascade of fabric on the side of my skirt, "Will that come open when you walk?"
  "It's not a wrap skirt, see?" I said, lifting up the cascading fabric part of the skirt to reveal the regular skirt underneath. Unfortunately, the regular skirt part had gotten all bunched up in the bathroom, so I actually showed her (and the resource officer behind her) a lot of leg and a bit of my underwear. My face became hot. "Let me go back in the bathroom and fix that," I said. I ducked back through the bathroom opening before she could respond. There, I found a stall and tried to ignore the presence of the janitor while adjusting my skirt so everything was where it should be.
  When I came out, I showed the gym teacher that everything was okay with skirt. She shook her head, "I don't know. Maybe you should just put on your gym sweats."
  "Um," I answered.
  "Do your parents have any more of your dresses in the car?"
  I thought about it. My long, long-sleeved, white temple dress was in the car because my family had either just been to the temple or were planning to go soon. "Um, well I guess they do," I said.
  The gym teacher looked a little bored. "Wait, take off your shoes and stand there."
  Face burning some more, I did as she asked, removing my heels to stand in my nice new nylons on the filthy green-painted concrete floor.
  "Oh, that's it!" the gym teacher exclaimed. "Your short legs are just throwing off my sense of proportion. Just to be safe though, next time you should wear a longer skirt. I almost gave you a referral."
  "You do know I don't go to this school, right?" I replied. I wanted to say "You do know I'm twenty-three years old?" but that seemed rude.
  Her shoulders fell. "Well, that changes everything. See you later!" She ducked back in the resource officer's booth, and I realized I really should have announced my age because (a) it might make her actually apologize and (b) the resource officer really was very cute.
  Just to spite her, I changed into my old silk Nicole Miller dress ($85 on Bluefly!), which is too revealing for me to wear anymore. My underwear was showing! Then I found my dad and shouted (because that resource officer was now moving around the crowd nearby), "Can you believe it! I almost got detention, and I'm twenty-three years old!" People stared at me. The resource officer really stared at me, clearly repulsed.


  My mom leaned over and said that she'd left the missionaries a note hinting at having them over around Christmas for the sole purpose of having a reason to buy more of that spicy peach pie. Did I think it was a good idea? And then I woke up.

The Time I Personally Witnessed the Downfall of American Civilization

Today at the mall I saw a teenage girl—between fourteen and sixteen—out with her friends and wearing a t-shirt that said, "Pregnant Is the New Skinny". She was not wearing it ironically.

Baby bumps as fashion statements. We're ripe for the Apocalypse.

The Time I Attended a Clockwork Mardi Gras

Last night I dreamt that I was in some sort of hyperreality that was like a mixture of the French Quarter of New Orleans and Versailles during a simulacrum of the Rococo period. It was Mardi Gras, and people were dressed up in painted faces and white wigs and elaborate mid-eighteenth-century outfits. I wore a gray dress that looked like something Madame de Pompadour would wear, and my wig was black instead of white. My group were all wearing somber colors, like deep blue, with silver braid.

There was another faction in town which dressed in red and white. A huge red-and-white carriage with red-and-white clockwork footmen (like in "The Girl in the Fireplace") rocked down the narrowish streets of the town to pick up guests for their party at a huge mansion. My group and I retreated down a dark alley to avoid being too close to the carriage. It was time for us to gather at our small celebration, so our leader, a good-looking young man wearing dark blue, dark green, and black, took us down a series of gray stone and taupe wood sidestreets until we came through an archway onto another busy street.

The red coach tore around the corner. A man in red and white and gold jumped out, grabbed me, and threw me inside the carriage. At that point, the scene cut back to the leader of our faction, who was now planning to get some clockwork explosives and sneak into the fancy red and white Mardi Gras ball with them. And then I woke up.

The Time I Was in Building A Seawall: The Musical

Last night I dreamt that I got a job at a camp for older children and teenagers with autism. The point of the camp was to raise the campers' self-esteem by having them contribute to society. They contributed by designing and building a concrete seawall. The details of the construction were very specific, except that I don't know how to describe all of the technical building stuff: first they built a skeleton on the beach made of really big rebars, and then, from large red containers, they poured jointed sections of concrete in wooden molds like people pour sidewalks, except this was vertical but for a slight concave shape that reminded me of the Hoover Dam. The inner parts of the seawall were like the Clackamas Town Center Transit Station. While we supervised the construction, we taught the campers songs and stuff. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the sand was white.

Something happened after that, but I don't remember anymore because I got up late and had to go right to church instead of writing this dream down immediately. Anyway, after the thing I can't remember, I woke up.

The Time I Tried to Get Into German Literature

Last night I dreamt that I was at a bookstore (probably attached to a college, like BYU) looking for a book to read in San Diego. This dark-haired, medium-complexioned, very hyper young man kept following me around the store because he liked me. He was talking nonstop about all sorts of things, trying to hit a subject that would interest me. He never figured out that he didn't interest me, so it was a moot point.

Anyway, this guy wanted to pay for everything I bought at the bookstore, so I started collecting gold earrings and a fancy poster of British royalty to push my tab up. Finally, I came to a desk in the book department run by a tall, large, white-haired German man. The German man asked me about my literary tastes, and we chatted a bit. Hyper guy actually got bored by this and wandered off. Then the German man recommended that I buy a book from a series written by a dead German author. The whole story about the author sounded like Stieg Larsson's, except this author was German. There were a whole bunch of books in a whole bunch of formats, and I really wanted this really large, beautiful hardcover copy that was light green and blue and had the title in shiny silver letters. I want to say the title had the word moonlight in it. (I wish I could remember all the titles—they were probably the key to my mental state or something.)

Then I remembered that the book would be too bulky for the plane. The man suggested that I begin my journey with this author by reading another of the books, which came in a smaller hardcover edition but no paperback edition. In the end, I took the book that occurred in the author's oeuvre just before the one the man wanted me to buy. It came in a used paperback edition that had been used for a class and had a few things highlighted. It was called In My _______. (I can't remember the last word, but it could have been room.)

When I went to pay, my admirer suddenly reappeared by my side demanding to pay for the sundry items I had acquired. However, when the tab rang up, he didn't have enough money and became very embarrassed. I didn't feel sorry for him. And then I woke up.

The Time I Hurredly Jotted Down a Note on My iPod Touch

Passed the Bonneville Dam listening to "He Lays in the Reins". Gray sky. Mist coming off the water falling. Low hanging clouds. Opera part of the song at the right moment.

The Time I Met the New Billionaires Club

Last night I dreamt that my parents owned several houses in their area: their real house, the manufactured home we lived in when I was in high school, and a farmhouse that in the dream I said was built in 1905. The farmhouse was a little rundown, but gorgeous and out in the country. I moved into it. The only problem was that the house was dusty and smelled moldy and it really bothered my allergies. After being there for a few weeks, I was really feeling sick. I told my parents, and they said that we could switch houses.

I couldn't wait anymore, so I ran to my nearest neighbors' house. Their house wasn't very big on the outside, but it looked very nice inside. They had shiny reddish hardwood floors and luxurious countertops. A bunch of other people were at the house. They were having a New Billionaires meeting—everyone there had either recently won a lottery or inherited a lot of money. The people were all really nice, but I felt really out of place and wanted to leave. There was a redheaded woman with a Southern Belle accent in a blue suit. I sneezed, and then I woke up.

The Time A Wheel of Cheese Tried to Take Over the World

Last night I dreamt that a large orange wheel of cheese, kind of like the wheel of cheese in that weird Cheez-It commercial, was the tyrannical leader of these three young men. The cheese told them to do stuff like rob banks and things, but it didn't have a mouth. It had some sort of telepathic communication. Usually I am one of the characters in my dreams, but this time I just sat back and watched it go down like a movie. This particular dream was probably brought on by reading about the Sims 2 Grilled Cheese aspiration in detail right before I went to bed. (The aspiration levels all refer to some type of cheese that I want to eat.) The young men were trying to break into the White House or the Pentagon or something, and then I woke up.

The Time My Cat Was My Boss

Last night my cat slept with me, which is less pleasant during the summer than it is in the winter, but I didn't want to discourage her because it is really nice in the winter when the thermostat goes down to fifty-five. I kept waking up because I was so hot or because one of us had moved a little, and I ended up dreaming that I was at work.

I was a hairdresser, and my cat was the supervisor. She didn't talk, though, she just walked around on the counters knocking over all the bottles of hair product and rubbed our legs when she was hungry. I finally asked one of the other hairdressers why our boss was a cat.

"Well, we can't discriminate against a person with catness," she shrugged. She had used person-first language to describe a cat. It was weird. And then I woke up. Again.

The Time My Roommate and I Watched Too Many FBI Procedurals

Last night I dreamt that I was a skinny teenage girl—about seventeen or eighteen—with very dark hair, two younger sisters, and an older sister. We lived in California with our father (who was not my real father). He was an okay dad, but he had a bad habit of kidnapping young girls and performing vivisections on them. Finally, he ran out of girls in the neighborhood to kidnap, so he decided to eviscerate one of my younger sisters.

I tried to stop him, but my older sister said we should let him do what he wanted. She grabbed a glass vase and smashed it, holding it out as a weapon. I tried to get past her to my dad and my little sister, but my older sister just cut me with the glass. I was bleeding all over, and my father was starting to cut open his daughter, who was screaming, so I turned around and ran out the front door in bare feet to tell the neighbors in the red house across the street to call 911. They were all freaked out that I was bleeding, and I was trying to tell them that something much worse was happening in my house. And then I woke up.

The Time I Gave Some Random Guy Drug Money—Now This Actually Happened

  Today I was sitting at a local community college waiting for the class that I tutor in to start. My earbuds were in, and Muse's "I Belong to You (+Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix)" was playing and I was smelling the lavender in this truly beautiful landscape feature and it was a really great moment when this guy came up to me and was like, "Can I borrow a dollar?"
  I had just sold back a book for three bucks that morning, so I actually had cash. I was sitting near the bus stop, and the bus is a dollar, so I thought, I'll be a nice person and give him bus money instead of lying or ignoring him like I usually would.
  "Sure," I said, reaching for my super-awesome Mugwump wallet made out of a map (Adriatic Sea section) that my mom bought me a long time ago.
  "You don't have a five, do you?" said the guy, "'Cause that would be great."
  I narrowed my eyes. "No, I don't." Even if I did, I would have said I didn't. I was going to get the nicest bill for him so it would scan in the bus change-machine, but now I kept my wallet pinched shut so he couldn't see (as he leaned over to look inside it) that I still had two other bills.
  "Here you go," I said, handing it over.
  He grabbed it. "Do you got a smoke?"
  "No," I said.
  Then he stalked off away from the bus stop to hit up another clump of people for money. Well, at least he can't get much with just my dollar, but I still feel mad at myself for enabling him to buy drugs.
  And yes, it was for drugs. It's a pretty common technique around here, and I fell for it.

The Time I Went to Zombie-Fighting School

During a nap today, I dreamt that I went to school to become a zombie killer like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. There, I met this really hot guy who also killed zombies for a living. Then, of course, a bunch of zombies attacked the school, and it was all beheading and blowing up with bazookas all the time. A bunch of times the zombies almost bit me, but then I realized I would turn into a zombie too if they did, so I kicked them in the head. And then I woke up.

The Time My Mom Started Growing Ganja

Last night I dreamt that my very conservative mother who is very against marijuana in all cases decided to become a licensed medical marijuana grower for some extra cash. We still lived in San José, and she had inherited a house with a good-sized yard a few blocks down from our actual house. She decided to turn the new house into a clinic and grow the cannabis in the tightly fenced backyard.

"The only problem," she said, looking over the carpet of pink banana squash currently growing behind the house, "will be the stank. People will complain about the stank."

"Um, is stank the technical term?" I asked.

"Of course," she shrugged, as if I was sooooo square. "Maybe we could grow something fragrant, like lavender, around the edges."

"Um," I said. Then I thought of something else as I cleaned the curtains in the house—can you be licensed to grow medical marijuana if you don't have a prescription for it yourself? I decided that probably if someone could prove through regular drug tests that he or she wasn't personally smoking it, it would be fine. Then I was worried that being exposed to the growing plants would make my mom and I fail drug tests. (I don't really know how marijuana works.)

The worst part was that I had no job, so my mom recruited me to run the marijuana business for her. I'm not even sure how I feel about medical marijuana, but I know growing it, even legally, is major risky. I had to harvest mountains of pink banana squash so we could get to the ground, my mom went to the Department of Medical Marijuana (obviously I have no idea what this is actually called) to get a license and some seeds, and then I woke up.

The Time I Tried to Cast Out an Evil Jane Lynch

  Last night I dreamt that my brother was some kind of mystical chosen one, which consequently made him the biggest target in the known universe. My parents didn't believe me though, so they sent him to summer camp anyway. The camp sent him back five days later because in those five days he'd been kidnapped or become inexplicably lost eight times and nearly been hit by meteors six times. I went to pick him up.
  Something evil messed with our car, so we were stuck in some small Oregonian town with dusk fast approaching. We stopped at this nice-looking woman's house, and she let us stay the night on her floor.
  We got inside just in time because once the sun went down, the house started to shake like it was in the middle of a whirlwind. Someone/thing knocked on the door every thirty seconds, and when the woman opened her door—but not the screen door—who/whatever it was tried to force a way into the house. A few times the evil spirit/witch did get inside, and I had to hold on to my brother tightly so they couldn't take him.
  It was so bad that we couldn't even leave the house. Once all the forces of evil knew where my brother was, they even attacked during the daytime. There was also this pool of milky water at the bottom of an old shower in the house. Every time I saw it, I thought, There's probably just hair in the drain, I should take it out, but something kept me from touching that water. Days went by, and the water level never changed.
  Anyway, a few days later, the woman who had taken us in needed a break, so she left the house for the night. (Let me tell you, just opening the door for her invited in a whole bunch of evil that we had to chase out.) We thought things had been bad before, but the banging and the screaming outside the house became ten times worse after she left.  Two witches showed up in the early evening, one looked like Jane Lynch and the other was a young white girl with dark hair. Jane Lynch was a shapeshifter, so she made herself look and sound like our mom and knocked on the back sliding door. My brother wanted his mom so bad that I had to hold him back as he screamed and hit me to keep him from opening the door. This went on for a while. I wanted to take us in the bathroom with no windows and doors so we wouldn't have to see this, but I was afraid that if I turned my back on the forces of evil for one second, they'd find a way in the house.
  Then a troupe of three more witches swooped down on glittery flying skateboards. They were dressed in flowing white outfits. Jane Lynch and her buddy disappeared when the new witches arrived. The leader of the new witches marched up to the sliding glass door and knocked. I ignored it, as I had been ignoring all of the knocking on that door. She knocked again, and I looked up and felt that she was good.
  Don't worry, even as I felt she was good I knew that that may be another evil illusion, but I was too exhausted not to trust her. I opened the door, and she motioned for my brother and I to step outside into the center of a triangle that she and her two fellow witches formed. I hesitated, and then behind me the woman who owned the house came and said to the good witches, "Can I help you?"
  My heart stopped cold. I pushed my brother out the door and followed him. "She's not home, she's not home!" I shrieked, pointing at the woman with my eyes wide.
  "What?" asked one of the good witches.
  "I cast thee out, witch!" I commanded, pointing at the witch who looked like the nice woman who took us in. She changed back into Jane Lynch, and she bared her pointy teeth and growled at me.
  "I . . . I cast thee out, witch!" I stuttered, pointing at her.
  She backed up a little, and her evil-witch-in-training appeared beside her.
  "I cast thee out, witch!" I said, pointing to the younger evil witch. An invisible force shot her back against the tall, wooden backyard fence. "I cast thee out, witch!" I told Jane Lynch, pointing at her. She also shot back against the fence.
  "Let's go inside," said the leader of the good witches. She led my brother and I back into the house. We watched from the sliding glass door as the other two good witches flew back on their flying skateboards and then shot them straight through Jane Lynch and the other evil witch. The evil witches evaporated, which made me think they had just dematerialized rather than died.
  The two good witches joined us in the house, and I explained how unsafe I felt even inside. I wanted them to take my brother and I home with them, but I didn't want to ask. I showed the leader of the good witches the mysterious pool of murky water and told her about not wanting to touch it. She said I had a special ability for discerning good from evil. Even as she said that, I thought, That's just what she'd say if she were really evil but trying to convince me that the good glamor she has on is real. And then I woke up.

This is all the perfect foundation for a YA novel, isn't it?

The Time I Owned a Castle and a Prince for Hire

Last night I dreamt that my dad lost his job, so I moved back with my parents, they sold the house, and we started living in a motel in Southern California. My dad was feeling bad for me, so for my birthday/Christmas he gave me the combined present of a castle—like Hearst Castle or something. It was all decked out in red, white, and gold, which I've always thought are better Christmas colors than red and green, for a Christmas Ball that we now had to host because we owned the castle.

My biggest problem was getting a dress. Because my dad was out of a job, we had to rent a dress rather than buy one, which made it impossible to find anything modest. My aunt arrived to help me pick one out, but she really liked this purple two-piece with a tied back because it would be easy to wear something under it. The problem was that it was satiny and purple and totally out of style. I liked this strapless white dress with a red sash and a red rose pattern that went three-quarters of the way up the skirt. My mom made me wear a white shirt over it, so it looked kinda dumb.

Then there was some sort of prince or something who was going to escort me. However, it didn't really make sense.

The Time I Fought Demons in LA with the Slayers-in-Training

Last night I dreamt that I came to LA with the Slayers-in-training from the last season of Buffy and found this warehouse which Angel had cleaned up a while ago. However, the demons were coming back, so I had to move in. It was night, and the street was only lit by an ambient orange glow from the streetlights.

At one point, the green-gray demons caught me and started torturing me, but I was only letting them think they were in control so they would let down their guards. Then Angel arrived and I woke up.

The Time I Joined a London Pantomime and then Ran from the Coppers with Bonnie Hunt

My dream began fantastically enough—I had somehow acquired enough money to return to England, but my mom and sister came with me. We wanted a taste of real British culture, so we decided to watch a Christmas pantomime even though it was July. It was in a large tent like Bard at the Beach, except everything was dirtier. The pantomime troupe had very few actors, so they always recruited tourists from the audience to play some of the minor parts. My sister was asked to play one of the big parts, but she didn't want to, so I took over. My role was the poor mother at a meager Christmas lunch, in which my whole brood of five or six kids only had one boiled turkey leg to split between them. Even though they all expected me to mumble in my American accent—which would add to the comedy of the scene—I surprised them all with a clear British accent projected over the audience.

Afterwards, the leader of the troupe—a very tall, very thin woman with pink and purple hair and white face makeup—asked me if I would like to join her troupe permanently. Seeing a chance to stay in my real homeland, I took the job.

Then I woke up for a second and fell back to sleep. I was on the pantomime troupe's tour bus when I decided to go for a jog. We were still in Southwark or Canary Wharf or somewhere like that, and I was really frustrated that everyone I jogged past were American tourists who said, "Hi!" I jogged into an M&S—Americans. I jogged onto a rugby field—Americans. I jogged deeper into East London thinking I could at least meet some Bangladeshis or something but nope—Americans. I mean, I practically took a job in a circus just to be in the UK, and now everyone I met was American. Argh! I jumped on the Tube and went to Kensington.


There I somehow invaded Bonnie Hunt's London mansion. As I was chatting with all the Americans in her house, we suddenly saw a huge swarm of policemen running towards us over the lawn. I didn't even know why the police were there, but we all ran away. And then I woke up.

The Time I Was King Graham in King's Quest

Last night I dreamt that I was King Graham (or maybe Prince Alexander) in King's Quest—this dream was not in pixels, though—and my sidekick and I were trying to save a princess from an evil genius.

Anyway, we snuck into the evil genius's lair with the help of one of his minions. We found the princess and freed her from her chains. Then someone heard us, and we had to run. The lair was a medieval castle, until suddenly we ran into a modern gymnasium with computers in it. I thought, Oh, this is one of those things where they purposely put modern things in the past, like steampunk. We locked the door we'd came through, but all the other doors were also locked.

The evil genius and his minions were coming, and we had to convince the good minion who'd helped us this far to open a trap door in the floor. And then I woke up and it was only two-thirty.

The Supertaster Snob Strikes Again

I just bit into a poached free-range egg sprinkled with sea salt and pepper, and though I like neither eggs nor salt (see aversion to white foods), knowing how much I paid for it made it taste heavenly.

So It Turns Out that Dreyer's Creamy Coconut Fruit Bars Don't Taste that Great

A couple months ago, I had a dream about WMDs and Dreyer's Creamy Coconut Fruit Bars, which I'd never actually tried but had looked good when I saw them at the store. However, I don't usually like coconut things (see list of white foods I don't like), so I took my craving to the store and bought Dreyer's Pineapple Fruit Bars instead. They were very good.

Just this past week, however, I was still thinking about that stupid dream, so I sprang for the coconut flavor. Guess what? I don't like them.

Great Lines from Much Ado about Nothing

Benedick. What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
Beatrice. Is it possible that disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

Beatrice. I would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

Don John the Bastard. Though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-speaking villain.

Beatrice. [God sent] me no husband, for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening.

Beatrice. Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

Don Pedro (of Beatrice). She were an excellent wife for Benedick.
Leonato. O Lord, my lord, if they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad.

Benedick. The world must be peopled!

Benedick. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

Benedick. Ha! "Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner"—there's a double meaning in that.

Hero. Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

Dogberry. To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to read and write comes by nature.

Dogberry. O villain! thou wilt be condemn'd into everlasting redemption for this.

Conrade. Away, you are an ass, you are an ass!
Dogberry. Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it may not be written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.

Beatrice. I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

Benedick. Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.

Claudio. Another Hero!

Benedick (to Beatrice). Come, I will have thee, but by this light, I take thee for pity.
Beatrice. I would not deny you, but by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.
Benedick. Peace, I will stop your mouth. Kissing her.

Benedick. Prince, thou art sad, get thee a wife, get thee a wife.

Temple + Shakespeare + Sushi = Best Day Ever

This picture is so nonrepresentative of the feel of the play that I didn't want to post it. On the other hand, it is the only publicity shot I can find.

Okay, so remember eight years ago when I was obsessed with the play Much Ado about Nothing and I read it a bunch of times and watched the movie and even wrote an entire novel about teenagers performing it in a high school drama class? Well, I finally actually saw the play for the first time in person at Bard on the Beach. I am reobsessed.


Also, my brother just gave me his old iPod Touch, so I downloaded the free app that includes the text of forty Shakespeare plays (including the ones with doubtful authorship). When I couldn't understand Verges and Dogberry, I just looked up their lines on the iPod.

Then after going to the new Vancouver Temple and Bard on the Beach, we went to Octopus' Garden and had amazing tako (octopus), salmon, tuna, and crab sushi. If you're ever in Vancouver, eat at Octopus' Garden. Wow. I wish I lived in one of those pretty little houses on the side streets around it so that I could eat there every day. The décor was beautiful, and the food was even better.

Holy crap, I'm so bored.

My life is so boring. Sometimes I really want to experience a psychotic break so that I can do all sorts of risky, interesting things and not be responsible for them. Or I could join the CIA and use my Arabic for spying so that I could adopt another persona. Except the CIA's actually pretty boring too, and if I joined it, I'd have to support our nation's geopolitical agenda, which I don't.

A Couple Dreams about The Office (US)

Angela and I watch the American The Office nearly every evening in syndication. However, for the past two weeks, I've only seen it twice. Therefore, my Office-deprived brain invented dreams to fill the gaps.

The first dream was set around the end of the fifth season, probably because the last episode I saw was "Cafe Disco". In the dream, I was a member of the office staff, and we were all going to witness Jim and Pam's impromptu wedding. The problem was that everywhere we went, they couldn't get married. First, we loaded into our cars and caravaned to a church, but the vicar had already gone home for the day. Then they tried to get married at a public park, but that didn't work either. Finally, we all went to this super-high range department store (the kind with plush carpet and live music), where the manager was supposed to marry Jim and Pam. Unfortunately, the manager could not be found. We looked for the manager so long that the store closed with all of us in it. Then we raided the little department-store café because we were hungry. Andy turned on some music, and we had a dance party in the darkened store.

Another night, I dreamt that I had moved to the Midwest with my brother, who is also named Jim. Jim (my brother) and I went ward-hopping through all of the YSA wards in the area. To get to some of them, we drove for two hours. I was trying to get to know all of the people (okay, men) in the different wards, but it was hard because I was trying to also keep an eye on Jim, who was trying to get to know all the thin blondes in the different wards. One of the wards had a Halloween-in-June celebration, where they handed out ghost-shaped Peeps that they had bought last Halloween especially for the June party. Not surprisingly, the Peeps were hard.

The The Office part of the dream came when I went to work in Independence, Missouri, which I could not do until I flew over an imaginary, gorgeous Independence in a virtual tour of the fictional Mormon Quarter. A river bisected the city, and it was filled with neoclassical architecture (Monticello-type buildings). Basically, it was nothing like the real Independence, Missouri, of which my impression was sticky, dirty, and oppressive when I visited a few years ago.


Anyway, when I got to work, it was populated by the staff of The Office, except there was this very large and muscular woman. Michael asked me to fire her for him, and when I tried to, it was just like when David Brent fired Alex in "Judgment" and Michael tried to fire Creed and actually fired Devon in "Halloween", with a little bit of Michael and Dwight trying to choose a health insurance plan in "Health Care", except the woman stood up and walked into my personal bubble, threatening my with her bulk. She was yelling, "How am I supposed to provide for my kids?!" and telling me it wasn't fair. She got so scary that I wanted to call the police, but Michael told me not to because he didn't want the bad publicity. I was afraid she was going to come back with a gun or something. After Dwight helped me get her out, Michael also asked me to tell the homeless man who was settled in front of the entrance to our building to move on. The man also was very belligerent, and I got no support from my coworkers. A normal day at The Office, then.

Avatar Is Pretty Boring

So my roommate rented Avatar from Netflix, and we both watched the first half for the first time before getting bored and going to bed. I shouldn't have been surprised that it was boring—Titanic was like a bad soap opera (read: wooden) until the boat started to sink and water rushed through the corridor and stuff. Avatar has a problem in the special effects front that, while Titanic's special effects were new and exciting, computer animation is pretty ho-hum without the interesting 3D parts. Now, I have not read any spoilers, but I'm going to guess that after the big showdown, the humans will go back to Earth, except for Jake and perhaps Sigourney Weaver, who will find a way to stay in their avatars permanently. Maybe Colin from Bones will join them, but he hasn't gotten enough face-time so far for me to make a judgment about him.

What really bugs me about Avatar is that it's just like Disney's Pocahontas except the natives have blue skin instead of brown. It's even got the Indian princess who is meant to marry the brave warrior and future chief but chooses the stupid reformed invader instead. Is it a coincidence that all the evil humankind in the movie are white? I doubt it. The movie seems like an attempt to apologize for white oppression while actually being very patronizing towards "native" (read: backwards, but peaceful and connected to nature, awwwww) cultures. It carries the noble savage archetype to a far-away planet, but it's still the noble savage archetype.

The only part I identified with is Jake when he's not in his avatar. He says the human world has become like a dream, and he can't wait to get back to the (What are the blue people called again? I feel like they keep saying different things.) world. I feel like that a lot. Last night, I was dreaming about traveling rivers in a log canoe with my elementary school friends Gareth and Denise, except they'd grown up and Gareth looked like Martin Freeman. We hit rapids and had to drag our canoes all the way back to camp in the middle of a temperate rainforest. The trees were green. There were no mosquitoes. My allergies didn't bother me, even around the giant ferns. I wasn't tired. Why should I ever wake up from that? Sometimes I feel like I just go through the motions when I'm awake so I can fall asleep and go back to Dreamland, or at least enter one of my many complex daydreams.

The Time I Lost My Shoe at Church but Was Actually Looking for a Boyfriend

My latest dream happened during my customary Sunday afternoon nap, and I dreamt about church. I was at church, but no one would talk to me except this brother who was dating a sister in the ward. (Everyone at church is called brother or sister; I'm not talking about a black guy right now and saying brother as a synonym for black. Actually, the brother in this particular dream was either white or Latino.) He and I were talking about something church-related, but he was sitting really close to me and leaning in. I felt uncomfortable because I knew his girlfriend, but I also enjoyed flirting with him because flirting is fun.

Then church ended, so we all left the building to walk to the parking garage that was several blocks from the church because the church was in a big city like Salt Lake City or Vancouver, BC, or something. I had lost one of my beige pumps, but then I decided I must have left it in my car. I started walking unevenly down the street in one shoe and one stocking-foot. Then the sky exploded with that crazy monsoon rain which we had yesterday. I didn't have a raincoat, so I was soaked. My shoeless foot was particularly wet. I could feel the wet concrete through my nylons every time I stepped on the ground. At one of the intersections, I ran into a metal bar that was about ankle-height, and it scraped my leg. So my nylons were torn, my leg was bleeding a little, I was soaking wet, the rain was so heavy I could barely see through it, and I only had one shoe. Some of the people from church passed me on the sidewalk and gave me funny looks, and I wanted to snap, "Yeah, I only have one shoe. What's your problem?!" but I didn't. (In real life, I'm trying to become less confrontational.) When I finally arrived at the parking garage, I had to crawl on my hands and knees, in true dream fashion, through a very tiny concrete opening to get to my car. When I got to my car, I realized that of course my other shoe couldn't possibly be in the car because, when I walked to the church that morning, I'd had on both shoes. Duh! I thought to myself, Why did you ever think the shoe would be in the car?! As I contemplated hobbling back through the rain to retrieve the shoe that I'd taken off during Relief Society in order to wiggle my toes for a few minutes, I woke up. It took me a few seconds to remind myself that I'd actually had both of my shoes on my feet when I came home from church.


The symbolism is pretty basic: People my age like to run around in pairs, but I'm running around by myself—I only have one shoe on, but I should have two. When I look for the matching shoe in the car when it's obviously in the Relief Society room, I'm looking for my match in the wrong place. Flirting with the man who already had a girlfriend is taking advantage of an opportunity to not risk a real relationship. What I learned from this dream, that is, the impression that I received when I woke up and thought about it, is that I really want a boyfriend for the first time in a few years. That's not necessarily a good thing because if I just want someone to make out with, hang out with on Friday nights, and canoodle with during Sunday School, I can find somebody. It means I'm willing to date someone who is not and never will be a suitable eternal companion just because I want some temporal companionship. That's how I did it before my mission, but now I'm too old for that. I need to get serious. On the other hand, my schoolwork always suffers when I date.

The Time I Was Accused of Murder at Oxford University

Last night's dream started out smashingly: I fulfilled my life-long goal of studying at Oxford University. I had some sort of fellowship or apprenticeship because I was doing some teaching too. Then the faculty of my department went on a beach trip. The beach was very close to the college, and the water was fairly warm. (None of that is accurate.) Anyway, I was splashing around in the ocean with two of my friends (a man and a woman) from the college when we heard a lot of yelling. Two of the men in the water had started to drown, presumably because they were swimming drunk. My friends and I swam to them and pulled them to shore. It was too late for one of the drowned men—he was already dead. The other one was still barely alive, so my guyfriend picked him up, and we all hurried to the closest building, which was a dorm or something for the college. (In real life, we would have performed CPR and said, "You, call 999!", but it was a dream.)

The door of the building was locked, so my female friend and I knocked while our guyfriend said his burden was getting heavier. Finally the door opened a crack, but the woman inside said she knew I'd killed both of the men. She was not letting me in to kill her too. "But this one's still alive!" I pled, but she didn't believe me. Then we flashed forward a bit, and the police were investigating me for murdering both of the men because the one had died after we couldn't take him inside. They thought I'd poisoned the men because I had a low-class accent—I said sick instead of ill or something. Something else happened, but I can't remember because I forgot it when I woke up.