Adam Lanza and Diagnostic Fads

On Friday I was streaming ABC News at work and the reporter started talking about how Ryan Lanza (who turned out not to be the shooter) might have had Asperger's, so that's why he killed 27 people. Apparently that theory has been transferred to Adam Lanza now. I thought, "What." People with autism can be prone to tantrums, even extremely violent tantrums, but there is no evidence at all that autism would prompt someone to premeditate an attack like the one in Connecticut. People with autism are often overly emotionally sensitive because they have trouble regulating their own emotions and putting others' emotions in perspective.

Furthermore this woman's mentally ill son had also been diagnosed on the autism spectrum at one time, so let's talk about fad diagnoses for a second: When my brother was diagnosed with autism, there were still vestiges of a theory that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” floating around, so the psychologist told my parents that my brother had "PDD—autistic type." A quick look at the DSM-III-R reveals that PDD is a category of disorders, one of them being autism, so the doctor was actually saying my brother had autism. Now autism has groups and celebrities and apologists and, most important, funding, so doctors diagnose autism when the problem is clearly something else. For instance a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that diagnoses of mental retardation and LD have fallen proportionately to the rise in autism diagnoses. I'd also like to see a study comparing diagnoses of mental illness in children to diagnoses of autism over time. Labeling mentally ill children as autistic creates two big problems: (1) The children receive woefully inadequate treatment, and (2) a stigma could again build around autism, fueled by poorly treated children with mental illnesses. A lesser but still damaging effect is that as wildly variable syndromes are are labeled as autism, fewer people will have a clear idea of what autism is, what it affects, and what autistic people can actually do.

Why Universal State-Sponsored Health Care Would Solve Many Problems in the United States

The United States needs universal state-sponsored health care. Here's why: Right now, the people who do pay for state-sponsored health care (workers) do not receive it, and the people who receive state-sponsored health care (children in lower income families, unemployed parents, people too disabled to work, and seniors) do not pay for it. This disparity means that whenever state-sponsored health care is discussed, the two sides can never see eye to eye: The people who are not receiving benefits want to cut their costs, and the people who are not paying for their health care want more benefits or at least do not want their benefits cut. In recent years, this means that the federal government and some state governments have gone into severe debt trying to satisfy both parties—using money that does not exist to keep and even expand benefits while cutting the taxes that partially pay for these programs. While I am specifically discussing health care in this post, this same dichotomy is true for many government taxes and programs: the payers receive few benefits, and the beneficiaries do not pay.

Not all residents of developed countries feel the same way about taxes as residents of the United States. An April poll showed 64% of Canadians would be willing to pay slightly higher taxes in order to preserve benefits. Why do they want to pay for benefits? Every Canadian who buys anything pays a value-added tax that funds government programs, which means all Canadians both pay for and receive benefits like universal state-sponsored health care, which is administered by the provinces. No wonder they feel more positive about taxes! (Scandinavian countries have even more aggressive and more effective high-tax, high-benefit, high–budget surplus systems, which are probably too foreign for the United States to even attempt to emulate.) A fairer system would have everyone pay and everyone receive benefits.

Moreover, requiring employers to provide health insurance to their employees puts an undue burden on employers. They hire fewer workers and are more likely to move their company to a country that has another health care arrangement. A recent report shows that employers are shifting more and more of the health care cost burden onto employees. 

Health expenditure per capita in US$ Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) 2009, OECD countries

Our current health care system is also grossly overpriced, which a universal state-sponsored health care program would surely address. In 2009, health care spending made up 17.4% of the entire GDP in the United States, compared to 9.8% of the the GDP of the United Kingdom, which has universal state-sponsored health care. A common rebuttal to this argument is that, while expensive, health care in the United States is better than health care in countries with universal state-sponsored health care, or even "the world's greatest [health] care system." Well, it's not. Here's another report on the dismally expensive state of United States health care.

A lot of medical innovation comes out of the United States because the United States is a populous, developed country, not necessarily because the United States is actually better at encouraging medical innovation. A 2011 report found not only that "the medical technology innovation ecosystem . . . is moving offshore," but also that "US consumers aren’t always the first to benefit from medical technology and could eventually be last." Because government regulation has made medical treatment cheaper in other countries, more people can access it, ultimately creating more revenue for pharmaceutical companies and other private medical innovators.

Finally, because health insurance companies and hospital chains are allowed to profit and be publicly traded in the United States, profit is what the for-profit health insurance companies and hospital chains seek to satisfy their investors. They must pay out less in health care and administration than they collect in premiums and fees. That's how profit works. Any capitalist system benefits the strong and powerful over the weak and helpless; therefore, every system in the United States does not and is not expected to follow the capitalist model. For example, our country holds the value that all children should have a certain level of education, not just the children who can most efficiently achieve that level of education. Rightly or wrongly, we spend a lot of time, money, and effort on the children who offer the lowest return on our investment. If we can socialize education, why not health care? Health care should be a public service that pays for itself, no more, no less.

To conclude, the unholy union of public and private health care programs in the United States is unfair, overpriced, hurting patients, and violating American ideals of equity and compassion.

Terms

• state—the operations or concerns of the government of a country.
• state-sponsored health care—a program in which health services are paid for by a government body using government funds collected from taxes or other sources of revenue. In the United States, Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP are forms of state-sponsored health care. Contrary to popular email rumor, the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, is not universal state-sponsored health care, though it does give states the option of adding more people to their Medicare plans.
• universal state-sponsored health care—state-sponsored health care that is extended to all residents.

The Time Facebook Switched Me to the Timeline

Last night I dreamt that I logged onto Facebook, and a dialog box popped up asking me for a cover photo for my New Improved Difficult-to-Read Photo-Mangling Timeline! Nooooooo!

How My Mom Trained My Dad to Buy Her Roses

1985

My mom: I like flowers.
My dad: Happy Valentine's Day! Here are some of the flowers I grow on the balcony of my bachelor pad so that when I'm socially obligated to give women flowers, I don't have to pay for them.

1990

My mom: I like when you buy me flowers.
My dad: Happy Mother's Day! Here is a carton of marigolds that I picked up at Home Depot. When you're done looking at them, I'll plant them next to the squash to repel bugs.

1995

My mom: I like when you buy me cut flowers.
My dad: Happy birthday! Here are some slightly wilted carnations that were by the door at Thrifty's when I stopped there on the way home from work. I also bought milk and tortilla chips.

2000

My mom: I like when you buy me pretty cut flowers.
My dad: Happy Mother's Day! I took my thirteen-year-old daughter with me to the Safeway floral department, and she said this bouquet of mixed flowers looked nice. She also thinks tight pink t-shirts that say Babe in glitter across the chest look nice.

2005

My mom: I like when you buy me pretty roses. And the rose bush we bought at the nursery last month doesn't count.
My dad: Happy Valentine's Day! Here are some peach roses from the Safeway floral department. They aren't even wilted.

2010

My mom: I want you to order me roses from a florist in advance. I want them delivered to my work on Valentine's Day. I want you to pay no less than fifty dollars.
My dad: Which local florist has coupons?

The Time We Were All Spooks in New Zealand

Last night I dreamt that I was a teenage foster child in New Zealand and may or may not have been a character in a TV show. Our seaside town was infested with creatures called spooks, which were a bit like vampires, a bit like witches, and a bit like ghosts. Lon Chaney worked at the school. I really liked this attractive boy at school who was probably a spook, so I really went all out to be a sexy witch for Halloween. (Do they even celebrate Halloween in New Zealand like they do in the States?) Come to think of it, most of my human friends were trying to date spooks. They were just so much hotter than regular guys.

Then I woke up (in my dream) at 3:25 a.m. and decided to get ready for Halloween early because school started at 7:00 a.m. or something, and I wanted to look hott. I stuffed myself into a purple satin bodice with black lacy trim and was trying to decide whether tight jeans and tall black boots would complement the outfit. Suddenly my foster brother—who was tall with dark hair, and very annoying—popped his head in my room. I squealed and pulled something in front of me since I was only partially dressed. He wasn't fazed at all and said our foster mother wanted to talk to me, and, by the way, nice butt. I ended up turning the purple bodice into a long ballgown for Halloween.

Meanwhile, Lon Chaney met with the king of the spooks in an underground cavern and gave some information about the humans in exchange for being turned into a spook. The king, his queen, and the court were all wearing overly elaborate faux macaroni costumes like the people in the Julia Roberts "Snow White" and in Once upon a Time and some Tim Burton films I don't want to think about. The king thanked Lon Chaney for the info and then let his face be melted off by a yellow light.

I think my foster mother must have told us about the plot because soon it was evening and my foster brother and I were dressed in the same elaborate costumes and giving rides to the huge town Halloween gala in elaborate carriages with orange and gold curlicues hanging off them.

I saw my foster brother turn around in his carriage and talk to the fancy-dressed passengers, and I realized he was a spook too but he was somehow trying to stop the spook king or something. I turned around in my carriage and tried to convince my passengers to help. I also realized around this time that I was a ravishing redhead.

We entered the gala, which held in a huge mansion that had expansive grounds lit with torches and fireworks overlooking the harbor, like big party near the end of the 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo. The queen of the spooks showed up and then the she grew to an enormous size like Ursula in The Little Mermaid except she was like this bawdy pastiche barmaid with beauty patches and loose underwear. She stumbled around, and we ran from her feet.

Lon Cheney in the cavern still wasn't dead yet even though his face was all melted, and the king drew this shining sparkling green wooden stake and told Lon Cheney he had passed the test and then jammed it into Lon Cheney's chest and the cavern filled with sickly green light and Lon Cheney shouted in triumph because he was going to be a spook.

The king showed up at the gala and he grew enormous too and put on a dress and the mask of a pantomime dame and then he and the queen danced around grabbing each other's derrière, and I was like, What's the mask for? We all know you're the king of the spooks already because you just grew enormous in front of our eyes, and then I realized I was probably also a spook, and then I woke up.

The Time My Dead Grandpa Took Me on a Tropical River Adventure

This morning I dreamt that my dead grandpa (who was alive, very tan and muscular, and in his forties or early fifties) took my brother and I on a boat just like the African Queen through the Indian subcontinent. We were trying to get to the Ganges, but we were on another river in India. It was very hot and humid. The scary part was that the river had these massive rapids even though we were on a big rigid boat with a canopy and everything. My dead grandpa loved it: he was swinging off the posts of the canopy and yelling "Yahoo!" And then I woke up.

The Time I Fell in Love with My Serbian Mentor

I was an adult in the dream, but the above picture was too lame to pass up!

Last night I fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bed with the light on, which I haven't done since my early-morning Seminary days, and dreamt that I was a princess. I was the youngest of several daughters, and my parents always dressed me in light purple, while my other sisters each had their own color. I spent a lot of time skipping around the palace listening to my full satin skirts swoosh around me and watching my diamonds glitter in the mirror.

I had this middle-aged Serbian mentor, and then I fell in love with him in true Eliza Doolittle/Jane Eyre/Francie Stevens fashion. My family was not happy about that, so they tried to keep us apart. I snuck away from the palace and tried to get to him at a fancy hotel.
His room was at the top of a truly spectacular steep, wide flight of red-carpeted stairs with gold-and-green embroidered risers that had little handles of the same fabric handles attached at an interval. I started to climb up them, but when the majordomo (a.k.a. my father's flunky) saw where I was going, he ordered that the stairs be collapsed like high-school bleachers. As the tread swiveled and the stairs steepened, I rushed up, clinging to the edges of the stairs. I could see my mentor on the landing far above me, but I can't remember his expression. Finally the stairs became a flat wall, and I hung on the fabric handles. I wanted to climb the wall, but I had no arm strength. The seams of the handles started to rip, and I was forced to move to a lower handle.

That handle started to rip, and then I woke up to see the clock said 2:36 and had a minor heart attack because I'd obviously missed my meeting at 1:00, and then I realized the light in the room wasn't sunlight and I felt better.

This Is My Life Now

Wake up in ungodly hours of the morning, stumble through breakfast-and-frumpy-clothing routine, drive to far reaches of south Seattle, endure six hours of whining while avoiding collisions with thrown objects, drive back through traffic, collapse, eat, shower, sleep, repeat.

The Time I Dated a Mayan Priest and Then Woke Too Migrainey to Write Properly

Dating a neo-Mayan priest. Nice sister, who was blond for some reason. We were persecuted, so we hid our beliefs. Found an underground temple—tan concrete, with smooth columns and lined with torches—and had a nice ceremony. Everyone using sacred Egyptian words like ma'at that I remember from when I worked on that Egyptologist's book and had to learn some ancient Egyptian. Cut to a cinematic animated section where we learn how the Egyptian religion was carried through the skies to the Mayans by a god, and I'm thinking, Yeah, right. It was probably carried with several migrations like the Lehites, the Mulekites, and other movements to the Americas that we don't know about. But whatever. Then the ceremony ends and we start to go home. But no! The guy's sister and I are going home, but he's staying. People are after us! "Get in the car!" she orders me. I squish in the backseat with three other small young women. The car breaks down as soon as we get on the highway. A big truck with a blue undercarriage light stops and opens it's door, but we can't see the driver. I'm afraid it's one of our enemies. The guy's sister flags down a large pickup white truck from a phone company or something, and the visible driver opens his extended cab. The sister and another girl get in. The third girl and I realize there's only one seat in that extended cab, and the first two girls have taken all the space. I decide to run back to my boyfriend. "No!" shouts his sister, struggling to be free of the cramped cab.

I arrive back at the temple. A smaller group is dancing in a frenzied set of circles. Whenever their feet touched the ground, flames sprang up but didn't burn them. I saw my boyfriend down in the middle of it, wearing red, green, and gold feathers and a red tunic and almost surrounded by flames. At first I thought the second ceremony was for true Mayans only, but then I saw a couple suspiciously guera women in the circles, so I wasn't sure. What I was sure of was that the people up in the foyer, from which I was looking down at the ceremony, were freaked out by my being there. "You should leave, Hermana," they kept telling me, but our enemies were nowhere in sight. I said, "No," and started twirling around and kicking my legs. The foyer floor sparked a little! I twirled more and started soaring several feet in the air every time I jumped. Is this why he didn't want me here, I wondered, because I'm too powerful? I danced down the steps and onto the temple floor, real flames springing from my feet now. Some of the other dancers scattered as I came near them with the flames. They caught the edges of a few people's robes and had to be stamped out. My boyfriend looked at me in horror: "You shouldn't be here." And then I woke up.

The Time A Child Sociopath Almost Killed Me

Last night I dreamt that I was a teenager living in San José with my family. We went to stake conference, and a couple rows ahead of us were three brothers—ages twelve, ten, and six—whose parents had recently died horribly. The ten-year-old was also in a wheelchair, and his left hand was all shriveled, like a skeleton hand with bumpy skin barely stretched over it.
"That kid's hand was burnt in a house fire," my mom whispered to me. I looked at him and at the faces of all of the kids in that omniscient way you can in a dream. The twelve-year-old had dark floppy hair and was wearing a black jacket and smirking with his arms crossed. The ten-year-old was fat with rosy cheeks and just stared adoringly at his older brother. The six-year-old was dressed in ratty clothes and also staring adoringly at the oldest brother.

Suddenly, I realized what happened to the ten-year-old's hand and his legs. I snapped back to where I was sitting next to my mom. "It wasn't an accident—his brother made him stick his hand in the fire," I whispered.

"You mean he dared him to?"

I was treated to a lovely mental picture of how it went down. "No, he grabbed his arm and held it in the fire while he screamed. His brother broke his legs too. He still worships his brother, though."

I don't know exactly what happened, but I think my mom didn't believe me, and that's why next I realized that my mom had felt sorry for the three orphaned boys and invited them over for dinner.
So there we were, my family, the devil child, and his henchmen, passing salad around while he just glared at us through his floppy hair. Then something happened that made me remember that I am a mandatory reporter, so I excused myself and went to my parents' room where there was a phone. My dad followed me in. "I have to call CPS," I said, "but I can't remember the number. It's something cute like 1-800-safe-child." (Note to self in real life: Find actual CPS number and rememorize. Addendum to note: It's 1-866-endharm, not as memorable as it could be.)

My dad got out a phone book, looked it up, and started dialing. It rang once. "Wait," I said, pressing and holding the button near the earpiece, "that kid [the ten-year-old] is in imminent danger. We should call 9-1-1." Suddenly we were in the living room with a cordless phone having this conversation, and the boys were staring at us malevolently. The ten-year-old also wasn't in a wheelchair anymore. Then they left.

"Stop them!" I said. "No, wait, that could be dangerous. We'll just call the police, and they can catch up with them."

My dad dialed 9-1-1, but as soon as the operator picked up, the boys were back in the house carrying large bottles covered in brown paper. My dad hung up the phone. You should have at least said, "Help!" before you hung up! I thought. Now one police officer is going to make his leisurely way here, and he'll be no match for the psycho child. I tried to go back in the dream to change what happened with 9-1-1, but the dream was not obliging.

My sister and I ran for the front door, but the six-year-old was there. He had a knife and somehow scared us so much that we stopped in the entryway. Just knock him over! I thought to myself. No, a police officer will be here any minute, and the last thing I need is for the kid to say I hit him. The kid opened his bottle and splashed gasoline over us. Doesn't my dad have a bunch of guns? I desperately tried to imagine a way out. No, the sparks might set off the gasoline, and it would also be hard to justify shooting a child to people who don't know that one of them is a complete psycho trying to kill us! (And that's how Treyvon Martin's murder influenced my dream. I suck.)

We'll just pretend that girl's not in the picture, 'kay?

All three of the boys closed in on us, and then I woke up.

The Time I Trained CIA Secret Agents

Last night I dreamt that I worked for the CIA on covert operations. After a few adventures of the spying-running kind, the ELL teacher I worked with during my real-life internship and I were appointed to train secret agents who spoke some of the CIA's target languages. That meant that in my dream I was training a lot of the immigrant students whom I taught in real life because they speak Cantonese (okay, so maybe that's not really a language the CIA is desperate for since it's the most common Chinese language in the United States) and Somali. The classroom was also populated by a bunch of random made-up Cantonese and Somali speakers.
Anyway, apparently the CIA had been so desperate for Somali speakers that they had not only recruited the conscientious Somali students I really taught and a few random people, but they had also recruited this kid who had some serious behavioral problems. I asked the CIA director why he would trust this kid with state secrets and missions and stuff when the kid couldn't even sit at his computer in the training room for more than fifteen seconds, and the director just shrugged and said, "He speaks Somali, right?"

The kid was being really disruptive, shouting out while I was talking, "Do I get to kill somebody?" and "I don't like this. You're telling me what to do all the time." I was once talking about a secret mission with a projected map, and the kid jumped up and pointed to a completely different place on the map—"I have family there. They're my family." All my other trainees would just roll their eyes and keep analyzing data on their computers.

Eventually things got so bad with this kid that he decided to leave the CIA. The other trainees and I were glad he was gone, but at the same time I was thinking, Is it okay that we taught this kid all our secret CIA tactics and codes and stuff and then he just leaves? What if he joins Boko Haram? (In real life I realize that Boko Haram has nothing to do with Somalia, and if my subconscious brain wanted to be more accurate I would be worried about Al-Shabaab, but I think I listened to a report about Boko Haram on NPR Saturday, so it was fresher in my mind.) Again, I brought my concerns to my CIA director, but he was pretty blasé about the whole thing.

Boko Haram = No Fun

My trainees and I had a few weeks of blissful uninterrupted training, and then the kid came back because he didn't like Boko Haram either. Of course, he had been too distracted to collect any useful information about Boko Haram during his time with them, which was on one hand disappointing and on the other heartening because it meant he probably hadn't had anything useful to tell Boko Haram about the CIA either. We resigned ourselves to a few more weeks of irritating interruptions.

One of the other Somali students called me over to his computer and asked in a sincere, low voice, "Is the CIA really just trying to kill Musilms?" and then I woke up.

Sometimes I Am Way Too Literal

Today I embarrassed myself at church by being overly literal. (I say embarrassed, but most people probably have forgotten about it already. I just embarrassed myself to myself because I thought I was smarter than this.)

It all started when the stake president taught in Relief Society. First he told stories about his youth. I wanted to be generous, so I thought, I'll tell myself these are mildly interesting stories. Then he said that he hoped we learned something from the stories, so I reflected on what I learned:

• The stake president grew up in Salt Lake City.
• His paternal grandmother outlived her husband by many years and carried a black bag on the bus to the temple once a week.
• She didn't talk about going to the temple much, but she set a good example.
• When the stake president was a boy, he didn't use a envelope to pay his tithing—he would go to the financial clerk's office and just give the financial clerk a nickel or a dime. He's not sure whether everyone paid their tithing like this back then, or just the kids.
  
• When the stake president was twelve, the priesthood met in the mornings, and he had to give a talk, but he didn't want to. His dad made him do it though.
  
• Sacrament meeting was in the late afternoon after a big midday dinner except when his mom was doing stuff for the Relief Society and wasn't home to cook for him.
• The stake president felt sleepy during sacrament meetings when he was a kid.
• He felt the Holy Spirit really strongly after he was baptized.
  
• The stake president is two years older than the stake Relief Society president.
• The stake president's dad and uncles were construction contractors.
• The stake president's family were not active in the Church until the stake president was five, but then they decided to come back.
• When the stake president was a teenager, he tried to climb over a fence and ripped the hem of his trousers. He said two swear words and felt really bad about it later, but he was glad he knew what it felt like to lose the Spirit for a bit because it made him recommit to keep it with him all the time.
  

See, I learned a lot! Somehow, though, I felt like the stake president meant something else when he said he hoped we'd learn something, but I honestly can't think of what it would be besides the fact that stories of his youth are mildly interesting.

Next the stake president asked us to raise our hands if we'd been on missions. A lot of women in the Relief Society have been on missions, which is cool. Then he asked us to tell him what the legacy of our mission was. I was a little wary after the confusing stories, so I kept my answer to myself, which would have been that I invited people to come unto Christ and some of them got baptized. Then he said that the legacy of his mission was a love for the Irish people, and I was glad I hadn't answered.

By then it was getting late, so my filter was rapidly crumbling. The stake president asked us if we knew what was in Ecclesiastes 3, and I was like, "That's the one about how there's a time for everything, right?" but kind of softly because of the wariness, so we all opened to it. It was as I'd said, which emboldened me. Now I'm back on track with this lesson, I thought. I'm good with the scriptures! He asked someone else to read the first verse twice.

"What does that make you think of?" he prompted.
"That song by the Byrds," I said. Two seconds later I realized that wasn't what he was looking for, so it probably sounded like I was trying to be the class clown or something. But I wasn't. I literally hear that song every time I read the first part of Ecclesiastes 3, so when he asked what the verse made me think of, I gave an honest, literal answer.

What made it worse was that he didn't know at first what song I was talking about (which is weird since he is old), so he asked me to sing it. I said I didn't want to mostly because I wanted him to change to subject and get back to whatever he was actually trying to talk about, but he pushed it. He asked me to recite the words of the first verse, and I said, "Well, they're basically right here," gesturing to my Bible, still open to Ecclesiastes 3. He looked bemused. "You know," I said, gearing up to sing after all: "To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Luckily for me one of the other sisters joined in because I was starting to seriously lose my nerve. However, after the second "turn, turn, turn" the stake president looked like he finally remembered the song and his face became remarkably less interested in the whole thing.

"Okay. What else does that verse make you think of?" he asked again, looking over my head to the people behind me. He probably had thought that Ecclesiastes 3:1 made me think of a country song or something with a deeper meaning and that my contribution to the class would be a cool story about how the song and the chapter had changed my life. But no. The song I had thought of was basically Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 set to music.

I shut up after that, and it was hard to pay attention because of the embarrassment. All I remember was that he showed a picture of a tree that was broken into a winter part, a spring part, a summer part, and an autumn part and read part of a talk about how our life goes through seasons, but it didn't make sense to me. I understand one analogy of the seasons and life: childhood is spring, young adulthood is summer, middle age is autumn, and old age is winter. That makes sense, but this was a more spiritual analogy about how sometimes things in our lives are great like spring but we should harvest spiritual power in summer because then comes autumn when we get depressed and reflective and then we have a winter period in our lives when everything sucks but then it's spring again.
In my experience, however, life goes straight from great to completely sucky, and then you may be reflective, and then things could suck again, but then they're wonderful, so it would only make sense to compare life to many season cycles if the seasons were like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer, summer changed back into winter, and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn." See, literal!

The Time I Escaped from Middle-earth

Last night I dreamt that I was trapped in a Neverland-like Middle-earth with Sean Astin, Sean Bean, and possibly Richard Armitage. We were trying to escape to the real world, and someone was chasing us.

Luckily, we soon came across a giant who had a bag that produced anything he asked it for, like in a fairytale. Somehow the giant became our slave, so he joined us on our journey out of Middle-earth. We clambered over rocks and stumbled through forests. Finally we came to the edge of Middle-earth, which was a cliff so high that we couldn't see the bottom of it. Whoever was pursuing us got closer.

Sean Bean commanded the giant to ask his bag for a large basket and a piece of never-ending rope. "Good idea!" said the giant. He asked his bag for these things and produced them. Sean Bean secured one end of the rope to the basket and left the other end in the giant's bag so the bag could keep producing rope. Sean Bean, Sean Astin, the other guy who may have been Richard Armitage, and I climbed into the basket.

I realized I had been clutching a lot of souvenirs during our journey. I had a large jar with a small beehive and a lot of Middle-earth honey together with a birdcage or something. The giant started to lower us down the cliff.
When I could finally see the state park below, I asked Sean Astin how we were still attached at the top. He nodded up, and suddenly I was in free camera mode because my eyeline moved up the cliff until I could see a powder-blue 1993 Ford Taurus station wagon at the top with our rope attached to its bumper. I snapped back to reality and asked Sean Astin why there was a 1993 Ford Taurus station wagon in Middle-earth. "Because we're in the real world now," he said, which made a certain amount of sense.
Finally I got to my parents' house, which was a treehouse but looked a lot like an 1890s lighthouse inside too because the walls were really white. I swung and crashed through the lattice windows into my room, which was also a sun-porch. I dropped the jar with the honey and beehive in it, and the bees swarmed up to the ceiling. I ran out of the room and shut the door, shouting for my parents to get some damp towels to push against the bottom of the door to keep the bees from escaping.

I saw my real-life cat, Missy Butterball, lapping up honey on the floor since in real life she seems to have missed the memo that cats can't taste sweet things. (How I knew she was doing this when the door was closed is just part of the dream.) I hugged my family and told them I was happy to see them after all that time in Middle-earth.

Then my dad shouted, "No, Tagoo!" and we all turned to look at his (real-life) Siamese-like moggy, who had climbed into the birdcage while we were all worried about the bees and was terrorizing the exotic Middle-earth bird I had brought back. My dad grabbed Tagoo by the scruff of her neck and dragged her out, still clutching a petrified bird that looked like a pygmy owl with canary feathers. My dad detached the cat's claws from the bird, which looked mostly undamaged except that it was literally scared to death, and then I woke up.

The Time Aladdin Helped Me Get Engaged

(What is it with Disney these past few days? I haven't seen a Disney movie for a very long time!)

Last night I dreamt I was doing another practicum with an older, tall, large woman who had short, straight, yellowish white hair.

I was also platonically spending a lot of time with this good-looking guy. He asked me to marry him, but I said I had to check the Disney princesses before I gave him an answer. It had something to do with what I wanted my wedding to be like. So then I got out my laptop and watched clips of The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Aladdin (which was oddly spelled a-l-a-a-d-i-n) for a while while the guy paced nervously in an adjacent room.
Finally I got a good feeling during Aladdin, which I took to mean I should marry the guy since his dad was Arab or something. It also meant our wedding reception would have a Moroccan theme, which would actually be really cool in the world of betta-fish-are-a-centerpiece Mormon wedding receptions. The guy smiled really big and immediately called his father to tell him he was getting married. I really wanted to kiss my new fiancé or at least cuddle or something, but I didn't know how to approach him. It just felt really awkward considering we had been friends but now we were engaged and I really wanted to just tackle him and suck his face off, but our relationship had never been physical so I didn't know how to start.
I stared longingly at him on the phone for a while, and then I went to the school to help out. My mentor teacher took me aside and, looming over me, told me that I was too distracted by this guy to be a real teacher. If I wanted to succeed in my career, I would have to be more focused. I considered whether making out with my dream fiancé would make me more or less focused on work and realized sadly that it would make me less focused, and then I woke up.

The Time I Witnessed the End of the World, Disney-Style, and There Were Also Some First-Nation Christian Rafters

Last night I dreamt that my YSA ward went on a rafting trip. We all got on a bus with no windows (okay, maybe a submarine) and traveled forever and we needed our enhanced ID cards, so when we got out, I figured we were in Mexico.

The Mexican-looking guys who ran the rafting company didn't talk very much, but they only spoke accented English. They also talked about Bible stories a lot, assuming we were ignorant, so I got annoyed and gave a long discourse in Spanish about Sampson and Delilah. One of the guys just smiled pleasantly and asked me in English whether I had been saved yet. I nodded. He probably didn't believe me. Then we all climbed into borrowed swimsuits—of course, we had to change in the aisles of the little rafting store because I can never get any privacy in my dreams—and then we went rafting.

See? Really not Mexican!

I don't remember much about the actual rafting, but then we got back on the bus/submarine and traveled to the same place and I realized we were in Canada, not Mexico, on a reserve for one of the First Nations. I was majorly confused about how I had thought members of the First Nations were Mexican, and everyone was saying it was a simple mistake but I was thinking, They look nothing alike! Then I reminded myself that I was in a dream, so it was understandable that my brain would have just pulled up Mexican-looking people when I thought we were in Mexico. The guys who owned the rafting company handed us pamphlets about Jesus and gave us a lecture about reading the Bible every day, and then we got back in the swimsuits—my brain never misses a good awkward-changing scene—and rafted again.

Then everyone else decided to go out to eat, but I was feeling antisocial, so I said I'd take one more rafting run. Of course, that involved changing into a swimsuit in the middle of the super-Christian store again. I struggled and struggled, but then some super-Christian eleven-year-old boys were staring at me as I tried to keep my big 90s-style t-shirt pulled down over my behind while simultaneously pulling the wet black and red Speedo tank up my legs. I finally felt too embarrassed and gave up, reminding myself that I needed to buy a new swimsuit in real life—maybe red with white polka dots and a sweetheart neckline—once I woke up.

Then my real-life friend who is part First Nations, part white, and part Mexican was there and said she'd drive me back to where the rest of the ward was meeting up. Somehow we drove through Poulsbo. Now, I'm certain I've never really been to Poulsbo, but in my mind Poulsbo was a breadbasket—the Kansas of the PNW. There were a bunch of wheat fields and then the town was full of flour stores with the mark PBO. I wanted to buy something to support the local economy, but then I can't eat wheat, so I didn't.

Finally we joined up with the rest of the ward in what looked like the field behind an elementary school in the evening of a Bay-Area spring. My sister was there, saying everything was her fault because she's a werewolf. I was like, "No, it's not you—look over there!" We all looked up and saw a truly enormous moon on the horizon, as big as the moon was in the sky billions of years ago when it first formed. Suddenly it moved from the horizon to about 45° in about a second, staying just as huge.
"That's not the moon!" someone behind me called. "The moon's over here!" I turned around, and there hanging in the sky was one of those overly 3D Claymation moons from a pastiche of an old science fiction film. Then another overly round sphere with exaggerated craters moved around in the sky leaving a shiny spiral trail. I yelped, "An asteroid!" and grabbed this guy I know in real life. I was thinking about all the History and Science channel specials I've seen about how asteroid impacts would incinerate everyone in a massive global volcanic event.
"You can open your eyes," the guy said. "It's not going to actually hit us. We're in a Disney world right now, see?" I looked up and saw a hokey spaceship dancing with the asteroid.

"A Disney world?" I wondered. "But that doesn't make sense. Disney isn't real life." But then I reminded myself that I was dreaming after all, so I could be in whatever kind of world I wanted, and then I woke up.