Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

a kickball game is underway in a swamp and the alligators have been trained to catch the ball in their jaws and stand up on the water and drop-kick the ball back to land but this one which is unnaturally large (are we sure they are alligators? they may be supernatural creatures, and in any case they are frightening) keeps running up to reclaim the ball so that he is essentially playing kickball with himself

and haruki murakami is giving a lecture on something like globalization and identity and there is a huge audience and we are separated from him by a fence, he is actually in the swamp and occasionally retrieves a stray kickball and tosses it back to the alligators, and a girl comes up to me and asks when he is going to talk about asian american literature and i am trying to explain that althought this lecture isn't really about that she will probably find it of interest anyway but she turns away from me and yells MURAKAMI WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT CHINESE FOOD and he actually gives her a direct reply which is something like it can be very delicious in his experience

my view is blocked by three unnaturally large young chinese men who smell of old sweat and i realize how hot it's been

and then you remind me that we have to finish our training so we turn to page 115 of the manual and the next section involves singing directly into the kiosk or Training Machine and it has become nighttime

i am shaky at first but the songs on page 115 are all soft rock classics that for some reason i know quite well and this one is a duet called "quaaludes of tears" as if a quaalude were a measure of tears

i wake up with the tune of this nonexistent song still in my head

Woke up this morning at a reasonable hour; realized it was Saturday; went back to bed. Dreamt I was Velvet Rope–era Janet Jackson and Prince led me in a bondage tango—this was a real thing in which the tango involved an elaborate, fluid system of binding and unbinding the two bodies together with fancy shoe laces—in a gigantic drained pool in the middle of an Egyptian-themed shopping mall.

Sleep WIN.

After a long stretch of not being able to sleep more than 3-4 hours a pop, last night I went to bed at 9 and slept soundly for twelve hours. I dreamt there was some kind of school reunion where I had the opportunity to tell a bunch of my former classmates just how happy I am now that I no longer care at all what they think of me, and I had the lead in the play, and my crush loved me back, and my Grandpa Booney was alive, and Avril Lavigne played a set and saw that I knew all the words to her songs and threw me her haircomb. INSOMNIA CAN SUCK IT.

I've managed to sleep through the last couple of nights, which is refreshing, though I continue to have disorientingly undreamlike dreams. For example, last night I dreamt I subscribed to a bunch of blogs in my Google Reader and then never bothered to read any of them. I just spent seven minutes trying to recall if that was actually what I dreamt, or if I'm just remembering, like, yesterday.

Sorry for the Tweet Roundups, if you find that kind of thing annoying. I know it's lazy. But I figure since my posting is so spotty around here lately, I might as well fill the space with something. And I'm cultivating my Twitter style. You could call these posts my Twitter Juvenilia.

OK, must read five MA theses by the end of today, starting now.

So Arkansas is doing that weather thing where it's 78 sunny degrees one day and 34 bone-chilling degrees the next day and I am not even exaggerating for effect, this is actually how warm it was yesterday compared to how cold it is today, and I'm having the kind of day where I can't not take it personally. Walking into work, I tried to go over my mental to-do list and figure out what has already been accomplished this week and what remains to be done, and I remembered doing several things that I hadn't even thought to put on the list, like redeeming a $5 coupon at Nightbird books and making a phone call to someone I know from somewhere and having a breakthrough insight on a conference paper I was writing, and then as I approached campus I realized that all of those things happened in dreams. This was a very disorienting realization, not only because it suggested that my dreams have been overtaken by my mundane life, but also because if my dream-life becomes categorically indistinguishable from my mundane life, then it's going to be very difficult to sustain a realistic sense of which mundane tasks I've actually addressed and completed for actual real.

One thing is certain: I have had neither dream nor actual lunch, and I am hungry.

I also dreamt last night that I couldn't decide whether the midterm exams I'm giving tomorrow are too difficult or too easy, which is the same thing I was thinking about while awake just before falling asleep and just upon waking up, so I'm not even sure what the point of being awake or asleep is anymore.

In other news, it's my mom's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!) and my niece Penny was born this morning (HAPPY BIRTHDAY PENNY!!).

Last night I dreamt that against the odds, I remembered a small, ephemeral piece of information at a crucial moment and was elated that my memory worked so well.

I only just realized it was a dream.

I dreamt early this morning that I was lying in bed lulling D to sleep with a lecture on the motif of "gratuitous conflagration" in Tristram Shandy. Of course, in my dream, Tristram Shandy included a famous barn-fire scene, so it made a lot of sense.

Then I dreamt I woke up and needed coffee but the cafeteria was temporarily shut because a maintenance worker had eaten peanut butter and turned out to be allergic to peanut butter so this girl and I borrowed a few bucks from another girl and went to the subway station where we had to pay for one-way fares just to get inside to buy coffee in those Greek paper cups they used to use in New York and the girl said her father always told her to drink as much coffee as possible when you've paid full fare because it's part of what you've purchased.

Last night I dreamt I had written a paper on the objectification of race in family heirlooms and when it was finished I hoped it would land me a job at my alma mater and Bruce Robbins, a friend of my one-time dissertation director, kindly offered to read it for me because he's on the faculty there and when he gave it back he'd written on the back of the first page, "I can't find an argument here because you have no THOUGHT TREE! How can you know what you CAN'T-HAVE? How do you choose a beer in the bar??? You can't have it all at once!" and even though he'd put smiley faces all over to let me know he was nice and said I should send it along to Columbia when it was completed I cried big frustrated tears because my dissertation director had always tried to teach me how to use "thought trees" but I just didn't get it and also Bruce Robbins gave me a B+ and there was some other guy I didn't think was very smart and I saw he had an A-

I also dreamt that one of my graduate students caught on to my sinister plan never to actually read and return any of their written work and my only hope was that none of the other students would believe him because he had a reputation for being kind of a dweeb

In last night's dream:
D and I were staying in a fantastic loft apartment in New York with a gourmet snack bar in the middle of it and I was going to buy a $14 cookie but D said Just share this cheese plate with me and we went to pay for it and it rang up $152 and D said to the cashier, It's just 3 ounces of cheese, and she said, No, it's 3 ounces of [something European sounding] cheese, made of the milk of the rare goats of [something European sounding] mountain, and we were like, OK, whatever, we've got TV to watch, because there was a race coming on, a big race between a big dog and a little horse, and in the end the dog won and it was a big upset and scandal for the whole little horse community, and the horse's owner was trying to comfort the poor thing whose name was Textuality, and I said, Typical, but tried to keep my scorn under wraps because we were staying with my gay Armenian friend from grad school who's into things like that, and sure enough he said to his parter, I've been thinking we could name an appliance like the refrigerator "Textuality," and his partner said, Well, I was actually thinking we could name the fridge "Sir Future Robo-Tank," and I thought, This will not be resolved any time soon.

In this morning's waking life:
D is making a name label for our refrigerator, Sir Future Robo-Tank.

This morning I listened to the following voice mail message from my father, left last night around 9pm:

"Hey, Lady Z! This is Greg from Riverdale. Where are you? I just listened to an awful set of music, hoping it wasn't you, and yet wishing it were you.... You need to let me know when you're not going to be on the air. Trick or treat!"

To Greg from Riverdale and other loyal Pop Tarts, I extend my apologies. I did in fact take Halloween off to catch the finale of the Girl & a Gun Halloween Film Festival—and then I couldn't even last through that, I was so tired from an accumulation of work and moving. (Derek just moved in. Between work and film fests and The Move, the past couple weeks have been rough on both of us.) I did manage to catch a few minutes of what was playing on KXUA during my usual slot, and it was indeed awful. I had to cleanse my brain with the country music station.

But last night I did manage to have what might be the greatest dream in a long career of dreaming:

It's a teaching day, and I decide to cancel my afternoon class because I have no idea what I'm supposed to be teaching. But when I go to the classroom to send the students home, I see that the classroom is set up for a major karaoke event—screens and speakers everywhere, and a group of my students already in the middle of a tightly choreographed song-and-dance routine to Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison." So I decide to hang around for a while, and then I notice that Justin Timberlake, who is one of my students, is up next, and he's signed up for a Timbaland-Nelly Furtado duet called "Gena (Oh Gena Gena Gena)," and he wants me to join him in the "karaoke chair" (a part of the karaoke ritual in my dream-world) and sing the duet with him, which I do, even though it seems to push the boundaries of professorial appropriateness, because, honestly, how often does a girl get to get in the karaoke chair with JT and be serenaded? And after the song wraps up, I say, "Thanks JT," and he points out that the open bar is ready in the hallway and asks if he can buy me a drink, and I realize that this is the BEST CLASS EVER, but I'm still on the job so I say, "Well, I'm not sure it would be appropriate for a current student to buy me a drink," and he says, "Ok, then will you buy me a drink?" and I say, "Absolutely."

And that's why they call me The Pop Tart.

Last night I dreamt that Tommy Lasorda had been reading my blog.

I said to Derek: "How many girls can say that Tommy Lasorda has read their blog?"

He said: "Not many."

The dreams I've had:

It's Z's birthday (which it is, in waking life, next Tuesday), and I don't know whether I should send greetings, or how, and then someone gives me something to give to him, so I decide to pass it along, and it makes me feel better to have something to give to him anyway, and it's not too much—in fact, it's a small plastic bag of breakfast cereal, like Lucky Charms without the marshmallows, and the corner of the bag is ripped open so the non-charms kind of spill out if you hold it at the wrong angle, and I wrap it up in paper that doesn't stem the flow of renegade cereal, and break into his apartment while he's at work, and wander around the kitchen trying to figure out where to leave it so that he'll see it but it won't freak him out, you know, so it will be a nice present, and I'm scattering cereal all over his kitchen in the process and it occurs to me that now he'll have to clean up the mess but it'll just have to be that way because I need to get out of there before he comes home, so I decide to leave the package next to the sink, and there's no card so I take out a Sharpie and write "Happy Birthday," but then I can't remember his name, and I start to panic, and people are coming in and out and giving me odd looks ("It's okay," I tell them, "I'm the evil ex-girlfriend"), so I just choose a name, and leave the package bleeding out bad cereal on the counter, and it reads, "Happy Birthday, Jeff!"—and I think, Maybe that's right, but I know that it's not.

What happened in waking life:

My car died.

My sleep habits have been screwy lately—I either sleep 10 hours or more at a go, or I can't sleep at all. Last night I was up till 4 or so before falling into a fitful sleep filled with dreams of hiking through a jungle trying not to tread on the "hoot owls," skittish creatures with wide eyes who dotted the leafy floor and flew up into your face claws outstretched when disturbed. I believe once I made it through the jungle I had to help my dissertation director (ah, you think, the illustrious return of She Who Must Be Obeyed! well, she never really left the corridors of my consciousness, much less my unconscious, believe me) collect antique "advertising tiles" and china jars to decorate her bathroom, which involved stealing a New York City bus and taking it for a joyride while my dad slept in the back. I was also apartment hunting, and found a slick condo that conformed to all my wildest domestic fantasies, which caused me much consternation because I'd just moved into my sufficient unit here in Fayetteville. I kept thinking, "But the sofa—I haven't paid off the sofa!" until I thought I would cry.

Without revealing too much about real-life events I have no intention of blogging, let's just say that once again my unconscious proves both overactive and lazy, spinning out these vivid allegories that require no skill to interpret.

I have to go have a day now; more later, I'm sure.

Lately I've been waking up around 4am from vivid dreams completely unable to go back to sleep. This is a painful affliction for one who loves to sleep as much as I do, because I refuse to relinquish the lost hours, but rather get up and read for a while and then go back to bed as the sun is coming up and Z is getting up and refuse to leave until I've had all the sleep that is rightfully mine, which is usually not until well after 9am, which is when I'd agreed I would be up and ready to go to the library yes I promise I SWEAR the night before.

I usually wake up already having some train of real-life thought that has nothing to do with the dream in progress, like my unconscious is tuned to two different stations at once and one is all And then the girl committed suicide and left the note that you had to burn in the art room but the detectives put the ashes back together just in time for the teaching demo portion of your job interview and they made you copy the note out on a broken Xerox machine that only printed half pages and you had to deliver an extemporaneous lecture on the dead girl's poetry and then lead a discussion on facing the afterlife and you'd better hurry and get in there before the flood comes and the alligators wash in and OH MY GOD HERE THEY COME¹ and the other is all And you need toilet paper, and you haven't recharged your phone in three days and maybe you've missed some calls, and you have to update your LJ even though you have nothing to write about, and what was the deadline for that paper proposal for that conference and what conference was that anyway?, and I think your library books were due yesterday.²

My brain is very, very annoying.

My point is, this is not a real post because I'm technically in my Work Office, a.k.a my campus office, a.k.a the one space in my life where I am not going to habituate myself to falling down the black hole of cyberspace the minute I walk through the door, and I'm in the middle of trying to figure out if I want my library of literary criticism organized chronologically by time period, thematically by primary philosophical intervention, or alphabetically by author, which is taking longer than I thought it would when I first introduced all three possibilities (again, BRAIN, you're on my list).³ No, I'm just popping in to (temporarily) cross LJ off the list of things that continuously parade through the avenues of my consciousness trumpeting the fact that they are not done.

But while I'm here, I thought I'd let you know that Z and I made it back from our trip, a bit road-weary but perfectly intact. We spent Friday night at a lovely B&B in St. Louis called Napoleon's Retreat, a 19th-century townhouse in the city's Historic District run by two friendly and fastidious hosts, Michael and Jeff. We stayed in the Lafayette Room, pictured here:



The inn is just around the corner from Lafayette Square, which features (among other establishments) a wine bar, a bar & grill, and a chocolate bar, all of which we happily patronized.

And now I must return to my goddamn books.

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¹Actual dream from last night.<sup>a

2</sup>I omitted money-related thoughts from this general representation of the kind of mundane worries I'm talking about because they will be boring for you to read and anxiety-inducing for me to consider, but they are usually prevalent.

³So far today I have devoted several hours to this problem. I have not yet begun actually to install the books on the shelves in the order yet to be determined.

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^aI'm glad that lagizma, at least, appreciated my nerdy footnote innovation, introduced in the previous post. I'm actually fashioning them manually with superscript and dividing lines. I suppose I realized that since my thoughts tend to be footnoted, my journal content should be too. I also realize, however, that the footnoted footnote, while charming to fans of, say, Nicholson Baker,ⁱ is generally excessive and tedious, and I promise not to abuse it.ⁱⁱ

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ⁱWhich I am.

ⁱⁱOkay, I'll stop now.

I'm at one of those interim, it's-outta-my-hands stages of the whole job thing, and finding it very hard to concentrate on anything, even television. (Though last night's all-new CSI, entitled Pirates of the Third Reich, in which Melinda "Call Me Julie Cooper-Nichol" Clark made an appearance as the supersmart dominatrix Lady Heather who at one point straps a neo-nazi mad scientist to a car in the middle of the desert and slaps him with a bull-whip until he cries, kept me fairly enthralled.) Last night I dreamt about the I Love Egg! song, and that Posh Spice and Shakira were the same person and I had a huge poster of her in my dorm room, and that I finally hooked up with That Boy From High School I Never Hooked Up With (that last of which is a recurring event in my dream life, I confess). This morning I found myself finally signing up for the McSweeney's Book Release Club, which I've been trying to resist for weeks, and decided that in the interest of avoiding a full day of buying up my various wish lists through internet book sellers, I should go into the city and wander around. I think I'll go see Capote at some point, at which I'll release In Cold Blood, which I finished a few nights ago, and which puts Law & Order to shame.

I realized this week that I watch Law & Order with religious devotion because I have a serious problem that cries for therapeutic intervention, but I watch CSI with a similar devotion because it's really fucking good.

Someone say something witty and fun. Here we are now; entertain us.

Already having my two front teeth, I want this. According to the NYTimes, one lucky woman's husband bought her the complete Penguin paperback library after she lost all her books in a fire. I intend to add the collection to my Amazon wishlist for the holidays.

I woke up at 4am from a dream in which I was out at a bar drinking with a bunch of people and I met Britney Spears, who was out for one or two drinks before going home to husband and baby. Everyone else left and then it was just the two of us and she offered me a ride home in her minivan. We talked about a recent well-publicized falling-out she'd had with J.Lo. I happened to be wearing Britney's signature fragrance, which in my dream was called "Go," and I told her, "I'm wearing 'Go,' or as I like to call it, 'Eau de Fuck Jennifer Lopez.'" She dropped me off several blocks from my house because she was late getting home and I told her I understood, she had a family. We made plans to hang out again soon.

Last week I dreamt my high school friend J died and when I woke up, it was several hours before I realized she wasn't really dead.

Last night I dreamt I ran into former boyfriend J in a bookstore and he'd grown a beard and didn't hate me and I hugged him a little too long.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night and sleeping late into the morning.

I woke up from a long and strange dream, which involved, among other things, being served an enormous salmon-and-corn-cake appetizer at a trendy bar by the man from Afghanistan who used to fix my dad's cars when I was a kid, who remembered me and the fact that I totalled one of the cars he fixed up for us, and who was quite flirty and disarmingly handsome for one of my dad's old friends, and my leaving my purse behind in the bar as the man and my aunt and my cousin went out to our car, which was actually a dark red van, which was actually a dark red eighteen-wheeler rig, and my trying to find them but it was in an old section of New York I'd never been in before, full of enormous old architecture left to grow graffiti, and I knew this was one of those areas I shouldn't be in alone, and all the red trucks in sight were the wrong ones, so I kept going up to people asking if I could walk with them so I wouldn't be alone, never really considering that the reason not to be alone was to avoid encounters with the very people whose company I now solicited, and many hours later I found my aunt and cousin and the handsome man from Afghanistan, but it was too late for our original plan, so we went on an African safari instead, where my cousin, watching the trees zoom across a brilliant sunset, thought she was having an acid flashback, but tripping was called "transgressing," and then I felt like I was transgressing too, because the tops of the trees weren't connected to trunks, they looked like enormous chicken bones bleached dry by the African sun, hovering in the air like Dali painted them there, and then we saw a herd of gazelles, we flew right into it, and looking around I saw a pride of lions about to launch an attack, and I remembered what someone once said: Never get between the lions and the gazelles, but it was too late, we were on one of the gazelles, all four of us, and the lions were charging and pouncing, and no matter how cleverly I steered the gazelle using an improvised system of jabs and kicks in its sides, it couldn't run fast enough with all four of us on its back, and one of the lionesses ran us down.

So, anyway, I woke up from the dream to find my parents long gone for work and myself already woefully behind schedule. And on one of my bags, someone had left an article from the local private high school newspaper (sillygirl84's alma mater) entitled "Are New Teen Trends Sexceptable?" I can only assume one of my parents, or possibly but not probably their cat, left this article for me because he or she thought I would be interested in it. And I am. I am very interested in the fact that anyone thought it was acceptable to use the term "Sexceptable" in a newspaper headline. Samuel Johnson famously observed that the pun is the lowest form of wit, but I believe I have discovered one lower—what can only be called the integrated false pun. This miscarriage of language occurs when someone wrongly believes one part of a word to resemble another, shorter word in sound, and so integrates the shorter word into the longer word, to create what they must think is an innovative, communicative, and cute new term but which anyone with any respect for the language immediately perceives to be a monstrosity. Hence "sexceptable." The local business owners of Providence are grievously wedded to the integrated false pun. In addition to such actual establishments as "Hairoglyphics" and "Spadessey," which I believe I've mentioned before, there is in my very own neighborhood a toy store named "Creatoyvity." I maintain that giving such a name to your store is not only misguided but disrespectful to any and all of your potential patrons, who must inevitably face the possibility of having to utter the word "creatoyvity" in earnest, as in, "Honey, Toys 'R' Us didn't have anything for little Suzie's birthday; maybe we should try Creatoyvity?" This makes everyone look and sound silly. It is, stunningly, even worse than the damnable backwards "R" in "Toys 'R' Us," which, while so uncute as to be offensive, at least does not deform one's pronunciation of actual words.

I implore you not to tolerate the imposition of such grotesqueries on your everyday vocabulary. Feel free to use this as a forum for publicly shaming those who attempt to do so. Only when they feel the humiliation they would heap on the rest of the English-speaking world will they understand the nature of their crimes against humanity.

Last night I dreamt that I was a very pregnant Pamela Anderson floating in a friend's swimming pool, my belly breaking the surface, a hump like a snowhill. And my skin was so thin it was almost transparent, and gradually the fully formed features of an oddly skinny baby emerged, pressing against my plasticky skin like a squirmy alien struggling for air. And then we could see the chamber of my belly, that it was simply an empty cavity affixed to my body proper, framing this strange fetus sitting in a nest of pearly placenta like a deep-sea creature, and I thought, am I still Pamela Anderson? Or is this me now?

Then I dreamt that I was born again, not like I found Jesus, like I was actually born all over again and I was a baby, but I still had my adult mind and that was strange. And I was growing at a rapid pace, several months' worth in several hours, but there was something wrong with my skin, as my mother (same mother) explained: babies' skins are supposed to start out bunched up around their neck, so their butt-skins begin as their upper-back skins, and their belly buttons begin at their throats, but my skin already fit me, which was disturbing, a physical anomaly, a liability. Realizing we'd been having a very sophisticated conversation for a woman and a newborn, I asked my mom if I could talk, and she said of course not you're a baby, and I said then how do you understand me, and she said I only do when no one else is around. And then I grew up crippled, with a permanent stomachache and a tired look around the eyes, and we were in England, and I was in a shopping mall looking for ten pounds of fresh tuna. I couldn't find any so I asked directions to a meat store from a group of young men who laughed at my accent, at my calling them "guys," and they took me to meet a friend of theirs, an older woman who lived in an apartment in the mall, and she said she could show me the secret ins and outs of the place and took me to get my tuna but at that point my need had turned into tank tops, I needed ten pounds of tank tops, which in England they called "thongs," so she took me to an expensive lingerie store and insisted I try some on, but they weren't tank tops after all, they were thong underpants, just as they would be at home.

In my waking life, I have finished the last chapter of my dissertation and am working on a very brief afterword. Should be done by week's end.

Norimitsu Onishi has a piece in the NYTimes on Haruki Murakami that has brought several interesting facts to light, including these:

1. Murakami works on a Mac, as I do.
2. Murakami never dreams, and wakes up every day at 4am without an alarm, like I don't.
3. Murakami, though he has resisted selling his novels to filmmakers, says "he would hand them over unconditionally to Woody Allen or David Lynch."

This gives me much to think about as I wither in the heat. For example, what on earth would a Murakami script directed by Woody Allen look like? If I could sell my life to a filmmaker, to whom would I hand it over unconditionally? Since we're both Mac people, could I get Murakami to write the script to the rest of my life? Then could we get David Lynch to direct it?

For some reason, I am shocked by his statement that he never dreams. I tend to have such detailed and occasionally vivid dreams that I find it hard to imagine sleeping without dreams in general, but Murakami's writing uses the dream genre so well, I'd come to think of him as some kind of native informant from the unconscious.

Speaking of dreams, I had another one recently about Poppy Z. Brite. I don't remember the narrative details of this one, but she looked stunning. As I know Ms. Brite is a LiveJournaler herself, if she happens to come across this post, I'd like her to note that her colonization of my unconscious is proceeding apace. Man, between Brite and Murakami, I wish I could live in my unconscious instead of, say, Providence.

Edited to add the songs on my secret pretend boyfriend Rhett Miller's playlist:
( playlist tracks )

Make that dearest readers.

I have been silent lately, and I apologize. I hope I left none of you feeling snubbed. I have been working my butt off trying to get my job talk in shape, and in the meantime, I have managed to come down with a mean case of laryngitis. No, I am not making this up. Directly after my practice run-through on Monday, I completely lost my voice. I had a mild flu/cold-like thing over the weekend, which has decided to go right for the throat and vocal chords, just in time for my first professional presentation. I am under orders from both my doctor and director not to talk at all. The great irony of all this is that my one real shortcoming in my mock-talk was that, in the Q&A session afterwards, I apparently talked way too much. The Powers That Be have a nasty sense of humor.

So here I am, sitting alone at home, coughing up bodily stuffs that are better left undescribed, and not talking. I have been reading Tristram Shandy, which is delightful, but I'm too anxious to enjoy it—largely because I put it on a sample syllabus for a course I could teach, which suggests I've read it before, which I haven't. In fact, I've been making up many sample syllabi that include titles I've read only in theory, certainly not in practice. For those of you who have paid through the nose for a top-notch college education (either for you or someone else): Aren't you glad to know this is who provided said education? "Uh, yeah...Tristram Shandy...sure, sure I can teach that. No problemo."

Last night I had long, wonderful, troubling dreams. Nyquil-induced, perhaps; I can't remember if I remembered to take my meds. In any case, the short version is this: My parents lived in a huge mansion that served as a kind of dormitory for young hipsters such as myself, and a rude but charming young fellow (just my type) moved in down the hall, and he resembled that annoying Oliver guy from the first season of the O.C., whom I hated, but in my dream I really liked him, and I wanted to hook up with him and suggested that he meet me in my room later, but then when I went to my room Z was there, I'd forgotten about him (bad me), and in my dream he was much lamer (but still loveable) than he is in real life, in real life he's not lame at all, really, but in my dream I was kind of dismayed that he was there, and my parents and grandparents were there too, so the Oliver guy comes and opens the door and sees all my people in there and pretends like he just mistook my room for his, but Z's not fooled, so we have to have a whole thing about what my intentions are with this guy, and I convince both Z and myself that it's nothing, it was a silly lapse of judgment but it's nothing, and the guy hears us through the thin walls and escapes out a window to a construction truck that's going to a big outdoor party, kind of a rave, I guess, like the really fake rave from the rave episode of C.S.I., and I look out the window and see him running off with the truck but he's no longer Oliver, he's Poppy Z. Brite, and I realize that's why I liked him so much and I'm sorry for hurting his/her feelings, and also for swearing that I didn't really want to hook up with him because, now that he's her, I think maybe I want to again, so we go to the rave, and while I'm off trying to find Poppy, Z drinks 24 of those little bottles of Corona, a lime in each one, and stabs himself non-fatally in the forehead with a pencil.

There was more—it involved a high-school boyfriend of mine on The Real World, and my sister throwing rocks at her Home for Girls, and looking all over town at night with a bunch of well-dressed Koreans for a Circuit City to redeem a coupon before realizing that Circuit City has shut down all its North American stores, and saving a baby in the street from an evil mother and returning it to its crippled and grateful brother, and being in England and buying a really ugly decorative object for my mother from a British Pottery Barn because it was on clearance, and stealing another girl's contact lens case and then lying about it when she catches me, and going back to my room in my parents' makeshift dormatory and going to sleep (in my dream) to try to dream (in my dream) that I finally get to hook up with Oliver-slash-Poppy Z. Brite, which actually works, so I wake up happy (in my dream) right before I wake up from my dream kind of tired and confused.

I can't believe I have laryngitis. My director totally thinks it's a psychosomatic attempt to undermine all the work she's put into me and my career. Maybe it is. It still sucks. I can't wait till this week is over.

Forgot to mention earlier: I dreamt last night that, among other things, U.S. troops had dropped a nuclear bomb on Rome. Do we think this has something to do with the Pope?

It is an astonishingly beautiful day in Rhode Island. I'm getting off the internet now.

I've been having long, detailed, narratively elaborate dreams lately, too extensive and incoherent to tell the next day except in discrete pieces that weren't separate, or sequential, but overlapping. So this isn't the whole of last night's dream, which also involved my dad driving me and a bunch of kids from Columbia across the river to New Jersey to pick up my sister, and a book he just published about the history of China, and seeing the book at a table at MLA, which we happened to be walking through, and him buying all four copies even though I told him he should leave one there for publicity, and my insisting he describe the argument to my friends and their not being interested and my dad's embarrassment and my mortification, and a shopping mall full of injured animals and roadkill. But here's the part I wanted to write down:

I dreamt that we lived in a world that had developed a technology for cloning, where a person's DNA could be taken and turned into an embryo that would be implanted in a surrogate mother, and the fetus would develop and be born like a normal baby, but once born would rapidly grow into a clone of the person at the age the DNA had been taken, and this technology had been used to institutionalize certain jobs, the examples weren't clear, that required someone to die, because they would just be cloned and it would be like the death and replacement was just part of the process, and I was the surrogate carrier for one of these job clones, and I was pregnant, and then I delivered a baby, and it was all baby-like and I was feeling in a vague and druggy and dreamy sense but a genuine one nonetheless maternal feelings of attachment and all that, and it was all very appropriate because it was my baby, but then it grew into this adult person in a matter of hours, and then it turned out it wasn't just a person but Justin Morabito, a guy I went to elementary school with, but Justin Morabito as an adult, but the really disturbing part in the dream was that he didn't recognize me as his mother, and all my motherly love was completely unrequited, and this disappointment and frustration was only exacerbated by the fact that my lovely baby wasn't a lovely baby at all but this strange, indifferent guy. And then there was some kind of scandal because people were discovering that there was a problem with the clones, that although they were made of the same genetic ingredients as their originals, there was something alien in their affect that was creeping people out. And then a big display case housing my grandparents' china collection fell on me, and I was fine, but the china was destroyed.