Thursday, March 27, 2008

Cereal breakfast with banana. Helped Michele pick out a MacBook. She got a great deal from our campus computer store. Met 1-on-1 with Eric. Configured PharmAdMIT 2004 for Alyssa. Quick lunch: Subway sandwich, sun chips, Dr. Pepper. Went to Daisy CMS training at the Mission Center Building. Before I went, Eric warned me about the training room—something about how you can't line up the keyboard and monitor so that it's ergonomically correct. When I got there, I realized what he meant. The desks and monitor arms and keyboard trays were all fairly modern but whoever installed them didn't plan correctly. The monitor arms are jointed in a manner that doesn't permit complete freedom in all directions, and the keyboard tray similarly doesn't move where you need it to. So he was right—you can't position them correctly to permit the most comfortable typing, but I managed alright. John K was out of town so Danica gave our training which was essentially a walkthrough of the topics covered in the Daisy intro video that I had already seen plus a little more. I think I was the only person in the class who really had plans to build websites in Daisy—everyone else simply needed to know how to edit pages or add comments or do other simple things. Nonetheless, Danica did a fine job. Two web edits for Joel, one small, one medium. Made live final spring schedules for Lucia. Slide scans from DMM finally arrived—I have not looked at them yet. Dinner at home with Patrick: penne and rigatoni in leftover tomato and meat sauce. Dessert: we tried eating Mashti Malone's rosewater sorbet with sour cherries. We saw this gourmet sorbet in the freezer at I think Andronico's and although it was more expensive than other sorbets the combination of flavors seemed interesting. RUN AWAY FROM THIS SORBET! After we got it home and opened the lid, I was surprised to see rice noodles mixed in with the sorbet. Rice noodles in sorbet! I scrunched up my face and said, "Ewwww!" We checked the ingredients and after the first ingredient—purified water—the next 2 ingredients are rice and rice starch. But it doesn't say "rice noodles" which would have been clearer. Actually, "Mashti Malone's rice noodles in rosewater sorbet with sour cherries" would have been clearest. Nonetheless, Patrick prepared it according to the instructions on the back—leave at room temperature for 10 to 15 minutes, pour into another container, gently mix until it has a slush texture—and we tasted. I'm sensitive to food textures, and I took one bite and could not eat any more. The rice noodles seemed only partly cooked! Patrick had a few more bites and then stopped eating. The flavor was good, but the rice noodles mixed in ruined it for me. It would have been better without the noodles but even then it was still too sweet. Patrick said maybe we can blend it with other things to make a fruit smoothie. The label says, "You will fall in love with the taste of it!" and this claim did not hold to be true. Watched funny videos on YouTube. Added keywords to a bunch of unkeyworded delicious bookmarks. Tomorrow we fly Virgin America for the first time. When I had placed my ticket order, I selected seats and when it gave me my final receipt it showed no seats selected. I figured, oh well, I'll just select seats at online check-in before the flight. Now, when I do the online check-in, the seats I originally selected are not available and the only seats left are exit row seats which cost $15 extra per seat. And, even if I accept these higher-priced seats their website gives me an error message: "Multiple requests of this SSR are not allowed for the same Guest" which I can't figure out because I don't know what SSR means and I don't even know what the rest of the error means. I call 877-FLY-VIRGIN and an automated message happily tells me that no agents are available now (11:30 PM)—I must call back in the morning. We were looking forward to our first flight on Virgin America, but this is not a great start. Not last night but the night before I had one of the most memorable and perhaps most important dreams of late. The dream took place at a nonspecific ski resort and the first part of the dream I don't remember well, but I remember snow and skis, specifically one or two skis sticking up out of snow or perhaps being stuck into snow. The part I remember well went like this: I was in a large, skylit hall which housed a restaurant that for some reason was essentially empty—perhaps it was between lunch and dinner or it was some other dead business time. A young woman who wasn't anyone I know in real life was my friend in the dream, and she was with me there. I wanted to take a photograph of her because I thought the skylights in the building created great lighting—she was beautiful in that light, and I wanted to capture that and share it with her and others. Behaving like some who are camera-shy, she was reluctant and clearly not relaxed, but I urged her to let me shoot, marking an X on the floor with my foot to indicate exactly where I wanted her to stand. Around the same moment, I realized a group of other woman about the same age as my friend had entered the hall and approached us and wanted to sit at the table nearest where I wanted to set up my photo. Obviously, I thought, they see the same excellent lighting that I do and want it for themselves. One of the women asked us in an unkind manner to let them have the table and space, but I told her that she and her friends could wait just one minute for us to finish. But my friend was not feeling comfortable, and after trying but not getting what I wanted in a photo, I told her, "Sorry, my batteries went dead." And that was true, but I always carry spares, and I was upset about not getting the photo I wanted, so I didn't say I had them, thereby ending our photo shoot. I can be unnecessarily harsh that way sometimes. It became clear to me that it wouldn't work out even with more time and fresh batteries and a more relaxed subject—too many hurdles now. The women sat at their table with no further delay, and we did not encounter them again in the dream. They were no longer visible to us as my friend and I moved to another side of the hall. There was a small stage there, and this area was bright but not as well lit as where we were before closer to the center of the hall. I realized then that my friend somehow knew that group of women but was intimidated by them through some kind of peer pressure or social pressure and that she had become uncomfortable as soon as they had entered the hall. Her discomfort had nothing to do with the camera or the photo shoot as I had incorrectly presumed. I also then noticed the dress my friend was wearing. It is hard to describe because there is nothing exactly like it that exists in real life—not yet, anyway. The dress appeared to be made of thousands of small discs or perhaps rounded-corner squares that were tightly and intricately joined together with tiny metal loops. And the most amazing part was that the metal was subtlely tinted with muted colors, kind of like anodized aluminum, and the colors changed in waves every few seconds. Somehow the dress made no noise, and I found it simply magical. I turned my head this way and that trying to catch the dress at a different angle in the light and trying to figure out how it worked. I could tell that it was definitely not lit with fiber optics, which was my first guess—the metal seemed to be reflecting light rather than emitting it. And there were no colored lights on in the hall anywhere—only the natural white light that fell through the windows in the sky. Must be nanotech, I thought, but how is it powered? I felt that the unique dress only made her more beautiful, but then she covered her face, and she began sobbing, and somehow I knew then that that group of women had been traumatically unpleasant toward her in the past. It was that moment I realized—more than I had ever realized before—that it doesn't matter what people might see of you on the outside; what matters is how beautiful you feel on the inside. And when you have that inner beauty—and recognize it and believe in it—then it's as though nothing can hurt you. Until you achieve your own inner beauty and reach that understanding, you are vulnerable to so much unnecessary pain. My heart ached to comfort my friend, to remove her fears and revengeful feelings, to help her realize her own inner and outer beauty. But I knew that I could take her only so far along that journey and that part of it she would need to continue on her own. An open door revealed a darkened corridor to the backstage, and wordlessly I gently took her hand, and she followed me through it. And that's when I woke up.