Friday, January 21, 2005
I dreamt last night I was in a shopping mall. I was carrying about three 1-liter plastic bottles of water and some papers—my arms were pretty full. I needed to down one floor and found a stairway, but it had unusually steep stairs. Nevertheless, I was determined to make it down. With my arms full, I felt like an old man trying to make it down these big steps. I was also looking for something to eat, but all the places in the food court were spurnworthy. Later I ran into Melissa and asked her if she had had anything to eat and she said yes, she ate at the food court. I still hadn't eaten, and I wasn't going to eat in the food court. We walked for a bit outside and there was a grassy area next to either a railroad track or a river (can't remember exactly). We kept walking and then we were in a residential neighborhood. In a separate dream I dreamt that Brian K and Kelly H were walking with me in the city. We had been just walking, and they had gotten far ahead of me without realizing it. Usual breakfast #2 (cream of wheat, cinnamon, brown sugar, sliced banana). My office the past 2 days has been unusually warm. Even though my thermostat is set to the lowest setting it still says 73 degrees. I had called facilities 2 days ago, but no one has shown up (that I know) and the problem still exists, so I called them again today. Tinkered with VNC, which Kraig K says he needs to help me configure LMHOSTS properly for our server migration. Linkchecking. Prepared the laptop for James's AdCom presentation at noon. Supp app e-form building. Laptop set up for the presentation. Helped student Christine J set up wireless for her PDA. Before I left work, Ena had called to report that the N-Judah train was "off the track." I thought she meant that literally, but I misunderstood her slang. Melissa needed to get downtown for an appointment, so I lent her $15. Before James and I left about 30 minutes later, I checked NextBus which said that emergency sewage work was being performed and that shuttle busses were running between the beach and Cole. We had planned to get a cab together, but when we got down to Irving we saw lots of lights and construction workers, a big hole in the ground, a Muni shuttle bus was coming our way from the beach, and a train was waiting just east of Arguello to do a switchback. So we got on the train, and as I could have guessed, it didn't leave right away. A Muni guy on the ground kept the driver from leaving—"Wait until the next train shows up." The shuttle bus passed us by about a minute or two later—it was packed. We didn't realize it until Cole, but the bus must have let everyone off at Cole, so it didn't really matter in the end. Ran in to Rob S, who chatted and waited with us on the train. Dinner at La Mediterranee II with Patrick: chicken kabob for me, Med plate and iced tea for Patrick. Stopped at Radio Shack to replace a watch battery for the cheap yellow mountain climber's zipper pull watch that hangs on my backpack. Went to Karl M. Soehnlein's reading at the relatively new writer-focused guywriters series at Magnet. He read a gym scene from his new novel forthcoming in September—I can't remember the title. Afterwards he answered questions and the room discussed a variety of topics: the demise of correspondence as art, how writers communicate with (and about) other writers, the film option for The World of Normal Boys (Karl's first book), the edict of large publishing houses that gay coming-of-age fiction doesn't sell, whether to explicitly describe sex scenes or leave them imagined, Karl's fascination with the topic of sexuality. We enjoyed ourselves. Tony Q met us at the reading late, but we were too tired to hang out with him afterwards.