Saturday, June 3, 2006
I dreamt last night that I had just gotten home from work after a long day. It was still daylight outside. I went to my bedroom, which was very large, but let's just say 30 feet square and it felt much larger. The entire room was a bed and as I pulled open the crimson red velvet draperies, I realized that the only wall was the one which held the door through which I had entered the bedroom, and I could look—or fall—hundred of stories down to the city street below beyond the edge of the bedding, which was puffy and white. The curtains gathered at posts at each of two corners, and the posts held up the rest of the building above me. Except for the posts, I had a panoramic over-180-degree view of the surrounding buildings. The wind was blowing now gently then briskly, and I felt an intense vertigo, so I backed away from the edges to the center of the room/bed. I was wearing some kind of long shirt but nothing else, and I felt just a little self-conscious and embarrassed of that. I sat in the center of the room for a while, just relaxing. After some time, I left the bedroom and went to the bathroom, which was miniscule in comparison. The sink had two very worn hair brushes, each of which had many bristles missing and long hairs stuck in the remaining ones. I used one briefly but stopped but it was filthy and ineffective. A black comb lay on the sink as well, but it had some small objects stuck in the teeth, so I didn't use it. (I can't recall from the dream what the objects were.) Tina had left some of her hair clips behind, and I didn't know when she was going to pick them up again. I returned to the bedroom and again sat in the center of the room/bed. I looked out to one of the other buildings I could see. It was a General Electric building with the famous 1950s style script G and E letters gracing the face along with some smaller lettering that I couldn't read in the dream. The building had giant windows in those rounded corner shapes which were popular in 1950s America, and through the windows I could see the insides. One entire floor was an empty, richly decorated, high-ceilinged meeting hall or ballroom which glowed and glittered with gold accents. Another floor had a party going on and though I couldn't see what kind of room it was, I could see smiling women who were dressed in glitzy costumes carrying banners or posters of some kind which were too far away to read. Another floor was empty of people but prepared for a banquet with hundreds of round tables. I looked over to another building around me, and through another window I could see a piano bar. Music and singing started unexpectedly, and I couldn't tell if it was from the piano bar or not, but I noticed at one point the singing included a "Hello Mister!" and I looked over and realized it was the woman at the piano looking over to me enthusiastically. The music was festive, and others crowded around her were obviously having a good time. I returned her smile and nodded an acknowledgment in her direction. For some reason, a glass window started to rise from the piano. It was placed in the same place where sheet music already stood, and I couldn't determine why one would have or need a glass window there. It was the kind of glass window you might have in a limousine between the driver and the rest of the car. I sat enjoying the music and singing and the breeze and the sunset for some time, and then the dream ended. After waking, in recalling the dream, I realized that everything except for the brushes and comb was perfectly clean.—Continuing from yesterday, the shoe and sock industries... Another reason is that sock size charts are entirely different than shoe size charts—why? If you search the web, you'll find many elaborate conversion tables showing shoe sizes which are different depending on the country of origin where the shoe was manufactured. Sock sizes are entirely different than shoe sizes. Even when you have what you think is the correct information, you might still have to convert between English and metric units for the physical measurement of the foot. In the United States, shoes for kids use a different scale than shoes for adults even though they have some of the same numbers. For example, a size 8 for kids is not the same size as a size 8 for adults. For a few minutes, I thought: if only someone could take all the data that's available and put it into a single chart! Then I looked up the wikipedia entry for shoe sizes and found that extremely enlightening. The article says there are 4 length units people use for measuring shoe sizes: millimetre, centimetre, Paris point (equal to 2/3 cm), and barleycorn (equal to 1/3 inch). The article also linked to Tex Texin's website; he has already created the data chart I had envisioned (shoesizeguy.com), and his entire page is fascinating to read. The Bata PDF foot measuring chart he links to is also excellent. Yesterday I said I had 2 stories to tell about spending a lot of money to find clothes that fit me properly but I never got to the second story, which is that I spent about $100 to buy a "custom" tailored shirt from Land's End. The shirt that arrived was notably of fine quality fabric, and the sleeve and neck were exactly correct, but the general size otherwise was completely wrong—too big. For example, I specified a shoulder seam to shoulder seam of 16 inches, but the shirt I got was 19 inches. Armpit to armpit I wanted 18 inches but they gave me 23 inches. Arm at bicep laid flat I specified 6.25 inches and they sent me 8 inches. I called Land's End customer service this morning and a woman answered immediately—no waiting. We talked about how the shirt turned out very differently than I had expected. When I had placed my order, I included additional measurement specifications in a box called "order instructions" but the woman I spoke with said that although the box is labeled as order instructions, it's for shipping information only. They had tried calling me at my work number, but since I was on vacation and since my voicemail doesn't permit one to leave a message while on vacation, I did not know. She said she would have Sheila—one of their experts in the custom fit process—call me. She also said I could return the shirt (at my expense, it seems) and adjust my choices online as many times as I wanted (specify "reorder, please waive shipping fees" when ordering), but I preferred to speak with a human and get it done hopefully just once. I'll continue the story when I have more news. Did a lot of house chores this morning: dishes and bathroom cleaning. Fixed Patrick's computer, which had been giving an error message every time it woke from hibernation. (Found and removed My Way Search Assistant by removing registry entries searching on "my way" and "myway".) Fixed Patrick's mouse which was occasionally erratic due to a stray hair stuck on the bottom side near the laser orifice. The mouse behaved properly after I plucked the hair out. Plank exercises. Late lunch with Patrick: turkey burgers, ritz crackers, fig bars. Car wash on Divisadero, shopping for gifts at Under One Roof in the Castro, stopped at Starbuck's for an iced latte. Dinner at Phil and Drew's. Antoine and Kartek also came over. We ate salad, rice, and boneless, herbed chicken boobs. We drank riesling and muscat. We talked about where Antoine and Kartek might move to (out of California), Beard Papa cream puffs, wine, custom shirts, the recent underwear party at 550 Barneveld Avenue (space550.com), what paso robles means in English (I think it might mean "oak steps").