On Call

It was New Year's Eve, and I was on call. However, my fellow resident John had forgotten to meet up with me to give me the call pager.

I found his phone number in my cell phone, but when I called, I spoke to someone else named John that wasn't him. It was getting late, and I wanted to head out to a party, but felt really bad for sticking John with extra call. I thought about calling the blood bank to get John's number from them, but then just decided not to so that I could go to the party guilty but unburdened.

(I woke up this morning, went to work, and John immediately gave me the call pager for the weekend, so unfortunately this dream will not become a reality.)

The Thiamine Tower

My brother and I flew to Rome. He had scored a recording contract overseas and needed travel to sign all the paperwork, and I went along for fun.

We stayed in a giant hotel on the third floor. The third floor was so immensely large, this huge expanse of carpets and furniture, that we couldn't find our way back to our suite and had to ask for help.

The next day we ascended to the top of a tall, narrow tower where my brother was to fill out his paperwork. As he signed his life away, I walked along the slightly crunchy tan tiles that lined the top of the tower, and noticed that a few were more crumbly and unstable than the others. Some tiles didn't hold my weight at all, and instead sunk a few inches down into the tower.

This was surprising, even though it was very clear to me (and my brother) that this tower was made of thiamine (also known as vitamin B1).

Home for the holidays

My family left our house in Palo Alto to have dinner at a old family friend's house in Virginia. Before we left, my parents turned on the hose in the garage and left it running so the dog could give himself a bath while we were gone.

We drove for many hours to this friend's house, and once we reached a stretch of road around a lake in coastal Virginia, we got lost. We were circling a giant trailer park that I couldn't decide was full of poor people or rich people that liked slumming until my mother said that this was where rich people lived. The trailer park was so large with many wings of numbered homes that we had to wait to get instructions from this family friend to tell us which trailer she was in. She finally called my cell phone, exasperated, around 11 pm to ask us where we were and we clarified the directions with her. I thought it was rude that we were so late for a dinner but no one else in the family seemed to mind.

We entered the trailer and met the family friend, an older African-American woman with messy grey-streaked hair. She was warm, extremely motherly, and was overjoyed to see us. There were about twelve dishes already on the table and we dug in. Strangely, the gravy was so heavy I could barely lift it.

Dr. Phil apparently took over as dream muse at this point as I realized there was a small blond girl eating with us who looked scared and dejected (and really looked like Lily, Eminem's mom's kid in 8 Mile, now that I think of it.) Her parents had been fighting earlier, she said, and she felt bad. I asked her if she thought it was her fault, and she nodded. I told her that it definitely wasn't, kissed her forehead, and hugged her tightly for several minutes, until I realized the rest of my family was staring at me.

We continued eating, but this family friend left and went behind a printed sheet that split the trailer into two. We kept eating, finished the meal, and found a large table of desserts around the corner. My brother wanted to start eating the fudge brownies shaped like stars, but I thought we should wait for this friend, and why wasn't she spending more time with us anyway?

I looked around the trailer and saw several pictures of my stepdad's family, as well as a photo of this woman getting married many years ago; she and her husband married while wearing these large ceramic animal costumes (the husband was dressed like a frog.) This woman's relationship to our family suddenly seemed quite bizarre.

It was at this point that my mother told me that this woman was a descendent of some slaves that used to work for my mother's father at their plantation in Louisiana but that she had always remained friendly with the family. I was furious, and couldn't believe that my family wouldn't deign to eating with a slave descendent and still wanted her to just be the kitchen help.

Guest Dream!

Sharat represents with this fantastic dream:

I'm with a handful of friends walking through the lovely home that we have jointly purchased. While hanging out in the living room, John Oates (of "Hall &…" fame) notices one of those airline ticket dispensers amidst the cabinetry. He's excited to find that it's not a ticketing machine, but it actually an online CD purchasing terminal. He looks himself up and is surprised to see that there is a new compilation of his post-Hall solo work.

John starts remarking loudly (above all of the other conversations then going on) about how pleased he is with the track selection and is saying that not only is he going to buy one himself, he'd be happy to place orders for all of us that
want one too. He looks expectedly at each of us as we sheepishly try to avoid his gaze, trying to think of how to extricate ourselves from the awkwardness.

After a few moments of complete silence and the realization that not a single person is interested in a "Greatest Hits of John Oates (solo)" collection, he shouts, "Fine! After all we've been through, now I know what you think of me!" Then he stomps out of the house.

Elbridge Way

My family was staying at my old house in Palo Alto--the people now living there had nicely left the house to us for the holidays. My mom was loading the last remnants of garage storage and loading them into the car.

I looked through the trunk and found a rack of cassette tapes and CDs among my mother's old cards to her brothers, notes, and photos. The music was all stuff that I had kind of forgotten that I owned, notably my They Might Be Giants Hello Club 1996 CD set with all the CD covers thrown away, a CD single by the Gin Blossoms, and a cassette mix tape with Emo Phillips on it. I was pissed about the Hello Club CD covers, and couldn't decide if I needed to rescue this music detritus or not.

(In real life, I have a Gin Blossoms cassette single, a full-length Emo Phillips cassette tape that Christian gave me in Sudbury, and all my Hello Club CDs still have their covers, especially the one recently signed by Laura Cantrell.)

Checking the white count of a waterfall

I was on a road trip with Christian and someone else. We pulled off the road to look at a waterfall. The waterfall was contained by a large cement ledge; the water level was pushing up over the ledge and it looked like only surface tension was preventing the entire water basin from spilling over.

There was something eerie about the whole setup, either the water level was somehow controlled by hidden electronics not to flood, or that we got there at the wrong time, right when the balance would tip.

I was angry that I forgot my camera, and then heard this message over speakers that when I tested the water for polymorphonuclear leukocytes, the count would be high. The speaker sounded jaded when he said, "Of course, the count will be high, as it always is in rushing waters."

Joseph Campbell and Steve Martin, together at last

Joseph Campbell had written a new two-volume book about the 1800's, entitled, appropriately, "1800's". There was a picture of a man in a sombrero on the cover.

Christian showed me a passage from the middle of the book, a page from which there were many quotes from other writers. The paragraph he showed me was by Steve Martin, who explained that when CDs were made, new CDs were flipped by a "flipper" before they landed in piles of newly-burned CDs, likening the CD creation process to that of making burgers. There was great underlying meaning to this analogy, as one would naturally expect from Joseph Campbell, but perhaps not always from Steve Martin.

Pontchartrain

Lucinda Williams wrote a fantastic hurricane tribute song about New Orleans. It was included as an extra track in a newly-released Lucinda Williams box set.

Erythema in the sky with asterisks

I kissed a small paper square, imprinted with an asterisk, that was lying on my childhood rug. When I kissed it, the paper square turned into Claire’s friend Manu from France.