magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

written offline due to computer problems:

from the moment i began waking up this morning, it felt like saturday. but i knew i had to get up and go to painting, which seemed very out of place. i did get up and go to class though. no actual painting today, just preliminary sketches of the model who is the subject of the next painting. amber something.

when i got back, i began work on finishing off my financial aid application forms which i was filling out online. one of them said that the school i was submitting information to required information about my parents. but i'm applying as an independent, as i'm old enough to do so, and my parents certainly don't have the means to pay for my college. so i called risd, and they conferred, and said to skip over that part. i did, but then the web site would not let me submit the completed form. so i called them and after wading through a voice mail system, was told that i should just enter zero for all the values in those sections.

a little later i tried to send a fax to my bank, which is always a trying ordeal, and i seriously crashed lime in the process. i'm having trouble getting it to do much of anything at the moment, including get online.

yesterday, george bought some fuzzy furniture. a chair and a couch. we went and picked up the couch this afternoon. we sat around on the new furniture for a while and then i tried getting lime working, to no avail, and when i came back out into the living room, george had fallen asleep on the couch. i felt exhausted myself, and ended up taking a nap, during which i had a very odd dream:

i was sitting outside of the main building of a college, on a stone bench. there were women getting off a bus. a bit of time passed while i was sitting on the bench waiting for something. then another bus arrived that said smith college on it. more women, i assumed, but it was actually full of men. jock-types, even. who pushed and jostled their way on to the bench. i tried to keep a little bit for myself, but they just kept piling on.

something overcame me, a sense of blind rage, and i bit one of them on the arm. my sense of composure returned, and i only had a vague recollection of doing it, as if i had been someone else, or if that moment had been pre-ordained. i turned to look, and he was bleeding. my mind became flooded with excuses for why i did it, why he shouldn't beat me up. i may have been blurting them out as i thought of them, or they may have been coming too fast. and then with one thought, my mind, and time around me just stopped: what if he has aids? i could suddenly taste a drop of blood in my mouth.

the next thing i knew we were in a restroom, and i was standing over a sink washing my mouth out. he was infected, and whatever i did i couldn't wash out the taste of blood. we decided we had to go to a hospital. we ran outside, and this woman who was a friend of his joined us.

it was late evening, quite dark. i had left my van on the corner, but the valets had apparently moved it a good distance into this parking lot, and up on some sort of risers. i pulled out one of those portable police lights as we ran towards it, and the local security started falling all over themselves to get the van down. we were running in slow motion as they mounted this whole production, with a helicopter, a giant tarp, and an army of men. we got to the van just as the helicopter was pulling away. we jumped in and i put the police light on the dash.

i drove the van down off the blocks it was on, and then things were some sort of video game and i was trying to turn the van around in this parking lot that was littered with speed bumps and jersey barriers and cones and other cars, all the time with the gas pedal to the floor.

then we're driving down a busy street in a futuristic city. it was now mid-afternoon. i asked if anyone knew where a hospital was. someone said probably in new york city. i hadn't thought that we were too close to new york, but then i realized we must be. i pulled out a phone book, and there was a hospital on 35th street. so i asked if anyone knew what direction we were going, as we wanted to be going south. i tried to figure it out in my head, but it was more complex than it should have been, the angles kept changing.

from time to time i see that beyond the buildings to my left there was a drop-off to a canal or river, and a rolling mountain, too green to be fully real, rising up on the other bank. i tried to work it into my calculations. the woman said that she thought the canal was dammed, but the how could her boss get to work? i remembered (although i had never been told) that her boss lived along the canal and took a speedboat to work, presumably in new york city.

then we were in one of those concrete river-overflow channels. we were stopped at a traffic light, although there were no other cars. it was about noon, time was running backwards, although events weren't. at this point the woman found out that the other guy might have infected me, and she assumed that we were lovers and he hadn't been cautious and went into this whole moral tirade, at some point referring to me as a redhead, to which there was some mythical, archetypical connotation. at the end of it she began punching him, very hard, in the face, and he wasn't doing anything to stop her. i held her back, and these two homeless kids, in their mid to late teens came up to the van to try to stop this senseless violence they saw going on. one of them was wearing an orange football jersey, and i knew his name. i called him by name and said "here's a picture of yr mother," handing him a framed photo of a woman and a young child, him.

then we were at a cottage in the woods. it was mid-morning and we were no longer in the van. there was another woman with us. we had to wade across a flooded stream bed, about waist high, to get to the cottage. we were all wearing fancy renaissance clothing. halfway across the stream i had a flashback to an earlier trip to this cottage. i wasn't sure that i had ever been there before, or met these people, but in a way, we were a group that had always been together. in the flashback, the woman from the photo was setting out in search of her family, who she had lost years ago.

when i came back from the memory we were inside the cottage. the second woman was berating the first: "how could you be so hypocritical? you act so moral, but we know you popped into the back room for a quicky with yr new boyfriend as soon as we got here." her new boyfriend was a spirit that was somehow connected to the house. none of the rest of us had ever met him, but we had flashes of what he looked like. a woman entered from another room who was also tied to the house in a way. she said "how nice to have people here. it's been so long."

off to one side there was a tv screen with a video game that had something to do with airplanes. the game had a narrator who was also a member of our group. she was explaining how the game was important to play and provided "get up and go!" which appeared on the screen in big, friendly letters. the focus shifted again, to a talking squirrel, who was sitting on the back of a couch. he said "sometimes i play it during the math bits."

i woke up and remembered that bit about the squirrel and burst out laughing. as i was transcribing the dream, george woke up and wandered in. he had had a strange dream as well:

in the dream, he was sleeping on the couch. i had discovered the plans to a mayan temple, and was trying to figure out the math involved. i was dressed in a brown suit, something someone would have worn a century ago. this process of discovering and figuring out the plans for this mayan temple had happened many times before, and would happen again. but the ending was always in doubt. there was proof that the temple had existed, but not that it was ever built.