dream_lunch epitome of incomprehensibility (I like how my dream_mind works overtime when I have a cold, as if it's trying to heal my stuffed head by shaking up my kaleidoscope of thoughts in a mundanely detailed if inextricably mixed-up simulation of experience. Anyway.) ... I'm eating lunch at a university that has a food court. I'm a student there, having gone back to school after working a few years (as in real_life), and I'm anxious because I have an essay due in two days that I haven't started (see dream_conversations). I haven't even done the two readings that the essay is about. One is a chapter from a French book, and I'm unhappy: it's always slower reading in my second language. But I scramble around in my large black cloth bag, searching. I find a French novel with an orange cover: Moi, Tituba Sorcière by Maryse Condé. "How long has this been here?" I wonder. "I read it years ago. Has it been in my bag all this time?" But I look up because someone I know is sliding into the booth not far away from my seat. The dream doesn't give him a name, but he's also a "mature" student, though a bit younger than me. "How are your classes going?" I ask. "Literature, right?" My major is history and/or translation now. He groans. "Ugh. There was this whole discussion about My Neighbour Is a Dragon" (see dream_book). "Someone was quoting some homophobe who said it had hidden queer meanings. Like being a dragon is code for being gay. And she was trying to reclaim that interpretation, like, yes, it's code for being gay, and the author means it as a good thing. But hey, I'm gay, and I always thought it was just about a dragon." "People read to much into things sometimes," I say, taking a whole head of lettuce out of my cloth bag. Nope, not the right one. I try again. Ah, yes, the head of lettuce with the outer leaves removed. I bite into it, and it tastes good, sort of like alfalfa sprouts in the middle - but are some of them rotten? No, but there's a hard part in the middle, something I can't bite through. I pull out a sprig of what looks like sage. "But then some things are weird in the first place." I turn the corner to look at the front of the café I've ordered lunch from. Nope, my soup isn't ready yet. It's okay for me to crunch on lettuce in the meantime. I resume speaking, at least confirmed in my memory of the restaurant's name. "Like, I ALWAYS go to this place, but why is it called Schindler's List?" "Why, what's that?" "It's a movie about a guy who rescued people from the Holocaust. What does that have to do with salad??" He's too polite or disinterested to point out that what I ordered wasn't salad, that the lettuce is something I brought myself. So my mind turns to blather: should I write a blathe called "A Morbid Sense of Restaurants" or would people think I was weirdly obsessed with the Holocaust since it was one of the topics in another blathe I wrote that started with "A Morbid Sense of..."? What else was it about, though? My cousin? Wait, there was another one about her called "A Morbid Sense of Centennial Park." Did I write it or just think about writing it?? The story: my brother and I were at the park with Lia one winter day and we couldn't find her, so I feared that she'd walked off in the woods in a suicidal mood, maybe even searching for something high to jump off of, but this was my own anxiety running amok. She'd merely gone into the cabin to warm up. But this isn't very attentive of me right now, is it? I should focus on my surroundings. So I pull something else out of my cloth bag. It's the bulrush I was given in class as some sort of holiday token. Should I keep it for the seeds? No, I don't need bulrush seeds. So I get up again and place it gently on a chair in the corner of the food court that has a bunch of other bulrushes. At first I worry that mine will seem shabby next to the other ones after being jostled around in my black bag, but now that I put it with the others, it seems crisp and new again, its bushy brown head no longer flaking off into white fluff. 241226 ... e_o_i (Ugh, there's a "to" that should be "too." I ALWAYS do that.) 241226 ... e_o_i edits I can correct and/or confirm what my dream_mind speculated about blather, though: 1) I can't find anything I wrote about losing track of Lia at the park that time, but I remember I was going to call it "a morbid sense of cousins." Unblathed so ununderscored. Inundated with uns. 2) Centennial_Park is a slightly fictionalized story about an earlier time we went to that park. Lia appears as Lin. In that one I'm troubled by a recent news story. 3) A word search for "morbid" in my blathes gives me, in chronological order, a_morbid_sense_of_packages (I am scared by the import or arrival of packages) morbid_high_school_projects (No "sense of," but a dream in which I'm disturbed by the fact that a person's (fake) internal organs look yummy) a_morbid_sense_of_powerpoints (What I was thinking of in the lunch dream) a_morbid_sense_of_humour (People said Margaret Atwood had one. With a U, because she's Canadian.) 241226 ... e_o_i edits Oh, it's just "morbid_sense_of_humour." All right, then. 241226 what's it to you? who go blather from