1. Topless Gin Rummy. 2a. Plane movie with Bill Murray before and after he died 2b. my girlfriend

1. On a train, I am trying to figure out how to use the headphone jack. I'm on my way to Canada. I'm seated next to a tall, pale Norweigan man with dark features. I look uncomfortable. I'm fidgeting and my eyes are darting all over the place. My seatmate says "Do you want to play cards?" as his long limb extends to dexterously apprehend a deck. I say "sure." "What game?" says he. "Gin Rummy. But you'll have to remind me of the rules," I say, mentally recalling that I will soon receive ten cards and make groupings of three if I can. I am topless and he is aware. I can tell by his breathing. But he isn't openly staring at me. He starts to deal, focusing on the cards, a slow smile creeping across his face.

2a. On set with an alternate Bill Murray filming a movie with an inauthentic set dressing. Wide wooden waiting-room chairs upholstered with a coarsely woven mustard fabric are lined in rows and curved plexiglass walls with small windows where the bright set lights beam in are replicating a 767 aircraft. We are never acting, but the director calls "Cut."

2b. At home with my girlfriend, we are processing how upsetting it was that our longtime colleague, the alternate Bill Murray, had died, and how painful it was that he had taken his own life. We are all in the green room, which is our house. We've been watching a montage of his outtake clips from the film project with some other people from the cast. We fall asleep, and when we wake up, he's in the room with us and his new (ghost) wife. He jokes around with us and says "What, you think I was seriously going to stick around for when everything felt finished? Where's the fun in that?" He leaves, and the rest of the cast leaves and it's just me and my girlfriend. We're newly dating. I kiss her, suddenly inspired by the thought of how little time we have to get in as much as we can. I seek comfort in her mouth. She picks up a magazine and I lower my face to between her thighs and start to elicit moans of pleasure from her. I take the tall chapstick that was on the couch and start to slide its smooth plastic vertically between her lips but she just says "no." I set the chapstick down and carry on with my previous tactic. I ask her if she likes it. She laughs and says "I want to pleasure you while you pleasure me." I laugh and say "This can actually happen. It's an actual thing that is actually possible."

1. Meeting my boyfriend's date 2. Flying to my date

1. It's a beautiful, sunny day. Boyfriend and I have decided to spend the next few days apart. This beautiful someone he's  met through online common interests has a delicate frame. She has a calm femininity that I don't have. She's wearing black and maroon. He's into her. We've talked about it before; it's supposed to be fine for him to date. I purposefully sit far on one side of the couch; she sits on another couch and he sits somehow behind and above her, such that he can kiss her forehead. I'm a little distracted because I feel like I need to go to my own date. But I'm mesmerized by watching what he'd do with another person. I have a slow simmer of jealousy and I know that I need to get out of there. I go to the kitchen and her mother is there, stocking the whole house with food that has already been sorted onto labeled shelves.

2. I make sure I have my phone and that it's charged. If it is charged, I can use my googlemaps app, and as long as that little dot is in motion on the screen, I am able to fly. I was going to meet a friend in Seattle. A friend who, yes, I'm attracted to, but not in a developing kind of way. He is former military and so I ask him if I should stop anywhere specific over the base in Lakewood. I feel like I have a secret, in that I am flying there to see him. With my arms. Over the sunny, green grass. Like a goose. Like a witch. More like a goose.

I wake up certain that I should try flying today.

1. South Africa Corpse Bog 2. Chicago 3. Avacado

1. I am taking a tour or giving a tour. I'm in a thick, opaque bog up to my shoulders. As I look out to the liquid, I see it as more of a light green primordial ooze. I'm grasping onto things to get through the bog, and then realize that what I'm grasping are dead fish, and even corpses. The narration (I am giving? someone else is giving?) tells me about South African history.

I get out of the bog and into a car and find myself driving through the suburbs of Johannesburg. I'm surprised by how American it all looks- except for the iron bars on all the windows, and the gates, of course. Then I start to get to an area with primary-colored stucco and realize that I must turn around or else I will be hijacked.

2. Some sort of Chicago noir scene with boyfriend.

3. In my kitchen, wondering what to make to serve with my perfectly ripe avacado.

1. Remote Bicycle Escape 2. His computer docs

1. I need to leave the house. For good. I leave on my bicycle, and then realize that they are following me. So I leave the bike and duck into a bodgega. In the basement of the bodega, I meet Samuel L. Jackson, who congratulates me on arriving safely. I'm worried about my bike, but sit at a console where I can remotely ride the bike to the basement. I set it in motion, and then walk outside to check if it's really moving. It's really moving, but then I feel like I shouldn't have left. I am in grave danger!

2. On his computer, I see some documents of his. A word doc that lists his "regular appointments" and then several astrological matches. including one with "Laura". He has a word doc called "probablynotatalldefinitelyaboutkate.doc"

1. Five bedrooms 2. "People never actually talk" 3. Premonition

1. I move into a house with five bedrooms.

2. I followed him into his room or kitchen. We were playfully fighting/teasing each other about how he couldn’t cook. There was some short montage of ‘goofy moments’ we had had together, set to music. Cut back to the kitchen: he said things had changed, he was better at cooking now. I believed him, his whole life seemed different. Then I realized that I had overstepped a boundary while looking over his shoulder while he chopped green peppers. We started to talk about what had happened between us just then with that boundary, but then what had happened between us for that whole year and a half. I spoke lucidly and vulnerably from the heart, and, to my surprise, he was not looking away, but looking into my eyes. We were both weeping but not sobbing, and he spoke lucidly and vulnerably as well. We felt mutually understood. We actually talked, like he said people never do. (Dream on, Ariel, dream on.)

3. The director asks me to choreograph. 

Heath Ledger's Harem Compound

I arrive a little groggy from my flight to California/Australia and a nice Swiss girl welcomes me into the compound. She is smiley in the foyer, but as soon as we're in the hallway, she drops the ruse and I feel that there is something unusual going on here in Heath Ledger's harem-compound. She takes my bags and tells me about where everything is located. We walk to the pool house and she says that one of the girls is only getting paid minimum wage and that Heath is "pretty kooky." There are parrots and monkeys chattering. On our first date, Heath hands me an envelope. I set it next to the ice/wine in the kitchen. I see a bulletin board where there are pictures of girls I've seen walking around the compound. I see a different board with my picture on it. I'm not in the same "league" as the swiss girl, definitely, but that's ok. Heath is kooky. He's 45 now. He's tan. His hair is uncombed. His passions are...unbridled. I start to feel tender about Heath. He seems to feel tender about me. I'm getting paid...much more than minimum wage. I leave for the night feeling alright about it all.

Between two houses

I started renting an apartment downtown. The only stipulation was that I had to keep the two chest freezers of food in the living room. Main market food- Digiorno's pizza, Haagen Das Ice cream. Though they weren't put there for my shopping convenience, (they had another purpose not made clear by my landlord) If I ate from them, I had to pay. I would never eat from them.

I took classmates to my two houses. We had our meeting at both the new and old house. A significant portion of the dream was going between my old house and new. This was not abnormal to any of my guests, but I felt very strange about it.

"Why don't I just move downtown?" I thought. "It's got a bunkbed. It's got windows. It's close to everything. I could even sell my bed. I could get ready to move to a bigger city!" I look around at the new house, which lacks any real character. I long wistfully for my old house, but with the wistful pangs comes a bitter sickness.

1. Remembering "paradise" 2. Cutting off my own legs

1.
I see her from afar and it's not that long after her wedding. She still looks glamourous, and I sit beside her, or perhaps on her lap. We are on a moving thing, a tractor, or a car? She says "do you know what I'm drinking?" I say "Yes, a paradise...it's grenadine, aperol, and orange juice."

2.
I am fed up with it. I cut off my legs: by which I mean I take a knife and cut through the flesh on my thighs above my knees down to the bone, and through the bone, in a though-butter-like cut. Then I jump in the water, a pool, probably. The blood is not really flowing out. I reach out and grab calves that had been floating around in a mild panic and think "no, I think actually I need these!" I kind of just put them back onto my body.

It doesn't hurt all that much, but I feel ashamed that I cut off my own body. I walk around going to different places. B says that I did a good job and we do shots at an old western/Mexican cantina. Isa says that there are lots of things that she has to tie up! I have scars that ring around each thigh like low-slung garters.

Translates to lust

Our little gang is trick-or-treating. The leaves are golden flakes soggy and crisp along the edges of the side walk. We are walking back and forth between each others' houses. Walking west, it is spring time, walking south, autumn. In spring/west, it's violet hues and balmy, in autumn/south, it's orange and black and dark.

He's wearing fingerless gloves and a peculiar enthusiasm for whatever he's suggesting. I've never dreamed about this person. Now that we're assembled in the living room by the wood stove, he crouches to be eye-level with us. He's bombastic right now. His typical intellectual acuity is overrun by a gruff and furious enthusiasm. This is translating to me as "lust." He's trying to speak to me in a secret and lustful language. We are going to do his idea and I'm draw to it purely via lust.

"Maybe we were doing MDMA?" I start to lucidly think. Then, "Maybe [me and an unrelated crush] we should do MDMA!"

1. Working at GO 2. Can't win at adultery

1. Working at Grocery Outlet again for two weeks. Eager to get my paycheck.
2. I am visiting the area to gain access to some rare documents for study. The city is now home to a lover of mine from years ago. (I can't believe I still dream about him.) I happen to be studying a subject that his wife researched for her doctorate in psychology. I'm working on my master's thesis. I'm in their guest room. He steps in to check on how it's going with the book. It's a tough book.  He leans over my shoulder and reads what I have so far. I'm only taking notes, but they are displayed as if it's the first chapter of a book. He leans back in a chair, and with the casual machismo he exudes, his body posture is expansive, hands on back of head, knees out. He says "It's pretty depressing. Do you think the subject is that depressing?" It's a very science-based research project I'm doing...I say "No, it's not depressing, it's just that this is the first time I've ever examined this specific subject and I don't have any reason yet to agree with the conclusions out there. I'm starting as a skeptic, and you think that's depressing?" It's very unlike him to dislike a skeptic. He starts to chastise me for also having a Glamour and Cosmopolitan magazines under my rare research book. I'm embarrassed. We are having a sincere and easy conversation without any awkwardness or misplaced smiles. But something about it feels stuck. In the past, in conversations with him it was easy to see that we still desired each other. I feel like I have been friend-zoned, officially. His wife comes in to say hello and when I bring up something from the book she goes off on a tangent about the particulars of some dead king. They bicker about it, and I realize that maybe she's smarter than I am. Maybe she's funnier than I am. Maybe she's more beautiful than I am. I worry that his love for me is dead at the root and he's only being "nice." They had scheduled a dinner party, and I go back to working on my thesis, but I can't concentrate. I hear the clinking of glasses and their merriment. I go out to ask a question about my cab to M- and though there's no invitation to join them for the party, his eyes linger on me for longer than necessary. I realize that I do not want his sexual attention because it would be a mess with his wife, who I realize IS more beautiful then me, and smarter, and more charming, but is wife-flavored to him. I have been friend-zoned "officially", but unofficially, there's still a possibility for our lust to take off. But want him as I do, I want him as single man, not as an adulterer. I can't win in this game.

1. Underwater motorcycles 2. Breaking in to friendship 3. K's backstory as an amateur opera singer 4. Weird production with characters from Lord of the Rings, Batman, Who Killed Roger Rabbit, A Midsummer Night's Dream, & weird stagecraft

1. Swimming through Olympia with my dad on motorcycles.

2. I wake up and immediately go for a walk. It's sunny, the grass is dry and ochre, I'm headed through tracts of land, there are not sidewalks. I am following a little grey cat who disappears. When I get to a backyard, I can't see any way around it, so I keep walking through it until I reach the house which is fenced on either side...the only way to get beyond the house is to go through it.
There are plates with half-eaten food on them. I didn't think anyone would be home but there definitely is someone home. It's too late for me to choose not to risk it, I'm in the house. A brunette woman comes out of a hallway to see me traipsing through her living room. I briefly explain myself and she seems upset. But somehow we make amends and by the time I leave we are old friends.

3. Going to see a dress rehearsal at the Seattle Opera with the opera gang from Evergreen. K is a singer and during the opera I watch her so intently engaged that the dream dissolves into her backstory. We're at a crime scene, the police are here, and a camera crew. K's parents are being interviewed. The mother, a heavy-set southerner says "Ever since she was a little girl, we knew that she wanted to be singing."The dad interjects, a wiry, leathery man: "Once she said 'Daddy, I don't need to go to the opera'" But we knew better! I just laughed!" I'm watching my feet move through tall grass. The camera crew and the police are going to a house in Olympia where Kate used to live. We're talking to the current woman who lives there. She says K was one intense roommate as the leaseholder. There are a lot of trendy but functional items in the home and a box of records. When I look at the records, which has homemade subject dividers covered in lace, construction paper and "self" laminated with packing tape, I understand that K and I have lived in Olympia for the same amount of time.
The mother comes in the door and says "Nineteen. They just found nineteen shot guns. Why did she have to go buy another one?"

4. The opera gang heads into a a seminar room at evergreen afterwards. We're passing out scripts. I'm Bottom, who is really Bilbo baggins, as well as Bottom, who is Bottom. That was a flashaback. The show is tonight. From the audience I see the stage, this is a weird show! It starts with Bilbo Baggins and a wizard, then goes to the Joker and a kind of Jessica Rabbit number. The Joker character is to the side of the stage with his head in an aluminum box. He is speaking, but every few seconds he pulls a sheet of aluminum quickly across the box with a tab at the bottom to mimic cameras flashing. When flash has happened, he has a new expression on his face. He's incarcerated. I go on stage and say my first few lines which are about being hesitant about something. I look at the rest of the script. I'm not sure I can memorize this all within a few minutes.

1. Bus Cliff, 2.Dressing Room, 4. LAX Mushrooms

1. Bus Cliff
I'm with C and we're on the bus going down Division. The area where there is a farm on one side is actually hundreds of feet of elevation below the road of Division, so there's a cliff edge there. Well, that's one explanation. The other is that the bus has a cliff face on its underside and that's the one I think really was happening in the dream. Anyway, the bus makes a wild turn, but the door is open- it was a warm day. A man slides out the door of the bus and so do I, C tries to grab me but fails. I fall out, attempting to grasp onto something. I see the man hit, firmly, and like he was already dead, a little horizontal platformish creation of the cliff. But I'm able to grab onto something, a very small bit of cliff that is a perfect handle. But I hear someone say that it's going to take twenty minutes to get me rescued. I don't know if I can make it twenty minutes. I know there is a lot of efforting going on at this point for me to be rescued...and then when I am safe I answer questions for the news. "How did you think to grab something?" - "I just thought to myself as I was falling: There is something to hold onto." "But had you ever seen this before? This is really one of the only things available to hold!" "No, I hadn't seen it before, but I knew I just had to hold onto something."

2. Dressing Room
I'm taking a long shower in really deluxe accommodations. Three sides of the shower are glass, one is tan marble, the floor is tan marble, the towels are sage green, its' normal to the people who live there. The Dad comes by to let me know something I don't remember now. When I get out of the shower its a locker room, three girls from school are standing there fully dressed and one is like "Do you KNOW people in LA?" The other says "Well yes, that's the only way you get anywhere. I've worked with a lot of people. The way you do it- you and me, say, we'd go into the studio and they'd recognize me or not, but I'd say 'Don't I look like a lot of fun?' And ta da!"  She has huge eyelashes.

3. LAX Mushrooms, Bugs for ghosts
I get to my parents' house and ask where Isaac (my cat who died in waking life) is. She says 'Oh he's alright but I don't know if you want to see him. He's in the cat door. He got into some fungus. I realize that my roommate was hiding a bag in there that said "LAX mushrooms" on it. I feel so guilty even though it wasn't my fault. I go to the cat door and get him unstuck. He's fine- not purring, but fine, and he's been shaved so the white of his  undercoat is showing. However, he has really strange flat bugs crawling all over him. I try to catch them but they won't be caught. They don't get onto me, only him.

Performance art propaganda at the Assembly of God church

I had been making a big pot of stewed meat for the luncheon in the massive kitchen at the church. I was not a congregate, though. I was something of an insurgent. I came in alone, but then several of my friends showed up with me. We stayed in the kitchen and the lobby. I was there because I had been selling copies of Gentle in Carnations (IRL poetry book skirting issues around sex.) In one of the back rooms, I had even done a performance of the works- but they were musical/dance reinterpretations of the poems rather than the poems themselves. The points in the book were still made, causing the audience to slowly leave the room one by one. Earlier, I had put copies of Gentle in Carnations in many of the church pews. Now, I peeked in to see the congregation in the sanctuary- it was packed with people who were in the full swing of a "holy-spirit" filled church service: hands in the air, eyes closed, mouths murmuring prayers, and a sermon that spoke clearly of shame and its importance for keeping one holy. I spotted one of the copies of GiC and was wrought: this was a bold move to put that with the hymnals! And even more so that I even took the name of the hymnal publisher and put it on my copies of the poem book! Right on the cover! Bigger than the title of the book, even. Why did I do that?! And isn't that illegal? I snuck back into the kitchen as the service let out. A large, somewhat shy man came up to me and said that he really liked my book. A woman from work joined us, gave me a hug, but completely avoided the issue of what was in the book. I gathered my things while the man was still talking to me and said cheekily "one last thing!" and grabbed a few bits of meat from the bowl of meat I had set on an armchair. The man said that he hoped that I'd keep in contact with the church with the work I was doing. He kept saying he liked it, but I didn't understand how he could both like that book and like the church he was going to.

1. Grape arbor make out 2. Jon Pon's new career 3. Art as understanding, the artist as a coward

1. He stops over, out of his way just to lay beside me and hold me in his arms for a few hours. My bed is under a grape arbor. Early nineties slow jams are playing as the soundtrack to an animatied movie that gives blue flickers to the otherwise warmly lit room by projecting on the walls. We have to stand up to reach the grapes, bright green big ones. J comes in and says that he’s been lasso-ing them with a metal wire and pulling them down. Then J says to me, pulling me aside “Are you sure you want to be kissing him?” - This is because man who has me in his arms is dating my friend in waking life. I don’t answer. It's just such a warm and loving moment that happens to be rare and stable enough to both confine itself to that single moment and last forever because it is so absolutely loving that it seems very weird to think of "fidelity" as anything but the end of happiness.
2. Jon Pon is married and has been funding his life by panning and digging for gold for the past 7 months. He’s got a baby on the way. I’m watching him get ready for his next big trip and looking at samples he brought and the shiny gold tears in the soft and dry rocky clods. 
3. At C’s art opening: an installation piece with a laser point that randomized briefly and then settled on a fixed point inside a box that no one could see. It made me extremely angry. I was so furious. I started walking to the bar, and he came up beside me and asked me to go for a walk. We went for a drive instead, up a mountain. We got out at a waterfall. I was thinking about chocolate milk in cartons. I was still so mad at him and finally I said “You knew all along about uncertainty. Your piece is all about uncertainty! When you make art like this, I just know you get it, you get that commitment isn't about the end of uncertainty, and it makes me so mad that you couldn’t ‘get’ me!!!” There was a tour guide that was trying to get us into the fold. I wanted to cry, and I also wanted to kiss him. He looked exasperated and sad. I wanted to be comforted, but he had no idea. 

1. Chess with mother 2. Funny Doctor 3. Artistic merits of amateur work

1. Playing chess with my mother, she effortlessly beats me three times in a row each time within only a few minutes. One time, she checkmates me with the knight! How do you checkmate with the knight?!

2. Getting a Pelvic exam from J O’J- there is a chart behind him that suggests that I am dangerously dehydrated. In his characteristic way, he both chastises me for this and makes it a fun experience. 

3. At a resort with Ms. Carley, a vocal teacher I met at a camp last year. She had let me borrow her journal to make some drawings. I drew many conceptual things- including an idea for a sculpture: “the foot” “the step” and two others. When I gave her journal back to her in the dining room of the resort, she asked my artistic opinion. As if I was her art teacher, or a critic, I had already written in responses to her drawings. We had both been reading a book that mentioned feasts, and I told her that all she needed to do to her drawing fo a feast table was to choose a focal point or a shape of focal points, highlight those objects, and take a fine dark pen to the shadow sides of the the many fruits and bowls etc. to define their shadows- and the shadow side only. She had just taken a shower and was drying her hair. 

1. Married to a conservative Hindu romantic who changes into a misogynistic radical spy in South Africa.

1. As soon as I arrive in South Africa, a sweet Indian man starts to seduce me. Before I know it, we are in a building having a wedding ceremony. We are standing on a big white sheet barefoot. The officiant shows up rarely: mostly it's my fiance talking to me about beautiful circumstances in nature and so on. Then we both are supposed to sing. My wedding party sings my parts for me because I don't know the tradition- the witnesses in the audience also sing. There are little dishes of nuts and herbs that we pour oil over until it overflows onto the white sheet. Then we cover each other in oil, and I unceremoniously finish with his feet. He takes a long time getting to my feet and mirthfully confides that because women take such wonderful care of their feet, it's the most special part of their body. I feel lucky- he is very romantic. Then he starts singing the final song. I'm standing up but my bridal party nudges me to bend down. I bend from the waist like I'm folded in half. The bridal party not so subtly forces me to lay prostrate, not looking at my fiance. I feel embarrassed that I can't get it right. The song is all about how the man will lead and the woman will follow, always kneeling beside her husband in devotion and in the honor of his mercy. I become unsettled at this. When I do look up, my fiance is now some chiseled white guy. The lyrics are sung in colloquial American English- he is not from India or South Africa or wherever I am. I realize that he is a spy and that we're in a Fascist country and that he's saying these things so as not to be called out by the militant powers that be. But I'm still critical of his methods because now the song he's singing is a satire of female subordination, but somehow despite its satire, it still fails to make any posits for the worth of women. I feel ashamed that I was embarrassed to kneel "improperly" and ask myself if I should have knelt at all. When the ceremony is over, many people come to speak with my now husband, but I am not to do that. I half listen, but mostly stare out into the crowd of people who were from every different country, and out through the back windows which look out into lush, gorgeous land. I'm super thrilled to be here even though I'm confused and worried. Am I really married? Can he refuse me exit of this country?

1. Ophelia 2. Doses in New York

1. Out to lunch with someone who says that I should play Ophelia. 
2. I decide to get a ticket to New York. I meet A and he’s on his way to his aunt’s apartment. We’re going to go see a show, but we aren’t in the city. We’re in some seedy city far outside of any of the buroughs of New York. Her apartment is one room with a balcony and she has two cats. His other aunt had taken us there and she says “this is the extent of it for these cats.” I don’t think it’s such a bad deal for two cats, could be worse.The aunt that brought us there leaves, and then many of his friends show up, and also Jamy shows up. She says “How do you like your new phone?!!” I say “I love it!” But for some reason I don’t want anyone else to know.  A nurse comes to the door who has A’s aunt’s morphine. The nurse takes a great deal of time to explain exactly how it works: One digests it but one shouldn’t let it touch their tongue. There’s a high likelihood of regurgitation. She says that the dosage is mix of DNA-specific mucilage from the mother and the father of the patient. Despite this seemingly patient-specific morphine cocktail, as soon as the nurse leaves, A’s aunt discusses how we can all share it. Suddenly, A’s (former?) junky brother and sister are there, and a whole bunch of random scene “friends.” A takes a little bit of this morphine, which worries me, but I do too. I take only a drop or so. A’s aunt is watching carefully, totally unworried, but reminds the party that she does actually “need” a certain amount. She gets hers, and then we leave for this show.  A plops into a wheelchair and one of his friends pushes him. My head is heavy and instead of a narcotic I feel that I’m on a disassociative or a low dose of psychedelics. We keep walking, the whole gang kind of ambling through a street. The wheelchair gag is over. There is a woman who has a stroller shaped like a VW bug or perhaps an Old Rolls Royce, it is white leather and has miniature car wheels with shiny rims. Inside are two little children, and two enormous dogs. She’s blasting pop music from her stroller and stops to watch a tennis match. Suddenly I'm in a car with black leather seats. I look down and see that I had grabbed the the morphine from the dashboard- which though it had always been in a big bottle with a syringe tip (not an IV syringe, but just one that will make the liquid go in a very pointed direction) now it is embossed with “HEROIN” which makes me nervous and makes my hands shake...which makes me more nervous. 

Half remembered 1.5/3, 1. Errands 2. Politician

1. Going shopping. I leave Ross Dress for Less with a nice haul. I'm on my bike and I peddle hard up a hill, as it's starting to rain. I'm in the grass as I crest over a hill I realize that this is a jump! So I'm airborne, then land, safely, no crashes. Phew! But it's starting to rain even harder so at the next house I pull in. All my coworkers from Radiance are there and we're all getting ready to go to sleep. Micha offers Brandy her yoga mat to sleep on. I'm not ready to sleep, I worry I'll be too loud, so I take off again.
2. It's important to get where I need to go that I follow the actions of a politician closely. It is not Condoleeza Rice, but someone like her. This is going to make me a lot of money.

1. a. “Readers” on American Idol b. Backstage 2. a. Sex b. Cake c.Costumes

1. 
a. “American Idol” has a new segment/spinoff. Viewers submit their letters to the show to be “read” by singers who improvise (or are they prewritten?) melodies to perform letters about the audiences' lives. The “readers” don’t change erroneous grammar or repetitions or incoherencies in the writing. I find one woman to be very skilled. Most wouldn’t peg her for a TV personality because she is quite overweight. I tell her after the show that I liked what she was up to with her “readings.” She thanked me, left. Afterwards I got the impression that this had happened before and the other “readers” were resentful towards her, because she kept getting the best letters to perform. At first I had thought they just auditioned people from the audience, but now I wonder if they’ve cast for these folks. I wonder to myself if I could do this.

b. I go back stage to see about getting involved. I go into a dressing room where there are two dudes rough-housing with each other and pulling on each others’ afros. I think they are both pretty cute, one propositions me. I look down and notice that my toenails are no loner painted. How did that happen?

2
a i go to a crush's house and he kisses me. oh god, finally. He says “i want to do this,” which in the dream sounds like the most sexy phrase I have ever heard. We announce all that we do- our intention to do it and our acting out the actions. On one hand, this feels silly. On the other hand, I appreciate our emphasis on consent and so I say so. He's shy, stern, serious - so I couldn't read whether or not he was into it. He's into it.. He is on top of me, with his mouth right next to my ear, whispering breathy ideas about what to do our what he wants to do. It occurs to me that we’re actually pretty clothed. His rhythm is incessantly straight, which seems dull, but also strong. He stops, gives me a swat. Ugh I am really quite helpless over him and start begging him for... this and that...Well, yeah it was a sex dream, okay?

b. then there’s a knock on his door and his roommates come in with birthday cake. Up in a flash, fully clothed, he blows out the candles and smiles. It’s a red velvet cake. One girl has wavy hair, one kinky hair, and some guy who is just tall and quiet. I think “What goes in red velvet cake? Wheat flour... wheat flour.” 

c. A few dawdlers are left and I am telling them about something I think we should do- which is dress up like characters of figures from a play or a movie and walk around during carnival times or create little skits.

1. Real teen screenplay & criticism 2. my parents' animal flood

1. I am watching a pilot episode. 7 girls on the day they turn 14. The premise is that they are conscious of who they will be when they're much older, but they're telling the story from when they're 14. All of the girls in the pilot episode are real people who I went to middle school with. There is a voiceover that comes in and foreshadows what will happen next and gives creepy "insider" information. When D is on the screen, the voiceover says that I went down on her in middle school. (There is no mention of what effect this has on D's life.) In disbelief I say "That just didn't happen." There are few others that I don't remember now, the last is a girl- Mary, sits up in a top bunk bed. She says to the camera "I just turned 14 this minute, and I just now got my period." Then the camera does a close-up of her chest. She is wearing a hospital gown, removes that, then starts to remove her bra.  I say audibly -"Now this is in poor taste, I really hope they don't go there." She removes her bra and reveals breasts that have had a horrible boob job, perfectly spherical and with odd indentations in the skin on the outer underside.
I turn to A and start having a discussion with him. I say "So that's my screenplay." He shrugs, and I say "but I was thinking about having this one part where she takes off her bra and we see her terrible boob job." Then he says "You can go that route I guess, but it seems like overtelling. The audience is already going to assume the worst...so if you put that in there it'll just take away the fun of them getting to know her story more slowly."

2. There are a lot of animals showing up randomly: a jackal, possums, squirrells, raccoons, hares, deer, large insects and arachnids, armadillos...etc. They are coming in one at a time to my parents house, and they are neither staying nor running away quickly. I'm trying to help my mom have a yard sale. We are just looking at some bright coral colored cutrains together and a man is about to sing a song. I go into the garage where I pick up an old swimsuit. I open the door and see a jackal bounce away like a kangaroo. There is ocean water coming up over the stairs and it keeps coming. I say to my mom "We have to just keep going." We go out the livingroom window, and walk past the Rolleighs' house and just kind of leisurely relax in the sun. A few hours later we go back home, everything looks kind of fine, really, but I know that we ought to set up an appointment with the carpet cleaners.