Global Warming

I am on vacation with my family and the Kolpacks. We stop and park our van behind a cedar-shingled house and one-by-one go inside. I think it must be a gift shop, because there are lots of distracting object hanging down at eye-level, making me repeatedly forget what my goal is.
Eventually I make it back out to the van, and now my mother is impatient because we are going to be late for Christmas. I remember that the reason I went in was to retrieve her.
We make it home in time, but I get impatient waiting for Christmas to get there, and all I want to do in the meantime is take a nap, but the door to the spare bedroom will not close.
I end up in the basement, sitting at a circular table next to the piano. Kris and a girl that resembles Beth, Sarah, and Deb from Napoleon Dynamite all at once sit across from me. We are having a conversation about my plans to rent a house with Kris and some roommates. We are all giddy. He is saying, "I just don't know why we have to live there as separate couples."
"What do you mean." I say.
"Well why couldn't we exist as one relationship? Because I love you-" At this point he leans across the table to kiss me, but I'm starting to feel less giddy."And there's no reason for you to be jealous, and I love her too."
"So what then, Kris? All I need to do is love her-"
"No!" he cuts in, as if that is the silliest thing, but what he is suggesting is not. "You just have to be okay with us. Look!" And he kisses her shiny pink gloss-coated lips tenderly. She giggles.
My reaction is the thought "Do it again". I'm not sure if this is because I don't know yet if I feel jealous; or if I mean it as a threat. He's watching my face, I'm watching her shiny pink lips. "Do it again, Kris." This time it's sounding more like a threat, but I almost say it as a request, when he leans in and kisses her again anyway.
I feel it physically that time, as if I'm swallowing vomit and getting the wind knocked out of me at the same time. I jump up, crying out, "I can't be in love with a boy who is in love with someone else!" and run away.

Now I am in the Art building, room 301. I am collecting my things now that the quarter is over. There are a few grad students there, doing self portraits, and the model Robert, just taking a nap, not wearing clothes. Lucas from my class comes up to him and examines his face as he sleeps. Robert wakes up and asks if he needs anything. I feel bad and want to tell Lucas that now that the quarter is over he's not modeling for drawings anymore. Lucas says, "Man, I need to work on facial features." He shows Robert his point drawing, and it's very good, so I don't feel as bad.
Joel is over on the other side of the room, curled up on a couch reading. Remembering what just happened with Kris, I go over and say, "Joel, I wonder if maybe you can help me understand something." He says sure, and I begin repeating the conversation with Kris word for word. As I repeat it, I begin to realize that when I said, "I can't be in love with a boy who is in love with someone else", that has and always will be true for me, no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise. I tell Joel and he nods, but then I wonder what "can't be in love" means. I'm still wondering that, actually.

I stand on a beach with many of my friends, I think it is graduation. I am skipping stones. Then: some powerful figure ( possible my geology prof) has declared that there is no possible way to stop Global Warming. I watch that shoreline and think, "Well then if we can't stop it, why can't we at least stop it from dragging out so long and get it over with? We could all use a little adventure."
The air warms, the alpine glaciers melt, and the sea lazily rises. We all skip up to the parking lot where are two orange VW camper vans are waiting for us, ready to transform into houseboats. The water is rising more quickly now, and we all pile on top of the vans. Matt gets annoyed with Kellen or something and decides he doesn't want to be a part of our van, so he jumps off, but I grab him before he can float away, because we had a deal: I need him to tend to the sails.
We've got quite an assortment my friends on the boat. No one over twenty, all vaguely acquainted. When the water stops rising we float around, observing the new landscape. No one knows who exactly survived, if our families survived.
Some people who formerly lived on a cliff in Normandy park now have a volleyball net set up where people on jet skis joyfully play a game in the "yard". Even though there is a potential for tragedy, starvation, and suffering, everyone shares the air of giddiness, and we soon discover that oral sex is actually the best way of sustaining ourselves. No, really.

Exorcism

The dream begins in a well-lit, nicely furnished living room. There are many people, and one girl is possessed. The rest decide she needs an exorcism, and the violence begins. At times I am her, at other times I am participating in the exorcism, at other times I just watch. The pin her down to the floor, one on each arm and leg, one sitting on her torso, she writhes, alternating between moans and screams. She escapes, rips apart the room's furnishings, they capture he again and try unsuccessfully to physically force out the demon from her body. She begins to tear things apart with her mind, ripping the roof off of the car parked outside, and starting a great wind.

I get tired of watching and move off into another part of the room. My brother has returned from the ranch, and we wanders about in a floor-length red-orange chiffon nightgown with a blank look on his face. This is the mos terrifying thing I have ever seen. He speaks in a monotonous voice of facts he has learned, showing no personal connection to... anything. He sits down with me and my parents at the dining room table, and begins to mark x's on a piece of notebook paper, describing that each x represents a dosage of a drug on a given day. There are many rows of them, up to seven in a row for each day of the week. Then he begins to explain what each drug is and why he takes them. I interrupt and ask about the chart, because I don't understand the system. He responds, "No, There's one for every time per day. And this one is for when I feel anxious, and this one is for when Jenny makes me feel inadequate, and this one..."
I'm so shocked that I get up and leave the table to go back to the exorcism. He was supposed to get better, not become a zombie. The people on the other side of the room haven't made much progress, so I go grocery shopping. I am looking at the cheeses when I run into Ariana. We exchange the typical greetings, Hi how are you, How have you been, etc., and Ariana responds that she was doing fine until the first part of the quarter, but then her upstairs neighbor began bringing home this guy, and they made so much noise having sex that Ariana couldn't concentrate on her studying anymore.

And the Award for Wierdest Section Goes To...

The entire French Horn section pushes a row of roller coaster seats to behind a curtain, where they are being organized for our Disneyland performance. We sit down. I try to organize my music. Matt Perry has obtained a Playboy magazine and is flipping through it, obviously delighted. I tell him he needs a girlfriend. Cindy substitutes the word "men" for the word "genies" in one of her sentences, and I realize she must be Indian. I didn't know that the word "genie" was punjab for "man." Sarah Davis looks at me as if I am insane.

Man, I am a terrible host

Kory takes our class on a field trip to show us the three "principles of dance":

Number one is a fake scepter placed on a velour cushion. I lead the group up to the porch of the cabin to look at the scepter, but everyone crowds behind me so I pass by quickly.

Number two is one of those poles you slide down on a big toy, with a curved top. When I approach I give Kory a skeptical look, and he sighs and says, "Envision a flagpole!" So it's a curved flagpole... I kind of get it.

Number three is a station wagon on a platform perched on top of a large pole. This one I just don't get. When we look questioningly at Kory he uses a remote control to tilt the station wagon; something spills out. We tell him to stop, the car is about to fall off. He tilts it again, and several small objects spill out and clatter to the ground like pop cans. The car slowly topples off, and we all run and take cover in great fear of the small objects inside the car (beetles?). I hide in the big toy for an unnecessarily long time. When I come out my mom is frosting cookies on the porch of the cabin. I help for a while, frosting some bundt cake from a paper sack filled with blue frosting.

I walk around the corner of the cabin to find myself on the playground at Shorewood. Kyra, some other familiar friends, and I take turns on the slide. As we slide, I ask Kyra questions about her upcoming surgery. She is optimistic.

I have some assignment that I'm late finishing for school, so I decide to go early to work on it. I walk down the Burke-Gilman trail and end up on Lake Union under I-5. Alex is there, and I stop to talk to him, and then I continue on, now wading through the water. When I pass under the University Bridge and arrive at my my desired destination, and start to climb up the bank to get out of the water. Too late, I notice the muddy structures around me moving- they are trolls! No one ever told me there were University trolls! They seem to jsut be waking up from a nap, so I hope that if I climb quickly they won't notice me. Then my shoe gets stuck in a hole in the wall, and when I turn I see another troll climbing out of the water after me, a dead fish in its mouth. I consider screaming, but decide against it.

On land I find my way to a designated study area, which is a small patch of grass next to the Burke-Gilman where about nine people already lay in a grid formation. When I get there I feel sleepy, so the natural thing to do is lay down. I wedge myself in an empty slot and arrange my stacks of books around me. Chris, a guy from Solstice who always orders "short americans" is there, telling a friend that he is in my French class as well as in another girl's senior seminar. This is not true, and it frustrates me, so I leave.

Back in my apartment, I am just waking up from a nap, when I become aware of a giant plasm television on the wall next to my bed. My eyes are closed, but I can see the colors from it on the insides of my eyelids. I can also hear that my mom and another family member or two are in the room. Listening to the program, it is a news interview. I hear "University of Washington Track", "New Zealand", and "Vinh". I realize they are about to interview my friend from my tea class, and I roll over and try to open my eyes to see the TV, saying groggily, "Hey, it's my track star! That's my friend!", which comes out as an incomprehensible mumble.
My eyes will not open. I focus all my energy on opening my eyes, but all that happens is I can see some very blurry outlines. Urgently I pry my eyelids open with my fingers, but I still cannot see. I let go and my eyes fall shut. Feeling as though I am on drugs, I sit up with difficulty in front of the mirror and try to open my eyes again. I suspect that the lids are actually opening, but my vision does not work.

Later, as I walk down the path to Shorewood Beach with a number of people I tell them about the incident over and over again.


Then Courtney and Kris had sex. This was not surprising to me, but Andrea was really concerned about it, especially that Beth would find out, so she devised a complex plan to drug all of our friends and somehow hypnotize them to forget about it. She invited all of the Academy 4.0s over to my house and prepared several dips that would cause everyone to fall asleep. There were also small, crescent-shaped pieces of sheet metal that she fed to the guests after they fell alseep for some reason.
The problem was that everyone arrived at different times, so we had to move the party out onto the patio, and then Megan Su wanted to make her own guacamole, and Andrea almost flipped out. I tried to pull her aside and tell her that maybe this wasn't worth it, and ask what the pieces of sheet metal were for, because they seemed really dangerous for someone to be consuming. Andrea didn't pay attention and told me to go feed more dip to the sleeping peole upstairs while she helped Megan make a new dip.

Gasp! How Scandalous!

It is the family reunion. I am sitting at the table with my oldest cousins and my aunts and uncles. I am pleased that Katie and Bisbee remember me. I realize how much we all look alike simply because of our eyebrows and eyes.

I get up to get something and find myself on some sort of carnival ride, which is actually transportation to another part of town. I am very high up, and the fog pushes past as I whiz along the rails. I wonder why I am not cold, as I am wearing short sleeves.

I am deposited in a run-down area of Downtown San Francisco. Examining my surroundings, I see a squadron of Black-American policeman, advancing menacingly on me. I run for my life, around the corner of a large brick factory building and down the stairs to an iron-wrought door. I wrench open the door and run inside. The purpose of the small company seems to be to provide a bathroom if you are really desperate. I guess there weren't any others around. I dash past the elegantly decorated and nicely lit entry and lock myself into one of the spacious stalls. I decide to unlock it again, because if it's locked, it's obvious that there's someone inside. I can hear the guards slamming open the stall doors next to me, looking underneath for feet. I manage to crouch on the porcelain toilet, then I lose my balance and fall off. I think they have gone away, but when I open the door cautiously they are there. I slam the door in their faces, delaying them as they barge in. I throw a couple of punches, one's lip begins to bleed, but the two large men are able to overcome me. With a secure grip on me, they open the stall door to take me back to their squadron.
A clean-shaven young white man stands defiantly in their way. Between the two of us, we are able to take down both the policemen. Very relieved, I decide this man is now my boyfriend. He wants compensation for saving my ass, but I tell him not right now because Mister Fosberg is in the cubicle right next to ours. How embarrassing that would be! So we exit the bathroom (without paying for its use) and sit together on the back steps. I have grown very fond of him in a short time.

I stand on the same steps heartbroken, my family tries to comfort me. I think my boyfriend has been abducted. My father, in a sudden flash of inspiration, turns into a werewolf in order to track his scent. We set off down the block.
I notice that there is an abundance of small dogs in this city. Two chihuahuas take a liking to us, and begin helping us track down the missing person.

We find ourselves in an underwater dungeon. The search party splits up - I follow dripping pipes and grimy walls to a large room. The light is soft and ambient, such that the blue walls seem to glow. I feel like I am deep in the open ocean. In the middle of the room, a large black sphere spins slowly. There is an opening on one side. Near another entrance to the ocean room, my boyfriend is standing, transfixed. I am very glad to see him. Joining him, he tells me he thinks this is some sort of portal to another world. I decide the only way to find out is to try it, and together we dive through the opening. It is no portal, but the inside of the sphere is dark and embracing, like a womb or a nest. We decide it is an excellent place to give and receive compensation.