Dream 6

Oh, goodness. I mean, I have all sorts of dreams all the time, but fortunately (or unfortunately) they've been more tame the last few years. Granted, most nights, they're pretty cool. On occasion, they're awesome. But then, every once in a while, I get the most bizarre things, sometimes disturbing things. And although it didn't start out that way, this dream certainly became one of those.

Dream 6: A Sharp Staff Picture, night of 18-19 August 2010

I am approaching the bottom of a grand staircase in slow motion. There's no one around yet, but there's a voice from my past encouraging me, "If you want to affect the way the world sees these things, go do it. You can be that kid who makes the difference." It is clear that this voice is a father figure, though he's a mixture of two roughly equal parts... one of my actual father and one of every other male I've ever looked up to.

Whatever exactly my "father" was alluding to, I'm here now. A new beginning. There's a great hallway behind the staircase and many rooms on either side. An ornate wooden door with shiny, brass handles is at the bottom of the staircase, sort of behind me, but not quite.

I ascend slowly to the top of the staircase and retrieve a large, ovoid mirror, about 2 metres high, 3 metres wide, and at least 30 centimetres thick. The mirror's edges are rather jagged and its back is weathered rock. It's as though someone took a roundish boulder, somehow made a clean, flat cut through it, and stuck the glass on the flat part. How I can lift this monstrosity, never mind why I'm doing so, is beyond me.

As I move the mirror into its position about a third of the way down the staircase, people start filing in. Another young man in a suit and tie, about my age and stature, but a few inches taller, is nearby. He calls out to one of the faceless others, "Hurry up; you'll miss the staff picture!"

I assume my place in front of the giant inexplicable mirror. The others fill in the remainder of the staircase. I am halfway to my right of center, with only the young man in the suit between me and the plated railing on my right.

Then the President comes in. Roughly equal parts George W. Bush and Barack Obama in both appearance and personality, but that's unimportant. He smiles, makes some small talk with the others, then comes to me, shakes my hand, and situates himself at my immediate left, directly in front of the giant mirror.

The photographer at the bottom of the staircase sets up his shot, and it's only as he's ready to take the picture that I notice I'm a bit squished between the President and the young man in the suit. And then I realize my face is being squeezed from both sides. Not squeezed out of the picture, no. Just squeezed. As though the President and the young man in the suit were playing some sort of practical joke on my visage. Except they weren't.

Somehow that all ends and everyone files back to their offices to resume their normal duties. Someone else takes the mirror back to wherever it was before. As I make my way back down the staircase, it shifts from mid-afternoon to some time in the middle of the night. Everyone else is sleeping but me.

A faint streetlight outside the front door is the only light entering the spacious anteroom. I lock the door, but just as I turn away from it, there's a knock. I look through the marbled glass into the darkness and can just barely make out the silhouette of a familiar face. I let him in and relock the door behind him.

"Good evening, Mister Prime Minister. How are you tonight?"

"Oh, hello. I'm just fine." Then a pause and a smile. "Did I miss the staff picture?" We start chatting amicably and jovially about policy or whatnot.

This jolly, old chap is, at least in appearance, roughly equal parts Benjamin Franklin, Nick Clegg, and Robert Gibbs in a top hat. There's not really a well-developed personality to speak of, except I already knew from prior experience that I like the guy and that we got along quite well.

Before I know it, we've spoken for several minutes and the Prime Minister decides he'd better depart. I turn to face the staircase and he disappears into a large room to its right.

But instead of ascending the staircase to where I belong, I sit down for a while. The door immediately behind me and the staircase directly in front of me, I just think. My legs are crossed, "Indian style" like they teach you in kindergarten.

I soon discover that, somehow, I am floating some distance above the floor. As if I were sitting in a chair with my legs crossed, but the chair is not beneath me. A small puppy briefly passes underneath me.

"Hello, there, Beverly."

Beverly just scurries off silently into the pitch blackness, into the distant reaches of the building.

Facing the staircase, I'm presented with a list. Boldface Roman type, numbered from the bottom upwards, alternating white and pinkish-tan rows. Two columns: a song, and a key in which to sing it. Almost like a track list of sorts.

Suddenly, I start vocalizing. But these were not songs. More like wails. Think Moaning Myrtle, but twice as loud and thrice as demonically creepy. Each "song" is only a few seconds and a few words long, and while it may start on a "note" of sorts, the very nature of wailing greatly distorts the eventual final pitch.

Basically, I'm screaming beyond the top of my lungs.

The process soon becomes entirely involuntary. My voice becomes raspy and the "lyrics" become increasingly random. One "song" is a simple plea for Beverly's return. Another states that it's not dinnertime.

And, every four or five, there would, quizzically be a "song" called "A-Sharp" to be sung in the key of A-sharp. It was always prefaced by a brief pause, but once it started it was far louder than the rest, and the only words were "A-sharp." Often, but not always, this was followed by a slightly softer, but still obnoxious song listed as "B-Double-Sharp," again with titular lyrics, but to be sung in G-sharp, even though it only sounded a single semitone lower when it came out.

Though I was still floating, this semi-paralytic process continued for some time. I physically couldn't do anything else. I probably came back to "A-Sharp" three or four times before I felt a pair of hands abruptly squeezing my neck.

I was only able to glance up for an instant. The darkness obscured the Prime Minister's face as he swiftly grabbed a blunt object and hit me twice in the head. I fell to the ground.

* * *

I awoke from this dream at 04:48 EDT and could not move for several seconds thereafter. The chorus of wails was still resounding in my head, "A-Sharp" being by far the most prominent. Once I came to, since I am a geek, my curiosity was naturally piqued. After having checked the time, I reached for a nearby pitch reference. Eerily enough, the original A-sharp itself was perfectly in tune.

Summer Stasis

This summer has been flying by so quickly, it's not even funny. Every once in a while, I've gotten the itch to write something here, but my attention has too often been diverted elsewhere. (Which, to be honest, has often been a good thing.)

The main highlight, activity-wise, was another week of counseling at Music Camp this year. Before I knew it, earlier this week, I was packing up my belongings at my apartment in Pittsburgh and heading back home to Girard.

At home, right now, things are a bit off, to say the least. Mom's been overworked lately, and Dad's been overstressed as a result. David, preparing for college, is caught in the middle. And I'm trying to get acclimated to our normal family structure as I'm used to doing, except such structure doesn't really exist right now.

It would be unfair to say things are bad, since there are so many families which deal with much worse for much longer periods of time... but it's definitely "a bit off," which is at least somewhat unsettling.

So for now, I'm in a bit of a stasis. Yes, there are things going on in my life, but right now, I'm marking time until things are a bit more settled in the lives of those around me. Nothing right now is so urgent it's bursting at the seams. Which is actually quite refreshing when I think about it.

I've been doing some introspection during this quiet time. The sort of thoughts that help you figure out exactly where you are, what you are, who you are... so that you can have any hope of knowing where you're going, what you're doing, who you're becoming. And while I may not have the most ostensible pieces quite nailed down, spending time alone with my thoughts has definitely paid some rich dividends.

I'm working on the rest. As my friend and I have said to each other, "one of these days, we'll figure it all out."

Quinquennial

Has it really been five whole years since I started this humble blog?

The short answer is yes. Yes, it has.

A lot has happened in the last quinquennium... more than I can ever hope to have written about. And so, as I've done so faithfully in the past, I whipped up another Bloggy cake in celebration of this achievement.

That said, it wasn't that easy. It's getting harder and harder to find good clip art birthday cakes. Yes, I do have certain standards when it comes to selecting clip art cakes, the biggest being that it has to be workable with the black background of this blog (which, much like the title, I've been meaning to change for a long while, but I haven't yet found the motivation to come up with anything better).

And it has to be somewhat professional-looking. I mean, clip art is vectorized by definition. For some reason, people think that the things they draw with the "pencil" tool in Microsoft Paint qualify as "clip art." (Hint: They don't.) As far as I'm concerned, they're just drawings. And while some of them are very nice, many aren't... and in any case, they're not what I'm looking for.

Still, is it so much to ask that new and halfway decent clip art images of birthday cakes be uploaded to the web and make their way to the first 20 or so pages of Google's results at a minimum rate of one per year?

The short answer is yes. Apparently, it is.

Maybe in future, I'll actually use 14 May as an excuse to bake a real cake. But for now, this digital cake is my sincere thank you to the 1160 visitors this blog received during its fifth year. Yes, that's down 53%, but it's completely understandable as I've written 66% fewer posts with 71% fewer words[1]. In my defense, for much of the past twelve months, I've been a senior at university who has neither been traveling abroad nor attempting to blog every day (and even being way too busy to write every other day, let alone more than once in April).

But "I'm not dead yet... I'm getting better...," er, something like that.

Anyway, in addition to the admittedly contrived and self-centered celebration of five years of admittedly poor blogging, tonight I'll be celebrating my friend's 22nd birthday (which was yesterday), and on Sunday my home church will be celebrating its 175th anniversary... both are significant achievements, if you ask me.

Here's hoping I'll see you again soon... whether in person or in the blogosphere!

* * *
[1] I should note that these figures were somewhat hastily calculated/estimated (and obviously do not include this post). As such, they might be a tad off. But they're certainly close enough and I don't particularly care to go back and figure it out exactly.

BE(E)DA

So, I've decided on a compromise. I totally don't have time to actually do BEDA this year. After taking a look at my schedule of exams, presentations, and performances for the next few weeks, I've noticed that many of my roughest days are going to be the odd-numbered ones. So I've decided to be clever and try to blog every even-numbered day. Hence, this year, I'm attempting BE(E)DA... Blog Every (Even) Day in April. (It'll even be pronounced the same.)

"But, Tim," you say, "what's this about posting on even days when you're posting on an odd day?" Like last year, I'm going to consider it to be the same day right up until I go to bed. After all, half of the time I'm not even home by midnight. Ah, the life of a college student!

Of course, April being what it always is, there is the inevitable case that something more important may will come up, so much like last year, I reserve all rights to amend my BE(E)DA goals, skip days, or just call it quits at any time. I think I did pretty well in 2009, considering that I got 14 days through daily blogging before, as I put it then, I had "bigger fish to fry."

Speaking of which (and I swear, I did not plan this transition), I really was looking forward to going to a fish fry tonight. Being in college, I've been in Pittsburgh for pretty much the entirety of Lent every year for the last four years. (Although I have spent a few Fridays therein traveling to basketball tournaments.)

Anyway, it's not that Pittsburgh doesn't have fish fries (they do). It's just that for the longest time, I've not known where they were. Or at least, didn't care so much to look... until earlier this year, I realized it had literally been four years since I'd been to one. So then I got this thing called a craving.

Of course, Lent came, and I forgot all about it until the last possible week (this week). So I looked up a list of local fish fries and was dismayed to find that most of the ones anywhere near me wouldn't be serving on Good Friday. But I found one in the South Hills, scoped it out, and invited Dylan to come along.

Unfortunately, life got in the way. Two reports due by midday, rent due in the afternoon, and not much sleep had drained my energy. And apparently, at the time he'd considered coming along, Dylan wasn't remembering that his parents would be in town.

Not being able to find another friend to go with me, I lacked the motivation to make such a long trip just for dinner. So I stayed home, got some stuff done, and made "Charlie shells" for dinner (don't ask). Oh, well. Better luck next year. Or maybe I'll just get fish at a restaurant some day soon.

Anyway, happy Easter to all! We'll see where the rest of April shall take us soon enough.