Last night’s dream had me crouched under a white blanket in a hallway. I was on a cruise ship that was being invaded by murderous turn-of-the-century Frenchmen, and under the white blanket, I was passing for a table of flowers. The Frenchmen kept racing by me in the hallway, murdering other people. When the hallway cleared, a few of the other passengers I knew crept out from other hiding places and gathered around me. We could hear people being thrown off a balcony onto pavement (uh, I guess it was a grounded cruise ship?), and we were so scared and crying. My friends heard the murderers returning and got ready to scatter. Then they debated whether to take me along or even expose me (!), but I was pretending to be a table of flowers under my white blanket, and they decided to leave me as I was. I debated crawling into a utility closet behind me. Just then, the murderers came running by. A few of them paused at the table of flowers and looked at it closely. Then they ran on. I was terrified, and to distract myself, remembered a similar time when I had hid under a blue blanket pretending to be just a table to survive some similar danger.

Yesterday evening I was talking to Steve about my dreams and said I intended to analyze them. “How?” he said. I declared that I had purchased multiple books, and he said, “Oh, don’t …” as in, don’t become one of those people who analyze their dreams, those people are lame.

“You just dissed my whole thesis!” I objected. How un-husbandly. He defended his comment by questioning how I expected to defend said thesis to my thesis committee, and I reminded him that this is a creative thesis open to any and all ideas/topics and that no, I don’t think there’s anything to dream symbolism, it’s just an avenue for exploring something fun and weird (i.e. my weird dreams), and my thesis committee doesn’t care.

And then I forgave him, because when we were first becoming friends via long, daily e-mail letters, and I worked in the office in which he had previously worked, and left a year before I worked there (coincidence? or FATE?), and I mentioned that I had cleaned out the office and thrown away a giant box of very outdated CD-ROMs, and it turned out he had created those CD-ROMs, he wrote, “I forgive you for throwing away a whole box of my entire 1997.” So now we’re square, don’t you agree?

I have to report for jury duty today. This sucks, because I was supposed to teach poetry at the high school, and not only do I hurt at the thought of missing one of these teaching opportunities, but I feel like I am leaving them in the lurch. Any day but today! That said, though, I would love to be on a jury, since I love crime shows so much. But Steve says it won’t happen, because they’ll ask me where I live, and it’s too nice a place for the kind of jurors they usually assume will be sympathetic to the defendant, and he says I can’t lie about where I live.