Monthly Archives: May 2007

I just woke up from a strange one. I had Osama bin Laden as a guest speaker in one of my classes, and I was getting annoyed because a lot of students were bored and not disguising it.

Osama was indeed pretty boring, but there was one interesting conversation:

A student: Are you going to kill us all right now?
Osama: No.
Me: Why not?
Osama (paraphrased): Because I’m not a suicide bomber. I’m needed for the cause. (He went on and on for a few minutes, but that was essentially all he said.)
Student: Are you going to kill us all as soon as you leave the building?

At this point, a different student, named Neil, got up and started walking toward the door. I shouted his name and told him to sit down. Then I went over to him and told him he was being disrespectful, and I slapped him. He was holding an unlit cigarrette, and I took it from him.

He was laughing, but when I took his cigarrette, he said, “Hey, you can’t take that!”

I said I could and he went off on this little rant in which he swore at me, so I tore up the cigarrette.

He was shocked. “Aw, man. I was just quoting some lines from Dazed and Confused,” he said. “Haven’t you seen that movie?”

I was teaching a class, and everything was going just fine, but then the department chair brought in a few parents. They were all tall, blonde women and they had some “important” role, like maybe they were presidents of the PTSO or something. So they came in and started taking over my class. Suddenly there was all this expensive new equipment, none of which had anything to do with my class — things like fancy exercise equipment and other stuff that looked like fancy exercise equipment but was actually just a different way to watch TV or get on the internet.

I was really angry with these women and I told them to get the hell out. I used some strong language. But they just laughed at me.

This enormous beast floated down from the heavens. It was about twice the size of a city bus, and it was a cross between a dog and a dragon. It was black and white, kinda like a holstein cow. I thought it was spectacular, but once it landed on the ground, it took off running, crushing everything in its path. It decimated a small village.

I was a member of something called a Press House. It was me, 3 guys, and about 6 or 7 girls. We were excited, because it was a good team. The guys were small but quick, and the girls were all star athlete types. We had to do things like put on charity fundraisers and compete in athletic events against other Press Houses — all in the name of vying to be the coolest Press House on campus. It was absurd and nothing like the real world.

Then the dream kinda went backwards, and I was driving to a college I had applied to for grad school. It was a small college in Iowa — Iowa, Wisconsin, that is — a two and a half hour drive from Madison. So I went there to check it out. There was one road into the campus, and I had to drive through a group of students playing kickball in the street. The buildings were all very old and they had a lot of character. I got out of my car near the pool and walked into the men’s bathroom. There were two women at the sink, but they were blind, so I used the urinal.

The dream gets kind of foggy from there. I was with the Press House and we were choosing field stones for a small veranda in the park and making rules about where students were allowed to make out.