“… like a ribbon surrounding a gift of distance.”

I had a dream about you last night.

We were in a car and driving to Alaska (can you even do that? I have no idea).

The open windows brought in the air from the outside and it’s tendrils tickled my hair while the wind giggled as it rushed its way past my ears. The stars clung to their locations in the clear night sky above us, their resplendence reflecting off of the sides of your car making it seem as though we too were a celestial constant amongst scenery that was forever whirling faster and faster around us. That song was playing on the radio that so reminds me of your smile and and we watched the road unwind before our very eyes, like a ribbon surrounding a gift of distance that sits just before and beyond us, always tantalizingly out of reach yet close enough to make it seem possible to finally know what it would be like to be “there” instead of “here”.

Usually time moves too slowly to ever feel like we’re anywhere else but in a “here”. “There” always seems like a fantasy to me, a figment of my imagination that beckons me ever closer with a crook of it’s finger. It’s a phantasm that exists until I arrive where it stood, where it then wafts off with a startlingly playful immediacy to yet another location, like a never ending game of tag with a person who is never really there.

“I am ‘you’ to you.”

Prof G just told me a dream he had the previous evening which I wound up being a huge part of.

In the dream, my professor was teaching a class in a pub about signifiers. He had drawn something on the chalkboard behind him (there was a chalkboard at this bar, apparently) and was asking all the students what it inherently was. After about five minutes of the other students saying things like “apple”, “fruit”, “supposedly red object”, I stood up suddenly, my bar stool falling behind me. With a wild glint in my eye I started yelling over and over and over again, “It’s just chalk on a chalkboard! It’s just chalk on a chalkboard!” I then picked my chair up and sat down with a weary thud, a far-away look in my eyes as I mumbled something under my breath about how no one knew anything about semiotics or Saussure these days.

It seems as thought I was representing materialism in Prof G’s dream.

In any case, that sounds freaking bad ass.

I hope that dream goes on the recommendation he gives me for Graduate school.

Speaking of Graduate school… After a conversation I had today with Prof G, I’ve decided to put off Graduate school for a few years. I’m in no rush to go, really. I want to travel to ridiculously far away places where I can hop trains and occasionally rely on the kindness of strangers while I still have the chance and the drive to do so. I want to work odd jobs in a city I’ve never set foot in before. Or do organic farming in a foreign country. I want to read Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and Kurt Vonngeut for a while, instead of books titled “The History of American Buddhism”, “Biological Psychology,” or any other cleverly compiled secondary or tertiary source.

Don’t get me wrong, I love academics and I know (think?) that I’m supposed to be a professor/ethnographer at some point in my life, but it’s hard to breathe sometimes when you’re buried under the bureaucratic responsibilities  and paperwork inherent in any sort of academic/government institution. Besides, my favorite professors took 4-10 years off between Undergraduate and Graduate school, and they’re freaking amazing. They spent the time between traveling and learning languages and reading books that eventually fed into their teaching methods (methods which I happen to admire quite a bit).

Besides… my passport looks rather barren. It is in dire need of some accessories.

Smash Brothers Beatdown

I keep having this dream about me and one of my professors playing Smash Brothers Brawl in his one-room apartment that has no windows… He also makes sushi for some Japanese guy that knocks on the door and demands payment, but that’s just the crazy part of my brain talking.

My professor kicks my ass at this game every time. Every. Single. Time.

Even in my dreams I can’t beat anyone at that game.

I’m sticking with Tetris.