Fear the Crab

I think I know the reason behind this morning’s dream, at least for the girl who had a hard time with math. Irene is taking a “practical purposes” course in math, where students use formulas to calculate everyday things like compound interest or matrices for bus schedules or airline flights. She understands the formulas well and good, but when it comes to assignments she can’t seem to cut it. The reason? They’re all word problems, and she hates word problems. She says she panics when she sees them, and I guess her brain locks up and can’t figure things out. I recommended she circle the important facts she sees in the problem, and then once all the facts are circled, put them into the appropriate variables in the appropriate formula. Here’s hoping she does well.

However, I have no idea why Booger was trying to kiss Maile.

There was an accident on the freeway that backed traffic up for a good mile. I got caught in it on the way home from work. We were stopped for a good 15 minutes before we slowly started moving again. From what I could see, some car or truck either lost control or skidded from the right lane all the way across to smash into the center barricade. I didn’t look too well, because I was more interested in getting home, and I hate rubberneckers.

Maile says I need to be more curious. I need to pry my nose into and squeeze every drop of information from whatever it is I’ve encountered, just so I can relay the entire story to her when I tell it. I told her I’ll try.

Today’s Invader Zim episode(s):
Door to Door
FBI Warning of Doom
Megadoomer
Lice

I was sitting in some sort of cafe, only instead of being there to drink coffee and eat food I was there to take some sort of math class. There weren’t enough seats for people to use, so many were sitting on the floor. I don’t know what kind of math it was, for there were strange symbols like (0 0) + -0/-0, which I think stood for a weird twist on boolean logic; true and true + minus true over minus true. We had some kind of test to take, but sitting behind me was a girl who was supposed to be smart, but she never seemed to cut a break from the professor. She would ask me to look over her work to see if anything was wrong, because the professor would just jump all over her case if there was even the slightest mistake. This was strange, because the professor only treated her this way. Finally the test we were taking was over, and to my horror I realized that while helping this girl, I had neglected to fill in my own results. Thankfully the prof didn’t approach me for my answers, rather he went straight to the girl and confronted her. She spoke an answer that was correct to everyone’s opinion, but the prof wouldn’t accept it. There was some trivial detail that was wrong, like she hadn’t written in one of the ( signs in the right place, and so he flunked her completely. This time the girl got fed up and ran out of the classroom crying, which at this point had transformed into a giant bus. Going against my better judgment, I decided to go after the girl, taking with me my girlfriend. Except we couldn’t catch up, because I was driving her car, which wasn’t the car she has now, but rather an older model used years ago. I was having trouble driving because, as I said in my dream, “The gas and brake pedals are right next to each other, not separate on other sides of the drive shaft like my car.” Every time I wanted to press the brake, my foot would reach over and hit empty air, causing the two of us to momentarily panic before resuming a normal state.

So we got lost in a parking lot, and all the while my girlfriend is shaking her head and sighing at my ineptitude. Finally we get out, and we’re at this big college party. We step onto this wooden deck where three guys are playing basketball, only they’re not playing it with a hoop and net but rather giant fruit and a giant vending machine. Don’t ask me how that game worked, in my dream it felt like it was commonplace. My girlfriend and I asked around for the girl that ran out of the math class, and everyone seemed to have their own idea of where she went.

Then to my horror one of the guys at the party starting to make the moves on my girlfriend. He looked.. well, right now I can say he looked like Booger from Revenge of the Nerds. At this point in my dream, I started to treat it like a rewind/fast forward videotape. I first went up to the Booger impersonator and punched him in the left eye, hard enough to shatter his sunglasses. Then it seemed like the dream rewound itself back to the moment I caught the guy trying to kiss my girlfriend. Perhaps I was doing something wrong, and my dream was giving me a second chance to do the right thing. So I ran over and started yelling and doing the macho bump-your-chest thing. Then I grabbed him and THEN punched him, this time in the stomach, and pushed him down the stairs that were magically placed next to us. The dream fast forwarded to a weird scene where I’m standing on the sidewalk of a two lane road in the middle of the night, watching cars edge slowly forward in rush hour traffic. The only significant thing I remember from that is a taxi parked on the side of the road suddenly pulling out into the lane and nearly getting T-boned by a limousine.