Fear the Crab

I was watching an american football game, but it was unknown what the teams were. I was watching it as though I was a roaming camera, zooming in and out of the action, panning overhead, capturing the many angles. I watched a touchdown play happen and then the holding call to bring it back.

Funny, today is the first exhibition game for professional american football.

I also dreamt that I discovered my pygmy corys required a temperature of 3 degrees F in order to survive. It was because they were arctic fish.

Now, I know that to be false, because pygmy corys are tropical. Still, when I woke up I checked online and thankfully my dream was wrong.

I was attending a Japanese school, replete with uniformage, except I was granted some exemption because I was in jeans. Probably because I was a foreigner. I still had to wear the jacket. I was in a mixed classroom of boys and girls, probably younger than me, and we were going over some kind of philosophical question. The problem was, while I could gather that it was a philosophical question, I had no idea what the question was nor what anybody was saying. I couldn’t read the questions, I couldn’t read the responses written on the board, and I sure as hell couldn’t read what people were writing. My teammates seemed to be moving along pretty well despite my lack of performance, and I was overcome with a sense of guilt.

For some odd reason, class was dismissed, and I felt I had to catch a school bus because I had to attend another school (maybe a cram school?). During the bus ride, then the walk to this new campus, I kept thinking that everybody was talking rather badly about me. Like, why is this foreign idiot here.

I never made it to the new campus, but the neighborhood looked oddly familiar, like the back streets of Kaimuki.

I was playing left field for some baseball team, and I think I was back in little league. But it was a strange little league because we were using a ball that was about half the size of a regular softball, yet still larger than a regular baseball. I was wearing a white uniform with blue trim, and after our warm-ups on the field we had some kind of pre-game ceremony where they play the national anthem. They unfurled this huge fan-shaped flag and all of us on the field were required to hold our portion of it. So since the flag was shaped like a baseball field, I had to hold the left corner. I kept thinking this was probably the stupidest thing I had ever done on a baseball field.

When it (the pre-game show) was over, we all retired to the dugout, which was some kind of wooden shack, almost like a tool shed. Only now we weren’t in our uniforms, and everyone sat around in regular clothes. It was almost like we were done playing, the way we hung out, drank soda and juice (as is the wont of little leaguers).

I got bored, so I left the shed and walked around, and I saw my co-workers from The Lab. I was very surprised to see them, because they were probably the last people I expected to see at my baseball game. Then I figured that if they were there, Maile was there, too. So I started looking for her.

I ended up at an extravagant mansion that was actually right next door to the tool shed. And my extravagant I mean it was posh, with wide open spaces and impeccable taste. And it was clean. There were a lot of people there, and I felt that they were all involved in the baseball game somehow, but I couldn’t figure out what their involvement was. Perhaps the parents of one of the players owned the house. Perhaps it was the league. I don’t know.

I began to feel very uncomfortable at that house, so I left and tried to find my way back to the tool shed, to be with people of my own tax bracket. I heard someone call my name, and it was Maile. She was very happy, to the point of tears, and when I asked her why she gave me this small device that looked like a miniature shoe horn, but it was some kind of recording device. She played the message on there, and while I couldn’t make out all the words, she had apparently received a gift in the form of a brand new car. We had to drive out to the place to pick it up, so we hopped into her car and she drove.

The area was very unfamiliar to us, and we kept getting lost. At some point we both realized that we needed to bring along one of those rubbery fishing lures and.. something else. So we had to find a place that sold them. We kept driving, looking around for either the place we had to get to, or a store that sold bait.

What stood out to me was that I was getting very frustrated, because Maile was not following the rules of the road. Not staying in the lane, speeding around corners, stuff like that. We finally decided to park, and walk around. Except now I had to sit in a wheelchair, apparently I had some kind of injury. So Maile would push me around, and I’d try to help by wheeling myself at times, while we looked for fishing lures.

What was odd was that at several points I found myself standing next to her, and thinking that I probably shouldn’t leave my wheelchair out where someone could steal it. We had just been given directions to a store that sold what we needed, but when we left, Maile decided to stop searching and go home. It looked late, nighttime, and it would be a while before we got to the store and to wherever we were supposed to receive the car.

We never did find the car.

The last couple of weeks have been a fucking hell. Not just any kind of hell, a fucking hell, with no protection. And it was all my fault, so that’s why I’m bitter, because I could have prevented it had I exercised a bit more caution, or more appropriately, anal retentiveness.

First it was discovered at the end of March that I had misplaced all my W-2s for the 2003 work year, plus the Form 1099-INTs that the banks send out with all the interest accumulated. I don’t know how I misplaced it, all I know is that it was all together with the Federal 1040 forms and then it disappeared. It used to be on the dining room table, but then my dad says he told me to take it back and hold onto it until he was ready to process them. Unfortunately, I don’t remember if I did take it back or if I left it on the table. So I turn my room inside out, looking through stacks of loose papers and books and other knick-knacks. I look through my old files, my old folders, the closet, my brother’s room, his closet, all the folders and files and books and binders and shelves and even under the bed. Nada.

So I had to do the next best thing. I had to call up all my employers and ask for copies of W-2s. The Office and The Lab were pretty easy, since it seems I’m not the first to lose a W-2, so they had copies readily available. DFS was a bit more stressful, because I had to call the main office in San Francisco to request a W-2, only to discover that I needed to fax my request in. So I had to wait. I didn’t know how long it would take, so I began preparations to file for an extension.

While this was happening, my laptop died. I mean it died. The hard drive failed, I think for a possible number of reasons. I’d been using the laptop every day for the past 2 years, so perhaps it was its time. Laptops are notorious for placing hard drives next to CPUs, so perhaps the high heat output negatively affected the disks. I was downloading and installing Visual Studio .NET (a legitimate copy from school), and I had forgotten to defragment my hard drive prior to that, so perhaps the disk wrote into some bad sectors, and upon boot it failed to read. So many reasons, or perhaps all of them, contributed to my laptop dying.

Ordinarily it wouldn’t be too bad. Unfortunately, the laptop crash occured at a crucial moment in my school life. I use my laptop to do my assignments, where I download applicable software to run my programming assignments. The crash meant that I no longer had a computer to program, and I wasn’t about to try to dload and possibly corrupt my desktop. So I had to scramble around trying to find someone else who either had the software I was using, or was willing to let me install it temporarily.

Needless to say, it’s been a stressful two weeks.

However, at the end of the two weeks, things worked out. The W-2s came in fast, allowing me to file in time and avoid having to submit an extension. Getting a new hard drive was simple, I just had to go to ByteWare and buy one. My professor offered his computer for me to test my programs on, so that went well.

Repairing my computer was a trial. It was the first time I had ever done something to a computer that involved the hard drive, so I didn’t know what to expect. Taking out the old hard drive was deceptively simple, so simple that at first I was trying to do it the hard way. I tried to remove the disks through the keyboard, when in fact all I had to do was open up a side panel and slide the carriage out. Pop the new disk in, and prepare to partition, format and install the OS.

Partitioning was easy. Formatting was easy, albeit long. But installing the OS was tedious. I heard from a reputable source that I couldn’t use my recovery CD that I got from Dell that came with the laptop. So I pulled a copy of WinXP from one of my friends, used the product key, and installed the OS. Then of course, I had to install all the patches, especially Service Pack 1. But after I downloaded it from the update site, it told me that the product key I had was invalid. Apparently MS put in checks to ensure that only legal copies can update their software, by comparing the product key to a known list of copies or pirated versions. So this meant I had a working copy of XP pro, but I couldn’t install any of the security patches needed to cover up the many holes.

I then discovered that my “reputable source” was an idiot. My recovery CD has a legal copy of WinXP Pro specifically for my laptop, and restores it to factory specs. I didn’t even have to enter the product key. But I had to delete the partition, reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS. I had to do this three times. The first time, I saw the message about the bad key. The second time, I figured maybe I entered the key wrong, so I reinstalled, and that didn’t work. The third time was the final, after my enlightenment by more wizened members of the computer community.

Updates were a cinch, although long, since I had a lot to catch up on. I also didn’t want to install them all at once, because sometimes that has nasty side effects. So I was downloading them one by one, installing each after I got them, and rebooting my computer. Took forever. I spent the whole day getting my laptop back on track.

And then I had to reinstall all the programs and files that I had accumulated over the past 2 years. This was a bit easy, and I cannot stress the importance of regular backups. Had I not saved many of my files to CD, I’d be lost. I suppose if there’s nothing important on the computer, backups aren’t necessary. Like I said, though, I use my laptop for my assignments, and I’ve started to make it a practice to save each one to disk for later retrieval, or as it so happened, in the event of a hard drive head crash. Even on my desktop, I’ve saved photos of friends, stuff that I wrote, even certain legal downloaded applications like ZoneAlarm and virus scanners (only because it’s a bitch to search the web to find them again). I’ve thought about saving stuff like the web pages I created, but if RoadRunner’s servers ever crash, it might be an opportunity to simply remake my web page from scratch. I don’t know. Jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, I just finished getting my laptop back to “normal” level. It’s not quite the same as when I first got it, but that’s good, because after this reinstall, I only have the programs I want on there, not all the bundled software that usually comes out of the box. In fact, I should have done that for my desktop. It’s not too late to try, although it’d take a couple of days to backup current files and reformat/reinstall the discs. I need to check what reinstallation discs I have, though. Don’t want to start formatting and find out I don’t have that DVD player software anymore.

This morning I dreamt that I had a 10-inch fat centipede in my shoe, while my foot was still in it. I felt something inside, so I took my shoe off and emptied it, and this monster of a centipede fell out. It was dead, according to my dream, so I had no fear of being bit, but it was a disturbing sight and I felt very… uncomfortable. Chills and goosebumps, that sort of thing.

I was standing in a lush valley, surrounded on three sides by high mountains and overlooking a large calm lake. The floor of the valley was claimed by two kingdoms, splitting the valley into equal halves. On the left were humans, on the right were elves. And suddenly it seemed this valley was populated by some LotR characters such as Legolas and Theoden, and even Liv Tyler’s character had a cameo. It seemed someone opened a Pandora’s Box and let all this nasty stuff loose, which proceeded to coagulate into a single entity that ran amok eating all the vegetation in the valley and covering the hills in yellow dirt. For some reason, it felt like I was the one who opened the box and that I actually wanted this to happen. I’m watching the progress of this vegetarian evil when it suddenly occured to me that if I were simply standing around doing nothing, I’d be suspected of causing this. So I ran around alerting people that something bad was happening, and I had started in the human area and ended up in the elven area. At this point I became an observer, like I was supposed to be there, and all the elves were talking amongst each other and to me. Legolas had just returned from a scouting mission and seemed quite gloomy, thus Elrond appeared to act as a psychiatrist and counsel the lad. As Legolas began to open up to Elrond, I was at a sink rinsing out some kind of.. metal cup thing. I didn’t stay too long to listen to what Legolas was saying, because I found myself standing on a large patio-type area, covered by a ceiling but no windows, facing the lake. Then a man in armor appeared, armed with a bow and equipped with a full quiver, and he proceeded to stand on this dias-looking thing and aimed an arrow at this falcon that was carrying some type of small prey (weasel, perhaps). At first I thought he was going to shoot the dead weasel in the falcon’s talons, but instead he fired at the falcon itself, bringing it down with a splash into the lake. None of the other elves saw this except for Legolas, whom I can only assume finished his therapy session with Elrond and was standing next to me. I rushed up and tackled the armored man, and discovered that he was some bloke name Lord Hoggoth, or something to that effect. The commotion finally brought the attention of everyone present, and after a quick explanation all decided it was the right thing to do. However, no one could decide on a punishment, so they all went into this dining hall to discuss things over breakfast. I decided to take matters into my own hands, so I called Legolas over, and told him to take this Lord Hoggoth over the lake while I held the bow and quiver. Legolas immediately understood and transformed himself into a giant dragon-bird, snatched up Lord Hoggoth and flew over the lake. I then spend the last few minutes of the dream firing the bow at Lord Hoggoth and trying not to hit him. It was a bit difficult, because the arrows would never fly straight and would curve and dive around like paper airplanes. I did manage to scare the guy, though, with a few near misses. The other elves turned a blind eye to this, even though it was obvious they were aware of it. I was having a lot of fun trying to shoot arrows as close as possible to Lord Hoggoth without actually hitting him, and of course avoiding the bird-Legolas, until I realized that I had not set my alarm and had overslept and was late for work.

I dreamt I was in my brother’s old room, and it was arranged how it was more than a decade ago. Against the wall was a small fish tank, a rectangular one, and rather flat as well. Not in a bowl-y type of way, but like a Phillips Magnavox flat screen monitor kind of design (4 inches thick, I believe). Anyway, there were fish in this fishtank, three small goldfish in clear water with the usual plants and rocks. But as the dream progressed, the fish kept changing. It became two goldfish and a weird white fish. Then it was one gold fish and four tiny blue fish. Perhaps it was that Dr Seuss book in my dream. But it felt like I had this fishtank for years, and I don’t remember ever feeding them. I did remember, however, that there was this box, which used to contain a self-feeding apparatus that worked on a timer. So I looked into the fishtank and there it was, a long glass tube that dispensed food to the fish so you wouldn’t have to remember to feed them. I was staring at this tube, trying to figure out how it worked, when one of the blue fish went up and nudged this thing loose, which was underneath the tube. When this thing came loose, all the food started to spill out into the water, and I thought, “Damn, that’s not going to go well.” And then the food turned into tiny tiny fish, like the size of an ant, and I realized that the tube actually contained fish which were meant for food, and these food fish were kept alive by tiny tiny plants which were also in the tube. But these food fish got out, and all the other fish, of which now there were two sturgeons, one goldfish, and about half a million tiny Kermit the Frogs (yes, all in this fishtank), they all starting gobbling up the fish and I thought, “Damn, that’s really not going to go well.” The Kermits all swam up to the top of the fish tank to say “hi ho” while the rest of the fish busied themselves by doing fishy things.

Then the dream turned weird, but I don’t remember too much of it. I am haunted by images of a bottom-feeder trying to disguise itself as a crab, and not doing that well a job of it.

I dreamt I had long hair, except this time it was colored brown and only fell to my shoulders. I remember trying to put it into a ponytail, and that’s about when I woke up.

I dreamt I was watching George play a video game, when it seemed as though I were watching it up close and personal. I was in the game, and the characters were moving around me in a Mario-esque type of way as they tried to get to a certain location while monsters flew by and around and dropped nasty things. One of the monsters dropped something in my direction, and then I saw a medical team arrive to treat any infections incurred by what the monsters dropped. As the characters were being treated, I looked down at my right forearm and saw what looked like two gray slimy earthworms sticking out of my skin. I tried to pull them out, but they was embedded deep as I could feel the tugging within my arm. I went up to that medical team, and one of them assisted me by literally hooking both earthworm-type thingies with small wires, and pulling them out with some device. The ends of those things popped off with no pain, but now it meant that I could remove the parts inside my arm. Even though my mind was telling me not to do it, I squeezed out my right arm like a toothpaste tube, and this black sticky substance oozed out, followed by six small rubbery nubs, like pencil erasers. I remarked to the medical team that the stupid things left six roots in me, and they seemed pretty surprised.

There was a second part to my dream, that of me being incarcerated in a strange prison. My dad worked at the prison, which meant he had to watch his son spend time in jail. My mom and my sister visited me, and my sister wanted me to help her with her doll collection by getting and sending out the various dolls I would be able to get from prison. What’s weird is that we were all haole, and I don’t have a sister. It felt pretty real, though.

I dreamt that I was getting ready to go out, and I was running a brush through my hair. Instead of the usual crop-cut that I have, my hair was as long as it used to be back in high school, that sort of local boy surfer style. I tried to get it to look nice, but there were bulges I couldn’t get down in my hair, so I decided to go for that bed-head look and use some gel. Then the dream changed a bit, and I was sitting inside a salon and I was going to have my hair colored. However, the person doing the coloring used the wrong oil. Instead of using the FN brand of oil required for a lustrous deep and rich color, by mistake she used a bottle of fn dandruff shampoo. After she was finished, my hair was as long as it was during college, and it was dyed blonde. She was very apologetic, especially when she explained that I couldn’t wash my hair and it wouldn’t cut, so I was stuck with that hair forever. I met Maile afterwards and tried to explain the situation to her, but she didn’t seem to quite understand it all.

I had a nightmare about my truck. I dreamt that it finally came in, but when it did, everyone, including the sales manager and my parents, thought it wasn’t a very good truck at all. I had gone to Toyota City to have my trade-in appraised, and while I was there, the sales manager took me to where they were servicing the truck. I asked where I was supposed to drive my trade-in, and he told me to just leave it somewhere and he’d find it. I though that answer was rather strange, and wanted to get more information out of him, but he went into a building and grabbed some material of different colors. We went across the street, and my parents were in the service area looking over the design specs of the truck. That was when they all started to say aloud that it wasn’t a very good truck at all.