Your way of life has left its mark, that's clear

[austin_dern]

[ Patience, please. ]

More odd dreams: perhaps not surprisingly this one involves my first day of teaching a new class. A bit odd about this is I was clearly teaching a high school class, and it looked like a class in my old high school from several generations ago, before Microsoft invented AOL and gave us the Internet. I realize on the way to work that, somehow, the clothes I have on are unacceptable -- I think they were yesterday's clothes -- and take them off, expecting to find a suitable replacement in the prep area, somehow. And of course I don't, and with the start of class I can't go back to my car or wherever it was the old clothes were left, if they still existed at this point.

So, with no alternatives and class about to start I wrap a towel around myself, which to my surprise -- this must have been a dream -- is large enough to wrap neatly around my body. (That's not really an impossible thing; it's just my mother, who does the towel-buying at home, gets shorter towels.) Remarkably, none of the class seems to find it worth a snicker that they're being taught by a quite dry man in a towel.

What they do find amusing is that I can't find a working dry-erase marker to use on the whiteboard. There are an abundance of markers on the little tray in front of the board, and in the supply cabinet -- which is open on one side, but also has a pair of doors that open with less fighting than usual for school metal supply cabinets -- but they're all dried out or else so faint as to be unreadable in case of harsh lighting conditions such as there being lighting. Finally, though, I try one of the uncapped markers and find it makes a quite suitable red mark, and another one of the uncapped markers is a good black. Given two solid colors like that I can explain one-dimensional finite-element methods in under 85 minutes and leave room for odd, rambling diversions about Erich von Stroheim (I've done this in reality); if I get a third color I can do multidimensional ones. So things were looking good as the dream ended and I started polling my students about slopes.

Trivia: In 1692 Daniel Defoe bought seventy civet cats for perfume manufacture and invested £800 in the Africa Company. By 1694 he was declared bankrupt for losses of £17,000. Source: Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor.

Currently Reading: Ball Four: 20th Anniversary Edition, Jim Bouton.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I have variations on that dream all the time, except mine just get worse and worse instead of resolving at the end. Also, the dry-erase marker thing happens to me fairly regularly in real life.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's more traditional for dreams like that to carry on into more embarrassing directions. My impression is this wasn't embarrassing, although it might have been embarrassing enough to carry on in that state.