Oh boy! Sleep! That's when I'm a Viking!

Last night I had one of those dreams where I thought I had a great idea for a blog post. In my dream, I wrote about some hilarious thing that happened in one of my classes, and I remember thinking, "God, this is pretty darn funny! Erin will read it to Anna, and they'll both laugh!" Then I thought, "But this is a dream. Did this really happen? Will I remember it tomorrow?"

Today, I find myself with no memory of the post's content, and no sense of whether it really was based on reality. Oh well. Duh.

I spent today listening intently to my classes, hoping for writing fodder, feebly grasping at moments of levity, incongruity and insight, all of which slipped from me as I answered the intercom, or gathered back work, or had to leave my room to make way for another teacher.

I finally gave up.

Because I am a person firmly grounded in reality I will offer today's statistics in lieu of my fantasy post.

6: Number of Saturdays until I visit Nora in Venice.

5: The average number of seniors absent from each class today.

4: The number of phone calls I made (in between classes) trying to arrange to pay my son's tuition for the fall.

3: The number of seniors who told me they don't think they'll graduate this June because they still haven't passed a Regents exam they should have passed in 10th grade.

2: The number of students who showed up to mod 8 whom I hadn't seen in a week and a half.

2: The number of former students who came back to visit me with excited reports about their first year in college.

2: The number of beers I drank on my deck when I got home from school.

1: The number of seniors who told me they're pregnant.

1: The number of seniors who told me they're about ready to drop out of school even though graduation is on June 27th.

1: The number of former students' obituaries I found in today's paper.

1: The number of boxes of already-opened granola bars I received because they "tasted like bark, and I know you like to eat healthy."

All in all, it was a good day. Or at least it was a normal day.

Toddlers, cockers and pills

Being home for a few weeks has given me a new set of "dreams in which I realize my shortcomings." Instead of students staging coups, this new dream involves the pills Geof takes after his heart surgery. These dream are much quieter than those involving students and revolt. In the medicine dreams, I simply forget to provide the proper medicine. Or I give too much. Or I lose the medicine. In this morning's dream (not coincidentally after I dispensed the first medicine of the day and went back to sleep), I not only forgot to provide medicine, but I also lost it and even worse, discovered a whole new set of medicine I'd forgotten about and had failed to dispense. As this horrible realization washes over me, I notice that the car I have been driving has turned to a motorcycle in the pouring rain. Not a good thing, since I have no idea how to drive a motorcycle. Plus I'm getting soaked.

At this point, the pill theme disappears, and as I open a door to an attic in a house that isn't mine, three toddlers and two cocker spaniels escape. Somehow, I am able to round them up and stuff them back through the door and close it before their parents/owners appear. At this point I'm awakened by the repetitive vibration of Geof's cell phone on a table, and our nurse-friend, Prestine, is calling him to find out how he is feeling.

As in the student insurrection dreams, I am appalled by my lack of competence. This time, however, there is no public reprimand. Why I'm dreaming about dispensing medicine is clear enough; I'm doing this several times a day, and last night, I gave the 8:00 pills at 8:28. Why? Because I just forgot. Not a big deal, but apparently bothersome enough to appear in a dream.

The toddlers and cocker spaniels in the attic? I'll have to think about them for a while.

Snow days are better when you're young

The problem with snow days is that sometimes the anticipation far exceeds the reality. Such was the case today. When my alarm went off at 6:00 this morning, I immediately checked the TV to see whether my school was delayed or closed. We were closed, for the first time this year. I cheered quietly, so as not to wake Geof, and crawled back into bed. When I returned to sleep, however, I found myself dreaming very intense and disturbing dreams. While I often have trouble remembering whatever dreams I have in the middle of the night (or whenever such things occur), those dreams that occur after I would normally be up are easy to remember and sometimes bizarre. At some point, between 6:00 and when I woke up for good just before 10:00, I had several dreams of a type that I hate: I categorize these as "The dreams in which I must face my shortcomings."

Usually they involve school. Occasionally, I'm in college and realizing at the end of the semester that I've not attended a single class. More often, these dreams feature me being somewhere else while I have a class to teach. I have, for some reason, decided to go out for a beer. Or I have decided to take a nap. Or I have just been unaware that I had a class at that particular time. These dreams always end with me hearing someone in the main office asking me over the PA system to report to wherever I'm supposed to be. I'm mortified, aware that this is totally unlike me, and I wake up vaguely ashamed.

Sometimes, my students decide to stage a coup, often involving lots of swearing, shouting and standing on desks. From these dreams I awake frustrated, angry and feeling vaguely powerless.

This morning's dream was a combination of the two common themes: Even though I thought we had a snow day, it turned out that we didn't. Therefore, administrators and students spent the morning looking for me because I was home sleeping, secure in my belief that we had a snow day. When I finally (for some reason--guilt??) went to school, I faced the annoyance and anger of my superiors and my students. I had failed them both. I was stupid, inappropriate, lazy and just dead wrong.

An inauspicious beginning to my snow day.What should have been a day to relax and perhaps perform some useful task ended up being a day where I was dogged by a sense of my own limitations and vague unrest. It took me until this evening, really, to shake the feeling, and it's only now, as I write this in front of a fire with a Guinness next to me, that I feel fully prepared to deal with the world.