19 Dec 2024
Dream
I was staying in a teenage girl’s bedroom. I was sleeping in her bed while she was sleeping in the floor, she was a person of color, with brown skin and curly hair, perhaps of Pacific Islander descent. She was differently abled, having been born with her torso backwards. I sympathesized with her that people also often assumed she was mentally challenged when she wasn’t, her body just looked different. I thought while it must be difficult to live with her body and she had medical issues, her arms were constantly embracing her own back, like she was always hugging herself. As she readied for bed on the ground I thought about how if she had been born in the past, there’d be no surgery possible and she’d have to live as an often shunned disabled person. As I settled into her cozy bed there was a sense that she was going to get surgery, her torso would be turned around and her body would align normally.
While in her bed I began coughing and feeling tight and unwell. I was worried I’d make her sick, so I was going to ask my aunt Carmen to take me to another room. Aunt Carmen suddenly came through the door and was about to chastise us for being too loud again, like we had the night before. I let her vent before apologizing and explaining my situation and how I needed help. Once she understood she took me to the kitchen (this house was apparently hers) and fed me a snack. It was a dark night outside and dimly light inside. While eating and talking, I saw a shadowy homeless man walk by in a window behind her. He was carrying a large sack or brown paper bag and I was a little worried he’d go rummage in my car. He rounded the corner of the house and I turned my head discreetly to watch him through another window and he disappeared down the alley. He had just been minding his business and I thought I shouldn’t have worried.
Next I was making arrangements in a large apartment to share wifi with neighbors. Instead of each unit getting their own wifi, I was offering the whole building to share one big fancy wifi plan. It’d be way cheaper and more communal. I arranged several meeting times over a weekend so interested folks could have opportunities to attend. There was a blonde white girl who showed various scrunchies or tulle fabric items that somehow represented different wifi plans or preferences. There was a point where we all hovered around someone’s laptop, about seven people, researching wifi equipment and plans. The most expensive one was $300/mo and if we got enough participants, we could afford this setup. I thought I’d put the equipment in my place at first, and if anyone needed boosters because they lived far in the building, we’d add a wifi booster or extender to the total price we were all sharing. That way they wouldn’t have to spend $25-$50 on their own just because their unit was far from mine. We ended up moving the equipment to somewhere more central, a small room with a few printers and a conference area. I was briefly in a hall nearby inviting people off the cuff to join, and a young man moving in was being standoffish and rude, but I tried to invite him anyway. I offered to help him with the bubble wrapped keyboard piano he was trying to get into the apartment, and I caught a couple skinny boxes from falling and spilling their contents onto the carpet. He wasn’t very thankful or responsive to my efforts.
Later the group of wifi sharers and I gathered in a conference room, and my roommate Meghan was there in heavy makeup. She was talking with someone about a region in Iowa called Wisdom Alley and how there was a Catholic girls’ school there. The blonde girl from earlier was spreading out her scrunchies and fabric samples again, and I whispered to the person next to me that they were ugly. There were so many people interested in this wifi plan that the big conference table filled up with unfamiliar faces, like each meeting had mostly different attendees. I did admire the blonde girl for being on top of things and logical about democratically choosing a wifi setup.
At one point I was on campus with my friend Conrad. I was frustrated and feeling out of sorts. It was a sunny day with lots of dead leaves and we parted ways near a main entrance to a building, he waved kindly and I headed to a certain hall, feeling off put and a little sad. Lots of people were about and as I walked by a group, one girl stuck her head out towards me, looking at her friend behind her. I had to move out of the way. Her head was that of a deer upside down, with a frowning mouth and ears at her chin. I knew little of this symbol other than I had seen it before, it was some sort of joke among other people on campus, and it looked disturbing but it didn’t scare me. I had a sense it stood for something I didn’t have or couldn’t really understand and I was okay with that.
