Only Dorks Dream Like This

I had a series of dreams last night. This is the stupidest.

I was at some kind of work-related function where my boss needed to have everyone fill out a form to prove they attended, and these forms would also be used when taking the head count when we had to load onto the bus at the end of the day. (I know, it sounds more like a field trip than a company outing.) The boss gave us a brief speech about how the company had fallen on some tough times, and luckily these forms were donated by another company, to spare us the expense of paying for our own head-count forms. (What an expense that would have been!!!)

I start filling out the form, with my name and address and telephone number, unsure why they need this information again when it's already on file back at the office. Then the form starts asking what my favorite type of music is -- Easy Listening [Harry Connick Jr., Frank Sinatra]? Alternative/Punk [Green Day, Bowling For Soup]? I wonder why my boss gives a crap what kind of music I listen to. Then I realize these are the exact sort of groupings they have on those CD club membership forms; choose 8 free CD's, buy 1 at regular price, get 4 more at just a dollar each! (And choose your favorite genre of music so that you can receive the monthly selection!) I start telling my co-workers that this is just a scam, that our boss will sell our private information to some stupid CD club, and we will be inundated with junk mail and unwanted CD's we'll have to pay postage on to return. They all just shrug. First of all, they didn't notice anything out of the ordinary on their head-count form, but even so, this is the only way we can get a safe and accurate head count before leaving, and we simply have no choice. I tear up my card and abandon the group.

That's me. Creating injustices in my subconscious. And standing up to them in my dreams.

Radio Waves of the 90's

Today I have purchased a hilarious CD. It was on super-duper clearance, and it is titled, ahem, “Radio Waves of the 90’s: Alternative Rock Hits.” Cowabunga.

Even though I hated high school with a burning passion – so much that 9 out of 10 bad dreams I have involve being stuck in high school for some reason – I’ve developed a peculiar fondness for the music I grew up with. I was bored to death in high school, often lonely and miserable, and stuck in the sleepy grayness of semi-rural Connecticut without the means to get to a commuter rail into Manhattan. But shaggy rock and glossy pop were free on the radio, and they were comforting when nothing else was. And the few good memories I have of high school – few, but very sweet – often occurred with some sort of music playing.

I have a song for each of my high school ex-boyfriends, and these make me extremely uncool, but who the fuck cares; I’ve got a whole separate rant in me about the current obsession with putting your iPod on shuffle to show off how hip you are (“No skipping embarrassing tracks!” Bite me.) They are “I’ll Make Love to You” by Boyz II Men, “Another Night” by Real McCoy, and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” by Celine Dion. And yes, if you put my iPod on shuffle, eventually you would get all three of those. Do I think these are outstanding examples of musical composition and performance? Hell no. But they’re fun and take me back to some of the most giddy, cow-eyed moments of my life, and even in my crankiest moods, that is a fun place to go.

So with this ridiculously slapped-together compilation CD, which was $5 with tax, I got three miniature time capsules. I had asked a guy to the Freshman Semi-Formal, and he turned me down, saying he had a basketball game to go to that night. At the dance, I decided to call him from the pay phone, to see if he really was at a basketball game, and sure enough, he answered the phone. I was pissed, but I went back into the dance, and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something was playing, so my friends and I starting silly-dancing to it and I felt a lot better. “Closing Time” by Semisonic was always playing on the radio whenever I was in a car with my friends, and it was the sort of lyrically-limited song you could sing along with even if it was your first time hearing it. (Also, the last line, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”, was the senior yearbook quote for about 10% of my graduation class. Sheep.) And “Roll to Me” by Del Amitri was a song I taped off the radio – I always had a blank tape cued up in the stereo to make scrappy but effective mix tapes – and it became my high school fantasy: The guy who would somehow come into my life, a “soul so in despair” like me, and we would save each other from the loneliness of being The One Who Does Not Belong.

And guess what? During my junior year of high school, he did.