quislibet | critics; and dreams

Yesterday J. and I studied together most of the day, possibly not getting as much done as we might have because of our constant need to mock the books we were reading: "'Panopticism of power' my ass!" she exclaimed at one point.

That's so cool.

As for my own reading, I had to stop and record my main complaint in writing, as if doing a book review:

"Who is P. writing for? The reader who is grateful for the information on p. 22 that papyrus is 'a paper-like material made from ... the papyrus reed' (and that the study of things written on sheets of it is called 'papyrology') will likely need more help with the statement on p. 37 that 'The Hellenistic parakataqhkh eventually became the Roman depositum irregulare' than can probably be found by turning to the foreign-language scholarly articles cited in the footnote."

We also did laundry, ate kielbasa, watched "Angel," and made fun of the cats.

The laundromat floor was covered in water (or, to judge from the smell, a water/urine solution), making it vital that no clean (or even, if it could be helped, dirty) laundry fall upon it. Fortunately the locations for our other activities were less objectionable.

In other news, I can only remember fragments of my dreams last night, and I am convinced that more of these fit into a single dream than should have been possible; it is pretty clear to me where some elements have come from (although I wouldn't have thought them important enough for my subconscious mind to dwell upon), but the rest has me baffled:

- J. and I went skiing, only I wasn't about to ski, and we stopped partway up the mountain to attend an amusing concert, recordings of which could be obtained in exchange for a nude photo of one's own lower body (but we didn't have an instant or digital camera, so we passed). Some high school friends of mine were there, but I didn't have time to visit, as I had to get to the top of the mountain, even though I didn't intend to ski. I wish I could remember more about the concert; I am fairly certain that it involved a particular piece or pieces of music performed by humorously inappropriate performers, one of which may have been Commander Data.
- Eventually I was back at work, only my office had been moved to a function room of some sort in the basement of something akin to my old dorm in college. I had my smaller cat with me, which was fine with the RA but other residents told me I had better keep an eye on her.
-

eye_abstains held some sort of party or perhaps LARP in that same room, as had been the custom before I usurped it for my office. Scores of people showed up and I couldn't get any work done. Eye_A. was very happy that there were some of the old spice cookies (*) there from the last party (or LARP) six months before.
- Lots of rich, stuck-up skiers were converging on the university; an occasional aerial map-view tracked their progress from as far away as a strangely narrow Ohio.
- Somehow connected to this fact of imminent skiers in a way that now escapes me entirely was the presence of three small fleas (arriving, thank god!, before the skiers did) that had the ability to become life-sized paper dolls of "Nightmare Before Christmas"-like little girls, who, at last receiving permission (from *me*, I think) joyously summoned "Ghostie," a spirit likewise manifested as a (Gorey-esque) man of paper (or possibly papier-mâché), who stalked majestically through the hallways for a bit; but I think that was all he did.
- The Devil also showed up for a while, or some similar entity of great power and malevolence, who imparted a message of considerable importance, which a large jock guy was trying to pass on to a guy in a closet whose job it was to take down such messages (here played by a particular assistant professor of Greek Literature in the Boston University Department of Classical Studies). The Devil and I were walking to the elevator in a hurry (I don't know; maybe we were going to go visit the janitor from the Uruk-Hai dream), and I could tell the jock was getting the message wrong, and I tried to get his attention to correct him, but I couldn't, and the Devil was rather impatiently holding the elevator for me, apparently unconcerned that his message would go astray, the evil bastard.

There was also some bit in there somewhere about a guy covered in slime and other less wholesome substances who claimed to have been "shooted" by the Devil; I tried to suggest that he meant "shot," but the man was insistent that the Devil could not have actually shot him because of the terms of their contract, only shooted.

There was a separate (I think) dream about running my usual Changeling game, and everything was going wrong. It was more intelligible and so less memorable.

(*) In the real world, yesterday while our laundry was drying we went into a local kitchen-and-bath store selling, in J.'s estimation, too many scented things and not enough useful ones; they had a shelf of tins containing Moravian Spice cookies. That put a song in my head by Siouxsie and the Banshees. (You know the one: "Myriad lights--they said I'd be impressed / Moravian Spice--at your primitive best"...)

So: Conceivably you won't need to be told, but I feel I must impart to you my discovery that plain yogurt cannot with complete success be substituted for other, more usual (but absent) dairy products in a coffee environment.