Oh lord, did my alarm clock just wake me up from one HELL of a scorched-earth hissyfit.
I was dreaming that I had some sort of big final paper to turn in, the fate of my BA hung in the balance, and a string of catastrophes was preventing me printing it out and handing it in.
Some stoner drove a Ford Festiva through the front of the flophouse I lived in, crashing to the basement and taking out the electricity with him. So I had to move to the public computer lab between the dorms and some drunk fratty wannabe pissed on the computer keyboard, blowing that computer all to shit, so I had to move on. I finally ended up hunkered down in an office above the black-box theater in Memorial Hall. My dream brain created an office which was a cross between the horrifying props closets of both my high school and of the Lords Of Misrule, who keep their costumes and props in an attic in Kings Manor. It was full of papier mache dragon heads, old cat-pee sofas, and badly-made period costume of every stripe. So I get the paper written (it’s about Thomas Hardy, an author I always think I should love, but who leaves me totally cold) and realize I have no way of printing it. So I took the floppy disk and went to the English Department and asked if I could turn that in. But of course I couldn’t; however my advisor allowed me to print it from his office; so long as it got done printing before 3:00 (which was the deadline).
Of course, it didn’t finish printing in time, so I was disallowed from turning it in and therefore my four years put into the BA were to naught.
So, I went on a tirade about how flunking my entire degree would be the best thing that ever happened to me, that doing a degree in English was a shitty choice anyway and would only lead me to frustration and misery, and that I was going to go off and live a fast and scandalous life and do just whatever I chose, even if it destroyed me in the process.
Then I tore off on my green singlespeed (a bike I wouldn’t actually own until about 8 years later) and rode until I met up with a bicycle gang that was like Mad Max, except on bicycles, and we rode around being sweaty and disreputable until we rode up a bridge that was under construction and there was a gap in the span. The Road Warriors leapt their bikes across the gap with a grace that would make Danny McCaskill weep, but since I am decidedly of the non-aerial type of cyclist (also terrified of heights) I found myself stranded atop an enormous overpass, petrified of the dropoff, alone, and in hysterics, because I have hysterics when my fear of heights kicks in.
Then my alarm went off.
It’s very rare that I am happy to hear my alarm clock go off at 6:00 a.m., but I think today is one of the few days that I was truly “saved by the bell.”
I’m sure a psychologist could have a lot of fun with that one, Meetzorp!