Searching Buddha

So this morning I started putting my life back in order, which is a ritual for me as I enter the post-semester period. Only this time it's tinged with sadness, because I know that this is the very last time that I'll go through these motions.

My desk is in order, my checkbook balanced, my house cleaned. Yet I'm feeling an emptiness - a resonance of the void in my life that until this week was filled by school.

I'm sure that I'll get over it quickly, but even writing this feels like a sad thing to do. Blogging here has become such a regular part of life that closing it off feels like just one more box closed, one more door shut.

Change is always like that, I suppose.

I was a blogger before starting this blog, so it's not as though it was a new experience for me, but it was interesting to do it on assigned topics and see how a classroom full of people addressed the same subject that I did. As a writer, I really appreciated that experience.

Although it's campy to say, this year has been a journey and this class has played a large part of that. Rather than just taking another three credits, we've really worked together and become friends, which is something that I'll always appreciate.

Blue skies to all of you --

The images have mostly faded now, but I was camping out at a resort with a bunch of people from high school. We had cabins and we were assigned to different ones. We ran around and did a bunch of stuff, but then we went to this huge dining hall. Suddenly my friend Rob from high school stood up and gave a speech in Hebrew, which I somehow understood. He was still talking about a discourse on Biblical literature when I left and waited for a phone call that never came.

I'm in a cabin out in the woods with my friend and her family, from her two kids to her father, who is pretty sick. We're sitting around having a big discussion on some intellectual topic or other, when I decide that I'm going to read to the kids, who are still very young. I pull out Slaughterhouse Five and start to read to them, which they love, but then I get distracted with a concept in the passage I've just read. I start going on about communist feminist theory and the kids wander away bored.

Suddenly I'm in a van with a bunch of people and we're driving around some urban landscape, which has people wandering around everywhere. It's night and it's dangerous, but I'm still going on about communist feminist theory....

I was really nervous about presenting my paper, mostly because of the subject matter. I'm basically taking three respected religious visionaries and relegating their visions to the status of dreams, which is a pretty sensitive topic. Doing so publicly is even more frightening, since I feel like I'm bound to offend someone.

Still, after reading my little speech out loud in the class last week, I'm feeling a lot more confident about it. I'm not nervous about the conference at all now. I'm mostly just thinking about what I should wear to it.

The web project was pretty easy for me, but I enjoyed doing it. My paper was naturally "chunky" since I covered three different people in it, so dividing it up barely required any thought at all.

What I really enjoyed was being able to add in some visuals to the ideas I was trying to get across. And, of course, it was fun to play with css too...I learned a couple of new things there!

I'm in Portland, Oregon to meet my best friend (M) for a visit. I meet up with her, but her other best friend (L) and L's husband T are also there. T is an ex-boyfriend of mine from my teenaged years, so the flame is gone, but I am delighted to see him becaue it' been a long time. I walk along the street with my arm linked with his (his other arm is linked with my best friend.

We're chatting, when M suddenly points out to me that L has a jealous streak and she's very pissed off that I'm talking to T. Horrified, I jump away, because I like L very much and don't want to offend her.

A bizarre dream - I dreamt that I was going on a family vacation with my (12 year old) brother. My father put my brother into my care as we were walking down the street - my brother popped into a store and my father disappeared. We went to find our hotel, but when we got to the address, it turned out to be Michael Jackson's house. In my dream, I knew this to be a very bad thing, but my brother disappeared at this point.

Instead I was trapped in Michael Jackson's house and not very happy about it! I kept moving from room to room and whenever I got upset, Michael would let me go into a room where my cats were hanging out. They'd make me feel better for a time, but I was still stuck.

(I saw a biography of Michael Jackson on mute while at the gym last week...I imagine that's where that came from!)

We are in a large house with a number of family members. We is pretty unspecified - they seem to be family, but no one that I recognize. Upstairs are some members of the family with a frightening medical problem and I am the only one willing to deal with them. They keep venturing downstairs and terrifying the other family members and I keep having to calm everyone down.

I leave the house with two people, who have suddenly become friends instead of family. We're driving to go somewhere and we come to a parking lot. The driver, my friend, goes to turn into a pay lot and I question her on it, since there's a free lot directly behind us that just requires a little more walking. She goes for that instead.

We get out of the car and are walking down the street and we've lost her, even though the friend and I that are walking together are limping slowly down the street. A bus load of people are behind us and we think that maybe she's behind it, so we stop and wait. She does finally come out, but she's walking with a cane. Then the alarm goes off!

Well, my paper sure is a lot prettier with a green background.

It's not really significantly different from my paper at all, since my paper was pretty chunky in its original format, but it is pretty to see it with some images.

It was easy enough to do - and fun to finally play with style sheets, which I've never really worked with before. :)

I'm at a software conference, but it's a small event with only a few people in the room. The speaker makes a big deal about me being there since I'm a woman and so few women come to these things. He talks about my knitting and I realize that I should have brought my other knitting project with me - I seem to only have the one I'm sick of working on right now.

The scene changes and I know I'm getting ready for a party, but I've got these three dresses to make alterations on and I know they're not ready yet. Also, they're supposed to be small black dresses, but they're in unbleached muslin. I try one on, even though it's the one for my best friend's other best friend, who is much more petite than I am. I just barely squeeze into it. Suddenly my dream-husband shows up and asks if I'm ready and I say that of course I am, even though I'm not even close. Five more minutes, I say.

I go into the next room, which is a gigantic bathroom, where the children are sleeping in their canopy bed. I tuck them into sleep and then bring my dream-husband in to look. We ahhh and leave the room, even though I know that we shouldn't be leaving, because the babysitter is a vampire.

Analyze that one, if you can!