I've been dreaming too much again. This is probably happening because I'm oversleeping. I missed a couple of classes this week. I am almost never sorry when I dream too much because such interesting things happen.

I was lost in a forest and I had been separated from my friends. There were monsters in this forest so I was pretty tense. I came across this raised metal tower on steel legs which is unusual to see in a monster-filled forest. It has no doors or windows, but there is a hatch open in the bottom that I reach by climbing up one of the legs and clamber inside.

The hatch shuts behind me and I am left in an empty metal room. Another hatch swings open above me so I climb that and find myself in another room just like the first. And like the first the hatch I just came through seals itself shut and another opens in the ceiling. I do this quite a few times. Finally, a ceiling hatch opens and I can smell fresh air and see sunlight. I climb eagerly out and see that I am higher now than the tops of the trees. The hatch slams shut again and I am left shivering in the wind on a platform that is not much bigger than myself. I huddle down and wait.

As the sun begins to set, the hatch bangs open. I am so startled I nearly fall off the side. The smiling faces of my friends peek out through the hatch. They explain that instead of wandering around looking for me (because I am apparently very difficult to track down in dreams as well) they had just built a series of Guillermo traps and went around checking them until they found me.

My pride was a bit hurt at having been caught so easily but I was immensely happy to see them. Still, I didn't see why they couldn't have just left a note or something.

Slashdot.org led me to one of my new favorite sites. It's pretty much the culmination of my favorite things: Science fiction+Real life science+gadgets that would help me be a superhero.

Shake hands with the Impact Suit.

At the moment only skiiers can get them which I think isn't very fair because there isn't much crime to fight on a slalom run. At least, not in the reputable slalom circles I travel in.

Well, that worked rather too well.

I didn't make it to my rant at all. The sun was a golden smear in my eyes as I drove Brian to class this morning and I had to remind myself several times of what I was doing.

A smarter man would have likely brought along a wallet and a shirt, but I couldn't be bothered for those things at the moment. I felt secure in the knowledge that any officer of the law would see me and think "Now there goes at least 3 hours worth of paperwork."

Bureaucracy, I was a fool to loathe you.

I've just realized that it's still Valentine's Day and I'm not drunk. I am working to remedy that.

More as the situation develops. Or undevelops.

Unravels?

I've become just another common freak. Saturday night/Sunday morning I discovered that I seem to able to walk across broken glass. At least for a couple steps.

After a night of rousing festivities, I had taken out my contact lenses and made the short walk from my bathroom to my bedroom. A beer bottle had shattered on the tile outside of my door and I crunched obliviously onto the pieces. Well, oblivious at first.

I was unharmed, but my feet were cold and wet from the spilled beer.

My impromptu carnival act fit well with the theme of the evening. We had a slack line set up between two trees in our backyard and people had tried to walk across it with varying degrees of success. There was also the Amazing Regurgiating Jodie and a Turning-21 Girl who had the amazing ability to fall down no matter what position she was in.

I'm going to start charging admission. Or at least demand that I get to drink the beer from the bottles before they are broken across my floor.

The clouds grumble and grow dark as currents push them along. They refuse to promise rain. A black beanie with "nintendo" stitched on it is a decent surrogate for the hair that I won't allow to grow. The earbuds of an MP3 player are still cold inside my head as I twine through the pastel towers of this mock city. I'm unaccustomed to shutting out the sounds of the world as I travel through it. I often hear possible threats before I see them. I am reluctant to provide the soundtrack to any blundering mishaps.

Inserting only one earbud tricks my brain into believing everything in the world is happening to my immediate left. Even more confusing. I considered using electric fields to try to detect the movement of living things around me but a bit of research on sharks revealed that the sense would be almost useless outside of water because air doesn't conduct electricity very well at all. I immediately resolved to stop attempting to grow electroreceptor cells through intense meditation. All the science classes I've taken said it was impossible anyway since the instructions are not in my genetic makeup and no amount of meditation is going to change that.

But science doesn't close a door without opening a window. I have no basis for making the previous statement as if it were true.

It's too late for me to be genetically engineered, but not too late for gene doping. All I have to do is make friends with a virus and get it to insert the DNA I want into my cells instead of all the harmful stuff viruses usually stick me with. This time will be different because this virus will be my pal.

The clouds grumble a bit more as I pick my way through the litter that accumulates in the bend in the service road. I have learned to avoid Styrofoam cups because they sometimes contain splashing liquids or boba teas that spawn little gelatin eggs when aroused by a falling foot.

My mind wanders off to find the sounds in my ears and my eyes are left alone to guard me. The wind dries my contact lenses and my vision blurs. My surrogate hair sits patiently and beams its Nintendo smile at all the other students that aren't walking this way. The ear buds are warmer now, at least. I blink furiously, stop trying to hear my own footsteps, and listen instead to the soundtrack without a story.

I define a good day as one in which I get full points for sticking it to Carolus Linnaeus.

Also, we may soon have bathrooms that clean themselves. Cleaning up after your drunken friends throw up all over the place may become a thing of the past.

Although I do worry what would happen if I were to pass out on this kind of surface for hours at a time. Not that I'm planning on doing that anytime soon. BUt as my fortune cookie said, "In life and in love, it never hurts to have a spare face."