College Daze

I was get­ting ready to move out of my par­ents home. I had the dis­tinct feel­ing I could not leave soon enough for them. Not that they were push­ing me out, but just that it was time to leave the nest. As I headed to my room down the hall, I noticed that the whole floor of the hall was some­how dif­fer­ent. Phone books were stacked about a foot high all the way down the hall., and these com­prised the new, raised floor. Then here came Kathy, my step mom, wheel­ing a stack of my National Geo­graph­ics out of my room. Yes, I think they were look­ing for­ward to me leaving.

I went into my room, and it was almost empty, at least of my things. Kathy had brought a lot of her stuff in, and was set­ting up her new sit­ting room. There was a sitar on the wall. One of it’s tun­ing pegs was con­nected to the wall; as you pulled the sitar down, the strings tight­ened. I found that if you left the sitar down the wall about six inches, you got the per­fect tone to copy George Har­risons’ tone from Within You, With­out You. I played it for a while.

Then I stepped out to get a copy of some tapes I had– some Blu-Ray tapes. Because they were such high-quality tapes, only a pro­fes­sional could copy them. I went to the only place in town that could copy them, and handed them my three tapes. “I want this one tape copied to this sec­ond one here”, I told them. The sec­ond tape prob­a­bly already had some­thing on it as it was about 1/3 of the way through. They asked me if I was sure, and I said, “No, I am just guess­ing. I have packed up my Blu-Ray player so I can­not check the tapes. But I am pretty sure I know which tape is what.”

So they told me it would be .20 cents a sec­ond for the dub. Plus, I needed to fur­nish them with the patch cables. I could either bring in my own, or buy over­priced Mon­ster Cables from them. If I bought their cables, they would start right away. I thought this was all too much, I knew I was get­ting ripped off, so I used this junc­ture in the sales pat­ter to get my tapes back and can­cel the transaction.

I was walk­ing around the cam­pus of my new school. It was kind of Cal State North­ridge, but some­times not. I was in the big plaza area, one that was raised above the ground level. I did not see any stairs, but there was a hole I could look down to ground level through. I looked down, and saw I was about 14 feet up. On one side of the hole was a pil­lar, cement, with peb­bles on it sur­faces. The pil­lar was scooped out in it;s cen­ter, going to full width at its top and bottom.

As I stared down, con­tem­plat­ing jump­ing down, another stu­dent walked up the hole and casu­ally jumped down… and then con­tin­ued walk­ing across the quad. Hav­ing been shown the way, I jumped down the other side. An abrupt land­ing, but I did not break anything.

I made my way over to some uphol­stered benches to one side. I sat there think­ing for a bit, when a man sat down beside me. He motioned to the screen that took uup the whole wall next to us, and said, “I like him. I espe­cially like the one about the lit­tle kid.”

I looked to the screen, and saw it was show­ing a promo for the next Miyazaki film. I, too, like Hayao Miyazaki, and I told him so. “But I have no clue what film you mean”, I said. “All of them have kids in them.” We laughed, and we ended up decid­ing he liked Ponyo the best.

Now Tori was there, and I needed to drive her home. I gave the man a ride, too. As we were dri­ving along the front of the school, he had me pull off to one side, and asked me if  he could play some­thing that my wife would hate. I said sure, and he turned around and started play­ing spoons on Tori’s head. I started to object, but then his wife pointed out that her head was actu­ally pro­tected by another, larger spoon, so she was not actu­ally being hit by the spoons. I had not noticed the wife before. Nor had I noticed her Eng­lish accent. I thought her from India.

Tori and I con­tin­ued walk­ing along the front of the school. There were a lot of large dorms up there, nice condo-sized set ups. Some had jacuzzis or hot tubs. I was not sure if this was stu­dents or teacher hous­ing, but it was not the school admin­is­tra­tion; they had even big­ger places toward the cen­ter of campus.

And then I was in a class. I was not really pay­ing atten­tion, and I did not really under­stand what the class was about. There was a guy to my left, a real weird per­son. All his books were enveloped in plas­tic wrap. Who­ever he was, he exuded geekness.

The teacher came over to ask me a ques­tion; I just pre­tended to be sleep­ing, and she went on and asked the girls next to me. They did not know the answer either. Class ended, and I was on the bus with four girls from class. We were talk­ing, and the girls told me how the weird guy was freak­ing them out. I said, “You think he was weird, try sit­ting next to him. Did you know all his books are rapped in plastic?”

No, they did not.

We had a good laugh about that one.

I woke up.