"I don't even know why..."

I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but it's pretty clear that something is, at least inside my head... Brett pointed it out earlier. He's perceptive. He's a good friend, and it's about the best thing to have friends who've known you for about forever to keep track of you like this.

He says to me that I've been down recently, more this semester than I had in a long time. He's right. I'm not sure why. I've just been feeling... heavy, really. Like I'm getting old, which is silly. Like things aren't nearly as easy as they used to be, only I'm doing more or less the same sorts of things that I'd been doing in the past.

I'm having one of those moods right now. This recalls ... heh. I guess this isn't really anything new. I have these sorts of things. This recalls this summer, when I was feeling alien and ...

Shirt, does that guy's shirt say "ENIAC" on it? That would be really cool. Hrmph. Looks like a pretty well mundane AE shirt; it probably doesn't.

... when I was frustrated and separated out and in that post-almuerzo veggie cafe in Mexico city, furiously typing away with a cup of coffee and a cinnamon cookie ready to be consumed. This is about the same. I don't have a cookie. I'm in Brittain dining hall.

I'd come over to East campus with the intention of showing up at Mike's domocile to study S&N with The Guys, the Second Row Mafia, as Lisa once termed us. I remembered a dream I had today on the way -- I don't think I would have, except that I looked at the football stadium...

*laughs* A guy at a table next to me is teaching his friend about the appropriate usage of "dude!" and "'sup?", among other things.

... I looked at the football stadium, and I remembered my dream. It was a flying dream. I realize now that my flying dreams are mostly about isolation. I'm the only one who can fly, and it's normally not used for majestically soaring around in an open sky above green hills... my flight is something I use to try to get away from people around me, people who present a more or less united front of ... more normalizing authority, people who aren't particularly surprised that I can fly, but maybe don't approve. I don't think that they can. My flight is much like swimming through air. It's a bit harder, in fact -- it's ... very controllable, but it takes a hard frog-kick to get me up into the air.

Blair and John just sat down at the table next to me. Blair is social. They were Arwen and Aragorn this past Halloween, but I think it would've been more appropriate for them to be Galadriel and Celeborn. She's the more well-known of the two, definitely more powerful, but he's formidable in his own right. He's quieter. He doesn't have any of the Three, and he's not the King of the CoC.

So in my dream, I could fly, and I was flying around... a cityscape, at low-altitude. That's how I normally fly, just above other people's heads. Sometimes they try to reach out and grab me. Sometimes I can just barely escape, kicking and thrashing as hard as I can to knock them away and get up into the air. Sometimes I can't, but I generally wake up at that point. It must've been Atlanta. I generally don't feel welcome in my dreams, like I said -- I'm disapproved-of, sort of a ragamuffin just trying to get away. In this one, somebody told me that I couldn't fly in some particular way, maybe up over the top of a building -- he suggested that I fly up and run across the awnings instead... that was strange.

Somehow or another, and I distinctly remember thinking "this isn't where I want to be!", I ended up flying over the football stadium. This is why I remember all of this, the link from dream to waking world. I flew over the football stadium, and there was a game going on, and I fell. I sort of fell along this great long string of ribbon, which was studded with balloons, and it hurt -- like a ribbon rubbing up against your skin at high speeds would hurt. I hit the ground, and I don't think that I felt that, but then I was stuck in the football stadium for a bit. There were a whole lot of people in there, and maybe there was... some sort of metal framework or scaffolding set up inside the stadium, on the sidelines. I was trying to swim up through all of that, and for some reason I wasn't supposed to do that...

I don't remember what happened after that.

So I'm here in Brittain, and maybe the SRM is expecting me, or was, but... for some reason or another, I just don't feel like talking to people right now. I think I might go back to the room and do systems and networks on my own.

I should, tonight... What should I do? I should do some grading. This should probably be done tonight.

I don't really mean to eavesdrop, but I just tend to hear ambient conversations. I was sitting on the other side of Brittain earlier, and there was a girl sitting nearby, behind me, talking to a guy. They seemed to be amiably chatting about something. Another guy comes up, does in a polite-condescending-curt sort of manner (you know what I'm talking about) freaking lays claim to the young lady as His Girlfriend and essentially tells the other fellow to Go Away. She was irate, and her companion just sort of (maybe amusedly?) gracefully bid her adieu and wandered off. I clearly don't have the whole story. But he probably isn't super-healthy for her. People are interesting.

*laughs* Blair and John are talking about timing loops and algorithms that would need them... she's doing most of the exposition. Or at least I can hear her better from here.

She particularly is interesting. She's got... maybe a more developed form of Something to Prove. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I joke about having Something to Prove, and I think that it's about the same thing that Esther has... hrm, maybe Esther's isn't quite the same as mine. It's definitely close.

*chuckles* People are so much younger on East campus. They just have that "I'm a freshman" look about them. It also seems like the Ratio isn't quite s'harsh.

So if I've got to prove whatever it is, I should just go and do that. I haven't been very good about that this semester. I've just sort of been sucking. How can this be rectified? I've written these "Okay, now I'm up and ready to go! Let's eat the hell out of hamburgers and code and do math and not sleep from now on out!" sort of journal entries, and you know what? I've still been sleeping. I napped for a bunch of hours this afternoon. I didn't go and run with Wreck. I'll go tonight, maybe with Marty if he's around. Yesterday was a good run, by the way -- I went out to Piedmont Park and looped around in the neighborhood east of that for a bit, then went to sit and think and pray in the little garden space next to Skiles, at the top of the Hill, afterwards. I was glad for that. It felt nice. The sun was shining, and it was warm and breezy, and I stretched and considered and remembered.

Hrm.

alex@eowyn:~$ fortune
Wake now my merry lads! Wake and hear me calling!
Warm now be heart and limb! The cold stone is fallen;
Dark door is standing wide; dead hand is broken.
Night under Night is flown, and the Gate is open!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

*blinks* Cool.