Saturday

February 10, 2001

Ru lived here when it looked better....

there are holes in the roof now...

The prom theme had many interpretations..

I am rousted out of a dream at 8:08 AM. I know it's SuRu, my eXtreme dog walking partner. I start talking to her. Then I think what if it isn't her. She does start speaking back, though, saying the portable phone FFP thrust at me was making a weird noise.

I'd been dreaming. Of preparing for something while a young relative clung to me as we manuevered through yards and hallways. I say the young, unidentified person was a relative because their seemed to be a family event going.

I found out in the dream that 'all the cousins' would meet someplace before the 'real' event. As is usual in dreams, it was hard to get from one place to another and things kept morphing and twisting. I attribute this, when awake, to what is really going on in dreaming.

In dreams, you sort and optimize the data base that is your mind and memory. In data base parlance, a reorg. This isn't my original idea (who actually has an original idea?) but was articulated by a long ago lunch companion at another job, a guy named Bob. As you sort all the little facts and stuff and look at them individually, you are, of course, stumbling through a piecemeal, incoherent world. One where roads and rooms merge. One where people are the wrong age for the time. Where people with the same name are together for no particular reasons, having not much relationship in real life. But they hang off the same index or hashing location in your data base.

This latter phenomena is easily explained when you think about how we must store names. I know about this storage because I've reached the age when I can't remember someone's name that I should know. And then I see that I know the name begins with, say, L. Then I just know it's Larry. Then I find myself flipping through all the Larrys.

I mention Larry because I attribute the cousin dream to having seen a Larry I know last night. An acquaintance I've seen many times. (Rarely forget his name anymore.) However, I suspect I was organizing the Larrys. I have a cousin Larry. Larry is a man's name that, like Linda and Nancy for girls, is out of favor. I loaned a Nancy a book on tape, Larry's Party, which mentions this about the name Larry. Both of us got that bit and thought it funny, given our 'antique' names.

But back to the dream. The Larry file had a cousin. The cousin pointers needed cleaning up. There you go. The gathering of cousins was just organizing those bits.

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The dog walkers (including FFP) took a trip around an area north of Jefferson square. We'd never actually walked it. We also 'window shopped' Jefferson Square and street and the center on 35th Street.

SuRu showed us where she had lived long, long ago. The house seems abandoned and is falling apart.

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The afternoon slipped away. I worked on some WEB stuff. I made SuRu a birthday card. We made a trip to Barnes and Noble. (Didn't buy a thing.) We watched Annie Hall and I read some papers.

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A friend had a 40th birtday. The theme was prom night and we had posing for pictures, wrist corsages, and people dressed in all manner of 70's prom dresses and formal wear and a bit of everything else. I didn't have an old prom dress. (Did you, you ask, actually go to a prom? No, I don't think so.) If I'd had one it wouldn't have fit my old, fat body. So, both FFP and I wore the white dinner jacket look. I wore a red bow tie. (It was a Valentine's prom.) FFP looked way too dapper in the black shirt and cool tie. He's too cool for words.

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Saturday disappeared. I hate that when it happens.

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