back in California - I've mentioned this before, but whenever I go home to my parents, I feel like I've stepped back into childhood. I feel infantilized, disempowered, merely a child again, at the whim, beck, and call of my parents. I also feel particularly desexualized. And I just realized this now: this really is what it's like to be closeted, though I've been "out" for four or five years now. Though I've told my parents I'm gay, I haven't told them about Joe. Nor do I ever go anywhere near the subject of homosexuality in talks at home. This whole part of me is a nothing when I am at home (as are, truthfully, many other things in my life).

stuff - I get it from my parents, I guess -- this need always to be prepared from any contingency. They had this way of making everything your fault if you didn't have your whole life worked out.

something - I always brought a book for me everywhere I went, as a way to stave off boredom and need for conversation. I was probably looking for a book in the pile in this dream.

sister - My sisters have a strange existence in my dreams. There only ever seems to be one of them at a time. One recurring dream I used to have concerning this fear (?) involved family trips to a hands-on science museum like the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It would be crowded. I was small, so I could only see the bottom parts of people. I always had this fear of following the wrong dress (mother) or pants (father), only after grabbing that dress or pant leg realizing, as a stranger looked down on my in confusion, that I had been following the wrong person for who knows how long. In any case, in this old dream, our whole family -- mother, father, two older sisters, twin brother, and me -- are at this crowded museum. All of a sudden, a fire alarm goes off, so everyone evacuates the building in a frenzy. Crowds surge towards the red-lettered EXIT signs. We all make it outside OK. And we go home. Except no one in my family seems to notice now that there is only ONE sister. But we carry on as if things have always been this way. Months later, the five of us remaining are back at the museum. Same deal -- large crowds, confusion, fear of separation, fire alarm, evacuation. Except this time, as we all head home safely, the sister who had been gone was back, and the other sister now is missing. So on and on, only one sister now residing with us at a time, but each switch back and forth occuring as if nothing was really happening. Disturbing. The sister in this present dream happens to be the eldest. She lives in San Francisco now, so it makes more sense for me to see her there than the other, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

half-naked guys - I don't know if it was the case that there were scantily-clad guys running around campus in my [undergraduate days], or if it was too cold for anyone to bare skin up in Connecticut, or if I just didn't notice them, but I don't remember drooling over guys much as a college student. These days, though, I see these shirtless guys or shirt-clinging-to-skin-with-sweat guys running around all over the place on campus. I guess part of the reason is I spend so much time at the bus stop right outside the gym. It's hard not to catch guys who just worked out coming outside and walking by.

my brother's dorm/apartment - I don't know much about my brother's college experience. He went to school in California at two different colleges ([UC Santa Barbara] for the first two years, then transferring to [UC Davis] for his final three years because he hated UCSB, the place, and its distance from our parents' home). I only saw his schools once each, both when he was moving out at the end of his time at those schools. I helped him move out of UCSB when he was glad to be done with the place. He hated everyone and everything. When he graduated from UC Davis, I went to his apartment along with my parents and sister (the one who lives in CA). That's all I really have seen of his "life" in college. In neither case did I actually see what sorts of things he did. I've only met a few of his friends from UCSB and saw his roommates that last year he was there.

people - The scene seems to be lifted from the title sequence of the television show, A Different World. I saw that sequence on television sometime this week.

hand - I have this thing about my hands. I have sweaty palms. I hate having to shake people's hands. I hate having to hold people's hands for prayer circles and other like-communal activities. Even if my palms are dry at the moment, having to hold a stranger's hand makes them start sweating profusely right away. And when I'm nervous, phew!, just forget about trying to keep my hands dry... I used to carry handkerchiefs around so I hand something with which to wipe my hands. I should start doing that again.

school - We're driving somewhere in the Northeast, it appears. We end up at [Swarthmore College], the school one of my best friends from high school attended. I visited him there once (or twice?) while we were in college. It's in the countryside of Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. It seemed like an idyllic setting to me, surrounded only by trees and grass and stuff.

drive - Just a note to say that I usually drive Joe and me around. Joe doesn't like to drive for his various reasons. Of course, back in Connecticut, Joe was the one who drove us places when we sometimes went out of New Haven. I didn't have a car back then. It seems logical that in the dream he would be driving in his car in the Northeast. But also, last night Joe drove us to dinner. We took my car, though, since the rear window of his car got knocked out the night before. I remember feeling all taken care-of and safe last night. Don't really know why, because it's not like Joe never drives. But I was able to wear just my reading glasses and not have to put on my regular glasses which were giving me a headache yesterday. And that was comforting.

professor - I've never even read her stuff, nor met her, let alone had a class with her, but for some reason the person who jumps to mind here is Camille Paglia, that eccentric, provoking sort-of-feminist. I think she teaches at Swarthmore College, and that's why she happened to work herself into this dream. (Or maybe she only "teaches" there as part of Cheryl Dunye's [Watermelon Woman].)

Virginia Woolf - It's been awhile since I've read ol' Virginy. But just Friday morning, I was talking to a friend of mine at school. She's been teaching Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The book in the dream seemed, visually, to be like my copy of The Voyage Out (a Harcourt & Brace edition I got for class in my junior year of college). For some reason, "moments of being" seems to be an important part of the class, though for the life of me I can't remember now if that's a phrase or title of Woolf's or of someone else's like Wordsworth (or is that "spots of time"?) or Proust.

uncomfortable - I was reading frantically every day of this week for my classes. Due to last week's terrorist attacks, I was unable to do much of any work the week before and certainly not over the weekend. I hate going to class not having at least read the stuff for class because then I don't know what people are talking about and I shouldn't even be there. But I hate missing class even more, because I learn so much from hearing other people speak, even if I don't actively partipate in discussion myself. Of course, I'm trying hard to get myself to talk more in class. And miracles of miracles, I spoke for the first time in two of my classes this week. Now it just remains for me to break the ice in one of my classes. Since my comments didn't meet with complete and utter incomprehension, like I always fear, I'm a little more confident now that I can express my thoughts verbally. I still speak nonsense most of the time, though. I don't know how anyone can get anything out of my spoken words. They all seem so convoluted, disorganized, and nonsensical to me.
 
And to think I'm supposed to start in on the public speaking unit of my first-year composition class now. I'm supposed to teach students how to give impromptu and unscripted speeches! I dread this section of the course.

state troopers - I suppose the "law" is on my mind because of the constant reference to the heroes of the terrorist attacks -- the police and firefighters who risked their lives to help so many people at the World Trade Center. But these officers in my dream had more the feel of masqueraders. Anyone remember that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when the assassins are sent after Buffy? The one with the woman police officer at the job fair at school who starts shooting at Buffy? Well, that's the woman in my dream.

anal-rective (?) surgery - I honestly don't know what the words are, but in the dream she was clearly implying that all gay men who partake of anal intercourse end up with torn rectums and need surgery. I really have no idea how this came into my dream. It's the absurdity of it all that makes this last part so hilarious.

men wanting to be women - I especially hate homophobic discourse that reduces sexuality to gender confusion in a misogynistic kind of way. For all the life of feminist and gay & lesbian thought and activism, I can't understand how people are still so tied to traditional ideas of masculinity and feminity, of separate genders, and how (deviant) sexuality is simply a (misplaced) relation to those ideals. Call me sissy.

trimmed - Now this was rather strange. I might say even disturbing, although I am not really disturbed by women's genitalia like some people like to think about gay men. What is strange and disturbing is how this woman was using a physical display of her body as a way to rectify (and I use that term intentionally) what she saw as deviance from gender and sexual norms. In her little striptease and speech, she was trying to show how men and men, women are women, and they should only couple with the other. But what was fascinating was her position as a police officer and the way she tried to come across as "just one of the guys" in the way she swaggered into the class. All the other state troopers, I might add, were men. What's disturbing is the contrast she wanted to point out between her body, emblematized by the red silk underwear and the spot of pubic hair, and the uniform she was wearing. If I were to rewrite this dream into a story, she would definitely have gone on to finger-fuck herself.

inversion - I was introduced to the term "inversion" as a concept of the homosexual in the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century in the two weeks I stayed in a theoretical class on American Modernism and sexuality my junior year of college. I left the class because I freaked out about my inability to understand the writing of people like Sedgewick in her Epistemology of the Closet. This was really the first time I had any contact with this kind of theorizing, too. I still can't understand much of this writing, but I'm beginning to understand the ideas behind those writings because I've heard so much second-hand interpretation of the works that I'm beginning to build an idea of what might be in those elusive texts. In any case, inversion, as far as I remember, was the idea that homosexuality -- desire for someone of the same sex -- arises because a person is actually inverted, of the other sex. I think it comes from a conception of the vagina as an inside-out penis or something like that.
 
As a side note, my desertion of the class proved to be a minor point of embarrassment just a few months later when I took a summer course (survey of nineteenth century American literature) with the same professor, Michael Trask. I didn't think he'd remember me after seeing me only four times, but the first day of that class, he squinted at me and asked me if I had been in his class earlier that year. I had to admit I was, and that I left because I couldn't understand the reading.

class - The sense of support from the class was exhilarating. It was clear that, despite the old-fashioned classroom, the old-fashioned professor (remember, hair style from the sixties), and the fairly old-style, small-town quality of the state troopers, the people in the class were not old-fashioned in their understandings of homosexuality. It was great to hear them clamoring to debunk the lies and insinuations of the state trooper.

kick-the-balls - I'm afraid of flying balls. In the dream, I wavered between that feeling of happiness in being with Joe and fear that a soccer ball was going to come flying out of nowhere to hit me in the face. And also, that confusion of not wanting to be near the soccer balls, but liking the sight of guys running around in shorts...