Girl In the Sea

I don't really tell this story. It's one of those things I sometimes doubt anyone will believe - but I guess this is one of those times I just don't care.

The first time i met LuAnne was in a dream.

It was the summer of 2004, while i was spending a trimester abroad in Guadalajara. I can't nail down the exact day or time, or anything like that. What i can tell you is that it was on the second floor of the UAG (Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara) main building, in a corner room with a wall of windows looking into the cavernous center of the building.

I was studying for some test or other when i dozed off and had a vivid dream of one of my fellow students, a girl with curling blond hair, running into the room excited and ecstatic. In the dream I watched as she jumped into the arms of a man who I believed to be another student who was her real life boyfriend. Caught up in her joy, he spun her around - although it was more like her energy and happiness is what caused them to twirl.

It was a movie moment. The kind of thing you expect to exist only in Hollywood. And what was really strange was that although the other person had initially looked like her boyfriend, he felt like me. And even stranger, she didn't feel like her, she felt like "the Girl of My Dreams".

I'm not sure how to explain it any better, but ever since i was a child, i had dreams where i was loved and appreciated by this idyllic girl in my dreams. It might have been a nightmare we were fighting to survive together, or a utopia we shared for the space of a few hours before i woke up. But regardless of the circumstances, or what she looked like, it was always that same ESSENCE.

Anyone who's ever said "it looked like so and so, but it was actually this other person" when talking about a dream knows exactly what i mean.

Now like i said, i've had dreams about this girl for almost as long as i can remember dreaming, though the first dream i can actually bring to mind was some time in the 7th grade or so ... maybe earlier, maybe later. The point is that I recognized her in that dream. The difference was how much i wanted it to be real! I mean, of course I'd vaguely wished upon a dream before, but this was different. Maybe it was because i had only been dozing, but the dream felt so real that i was almost convinced I could have reached through the sheer veil of dream and pulled it into reality.

I thought about that dream a lot. I may have even blogged about it ... though it's doubtful considering certain other circumstances in my life at the time.

That summer a movie called "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" opened in theaters and made its way fairly quickly to the theater in the mall about a half mile from the apartment i lived in with my roommate Marianna.

I walked to the theater alone and ended up meeting a friend from class there. We watched the film together, and walked out to a torrential downpour. We waited a bit for the storm to calm down (as they usually did) and briefly chatted about the movie. It was a pretty big eye-opener for me to hear him say that he didn't really enjoy it, and that he didn't really get it. (or at least parts of it)

I had thought it was a perfect metaphor.

No, it's not that ... It was what I wanted. As foolish as it may sound to wish to have the life of the main character - fighting a losing battle to retain the memories of his "Tangerine" - i found myself feeling as if it was the most noble and undying kind of love there is.

You have to watch the movie, i think, to understand why the circumstances which bring the two people in it together might be considered amazing, or even enviable.

When I finally said farewell to my classmate and walked home in the not-so-diminished rain, I walked home with a barely audible question crossing my lips almost frequently enough to be mistaken for a mantra: "Where is my Tangerine?"

The question brought my dream to mind, and all my previous encounters with my "dream girl", but it yielded no real answers. The only thing i knew ... more intuited than anything, was that she was out there. She was out there and if i didn't find her that wouldn't make her any less real.

It was several months after that that I had the most important dream. I've told a few people about it - always with the same embarrassed look and downcast eyes that people reserve for the confession of some horrible secret that they almost want to be taken as a joke.

I wrote down the details as soon as i woke up, and though i can't find that piece of paper right now (i hope i haven't lost it) I'll tell you what I wrote on it.

The first part of the dream took place in a wide open space, but with people around. I remember red bricks on the ground, and the feeling of some kind of loose gathering. People were there for a reason, but they weren't obligated to stay ... more like the crowd in a central area of a shopping mall than one at a concert or meeting.

I don't remember seeing her at that point, but i remember being aware of her. The dream shifted in that subtle way dreams have. It was almost like the dream was painted on top of another one, and the paint of the first started running off the canvas until only the other dream remained - only the canvas was sideways and the first dream was running off in rivulets to the past.

In the second dream she was with me in a large white room - a new apartment or home. It felt more like an apartment though because the whiteness of it was that stringent cleanliness that only rentals seem to be able to have. That smell and look that almost dare you to do anything other than walk in and sleep in the middle of the room without touching the walls or ruining its great emptiness with your petty furniture.

We were on the second floor - i knew that much. I remember seeing her standing in the apartment with me. Tall, but not a giant. Her hair was dark, but not brown, though that seemed more due to the baseball cap she was wearing than anything.

I think we were having a conversation, but i don't know for sure. I only remember walking up another set of stairs, and that part of the dream ending in a kind of movie-script scene change where the next scene quickly drops from the top like a shade dropping in front of a window.

This next part I'll tell, but I've never quite figured out what it meant or where it fits ... if anywhere. We were at another crowded place, but it was more like being at a stage with sound equipment and projectors set up. Like a mix between a rock concert and a CEO press conference.

On the screen there was a video that almost became the dream itself, where I was chasing my little cousins (Tyler and his sisters) around their parents house in New England.

As the dream pulled back from the video, I remember walking over to my car, which was parked in front of the stage. My recent ex was sitting in the driver's seat of my Explorer, and i knew that she was leaving. (presumably with my car) She had recently moved out, but this almost felt like my guarantee that there was a definite conclusion to our relationship - a kind of finality which i may have needed to supplement my outer strength with a more solid inner one.

This is where the dream ended. I know there were probably a lot of pieces that i missed by not writing them down fast enough - or maybe i missed them because they didn't matter.

What matters is that a month or so after having that dream, i was helping the ASU chapter of Alpha Phi Omega raise interest and attract new members at the Activity Fair. There were many students coming and going, but some lingered long enough to make the air feel crowded and full.

On one of the last days that i was working at the Activity Fair, the students who were supposed to take my place at the table skipped out and i ended up staying an hour longer than i intended. While i was waiting for them to show up, a table set up near me which was for a group called TGS: The Gamers' Society.

Interested, I made my way over there once my replacements had finally arrived and introduced myself. I'll cut my story a bit short, and just tell you that it was through this group of people that I eventually met LuAnne.

After we'd started dating i went to visit my mother in Florida for a few weeks. It was tough because we'd just started dating but it was nice because, as always, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

When i got back she helped me move all my things into the apartment i'd found in Ahwatukee. I have pictures of the day that we spent lugging things into the apartment ... her baseball cap rarely came off as we spent the day talking and moving my things out of the U-Haul up to my new, sterile-white apartment on the second floor.

I can't remember if i put two and two together on that day. I can't even remember when it all fell into place for me.

There is one thing that i can remember as clearly as if it was yesterday. I was staying at LuAnne and Lucy's apartment pretty frequently, especially since she was taking and teaching classes and I hadn't really found a job yet.

So it was that one day when she came home from one of her tests I was there to see her run into the apartment excited and ecstatic, hug Lucy and tell us both about her test, then jump into my arms. As we spun around, more from her excitement and energy than my own movement, I knew that I'd found what I'd been looking for all along.

Christian

Global Believing and a Spoonful of Sugar

My interest in world religions was sparked during a gen-ed class at Bradley that I took because a friend of mine signed up for it.

I'm not sure, but i believe it was a class on the religions of the western world. Essentially it was an overview of the three biggies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Maybe i'm wrong - maybe it talked about Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that what I think pulled me in was this window that i saw into the cultures and strictures of societies around the world.

I started understanding that at its most fundamental level, a religion is a set of rules and regulations designed to protect a society from itself and from others. It wasn't until i started listening to Joseph Campbell that another aspect which drew me to such study crystallized in my mind: Religion doesn't just protect a society physically, but spiritually as well.

I mean yes, i'd thought about it, but i hadn't thought about what it meant. The fact that people needed spiritual protection in the first place.

Now keep in mind that i'm not talking about hocus pocus spirituality. I'm talking about your spirit. Your hopes and dreams and fears and desires. I'm talking about the beliefs that help you sleep at night, and the ones that give you something to fight for in the day.

These things vary from person to person, certainly, but if you study world religions you notice a trend in the morals of the stories, and a recognizable cast of characters that may vary in name, but are the same in purpose.

Did you know that there is a Native American legend about a great flood? The legend is said to predate any European contact, and when you read it it is clear that there really is no connection to the biblical flood in terms of Moses or the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God.

That's just one example, but there are many myths throughout the world that share a thread without their cultures being connected.

There are theories that range from the completely mundane: the stories had a common root in pre-history and spread as humans spread; to the spiritual: people have experienced the different faces of the same ultimate reality; to the psychological: there are common needs and wants throughout the psyches of people world wide, that coalesce into a kind of "collective unconscious".

I'm not presumptuous enough to claim that i have the answer, and I'm sure there are even more explanations than the ones listed above, but I do think that there is one very important thing to point out.

These shared beliefs have never stopped existing, and our capacity to share these underlying experiences and thoughts with the entire world is still very much alive today. What's more, those experience and thoughts are evolving.

There are people around the world who grow up with and foster their own set of beliefs (no matter how small they may be) in addition to the ones they are taught by their parents and their society. What's really amazing to me is that i think that people would be surprised if they compared their "side beliefs" to someone else's. Because i'm positive that they would be extremely similar.

So i wonder if there is something that can be done with that. An analysis and understanding of the way that human belief and faith which is shared around the globe is shifting and evolving.

I dunno - seems like an interesting idea.

Return of the Dirty Hippie

It's not that I think I can change the world. I'm not that full of myself. What I think is that regardless of whether i can or not, I should damn well try.

About a week ago i was drunk. Now let's be clear - if you qualify all states of sobriety as a kind of continuum, with sober on one end, tipsy in the middle, and drunk on the end, i was somewhere off the continuum in what i like to call "WTF was i thinking" land.

Somewhere on the way home, as i was riding in the passenger seat and watching the world fly by, I had a thought that shook me pretty badly: "The world is the way it made itself." Trying to change the way the world works is as futile as trying to change the way a person thinks or acts. It doesn't work. The change needs to come from within.

Have you ever quit an addiction? Most people don't know this, but I used to smoke. Granted, it's not like I smoked my whole life, but I did smoke about a pack a day for almost 3 years. I say almost because I quit about 3 or four times in there - always for a week or even a month at the most.

One day I got sick. Not a real bad sick, mind you, but sick enough that I decided that since I could barely breathe as it was, I should maybe lay off the cigarettes until i got better.

About one week later I was feeling better, and I practically hopped and skipped (as much as one can do so while driving) to the gas station to buy my first pack of "post crud" cigarettes. Camel Lights. (yeah, get the laughs out now you Marlboro smokers)

I lit up my cigarette (not sure that doing it while at the pump was so genius) and took my first drag ... which turned into my first gag.

I don't know if it was a stale pack. I don't know if I was still a little sick. What i know is that i can't remember having ever tasted something so foul, and i threw the whole pack away. Now, all you smokers out there know what an effort it usually is to throw a whole pack of smokes away ... trust me - it's usually harder than cutting off a finger. (maybe your pinkie)

Somewhere within that last week, my body and/or my mind had done without my conscious interaction what I had been unable to do for 3 years. I had no reason to quit. No desire to quit. I had simply stopped wanting to smoke.

I think there are a lot of stories like that out there. People who didn't decide to change - they just did.

I think the world is like that. I think maybe all we need is an event, or a movement, or a single thought that gives us a chance to give up our current way of living for a better one.

More importantly, i think that we have the tools and technology to end our need for societal stratification. We have the resources to give everyone everything they want without them having to step on someone else to get it.

Bull, right? No way can i convince someone to work in a factory to make me my new iPod if they've got everything they need, right?

Well ... yeah. Absolutely right. But why does that person need to work in a factory at all? We have computers and robots that can do practically EVERYTHING in that factory.

Uh oh - we've hit the first stumbling points right there, haven't we? First off - computers and robots aren't free! Second, what will those unskilled laborers do instead?!

Free? Of course not! Not in terms of money. But what good does money do? All it does is provide a medium with which people can trade and barter on equal footing. What if it was taken for granted that you got out what you put in?

I actually heard your eyes rolling there, but bear with me. Just assume that it's possible for now, ok? We won't get anywhere if you're not willing to stretch your imagination! As i said fairly recently on a conference call "OK, i've heard all the reasons why we can't and shouldn't do this. Now let's re-focus and try to think of ways that it COULD work..."

So let's pretend that the world would keep turning without money. Who makes the computers and robots that produce the iPods instead of the workers? Well, more robots and computers! At first we'd have to build the builders, so to speak, but after that they keep running with maintenance and programming.

So who designs the robots? The computer systems? Who maintains all these things?

People who like doing those things, of course! There will always be people who like to tinker and fix, and people who like to program and design. In a system where everyone has what they want, everyone can do what they want. This of course raises the question of laziness. Why do anything if you don't need to? Let me ask you - after you've been on vacation for a week, or maybe two, do you want to keep doing nothing? Or do you wish you were doing something you loved? Maybe that something is your job - maybe it's a different job. But you want to do SOMETHING.

Humans aren't lazy, we fill the time we have with the things we want to do. When we're on vacation or the weekend, the last thing we want to do is work, but if all we had was weekends and vacation, all we would be able to think about would be to do SOMETHING. Preferably something we love to do!

So those robots and computers came from a place that made them. Simple as that. And yes, they were free. The were built using raw materials that were gathered by people who like working with their hands. Don't bother son, it's turtles all the way down.

I was going to answer the question about "unskilled" laborers, but I think I already have. They'll be busy doing something they love, and something they're "skilled" at. Because no one is unskilled.

This idea that everyone can have everything and no one needs to be hungry or poor may sound extreme, i know. But it's not ridiculous, and it's not unfathomable. It's not communism, and it's not insanity. It's what we're capable of.

It is what humanity is capable of.

I don't know if we'll ever get there. I don't know if anything i ever do could help us get there. What i do know is that i've thrown away the pack of BS beliefs, and if i can help start that change everywhere else, you can bet your bottom denomination that I'll try. If i can't? If it's hopeless? Nothing's hopeless. And at least I'll be able to say i tried.