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

Walden Two and the Rantings of a Self-Made Lunatic

For a long time now you've all heard me mention my hippie commune occasionally and with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Those of you who've known me for a few years know that i didn't start talking about utopias and communal living only after LuAnne and I got married - it's been an idea i've had for a few years that crystallized into an actual dream (as opposed to an undefined fantasy) once I read Walden Two on our honeymoon.

Walden Two is the fictional description of a theoretically plausible utopia which exists by adopting behavioral psychology as a means of sustaining and controlling a modern society.

In other words: It's a great place to live ... you would like it there.

Walden Two essentially offers everyone who lives there everything they would ever need to survive, as well as all the things which we desire to make our lives happy and fulfilling. The only thing that it doesn't do is give us something which all humans seem to crave above all else:

The potential for more.

The potential for more is a pretty powerful thing. I was just talking to one of my friends the other day and asked "Why would you not want to live in this community i've described?" She answered that not having her own car might be an example of how she would be limited living there. Not that she would need to leave to go do something specific, but that she might want to go somewhere. She needed that freedom.

Certainly this is a small example of a larger need. The need to be able to do something different than what is "prescribed" to us is part of what makes us human! Think about the old "better to have loved and lost" adage. Logically, it is better to have never loved at all - you would be more emotionally stable, and if love didn't exist anywhere else in the world you'd never be any worse off for not knowing how it felt.

Remember that i'm just talking "logically" here. Love brings people together, yes, but think of how many it drives apart. It's unstable at best. (wonderful, sure, but unstable)

Now what about money? Why would anyone need such a crazy thing? If we're all doing our part in the community, we should all get our share of life and happiness. No one should ever be thought of as doing more than someone else ... what would be the point? If they're doing what they love and what they're interested in, then why should their job be considered more valuable than someone else's? Take the reverse: if it's a job that no one wants to do, why shouldn't everyone have to do that job a little and move back to what they love?

But here's where it gets sticky, isn't it? I mean, that whole paragraph could be years of unresolvable debate in and of itself. What i'm trying to get to though, is this: If we all got the same, we would all be the same. If we were all the same, then where would be the chance for any one of us to have "the potential for more"?

I've heard this a lot: "I don't want to survive - i want to live." (if you haven't heard that one lately, watch Wall-E)

Does it need to be one or the other? Do we have to have a world where some people have everything and most have little or nothing so that we can have "the potential for more"?

Couldn't we find some way to have "the potential for more" without taking away the ability for everyone to live at or near the same level? Happily? With their basic human needs fulfilled?

I know i can't change the world, but how can i accept it as it is? Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

The Hero Myth

I think we're all waiting for someone to show up and tell us that we're destined for greater things. According to Joseph Campbell, the basic hero myth starts off with the hero longing to do or be something else. But doesn't everyone reach an age or a point in their lives where they wish there were more? Or that they were living an almost entirely different life? Or maybe feel that there is something else they're destined for?
Maybe that's what the hero myth really does: provides us a story that we can relate to, and feel like we get sympathy, compassion, and self-motivation from it. In essence, it's telling us "You're not alone! This happened to someone else! This is that person's story ..."
So where do we find our mentor? Our change agent? Where is our Obi-Wan to lead us from Tatooine? Our Jack Sparrow to bungle us forward? Our coachman to show us death, poverty, and infermity? Our Morpheus to provide us with a red pill? Are we to provide our own impetus for change instead? What about the catalyst which occurs that jars the hero from the grooved path and throws him onto a path of trials and tribulations which will lead him to his destiny? Are we to create that as well? Is that what these stories are for? What happens when there is no mentor? No change? No trials? No destiny?
What happens when the hero has no story?