Back to School

Last night I had a dream that after a week away from school on spring break, I couldn't remember my class schedule anymore. The only place where I had it written down was in a file stored in the music building computer lab. So I went over there at 5:00 a.m. in my pajamas so that I could look at my schedule, return to home, sleep a little bit more, and then come back in time for class. However, when I clicked on the file to open up my schedule, all of a sudden hundreds of pop-up ads for the U.S. Army flooded my screen, telling me that I should enlist. The new windows were appearing so rapidly that I couldn't close them all fast enough. The longer the ads stayed up on the screen, the more specific they became. Soon they said, "We want you, Brian Tanner!" Finally an army colonel's head appeared on the screen. "You have 30 seconds to enlist or we are coming to take you away!" he said as a counter appeared in the corner of the screen. As the seconds ticked away, I frantically tried to close the window but it didn't work. I tried to restart the computer but that didn't work either. When the counter got down to one second, I destroyed the computer with an ax. (Good thing there was an ax handy in my dream. I'm in the computer lab right now and I just checked - no loose axes lying around.) As the sparks were flying everywhere, I decided that I should leave the computer lab before (a) I got in trouble for smashing up a computer (b) the U.S. Army came parachuting in to take me away.

I ran out of the music building and on to the grass behind the nearby Duderstadt Center. I still didn't know my class schedule, but since it was still early and I was still in my pajamas, I decided that I would take a little nap on the grass and then try to look up my class schedule again. As I lay down on the grass, the dream went into time-lapse photography mode, and I saw my self sleeping while hundreds of people raced around me in fast-motion and the sun and clouds raced across the sky (actually, it was more like this). When I finally woke up (from the nap within the dream, not the dream itself) it was 5:30 p.m., and I had missed my classes, my private students, and I was an hour late for opera rehearsal.

*****

When I woke up (for real this time) my mind was racing. Am I supposed to be in class right now? Hmmmm... 9:00 a.m. ... no class yet... I think?? I jumped out of bed, pulled my schedule out of my bag (much more convenient than an Army-wired computer). Nothing until 10:30. Whew. Farewell to spring break, welcome back to school.

This semester has been really busy and stressful for me and I had been looking forward to spring break for weeks in advance. Last year I look a little road trip to Chicago, but this year I wanted to just sit around and do nothing, and I succeeded beautifully. I kicked off Spring Break on Monday by never even getting out of my pajamas and never leaving the house. It was a great day. Other spring break highlights included a day trip to see the capitol building in Lansing (for some reason I had always had a great desire to go to Lansing, but we discovered that there sure isn't a whole lot to do there), a visit from my old buddy Tyler O. (who ended up spending the night with me at a homeless shelter as part of a church service project), getting caught up on my TV shows (plus all the back episodes of Spectacle: Elvis Costello With...), and going to a few gatherings with friends (like the Wii party - good times).

I made a list of a lot of things I was going to get done over break (I had four of five ideas for blog posts that I never got around to), but I'm kind of glad I didn't get them done. I was dragging myself around in the final days leading up to the break and now I feel like I have enough momentum to at least carry me through the opening of Albert Herring in two and a half weeks.

I've got a private student now so it's time to plunge back into school. Wish me luck. And if the U.S. Army comes looking for me, I wasn't here.