superman is coming! (and dreams 3 and a debate-related comic)

1. devin's film superman: the battle for home premiers wednesday night at seattle's admiral theater. admittance is free but popcorn is not.

2. sorry, everyone. as usual, i've lost interest in the three-part post that i was hoping to finish this week. i finished the storytelling and find myself far less interested in the punchline (i.e., my alleged ability to prophecy in my dreams). but i'll do my best in a sentence or three. here's a recap of what i dreamt:

• wednesday night: i met brady and his pregnant wife (as opposed to the not-pregnant one) alisha in the lobby of a hotel in belize. the stairwell to their room ended about a flight before their room, so i climbed on the roof to look for another entrance.
• thursday night: i hung out with a millionaire who liked ramming into cars, burning them, and leaving large checks for their owners.
• thursday night: i wandered over to an umbrella nonprofit outside the mall and saw brady talking with a volunteer. it turned out that an unknown woman had dropped her baby off with the nonprofit and not returned. brady packed the baby in his mountaineering bag and we set off to find the mother.

first, a little context. brady and alisha live in spokane. the last time i spoke to them was last summer when they attended danny's wedding reception. in other words, there is no impetus for them to suddenly appear in my dream.

well, on friday, the day after the second dream, i called my buddy jonathan to see if he was free to play tennis the next day. he was up for some morning tennis but had dinner plans--brady and alisha were coming to town! somehow my unconscious mind predicted their arrival...and alisha's pregnancy. crazy.

you may think, "that's just a pair of coincidences, mr. andrew," but my powers were later confirmed by my television. some friends and i are playing catch-up on lost, and sunday's episode just happened to be centered around desmond's strange new ability to see the future. is it a coincidence that i found a fellow seer less than a week later? hardly.

and since those first prescient dreams, i've had yet another vision of the future. one night i dreamt of an orange cat (if you're lucky, i'll share that dream in a later post), and then the next day, as i sipped tea and read cormac mccarthy's the crossing in my backyard, an orange cat secretly prowled in the grass. yes, i am a prophet.

3. here's a comic my roommate showed me that almost relates back to thursday's post about my mad debating skills:

it's from xkcd.com

dreams 2

[today's post is continued from yesterday's post in which i recounted 1.3 of my prophetic dreams and speculated about their cause.]

it was the last time that i ever saw the man: i watched him place the $5 million check a safe distance from the wreck and then return to the van. as a storyteller, i'll admit, this feels like an unpleasant way to leave the fellow; he should peel from the parking lot in a cloud of exhaust or shrink into the fabric of his grey tweed coat, a concrete chameleon, a certain spectre of some malovent surreptious secret. but, no, he walked at a rather ordinary pace to the rather ordinary van and i saw him no more.

instead, my dream suddenly exploded in a brilliant splash of colors. razzle dazzle rose, torch red, laser lemon, jungle green--a crayola parade of twirling octagons. apparently, i was surrounded by a throng of umbrella wielding shoppers returning to their cars, each peopling the drab lot with her own customized color. it dawned on me then that i didn't have an umbrella of my own, so i started walking purposefully toward the mall (yes, this is a remarkable dream). near the entrance, i saw a crowd, some tables, and an overhead banner proclaiming UMBRELLAS FOR THE POOR, A NONPROFIT. ah hah.

it was quite a spectacle; volunteers were busily attempting to distribute their wares to the hundreds of needy shoppers. as i watched, i gathered that the number of umbrellas was running low. it was nearing closing time. and then i noticed my college buddy brady hatfield off to one side, listening intently to a bespectacled volunteer in a red pant suit. she looked worried.

i worked my way toward the pair and greeted brady with a smile. he motioned me toward the woman.

"--carol, this is my friend andrew."

"yes, well, hello." then back to business. "after that, right, she asked me to watch him. she said she'd be right back. something about her keys or front door or i don't know." as she spoke, the woman brought a finger up to her cheek and absently performed tiny figure-eights.

"and i didn't have time to--" over the chaotic sounds of mass charity, an infant's screams momentarily interrupted the woman, but she continued. "she just left."

brady sprung into action. he gently removed the shrieking puddle of fat and face from the car seat and secured the boy in a burly-looking mountaineering pack that just happened to be waiting on the ground. "don't worry," said brady, "we'll find the mother."

unfortunately, that's where the dream ends--i awoke before discovering the baby's fate. however, that afternoon, i received an important phone call, and the prophecy was revealed....

[stay tuned for the final prophetic dream post]

andrew david. "a little girl with some flowers." san ignacio town, belize

dreams

[programming note: it's not wednesday, but i've decided to post a little something tonight anyway. also, my travel writing experiment is turning out to be a flop, so i may return to regular blogging again soon. we'll see....]

for my trip to belize, doctor wendy prescribed chloroquine. "don't worry," she said, "this isn't the one that gives you crazy dreams or makes you monster-sick." indeed, there are several ways to kill the malaria bug and chloroquine's side effects are rather tame. it's malaria med cousin is a bit more interesting however: travelers taking mefloquine complain of the usual aches and pains--headaches, nausea, dizziness--and then some more interesting symptoms like vivid dreams and visual disturbances.

i picked up my chloroquine at bartell's pharmacy on march 24th and have been taking the pills every saturday since. they taste rather nasty, but i didn't experienced anything too alarming until late last week. that's when i started having crazy dreams.

okay, in of itself, crazy dreams really aren't that uncharacteristic for the typical andrew evening; my memory and imagination have collaborated on some rather bizarre late night escapades. but this is new: my dreams are prophetic.

the first visitation of the future occurred last wednesday night. i was dreaming of a hotel in belize when some friends from spokane appeared in the lobby. "what are brady and alisha doing in belize?" i wondered. before i could inquire further, i learned that the hotel's staircase terminated about a flight and a half short of their room. this was particularly awkward because alisha was pregnant (and this wasn't one of my office mate james's flying dreams). after clamoring up onto the hotel's roof and trying to find an alternate entrance to their room (you know, ancient apostle-style), i awoke.

no, i didn't climb my way to work the next morning, but there's a surprise embedded in that little adventure. but before i explain, let me recount thurday's dream. i'll warn you though, my newly discovered talent for divination is in no way correlated with an improved sense of timing. that is, i'm not about to interfere with this vision i've been granted, and although much of the dream may seem irrelevant, there's no way i'm skipping to the end.

my recollection of the dream begins with me sitting in the passenger seat of a nondescript white van, watching as the driver, a heavy-set bald man, scanned his mirrors, pulled into the parking lot arterial, and then attempted to repark in the neighboring space. i say attempted because the space was already occupied--my driver didn't seem to care. he pressed the gas and gunned our big white beast through the rear bumper of the unfortunate subaru. with a chuckle, he jumped from his seat and tossed me a can of lighter fluid. as flames reflected off the walls and cars and puddles of that concrete jungle, we admired our handiwork. the man happily quipped about the surprise of the owner when he or she stumbled from the mall into the presence of their smoking car-cass. he then wiped the grime from his hands and reached into his sports coat.

"how does five million sound?" he asked. he nodded to himself, scrawled a figure in his ledger, and dismissed me with a wave. as i walked toward the mall, i turned to watch him stuff a check in a bright green envelope. he placed the envelope a safe distance from the smouldering wreck and returned to the van.

[i foretell that this post will be continued in the future, perhaps tomorrow....]

[disclaimer: this is creative nonfiction with the emphasis on creative--i may be overplaying my response to these dreams just a tiny bit.]

andrew david. "traveling by van" the highway from belize city to san ignacio town, belize.

stupid math problem

i think that i have gre posttraumatic stress disorder. nora and mari are preparing to take the test sometime this winter, and their ceaseless vocabulary drills have me dreaming of my own gre test. this evening i've been haunted by a really tough question from the math section. it goes something like this:

during his stay at robbins, andrew spent most of his time in one of three apartments, two 4-person apartments and a 2-person apartment. if no one who lived in a 2 -person apartment is currently married, the editor lived with three men who are currently married, and the engineers only lived with philosophers or other engineers, what were the majors of andrew's roommates? and for extra credit, what does this have to do with the other andrew?

major	2006 occupation	2006 marital status
1 biology	1 researcher	1 married
1 english	1 editor	1 single
3 accounting	3 accountants (2+ cpas)	2 married, 1 single
1 history	1 barista/editor (ee)	1 single
3 engineering	3 engineers	2 married, 1 single
1 philosophy	1 manual laborer/webdesigner with an mdiv	1 married

actually, i don't quite know why i made this table. as i prepared to discuss the other andrew, i was thinking something like "wow, except for erik and steve, everyone who lived in my robbins triangle is currently working in the same field as their majors. that's pretty impressive." and then, "i wonder if there's any correlation between major and marital status in this cohort." (gosh, i'm a nerd, and there's not) and finally, "i hope people (joel) aren't angry that i haven't talked about the other andrew yet."

(758 to go)

andrew moves to robbins

in september of 2000, i joined jonathan, brady, and danny in a two-bedroom attempt at apartment life. like any self-sufficient city-dwellers, we cooked in our own kitchen, lounged in our own living room, and squatted on our own toilet. very adult of us, we thought. but despite our self-reliance, i've since decided that our apartment was the collegiate equivalent of a half-way house. in order to lessen the shock of independent life, the university furnished each apartment with a security blanket--well, really it was more a security rug than a blanket, and it sat in the entryway, a metaphysical appendage of our front door. indeed, it was the dorm doors of robbins that kept us insulated from darkness of the real world.

forgive me. i just finished thomas pynchon's the crying of lot 49, and i'm afraid that his wacky, nonsensical style has somehow seeped into my blog. let me offer (and then dismiss) a quick spu tutorial.

students at the college of queen anne often refer to their school as the spu bubble. they lament the university's cultural composition (primarily conservative caucasian girls) and urge one another to pop free of the campus confines and explore more diverse seattle haunts. while at spu, i worked across the lake at a market research center in bellevue, and because the phone-room at northwest research group (it's sad...i still remember the number: 1-800-545-5909) was a haven for cultural diversity (and crazies), i never felt too passionately about spu's lack of hetergeneity. still, when speaking vaguely of doors and their ability to separate one from the real world, i understand that most spu-affiliated readers (after shrugging their shoulders in bewilderment) might speculate that i am satirically referring to robbins as an academic hotel california. the doors hem you in; they are everywhere (everywhere!). you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. or something like that.

they'd be wrong.

(note to self: don't employ this trick again--it's word-wasteful to spend so much time talking about what you don't mean).

(beth's note to myself: stop preluding)

during the past three years i've lived in a house and a pair of apartments. i've chatted with my neighbors about soccer, stolen cars, and Jesus "being some crazy, mixed up sh-t, man," but i've never peeked inside their homes, stared at their fish, or even considered stealing their milk. in robbins we were protected from the anonymity of this real world. the doors in robbins were always open, inviting us into communion.

and it was there that i finally met the other andrew....


andrew david. "jello 1 -- basi lays the trap" robbins, seattle, wa.
by the way, those are matts not andrews.

total robbins apartments (i.e., neighbors) that i entered unannounced: 6+
total post-spu apartments/houses (i.e., neighbors) that i have entered unannounced: 0