very nice-uh

ASIDE: (indoor) office temperature check: 81.9

DAMMIT!

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So, I had this *really* nice dream last night. And I know you guys probably don’t care, but I’m going to tell you about it anyway. Witness the joys of blogging. 🙂

Lord only knows where this dream came from. I do have a suspicion, though, which I’ll come to later.

And please, guys, don’t go reading more into this dream than ought to be, mmmkay?

So, my dream was about someone who was once extremely important to me, Greg. I got to know Greg best the summer before I left home for college. He was the sports editor at the newspaper where I worked, and became a close friend and something akin to a boyfriend (but not quite) during my first year of college.

Things ended poorly between us … I made mistakes, as did he, and though I have always desperately wanted to be in touch with him, he has made the choice over the last ten years to keep his distance. The first couple of years after we parted ways, that was really hard for me. A couple of times, I went to great lengths to track him down and contact him; I haven’t done that for a long time, though, and don’t believe I’ve actually talked to him since sometime (probably) in 1997ish. Thereabouts, anyway.

A long time.

The thing is, that has continued to bother me over the years. I know this can be hard for some to understand, but I have always wanted to stay in touch with my exes. One reason is that I don’t let many people get all that close to me emotionally, and those who do I like to keep in touch with. I’ve never had a relationship end on such bad terms that I never wanted to see or talk to again. Generally (including, to a lesser extent, with Greg) it’s been a mutual decision to split up.

Anyway, in my dream last night, I was working somewhere (not at TWU — and for the record, I wasn’t burning-up hot in my dream, either) with group of people (maybe five or six?), including Daniel, on some sort of project I can’t remember now. I do remember that we were in a big, open room that had this largish beam down the middle of it. Around the beam was a desk made in a square (the beam in the middle), so there was a ton of desk space. Around about half the walls of the room were more desks/tables, giving even more room to work. The room was relatively dark — it was lighted much like the displays are at Ikea, with lots of indirect lighting — and at least two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling glass. It was dark outside.

Whatever we were working on, it was fun and we were excited. It sorta felt like a newspaper of some sort … appropriate, since Greg’s a newspaper man. 😉

Anyway, Greg didn’t show up until day two or three of the project. He just sauntered in and started talking to someone else, saying he’d been assigned to help us. I saw him from across the room, sharing a quick moment very much like the first time we met, and my face broke into a ginormous smile. “GREG!” I yelled, and walked over to him, engulfing him in a big hug.

I pulled him aside for a while to talk, and it was as though nothing bad had ever happened between us. We fell into our comfortable friendship, laughing and smiling and telling stories. He told me how his parents were enjoying retirement (they had just retired when I last talked to him), and we talked mostly about what he’d been doing the last ten years or so.

And, as I said, if you promise not to read more into this than should be read: It was that sensation — of talking to and laughing with Greg — that left me so warm when I woke up today. That sensation that I’ve almost entirely forgotten now, because it’s been SO LONG. That sensation that kept me awake all hours of the night the summer before I went to college; a sensation that inspired fight after fight with my parents, who were convinced the only reason a 27-year-old man would befriend an 18-year-old barely-legal girl was nefarious.

If you had asked me this morning to describe my friendship with Greg, I could have given you broad strokes but no details. Thankfully, in the years I grew into the woman I am today, I did a meticulously good job of documenting everything through writing, so I can now share what of the story I did write with you here.

Why did I have this dream? I said I had a notion … let me try to be brief about it.

Something that I’m really spending a lot of time thinking about right now is at what point I should make adjustments in my life (by this I mean MAJOR adjustments) to move away from this career as a Web geekette and towards my future life as a professor. A major concern is, of course, financial; I make a decent living as a geekette, and making the changes that would make an academic life possible will most certainly cut into my bottom line.

I was just yesterday thinking, though, that here I am, 28 years old, and I *desperately* want to finish up my damned novel. I had hoped to do so this summer, before starting the doc program, while Daniel was in summer school. Of course, then he decided not to go to summer school, and we spent that time together instead. I was just yesterday thinking that many people suggest that part of turning 30 means letting go of your belief that someday you’ll be rich and/or famous. But I don’t want that — I want to publish, I want to write, I want to be that person. If I’m going to lose hope at 30, well dammit, I’ve got a deadline!

The book, you can now guess easily, is drawn heavily from those nine months or so my life was intertwined with Greg’s.

And having the dream I did has given me something I haven’t had in a decade: It’s reminded me why I fell for him in the first place. My story has stalled for months and months because I wasn’t sure how to write the part of the story that was warm and fuzzy… and the dream, well, it made me feel warm and fuzzy about those days again. For the first time since it happened.

And that, my friends, is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

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This is only slightly germane, but I wanted to post it anyway — a couple of what I feel are dead-on descriptions of me, an INFP: the Keirsey description and another pretty good one.