What The Hell?

I had another one of those dreams early this morning after which I awaken and ask myself, “What the hell?” and then can’t get back to sleep.

In the dream, I’d been forced to or made a stupid decision to attend a house-party with a bunch of family members and high school “friends” who’d never liked me much and seemed to take pleasure in making me feel insignificant.  At one point, as we were all walking through an airport in order to board airplanes to return to our places, as the ancient biblical phrase has it, one of these delightful people thought it would be lovely to turn around and snap a group photo.  I kept walking in order to put as much distance between the “event” as well as those people and myself as I could in the amount of time it took for them to pose and for the photographer to snap the picture.  In the dream world that brought out into the open my feelings about the whole horrible meet-up and allowed my “friends” and “family” to more openly show their contempt for me.  By that time, all I could think of was finding my departure gate and hoping I had something interesting to read in my carry-on.  Oddly, the airport had been made up to look like one of those cottage-like boutiques one finds in small “arty” communities out of which the genuinely artistically gifted people have moved because its trendiness resulted in higher rents and lower employment and the artisans found themselves scorned by the Art lovers.

Themes I identify from the dream are 1) not belonging while 2) grouped by circumstance self-or-other-chosen 3) with false friends and 4) “false” family and 5) a strong desire to get the hell away 6) from the circumstance and 7) from the people I’ve been grouped with in that circumstance.

Several weeks ago, I got a mailer from my high school’s reunion committee.  I looked at it, wondered how those people managed to obtain my address (they did it through a company that, according to the mailer, specializes in managing the details for high school reunions), looked at the names of the committee-members, thought “Why would I want to see any of those people again?” and popped it in the shred-bin.

At the house, my wife and I have been watching DVD reruns from the TV serial, Glee.  Another factor possibly contributing to last night’s bad dream.  Funny TV show, but…

I am not the same half-mad, deeply troubled, self-destructive boy I was when I graduated high school; but for all his flaws, that kid was better then than all of the monsters infesting my dream last night put together.

Idiocracy

Yesterday I interviewed then oversaw testing of a very bright young man at a mid-state location.  During discussion afterward he described his frustration with the majority of other “students” at his high school.  He described the majority of the school’s enrollees as having a lack of interest in reasonable things, a lack of respect for self and others, problems with self-direction, and so forth.  He used the term “idiocracy” to describe the mental status of most of the young people enrolled at the school.  I think he meant to say “idiocy,” but the boy’s misstatement surprised and made my colleague and me laugh out loud.  I blurted out, laughing, “Well, that’s our form of government.”  Rule of, by, and for the idiots – frustrating.