I had weird dreams last night.
I had one where I was walking around mental institution. I was trying to talk to these therapists. I was talking to them as a peer or as a potential peer. One of them said something to me that didn't make much sense, and I was trying to get her to explain as we walked down this long corridor.
What she said was vague, though. And I couldn't quite understand. It seemed rather cynical and I was thinking about how this woman had as many issues as her patients did.
The other was nice and helpful though, and I had a lot of respect for her.
She seemed to be well balanced, a healthy mix of idealism and realism. I asked her a question that was very important. But before she could answer, the corridor was filled with patients who were running quickly, to this black end of the corridor that was a void, jumping off like lemmings. The two therapists followed them, off into the void.
I wandered around aimlessly, confused and somewhat sad and creeped out. The institution was now nearly deserted. Finally, a nurse approached me and asked if I was a patient or if I was there to visit somebody.
I told her neither, that I was writing an article on the institution but everyone was gone and this had to be the creepiest institution I had ever been in.
She told me "Oh, well he [not sure who the he she referred to was] was only a patient here for a little while and our treatment didn't really help him anyways.
I startled awake in that way that you need to walk around for a minute before going back to bed.

I also dreamed that Kevin Smith came over to my apartment. I didn't want to be some doting fan or another loser with a screenplay to sell, so I didn't say much. We sat on seperate couches, watching tv for awhile and then he left.
Weird.


July 2, 2002

So, I went to orientation yesterday.
I overslept by about forty five minutes, so I didn't have time to eat breakfast. I rushed to the bus stop, and by the time I'd done the mile walk, I felt ready to pass out.
I got there a little early, but the line from the mcdonalds was so long that I didn't think I'd have time to eat my food after I got it, so I just got a kitkat and some water at the convenience store to hold me over, then headed to orientation.
I then proceeded to sit around and wait for forty minutes for orientation to start, cursing my sense of responsibility by showing up on time rather than getting some "real" food for breakfast. I need to remember this is college, not a job, and unlearn certain more responsible traits of mine.
This woman started talking to me who was nice, but kind of loopy and really uncertain and fearful. Now let me explain something about myself. This (along with the crazy magnet thing) is why I have often thought of becoming a therapist. For whatever reason, every time I have ever been at some kind of school orientation or job training class or whathaveyou, there's always one person who is just incredibly neurotic about the whole experience and kind of gloms onto me to help them get through this. Seriously. I have seen it happen time and time again. For whatever reason, people find me to be incredibly approachable. I got that with this person, who sat down next to me, started asking me all kinds of questions about school, orientation and myself, and was obviously quite nervous. She kept trying to explain why she was wearing a business suit (she had come from a job interview) and seemed in total awe of the fact that I had a lot of Sanrio stuff (assumed that I must have gone to Japan. I explained to her that I had actually got all of this at the Woodfield Mall in Chicago because there's a Sanrio store there.) then started asking about if she had to be there at orientation because she had already done a bunch of the stuff that was to be discussed and that she had to meet a friend later, and it could be a really long day. This last matter she asked me about several times until I finally said, "why don't you ask them at the front desk?" (where we had checked in.) She seemed to think that this was utterly ingenious, thanked me profusely and left.
So then we had a rather long financial aid lecture. Almost everything was old hat to me, but I did have a couple of questions he was able to answer. I thought it was funny how the man told us to be very careful to pick practical majors because otherwise we wouldn't be able to pay on our loans and then it would ruin our credit which would make us unable to get good jobs. At this point I thought of the boy who up until recently was in default on his loans (they seized his tax refunds until it was paid off) and was still able to get a high level security job at Lockheed Martin. Yeah, right, student loan debt will keep you from getting a job. But I guess they have to give those scare speeches. I mean, when I actually have money I like to pay off my debts and be responsible, but there probably are some people who don't and so they need to cover their own ass.
Then we got the speech from the campus police. He showed us all these statistics remarking how safe the Wayne campus was, in contrast to both the suburbs and other state colleges.
When he got to Detroit's crime statistics he tried to blame it on the fact that it's more urban. Since Detroit's per capita homicide rate is almost double Chicago's and almost five times what New York's is, I said "Wasn't Detroit ranked having the #1 per capita homicide rate in the FBI's crime statistics?" and he had to admit that he didn't know but it wouldn't surprise him, which elicited nervous laughter from the other students.
The campus cop then told us all these basic common sense things (e.g. "don't leave an expensive laptop in the library while you go out for a smoke"; "don't leave valuables in plain view in your car") then shared a story that I found to be hilarious. He told a story about a law student that supported himself solely by stealing textbooks and selling them back to the school. He had sold 500 text books before he was caught. Okay, maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it be kind of obvious well before he hit the 500 number that these weren't all questions he was asking? Wouldn't they have figured out after the first, I don't know, twenty books that he couldn't possibly be taking all these classes? Maybe it's just me. But at any rate, it was funny.
Afterwards, I signed up for my classes.
I'm taking:
-British Literature to 1700
-Intro to Theatre
-Playwriting
-Elementary Italian
-Undergraduate Education ( a required course on research and libraries and such)
I think that's a pretty good schedule, and I'm really excited. It's nice to actually be going to real university, instead of community colleges and low end art schools. In general, I'm feeling optimisitic about the future.