Glieuaeiel's DJ

[Another bad night; still sick. I woke up at 4:51 remembering something about a bike race on a mountainside where everyone crashed.]

Improvising a Screenplay (11:51)

I'm randomly driving around a town, improvising a screenplay aloud. I know some of the scenes won't come out perfect, but that's okay, because I'm only planning to use this as a sort of first draft. Once, a woman in a nearby car gives me a funny look, presumably because I'm apparently having a conversation with myself. Haha, oops.

The policemen and policewomen in this town are mounted on horseback, dressed in smart-looking blue uniforms with giant white feathers in their hats. There seem to be a lot of them on the road right now; I wonder why. Also, since I'm having trouble paying attention to the signs on the road and therefore making no few accidental violations of the law, I hope none of them have noticed me yet.

This car is new, and it comes with one of those small remote controls which can lock and unlock the doors. But this one also has another neat feature: if you're driving in a residential area and you click a certain button, the car automatically detects the nearest parking space, and directs your attention to it by slowing down and angling in that direction. There's a related feature for pulling out of parking spots which somehow detects passing traffic. I park and unpark a few times before eventually getting out to meet up with my family. I explain to them about the cool functionality in our new car.

Group Transportation (8:45)

A group of students at my college are traveling together one evening to get somewhere. However, the current stage of our trip is rather ad hoc: we're waiting on a curb to get picked up by people who have cars, but we're not sure who will be in which cars. So when I get in a friend's car and he drives off, I notice that there's someone back on the curb who didn't get a car, but there's still a spare seat in this car. I doubt my friend will be too happy about going back for him, but I tell him, anyway. He immediately starts turning around, but it's a complicated process, because this is a busy highway. For instance, we have to go a couple hundred feet down a side street.

Eventually we pick up the other guy. Then, later, we stop at a house on the outskirts of the city. I've never been here before. After a few minutes, it occurs to me to ask my friend whose house this is. He says it's somebody's dad's.

Frags:

• I'm watching a Miyazaki film in a theater. I'm surprised to realize, suddenly, that it's been dubbed in English, rather than just using subtitles.

[I just came down sick, so the only dream I remember is a feverish, tense one about being in a walking race where in order to succeed, you have to move your leg in slow motion in such a way that it crosses certain three-dimensional boundaries and surfaces in exactly the right way. Somehow you weave your foot's trajectory with the trajectories of other people's feet, and only one path can win. The dream was very closely tied to my own struggle to make it through the night in the face of fever and shivering and cramps. I woke up also at around 4:30.]

Wing Women (6:30)

A group of girls is talking to me in a side room. At the end of the conversation, they form a semicircle around one girl in the middle and ask me a question: something about adding up all of their ages and dividing by five. I realize that what they're really doing is trying to tell me that the girl in the middle is really cute and I should really consider dating her, because it would make her happy. Reflexively, I smile in response to the friendly gesture, and I actually think my smile turns out to be a nice one. Then the other girls go back to the main room, leaving me with the cute girl.

Despite being pretty sure of what I was just told, I'm still nervous about asking her on a date. We exchange a few awkward half-glances and half-sentences, then she asks me if I want to go to the parking lot. It will be quieter out there, so that's probably a good idea. We go back to the main room and find some friends trying to arrange rides home. One of them, a first-year from my college, has a small four-seater. Someone goes off to find her so we can ask her for a ride. Meanwhile, I realize that it's raining out here. I stack my belongings into a pile to protect them from the water. Another guy from my college, in the year above me, shows up. He's a pretty big guy, so he might not fit into the car with the rest of us, but I figure I should ask if he can come anyway. While we're waiting for the car's owner to arrive, I mention something about the rain, and the guy points out that I have a sports jacket in my pile of stuff, so I should just wear it, 'cuz that's what it's for. I suppose I can understand his frustration, because formal jackets are used nowadays only for fashion, not for utility.

The car's owner shows up, and I ask her if the guy can fit in the car with everyone. "He really can't," she responds. "I mean, look." The other passengers are loading in their musical instruments, including a cello and a double bass. They're taking up a lot of room already. I slide in my viola case underneath the others, then look around at all the passengers we're trying to squeeze in. I think we might all be able to fit.

Morning Dash (6:30)

I've invited a guy over to my house to work on a homework project. When we sit down at a table to work, I start asking him to help me fix some parts of my personal appearance, like my eyebrows and my hair. He gets angry and leaves.

Mom asks me to help her pack lunches for my sisters. I consider it for a moment, but then I decide that I have too much work to do this morning to help her with that. I tell her as much.

Later, I'm mostly packed to leave to catch the bus. Then my middle sister comes into the kitchen and starts talking about something interesting. A few minutes later, I look at the time and let out a yelp. I ask Mom if she thinks I can still make it to the bus on time, and she says she thinks so. I run out the back door and down the hill. When I look over my shoulder, I see the bus on a road behind me. It'll be going around the hill, so I have a bit of time before it reaches the stop, but I have to run as fast as I can. On the way, I get a little confused about where the bus stop is. I'm running along an unkempt path through the grass, with only two parallel lines of dirt to indicate that vehicles come through here. Then my sisters come running in from a side path. "That's the path Mom always uses," I call out to them, laughing. Then we find the bus stop. The bus is waiting for us.