Is being in a teen chick flick a dream or a nightmare?

Another day, another dollar, another dream. This one is much less excruciatingly, er, exhaustively detailed. And I make cranky complaints, too.

Another weird dream. But I waited too long to write anything down, so now I only remember some weird mention of BART, I think, and me as some sort of capricious Parker Posey-type character, and a roller coaster, and some weird teen-chick-flick romance dynamic with a sweet and humble guy, and then me being arrogant and flying/piloting a car off the rails and landing my party in some weird open-air apartment where the owner was about to come home.

I think that there were suggestions that certain people were people I know, just as there were in my last dream. But it's tough to tell, especially after showering and doing other stuff in real life. Note also that on Sunday night, I had discussed teen flicks with my friend Angel.

Once upon a time, Angel and I saw a really bad teen flick, the one saving grace of which was a scene in which the exuberant male lead, having gotten a date with the girl of his dreams, plays a vibrant "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" on his accordion. Oh, and the smart girl uses Salinger to some effect. We came in late, and I don't remember the title. She's All That? Loser? In any case, Angel informed me that Sugar and Spice was even worse than the accordion movie. Wow. That takes doing.

And, in the bad teen flick she and I saw, there was a capricious secondary female lead, the one our hero thought he wanted, and various thoughts over the past week or so had reminded me of her. More fickle than a movie-theater marquee. More arbitrary than a financial aid deadline.

And -- and here's the weird thing -- I was going through my out-box yesterday, and the very first email in my out-box ever on this machine was about this movie, and was the first real email I ever wrote to a person to whom I now write a lot of email. But about ten months passed between me sending that email and me sending my next email to him.

If a feminine-appeal movie is a chick flick, doesn't that create an obvious rhyming parallel for action-type masculine-appealing movies?

It's May Day. But my NPR station DJ notes the most important news, namely, that it's the beginning of National Bike Month! I imagine you can't wish a happy revolution to all the commies out there if you get government funding. Ah, but Morning Edition tells me that there are lots of labor protests today, all across the world. Even in nontrendy places. Good.

There is some sort of cruelty in assigning a paper at Berkeley, hotbed of activism, to be due on May Day.

Today is the anniversary of the capture of Francis Gary Powers, U-2 pilot, by the USSR. And just a little while ago was the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space journey, the first. Makes me glad to study Russian. Just think, if they'd kept up the good work, maybe I'd be speaking it already.

Hamlet. "This is not your grandfather's lumbering five-act Hamlet," the New York Times informed me of Peter Brook's new production. I always rather liked the old one. I see what he's trying to do, but I never believed I'd feel crochety about Hamlet.

Poll: Most Useful Language

• Taxilinga
• Esperanto
• Pig Latin

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Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/1/104514/1325