Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

11 Jan 2014, 8:21 a.m.

Also A Bunch Of Indian Kids Were Avoiding A Puja By Watching "Sleepless In Seattle"

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

A dream from last night included these bits:

I was a teen actress on a sitcom. We were filming a story in which a burglar broke into our kitchen, the kids came downstairs to check, and the burglar successfully hid on top of the refrigerator. However, one of the actresses portraying a teen in the sitcom was so tall that audiences would reasonably wonder, why doesn't she see him on top of that fridge?, and so the show fired her, thus arguably causing a much bigger plot hole (where did Mallory go?).

I was at a big party, seated next to other actors. An adult man sat next to me and started chatting with me, and I came to recognize that he was flirting with me. I enjoyed the attention, while reminding myself that I couldn't trust any feeling of connection. At some point I facetiously hypothesized that people's appearances reflect industrial design in their decades of origin -- people born in the 1960s look like cool sixties phones or reel-to-reel tape recorders, people born in the 1980s look like orange plastic lunchboxes. As I was saying this, the man's partner came by, and resentfully asked me what the product of a union of those people would look like?! I tried to gracefully back away from her insinuation by saying that it probably wouldn't work out. She dragged him away from our table and I shouted after her: "I'm fifteen, I'm not trying to steal your man! I don't even have a car!"

In the past few years I've gotten used to dreams with a lot more clear-cut wish fulfillment (e.g., the recent dream in which xkcd creator Randall Munroe tutored me in how to use Kerbal Space Program) or anxiety (e.g., the missing-a-flight or fertility dreams). My dream last night felt more Pynchon than Buzzfeed, and for that I'm grateful.