Sunday, June 24, 2007

Name that nightmare!

So I was snoring through a Sunday afternoon nap when suddenly, without warning, my son woke me up to deal with a severe gratitude-related emergency: he had been writing thank-you notes for graduation gifts when suddenly, without warning, he ran out of note cards. Normally I would be annoyed at being awakened for such a paltry reason, but in this case I was pleased because nothing could have been more annoying than the dream from which my son's request rescued me.

The entire dream featured a sound track of Borat singing his version of the Kazakh national anthem, but he kept getting stuck on the line about "inferior potassium," which doesn't scan no matter how you sing it. Having that particular song stuck in one's head is nightmare enough, but that's not the worst of it: I was standing in front of a class of freshmen on the first day of class and I couldn't get the technology to work. There was this rolling cart with a projector and a laptop computer and a lot of cords, and the only way I could make the thing work was to attach all the cords to the right pieces of equipment in the right configuration. In the end I had cords wrapped around my wrist and stuck to my glasses and in my ear, and every time I moved just a little bit, the cart would shift and throw the whole thing out of whack again so I had to start over.

Meanwhile, all these students, unamused by my incompetence, were getting restless in their seats. "We'll get started just as soon as I attach this cord," I would say, and then I would cough and dislodge all the cords again. And Borat just kept singing.

Which would you rather deal with: Borat and cords and restless students or a lack of note cards? I got up, found the note-cards, saved the day--but for some reason, that Borat fellow just won't shut up.

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