Sunday, August 17, 2008

Poor aim

Periodically I have anxiety dreams about being in high school. In these dreams, I'm my current age, but for some reason I have to retake one of my high school classes (usually calculus) and attempt to blend in with kids at least a decade my junior. What makes these anxiety dreams is that invariably I've forgotten something important--such as an assignment, a test, or the location of the classroom. And then my dream-self feels really stupid because I graduated high school in 1997 and yet I can't get my act together to do the same stuff all over again as an adult.

(I must be growing up, though, because I had a dream the other night about having to go back to my doctoral program in order to retake statistics. In my dream, the class was taught by a computer science professor I had as an undergrad, and she'd assigned some gigantic research paper that I'd completely forgotten to do. Most of the rest of the dream was me dropping the F-bomb left and right about having neglected to write this paper.)

In my parents' mail yesterday was a piece for me. Every so often I get mail at their address, where I haven't lived since 2001, and it's usually a Mathcounts alumni newsletter. This piece of mail, however, left me speechless. I have no idea how I became targeted for this mailing, let alone why it went to my parents' address; but anyway, here it is for your amusement:



To the direct-mail genius who thought I might be interested in attending an alternative high school: That's Dr. G to you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha, my anxiety dreams are always high school too. Never college or grad school, always high school. They are usually either not being able to find my class/not knowing what class I have next, or having a math final and for some reason having not gone to class all year so having no idea what is on it.

Butterfly said...

Hmm, maybe they messed up and were thinking about hiring you?

Anonymous said...

OMG! I have a recurring dream that the school district has revoked my high school diploma, and I have to start all over again. Of course, this means all college credits become null and void. Invariably, I'm looking for classrooms for classes I've never attended on the day of final exams.

It's interesting to learn others have similar dreams.