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Not feeling particularly chipper or clever recently so I haven't had much desire to write. Hurricane Ike is blowing Texas up to Chicago so the skies here are about as soggy and expressionless as I am feeling. I sit in Starbucks about two hours a day, relishing contact with the outside world via Internet access, and otherwise lie on the nicely accoutered cushions of my couch reading one novel after another. (I am on my fourth of the week already.) Yesterday I took a long hot bike ride along Lake Michigan and thought of The Professor's House, a Willa Cather book that first Stephanie and then I really liked. The titular house overlooks Lake Michigan and the view is something the professor will not give up to move into a better house farther away from the lake. It's not as much about property rights as you might believe, but really more about cherishing an object as a memory rather than just as a commercial value. Which is a funny thing for me to be thinking about, surrounded as I am by new things in a gut rehab house that has no memories but a great deal of borrowed capital sunk into it.

The other books I've read/am reading are The Sun Also Rises, Love Marriage, A Walk in the Woods, Letters to a Young Poet, and The Tattooed Soldier, which put together make me feel masculine, moody and curt. (Btw, I have tried to battle back my female masculinity by spending a small fortune at the Gap. I am now able to answer that previously unanswerable question: "Who buys the $16.50 merlot-colored deep v-neck t-shirts from the Gap?") The second is the first novel by my friend and former college suitemate V.V. Ganeshanathan, which you all must buy immediately. I like imposing the authorial fallacy upon my reading of this book because I have known the author since we were eighteen, and I know her to be a journalist, and journalists prize their centrism/independence/moderation, and this book proclaims to be moderate (but also about choosing sides) but in fact condones the Tamil Tigers, which makes it a politically confounding and delightful book to be bothered by. I also joined a band yesterday, which is something I would ordinarily write about with more gusto, but again, Ike's overhead, and it is hard to work up the energy for excited typing when it is so glum outside. The small things that make me happy are: chatting by telephone with friends, one a dear friend who has a one-way ticket to an elephant-worshipping country very far away, and another a dear old (old old old) friend whom I lost touch with for too long, and who recently reentered my life at a point where we are both older and more mature and I am less of a crazy mean bitch so I can be a better friend now; and Lake Michigan, which is much larger than you'd think a body of freshwater in the middle of the country could be.

I wanted to write about two dreams I had recently.

In the first dream, I was at a house party. The house was dimly lit in orange inside and out, and the decorations reminded me of a Mexican family restaurant because the floor was hard brown tiles. I was tasked with filling a bowl with water for the dogs. I overfilled the bowl and carried it into a back room. I didn’t notice that there were four men sitting cross-legged on the floor of that room peering at laptops, so I tripped a bit and water sloshed over the edge of the bowl and onto some of the men, and also on their laptops. It was a party, so I grinned and said, “I’m Mandy.” One of the men said, “I am Sergei.” “Sergei?” I said. “Yes, you’re in my house,” Sergei said. He was not grinning at all. Neither were the other three men. I kept trying to stabilize the bowl but water kept spilling out. I realized that the man I was talking to was Sergei Brin, the founder of Google, and I was making a mess out of a special meeting to discuss a top-secret Google product by spilling water all over those secrets. I wanted to apologize to Sergei and make him understand that I knew who he was, so I tried to recall the Polish name of my high school journalism teacher, whose daughter Sergei had married. I forgot her name, but remembered it to be only three letters long. So I didn’t say anything, and I just left.

In the second dream, I was meeting Stephanie at an airport. Things occurred in real-time, i.e., it was Chicago on September 11, 2008. We were high. High on seeing each other, but also literally high on drugs. We held each other. I closed my eyes to kiss her and I was so dizzy but the feeling of her mouth on mine was so good. I tried desperately to open my eyes so that the dizziness might stop. I could not open them but I could feel her in my arms, so I knew she was there. When I finally forced my eyes open, it was 4 a.m. on September 12, 2008, and I was awake and alone in Chicago in a twin bed that smelled like curry. I had been dizzy because I had been in liminal sleep. Then I thought that I was a fool for waking myself from that dream.