Reflections and Echos

True

I get the feeling as college winds down this year that I should be setting some of my memories down, whether they are good or bad. I can actually remember most of the past three years to the extent that the parts that are a haze are not because I can't remember, but because I was drunk. Which wasn't a whole heck of a lot. I've already started with the story about Prospectives Weekend. But before I go on about myself, I would like to interpret an action that my brother reportedly performed in his sleep.

Apparently, in his sleep, he "reached out to his left, smashed his hand on the chair several times, and said 'true' ". There are several explanations for this action, which I will now go into.

1) You have been reading the Three Kingdoms, and were dreaming that you were some minor warlord (Liu Biao, Yuan Shao), and were, as usual, agreeing completely with one (but only one) of your flunkies. As in "True!! I must trust Liu Bei when he says his brother did not kill my general. Send out number two to get beheaded as well."

2) Reaching to your left is a sign of warding off evil. (Sinister). The smashing of the hand suggests some kind of evil bug, perhaps a spider or a cockroach. In your dream, you were defeating this evil, after which you proclaimed your victory over the darkness and evil with the word "True". Veritas (Truth) over Sinister (Evil Bug). Essentially, a superhero dream.

3) In your dream, you were in a bar, or had some kind of alcoholic beverage (probably Budweiser). Since you were with roommates on a trip, this suggests that you subconciously desired to continue bonding with them in your sleep (over conversation and a beer). The pounding was your emphatic agreement with one of their statements, as was the word true, which of course is also the motto for Budweiser.

4) You had a visitation by deceased Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (the Chief Justice of a very activist court). You are displeased by the current court's strict interpretation stance and wish for them to become more activist and grow a backbone and support Roe vs. Wade and pass more civil rights legislation. Unfortunately, Warren was naked in the dream and you banished the vision forthwith.

So there you go. One of those must explain why you would reach out to your left and pound the chair and say "True". If anyone cares to vote on this, leave a comment. Or suggest an alternate interpretation.

Now, I would like to write a little about college. Nothing extensive, just some thoughts.

Before college, for about two years, I was a member of the Official Fiona Apple Message Board. No joke. It was run through Sony, and some of the members had been there since her first album (maybe before even). I can't actually remember what my user name was, but I seem to remember that it had something to do with one of her song titles, like "Never is a Promise". "Sleep to Dream"? "Shadowboxer"? I can't remember now which is rather odd, considering I read and posted regularly.

Most of the users were female, with an age range apparently between 15 and 35ish. Any male users were gay. Since I neglected to introduce myself right off the bat it was about five months before the other posters found out I was male, and another week or two before they figured out that I was straight. And no, I'm not ashamed of this. Because in the end, it didn't actually make them treat me any differently, which was very cool. A very chill bunch, they were. One's gender is rather immaterial when talking about music, in the end.

The first thread that I read before I signed up was one entitled "Vagina Juice". The thread was over a year old and had over 50 pages in it. I don't remember how it started, but it was basically fifty pages, so over a thousand posts, most of them joking, about ways to market a drink called "Vagina Juice". Needless to say (I was immature then . . . wait, no, I would still sign up for a message board that had a 50 page thread entitled Vagina Juice) I thought it was amazingly amusing so I signed up.

And so by the beginning of freshman year, I had been in this group for a while. Almost a year and a half. I posted regularly and often checked threads into the wee hours of the morning. Which senior year of high school meant 1:00 AM. I found myself posting less after school started, since I was meeting new people and all that junk that one does as a freshman. Classes or something like that. I still talked to some of them online via AIM, but I posted much less. About a month and a half in, I stopped posting for a good amount of time. Part of the reason was because of school. But another part was because some of the older users had left, and the influx of n00bs was too much. Too many people posting about "how cool Fiona's music is" and asking "what does the video for Criminal mean" or "Does anyone have the entire poem that is the title for "When the Pawn"?" And so I stopped visiting the site altogether.

Before Spring Term started (I think it was then), I revisited the site. Only to find that the site was not there anymore. It had moved, as I guess Sony decided to redesign their message board system. The format was completely changed, and just looking at the front page I could tell that even more people had left. In fact, aside from a couple of moderators and regulars, everyone else was gone. I know that when you talk to people online, you might only keep up for a long time with the ones that you get really close to, but it still is weird to me that an entire community just went away in the space of a couple of months. Perhaps it had been going away for a while. Is it a community if it can disappear that easily?

So that's it for now. Only tangentially related to college perhaps, but then again, perhaps not.

Echos of "Vagina Juice" through the empty electronic corridors . . .