Vitanuova for 2001 July 10

Cross

Hey, somebody else noticed the big blue cross!

Anirvan and I ate dinner on Sunday at the Mediterranean place across from that church. Then a number of us ate there the following day.

Monday

I had a chiropractic appointment and a sore arm, and I worked at EFF for a bit. Various other things happened, too.

Dreams

I had a bunch of interesting dreams recently, and didn't write them down in time to remember them in detail.

One of them involved playing a board game on the subject of growing up. It's extremely difficult to explain; the object of the game was to grow up, and growing up was represented as a particular one-time event that happens once you have accomplished four specific "themes" (this was kind of like Trivial Pursuit, where you have to collect those pie-shaped wedges, each representing knowledge of a particular area).

Unlike Trivial Pursuit, here the themes were very serious life-experience things -- I wish I had made a list of what they were. I think one of them was "Sexual Experience" or "Romantic Experience" and another was "Death" or "Consciousness of Mortality" or something. And so if you could get all four of these things, then in the context of this board game you would win and grow up.

The way that you got the themes was by experiencing and "completing" certain scenarios, which somehow presented themselves as actual experience (maybe it was like a scavenger hunt: "Go out and find some Consciousness of Mortality and Romantic Experience, and don't come back until you've achieved both!" or maybe it was like a video game, in that holographic scenarios like a Star Trek holodeck would pop up around us when we started a particular theme).

So the result was that I, in the board-game character of a small child, had four successive upsetting experiences and collected all of the themes. The scenarios were frightening, something like the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker has to fight images which are supposed to represent his own fears.

I did eventually "win" and grow up; there was a strong element of magic in the board game, kind of like the movie Jumanji. So let us say that this dream was kind of a pastiche of Jumanji, Trivial Pursuit, the Holodeck, and the scene of Luke Skywalker in the cave. I think it was closest to Jumanji, of these.

After that dream, I had another dream in which I was accused of doing something wrong. And I know I've had another dream recently that I didn't remember.

More Monday

I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park with Ronnie and then went to dinner with a number of people.

Ronnie gave me letters my mother wrote to her between 1978 and 1983, one of which includes a newspaper photograph of me from when I was about four. I'll try to scan that and put it up on the web.

My arm is extremely sore -- very, very sore.

I bought plane tickets for my trip to the East Coast for Eric's wedding. It was an elaborate process on the phone with a travel agent. One conclusion: travel agents are better at searching for a variety of possible itineraries than you are. Another: if you are being a good patent opponent and boycotting these folks, you will probably get the lowest rate by calling a travel agent and being flexible. The various web sites that sell plane tickets are very convenient but may not give you the absolute lowest possible fare. (Of course, the absolute lowest possible fare involves things like being on standby, or deliberately getting bumped, or other really inconvenient things. So let's say "the absolute lowest fare where you actually know when you are going to be traveling".)