I was in school. It was winter, but early winter. I was wearing my super heavy coat with the fake fur lining the hood, from high school. I had it all zipped up and my rabbit fur hat on too.

A bunch of black kids started making fun of me, saying it wasn’t that cold, what was I gonna look like when it’s -10. I said, if I want to be warm, I’m gonna be warm!

At an art competition. The first contestant does something cool with spray paint in the time allotted. Some sort of technique allowed him to spray a watermelon texture onto a bicycle. It dried up super fast into the final color.

The next contestant was doing something crazy. A pair of pilots were drawn beforehand, and she was going over some details with a black marker. She was spending too much time on the details. She was tracing very faint details like numbers reflected in the pilots helmets from the dashboard. Time was up, and she hadn’t even begun painting. Somehow she gets extra time to do the painting, must be in the rules. One of the announcers makes a joke, and I say “viscous mockery!”.

Dreaming I was inside a Battlebit match, but it was real. The enemy was swarming our position. I call a supply drop down as last resort cover. I throw grenades at several enemies, does not stop their approach. As they near me I have no choice; I pull out a grenade and frighten them off with it, but it explodes in my hand. Knowing I’m done for, I pull out two more grenades and put them at the top of my head. I feel the first one go off, but not the second; presumably I’d died.

Dad visiting, wanting to do something so he puts on the video game Midnight Club, but not any one I’d ever played. I yelled at him, we were talking about a mathematical representation of the thrust of the video game car. Something about two motorcycles strapped together, he was suggesting the engine for the second be in a normal position and I got upset, it didn’t matter because it was just a math representation and didn’t have a real meaning.

Aliens seem to have invaded. I see crop circles in my backyard, more like tears of the kingdom impressions in the grass. I saw a small little drone flying around. There’s nothing definitive yet, publicly, but I’m conversing with a neighbor who also saw the drone, and saw the same shape. Sort of a twitter-bird shape with the head instead looking like an old-time camera with three lenses. It hovered in place, watching me. It was supremely unsettling.

Hanging w min and Andrew. In Nevada, mins got some sort of ministry/army stuff to do. Army is in the desert because they’re cleaning up old military waste equipment. Looks almost post-apocalyptic, there’s old green machines piled up high in the sand under old highway overpasses.

Min tells us about his troop leader / pastor who has an activity for us. It’s a large invisible maze, and we are given sand to throw on it to navigate. Every once in a while the maze is moved.

Dreamt I had a bullet fragment lodged in my eyeball. It wasn’t painful, but it was annoying. I had tried to get it out with a magnet the second day, but it didn’t come out, the cornea had healed and it was just pushing against the cornea. I stopped and figured a doctor should do it.

I visit some places I “typically” go (none of which I really typically go). One place hired young summer teenagers to do everything; ok for picking up medicine maybe but not for surgery. The other place took a look at my eye and asked if I had cataracts; no, I said, it’s actually a bullet. They placed some device on my eyeball, and began to extract it. I was concerned but let them do it. I was having second thoughts and wanted the Cleveland Clinic to do it but never did it. Dream ended before it could be removed.

At a conference with Cornell colleagues again, hybrid with a school summer camp. I fly in to Bayside where it’s being held. Cat, Gerardo, DJ, and Angela are all there.

I’m the morning we take a minivan to our destination. A king and queen ant were wandering the cabin, but they both really looked more like termite queens, where the “king” had big pincers, and the queen just had short pincers. I remark on this to Angela when we see her.

We’re in CA with Andrew. We are playing a milsim, and Andrew’s leading us to some objective.

Playing scrabble with my family. Matthew puts “gleoc” down and I’m like, “what, the beast from Zelda?” He’s like yeah, and I storm off, throwing a piece across the parking lot(?), muttering that fine I’ll start playing animal noises next. It wasn’t even spelled right, it’s gleeok. I try to find the piece but I cannot, I only find matchbooks on the floor. I figure the item might have gotten smushed by now. Someone else’s mom is screaming at her kids while they get into their car.

In a dorm. Walking to my room. EMTs are there, want to see me. They load me onto a stretcher, place a pair of bright orange boots onto my legs, which immediately chill ice cold and freeze in place, locking my legs. We stay and talk for a while.

Second part. Romeo + Juliet on set. Tarantino directing. One of the actors flubs his lines (I have the script) while he pilots a drone to creep on a girl. I ask Lisa if Tarantino directed it this way. Anyway they bring guns out with a spotlight on the gunbearer, I guess Romeo and Tybalt are going to duel. Or something.