Another Elizabeth Said
In Class Again – A Dream
First, I was in a class that was finishing. Big classroom, many students, in a large and modern school. Once done, you’d advance to a higher level, or graduate and leave.
I wanted to advance and felt certain that I would. When it was announced that I would be part of the advancing class, I was very pleased; it was a welcome shift from recent dreams where I was consistently passed over. The male instructor then further commented that I had more credits than needed by a large number. My ego ballooned when I heard that.
A dozen were selected for advancing, including me. All the others were females. We had to share beds, which seemed peculiar, three or four to a bed. I slept on the edge of one bed, turned away from the women in the bed. One kissed me on the cheek and said, “Meet me in the break room.”
She and I went to the break room. It was supposed to be in the middle of the night, so we were surprised that the lights were all on and many people were doing things in there, mostly in discussion groups or studying. The women and I looked for a place to sit down. Then I was summoned to help move a large planter. Four people were already there, so I was surprised that they needed another.
Lifting it, I found it very light. All but one of the others then left. I was told to put the planter back where it was. When I protested, I was told that this was a ruse. The women had changed her mind about me, and was distracting me so she could leave.
I shrugged that off because that’s what I suspected was going on. As I was up (in the dream), I found a table and sat down to write.
The dream ended.
A Knowledge Dream
This dream could’ve been named a number of things. I first referred to it as the “Born to Run” dream. Then, as I remembered it, I decided the new title was more appropriate.
I was traveling by airlines in America through multiple, crowded airports. After going through Duluth, Minnesota, I went through Fargo, North Dakota. After Fargo, I found myself in a huge building. We’re talking a Superbowl stadium size.
Old, the building was well-maintained, with cavernous but mostly empty rooms except for towering gray cabinets. A woman introduced herself as a director. I was at a knowledge warehouse. Speaking to the air, the director told her staff to assist me with whatever I wanted. She told me to fill out my requests on a request form. The request form should include a learning objective. Catalogs of learning objectives were in the cabinets. I could use them to expedite the process.
Six other students showed up. They’d arrived before me but were coming to meet me and continue with their requests. The director asked me how I got there. After thinking, I said that I’d come through Fargo because that was the best way to get there. After acknowledging that, she departed.
I quickly completed a half-dozen learning objective requests. The other students went off to continue their learning. Thick folders for the first learning objectives soon arrived. Within minutes, I had a stack of them in front of me. Perusing them, I selected one for attention and started reading it as I walked around.
I found myself with a microphone. The warehouse was lit like a stage so I decided to perform “Born to Run”. As I was doing my performance, I realized that security cameras were present. Embarrassed, I quit my performance. Someone was trying to raise me, but I ignored him because I didn’t want to be mocked.
Wandering the warehouse, I soon found myself in wooded thicket. Movement ahead drew my interest. After some investigation, I saw a squirrel, and then a cat, and realized that the cat was chasing the squirrel.
I was summoned back to a meeting room. The other students were there. We sat at a table and talked about our learning objectives. More folders arrived for me. The director called for a few of us to go into another room with one specific folder. It was our choice which folder to bring.
Aha, epiphany. I needed to decide where I wanted to go, and it was a journey to a different, isolated location. I also had the responsibility to educate myself but resources were available to help.
Now, weirdly, the dream ended with “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” by Lesley Gore (1963).
Repost: Things I Learned Writing Knight of Valor by Elizabeth Drake
Elizabeth Drake wrote about the macro-process, time, and commitment to bring out her latest book, Knight of Valor. My most critical take-aways from her post was believe in yourself, trust yourself, don’t give up on yourself, keep trying, and keep learning.
Toughest of these for me is to trust myself. I seem to get easily shaken. Elizabeth wrote, “Part of the reason this book had so many revisions was I took a lot of advice I shouldn’t have. More benign advice was to write in any order than piece those scenes together. Yeaaaah, no. Doesn’t work for me, and it created a lot more work in the revision process.” I don’t take much advice, but I read a book that I enjoy, and my brain attempts to duplicate that book. Sort of, kind of, maybe the same sort of thing, because it results in false starts and dead ends. It’s a tough lesson to learn, and one that I learn again and again.
Scoot on over there and have a read.
Self-evident
It’s humbling to think about how little I know, and disturbing to ponder how much I’ve learned and forgotten, or how often I learned, retained, and applied wrong information.
The information was sometimes wrong because we thought that’s how things worked back when we learned it. Then, later, you discovered, “Oh, shit, that works for everyone else, but it doesn’t work for me.”
Yes, this is another Big Lie rant. The Big Lie is that we’re all the same. Eat these foods, gain these nutrients, do these exercises, and you should be good to go.
Yeah, they then admit — you know they, the great aggregate of society, social media, medical professions, governments, you know, they — well, they admit, there are some exceptions. Like, you may be diabetic because your body rejects the insulin it makes. So you’re like, whaat?
Maybe you’re allergic to things. Or you may have problems because your body doesn’t process certain vitamins and minerals well, rejecting them. Maybe you hear things different. Perhaps you hear shapes, or you taste something because you hear a sound.
Whacked, right?
I grew up learning that people that talked to themselves were most likely not right in the head in some way. Now we’ve learned, no, they’re probably fine. Their personality is different from your personality. Conversely, telling me to come out of my shell and socialize more works on the assumption that I’ve made a choice to stay in my shell and not socialize, and not because of the components at work inside me.
Not all people we called slow were slow thinkers, but they didn’t benefit from the learning environment. Too bad for them, back then, because we didn’t know.
We keep learning that there’s a lot that we don’t know, and that what we thought we knew and pushed as truth was wrong. This was sometimes done deliberately to further someone’s wealth — remember how they told us for years that smoking cigarettes aren’t bad? — or to achieve a political advantage.
That takes me to food shopping. Oh, lawdy. I’ve decided to cut down on processed foods and reduce my sugar intake, so I’m reading labels more intently than before. A correlation often exists; if a food is low-fat or non-fat, it’ll be loaded with sugar. If it’s sugar-free, it has a lot of fat.
They say — now — that supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals probably doesn’t do anything for you, if you’re healthy. You really can’t tell that from the advertising and commercials that abound, can you?
If you’re not healthy, too much of one mineral or vitamin can cause greater problems. All this comes with that caveat, for some people. You need to learn early that you may be some people. You learn by observing your body and reactions to different inputs, studying those differences, and consulting experts when necessary.
And these deficiencies can have profound effects. Constipated, tired, and depressed? You might have a potassium deficiency. Or something else. Just saying.
Consulting experts — or the Internet — doesn’t always work out. Some experts dismiss study results. Reasons vary for why they dismiss the results, or skew them. It could be from ignorance, religion, or false information that they acquired. It could be because they’re being paid to dismiss the evidence, or they’re pathological liars, or protecting someone or something else. This spectrum about why is as broad as humanity.
Even when you find your flaws and shortcomings and address your patterns to cope, it ain’t over. Your body and brain, and our society, are dynamic. Our body is changing, sometimes from aging, sometimes from abuse. Sometimes, it’s just a slow shift because of habits.
As a society, we’re always learning new information, or revealing old frauds, or finding something new about the human body. Our food security gets exposed in unimaginable ways. Consider from this week:
In each case, these findings surprised scientists and investigators because it wasn’t expected. The sunscreen lotions were most interesting to me. They’ve been around back to a time before governments, industries, or individuals worried about the active ingredients in sunscreens, so they were never tested. That was partly propagated by the good ol’ common sense approach that sunscreen is rubbed on your skin; how the heck would it get into your blood? (That’s typically followed by mocking chortles because doesn’t that seem so self-evident?)
Yeah, there’s a lot that isn’t self-evident, isn’t there?
The Lesson
Hearing the sharp meow, thumps, and swearing, she knew what’d happened.
He came in seconds later. “That cat is so stupid. He’s black. He knows I can’t see him, but he still lays on the rug, and I almost step on him or kick him, and he gets upset. You’d think he’d learn.”
She answered, “He’s a cat. You know he’s not very smart. You’d think that you’d learn by now.”
He glared at her for several seconds before saying, “Sure, take the cat’s side,” and stalking out.
The Micro-Code Dream
This is a recurring dream. I had it twice, maybe three times in the past few weeks. It’s also a sequel to another dream. The first dream was dreamed at least twice. Both dreams evolved in its depths and complexity, or my ability to remember them. As always, I wonder how much I remember and how much I manage to fill in gaps through my imagination without being aware that I’m doing so.
In both, the backdrop is that I’m with IBM. The first dream has me being given a project. Not uncommon. I have a print out of several pages. Most of the back pages are lines of micro-code. The first page is an explanation that this list of hospitals need to be notified of these micro-code changes by a specific date. It’s a Friday afternoon. The date is the following Monday. So, YIKES. The next four pages are lists of hospitals where this code needs to be applied, with identifying fields.
The first thing I do is get a yellow highlighter and a list of hospitals that are our customers. Then I go through the list, highlighting the hospitals that are our customers. I also make notes in black pen.
Follow-up is to create the letter to send these customers. I do this on a computer, merging the letter with the data fields from the hospital lists, import the letters into email, and send them out. Done and done. My boss checks on me. I confirm with her that it’s done. She’s surprised that it was done so quickly, and I show her what I did and how. Done and done.
The second dream has me at some team party. I work in a one-deep position, from home, so I know few people, but I’m on this campus with my team, who are usually just voices on the phone or names in emails. I’m wandering the party and encounter some product engineers. They heard that I took care of the hospital micro-code notification. They have questions. Essentially, they want reassured that it went okay.
First, I sit with a senior guy with the micro-code in a room full of computers on desks and in frames, with people working on things all around us. It’s very noisy with the sounds of fans, hard-drives, and conversations. He shows me the micro-code and begins to ask who and what questions.
Excusing myself, I go to my computer bag in the other room and get my working company, along with a print out of the letter that I sent, and another print out that shows who it went to and when. I give these to him and tell them what they are. He’s surprised and asks me why I gave them to him. I tell him, that’s what I would’ve wanted to know if I was following up.
Everything is quickly answered with these papers. Other of his team members come by to ask and see, and he tells them what I gave them, and they’re all relieved that it’s been done. Time to party.
But first, another team comes up to check on the project, too. The first team gives the second team my papers, tells them what I did, and everyone is satisfied.
As this ends, another engineer is talking loudly at a table. She’s talking about a modem’s identification and wondering who was dumb enough to use last names as part of a modem’s identification. As I turn, I hear another person say my full name, because that’s the name used as a modem identification.
I go over and tell them it was me and answer questions. Yes, it was ignorant, but I was ignorant about the process, working alone, and learning on the job. She said she can change it for me. I shrug that off, because we’re not using it anywhere except the lap now. It’s older and we use new stuff for production and operations, but the old stuff is helpful for trouble-shooting customer issues who are using old stuff.
That ends. Everyone is going off to the party in the next room. I begin a drift that way. Others find me and congratulate me for the work on the project. That amuses me because it seems like it was such a quick and easy project.
The main party is in a huge ballroom at the end of a hall. Music is blaring and people are dancing in there. That’s also where the restrooms are. I need to use one but can’t get to them because of the dancing crowd. I make a long detour around the crowd until I find a place where I can cut through, go in, use the bathroom, and come back out.
When I do, I’ve decided to look up some people while I’m there. I find several and huddle with them. Speaking loudly over the music, in a huddle with our arms intertwined over one another’s back, I tell them that I’ll be leaving soon, but I wanted to thank them and tell them how much I enjoyed working with them.
The dream ended.
Michael Seidel, writer 