The No-Pants Dream

I just awoke from one... not a literal no-pants dream, but a dream in which I found myself suddenly expected to deliver an extended presentation before an immense, stadium-sized crowd, a presentation on two subjects on which I am largely unqualified to present. The talks were to be on a gigantic campus of the sort one finds in public universities in Texas, though the campus looked more like Stanford.

The first obstacle was that I had been delivered to "my" classroom on one edge of the campus, and the talks were to be held in a hall on the opposite side, perhaps 5 or 10 miles away. If you haven't seen the main UT campus, or Texas A&M, or UH (University of Houston) campus, trust me... to get anywhere in a hurry, you need a helicopter, or at least an ultralight.

Somehow, magically, I arrived at the hall. The laptop containing my slideshow went missing. Seeing no alternative, I began one of the lectures... the one with the topic, "The Entire History of Western Music" ... without slides. Someone then located a physical box of old-fashioned slides for my talk, but they were in more or less random order. The other lecture was "The Entire History of the Theory and Practice of Public Health." I have almost no knowledge of that subject. I looked at the author line for the lecture; sure enough, it read "S. Bates, MSU" ... and I didn't have to ask what kind of degree that was; I had a "Makes Shit Up" degree.

So this is the first day in weeks that I've awakened in a well-disposed frame of mind, the first in which the reality I awakened to is better than the dream I left behind.