I dreamed that I was talking to my boss, and we were supposed to go on some sort of recreational pasttime. nobody had any suggestions, so I gave in and said I would show her how to bowl properly. she had no idea I knew.

we went to the bowling lane, and I said let's start with showing you how to pick out a bowling ball with a proper fit. we started looking at the house balls, and I was sort of showing her backwards (putting the thumb in and seeing where the fingers fell, instead of vice versa). then I realized, none of the balls would fit, becuase her right hand ring finger was all stumpy and deformed, not like it had been cut off or something, but like it had grown thick and short instead of proportional to the rest of her fingers.

in this dream, I am not sure what I was doing, but it was some sort of rendering project with Weezy and Leyla. I was about to do the first pass and then test it by driving up sharp park road. the guy in charge asked me if I wanted to turn on the natural lighting of the building silhouettes, and I thought maybe I did not, but couldn't figure out why not. so I said yes.

I drove up sharp park and looking off to the left where the building should be there was nothing but gre. that will never do, I thought, and realized why I should be using the older way to render the buildings: so the viewer could see them.

I made it back and Leyla was upset I had messed it up. but since the fix was known, I wasn't too worried.

the family was a clan of sorts, of some eastern culture. we had a big house and lots of cousins and were fairly self-sufficient.

one young woman had a mascot-like role. she was to somehow be on display with a physical binding to the god, like a fairly large piercing hole and a cable through it. the guy who does this is older and somewhat mad which makes everyone think he is god-touched but really he's just arbitrary.

the woman ran away after the first time. it was uncomfortable and boring. they found her and brought her back. she wasn't concerned; this is what she was supposed to do. but the second time the guy put tht cable in her nose, through one of her teeth, and decided to make it emerge from the middle of her left jaw and bind her to her spot. I asked the guy if this was the word of the god. he said no not really he thought it was artistic.

my cousin had just become some sort of blessed warrior type and he reassured me. it will be OK, he said. but I couldn't watch them inflict that pain on her. I went travelling, wandering.

I was riding the bus with Jen Yee. I was wearing my bulky gap hoodie, and it was dark out, recently dark, like right after twilight. her stop was the second to last before the bus reached the end of the line and turned around. we were talking the way one always talks with friends on the bus.

we got to her stop and she made as if to go. there weren't very many people on the bus. we both stood up to hug goodbye. but somehow that turned into a kiss which in turn became... intense and passionate. we ended up on one of the bus seats sort of reclined back and by the time we came back up for air, the bus was past her stop... going the other way.

it was pretty realistic, even down to the normal self-doubt I initially experience in such situations and how that melts away. intense. after, we had that sort of harmony that comes from a singleness of purpose between two people whose evening plans had suddenly made that particular kind of absolute change. we couldn't go back to my place, we couldn't go to her place. we can go to my grandparents' place, she said. they are out of town playing golf and it's totally empty. that was what we decided as we sort of lay there on the reclined bus seat. I started considering in my own head where I got the capacity to do this... I thought it had been burned out of me long ago...

Jen asked me, do you have any more of those candies? (those candies being the weird Japanese rock candies like Ingrid brought back from Japan.) I laughed and said I did. if you tell me where to get them, I'll [unprintable] she said, very quietly. I gave her a wry look and told her that was not necessary, and pointed out a local shop that carried them.

and then, to my amazed disappointment, I woke up. oh... this was a dream. but I am left considering, that maybe parts of my psyche I thought were burned out of me forever... weren't really.

I don't know if I am remembering two separate dreams or not... I was visiting home, not sure if it was supposed to be my immediate family. I think I was visiting because I was doing some work consulting.

I didn't like these people. the father type was distant, and was a lot like Enrique from work. he was married to a woman none of us liked... I didn't know her very well, but the siblings were vicious about her. the brother worked at QA at Apple, but it wasn't set up like anything I knew. you got little grades like military awards, and he wa one short of having them all/getting the top one. I was his equivalent from the far past but old computer knowledge is not terribly useful. I think the sister type was in law school.

the family was in south, maybe central Berkeley, which in my dream was a much larger place, and the Apple/consulting place was there. I was in a meeting with other QA engineers, which my brother ditched and I found they were all fearful of him and amazed I was not, which got me wondering. I found myself walking up Shattuck on a sunny afternoon. I came across some Jesus freak selling newspapers... the one I bought was a gossip rag talking about the various affairs the wife was having.

this was war, damnit.

the three of us raced through the bunker. he held the quad launcher, it was too heavy for him to do anything but point and shoot. she held the ammo, and I loaded it. it was a big bunker. we had to worry about people emerging from all kinds of passageways.

we got to this part that was either a locker room or bathroom or something like that, near the deep end of the bunker. realizing it was hopeless, we started stuffing all the ordnance into one of the lockers. he looked at me. go, go he said. she said, what happens next will be very hard for you. I ran further into the bunker, back to where I knew there was a wall protecting the injured folks. I got there and there was one woman in a bed who looked at me curiously. I found a couple candies on a counter and started to eat one, and then the world came apart as all our ordnance exploded in the other room.

it was Heather's birt'day. I was sitting with her and Ingrid, in seats that were like the waiting area in an airport. look Heather says, damon sent me a birt'day card. I look and it was a very formal birt'day card, and inside was a copy of his Citibank bill. just paid off.

Heather was displeased and took it to be his boasting about his financial situation being better than hers. she wanted to toss it and Karine agreed. I grabbed it out of the trash. no no, I said, now we can find something out about him now. I looked at the bill and it was for some city on Oahu. I asked Ingrid if she ever saw Damon and she said no. the bill looked weird and I couldn't figure it out. [well actually it was two levels of weird. what seemed normal in the dream but was weird was that it looked like an AT&T bill.] then I realized that Oahu was in the address as if it was the state. the city was some really long name like Halekalannini but that's not really it.

Heather still didn't care, but Ingrid didn't recognize the town name and was curious. then I woke up.