Sliding and ripping my purse

I was at a New York City museum with a set a very tall, very steep steps. I'm talking scary, almost vertical steep (I think this stems from watching the Top Gear Bolivia episode in which the TG guys drive down an almost vertical incline of sand to reach the coast).

I started going down the steps on my butt step by step, only this was even getting difficult as the steps themselves started getting smaller and narrower. I saw a handrail, so I thought my best option was to move over to the handrail and slide down it like a fireman's pole.

As I started sliding, my handbag got caught on the railing. I tugged at it, and it ripped (though none of the contents came out), and I went on my way sliding down. When I reached the sidewalk, I surveyed the damage. It was a patent vinyl black sack, and one of the handles had ripped completely. Inside I had been carrying around (who knows why), this vintage fur headband that a friend's mom had passed on to me -- and that was ruined too.

Andrew McCarthy, pregnant women, and Peru

I was at a lecture with my mom and aunt. The room was sort of like the old lecture halls in McCosh at Princeton. Andrew McCarthy came up to me and said hi - apparently we had gone to high school together. When he left, I told my mom and aunt (in Chinese) that he was a movie star and we had gone to school together. They said that I should invite him to have dinner with us after the lecture. When he came back, he had notes scribbled on paper and gave them to us. He said these were his ideas for a movie script.

Then I was with my friend who was pregnant and wearing a gray seersucker sheath dress. She was thin and looked great - just the baby bump. I realized that I had been rude in not congratulating her sooner on expecting. Her 2-year-old was running around under the dining room table - he was proportioned like a 2-year-old but only about 1/2 the size, like a miniature kid. I tried to pick him up and he was tiny.

Then I was at some tourist site in Peru, walking along a trail full of other tourists. There were red llamas, and small buffaloes. There were also horses running down the mountains, followed by jockeys on foot running after them. I thought, I should take some pictures... Then the clouds broke and it started to rain hard, so I made my way into a building. It was a hotel, and there was a woman checking in who looked like a girl I went to high school with - at least from the back. She was pregnant and wearing a slinky black cocktail dress with cutouts, only because she was pregnant the dress didn't fit and she only had it halfway zipped up. She and her friend started talking to me - first about how quickly the weather had changed, then they also had a bunch of CDs of local pop music and wondered if I wanted them.

Anti social vampire me

I was on a flying bus with a bunch of other people whom I didn't know. The bus landed itself in front of a city hotel, and I started to get up to get off, and the other people on the bus looked at me like I was crazy. We need to pull into the garage first, they said. This, I realized, was because we were vampires and we would have fried in the sunlight.

So I checked into the hotel, and had to share a room with another fellow vampire stranger. We were next door to more of our kind who were throwing a big party, and I hated them all.

Random snippets

I ran into 4 people from work at a local cafe - they had just come from bible study at the University chapel, and asked if I was interested in joining.

My stuffed animal pig turned into a fat, little pink baby.

Conference or sleepover?

I was at a conference, only at times if felt like I was a kid there with other kids. At meals, it was a bit like worrying about whether you were sitting at a "cool" table in the cafeteria. I had the vague sense that some of my high school girl friends were there, but I hadn't found them. We had one workshop that was in an art studio, with a bunch of artists. Then when it was time to spend the night, we all slept in sleeping bags in the art studio.

Black Swan skin

I had little red wormlike spots all over my shoulders and down my arms. Kind of like Natalie Portman's budding bird feather skin in Black Swan. And on my back were growing a few huge barnacles with fluttering gaping mouths. It still makes my skin crawl just remembering this dream...

Wierdness at the movie theater and in the dining hall

Redneckhunter and I were walking through a big McMansion-type house. The house had an actual movie theater built in the house. A movie was starting so we tried to grab some seats - the theater was pretty full. We had to end up sitting separately, and I sat next to an African-American girl. After a while, I realized she was rubbing my leg. I started looking around for another empty seat, and I saw my friend Jim down the row across the aisle.

Later I was in a college or high school dining hall, wandering through trying to find a seat. I saw the guys from the band, The Walkmen, only they were really young. I must have been staring at them, because they noticed it and started joking about me.

After I sat down, I looked up and noticed an Asian girl across the room, who had a haircut like mine, with blunt bangs. Then I saw another girl like this, then another. They all had different faces, they didn't look like me, but they all had the same haircut, though blunter and more helmety than mine.