Leslie's Dream Time

My son’s girlfriend, Leslie, has read my blog and declared, “There is nothing personal in it”. Well dear Lesley, I don’t think my life as a student/manager/husband/father is very interesting, so I don’t normally look inward, but prefer to commend on the evils and foibles of the world around us. But, because you read and look for the personal in what I write, I will write it. (cause I like you!)

We’ll start with a dream. I dream a lot. Every night, many times a night, and to my distress, I remember them all. Normally my dreams are all about solving some big, hard to understand, complex, logic problem. Only it is a lunatic’s logic and it cannot be solved, and then I go crazy and end up killing people. I say normally because if I read or watch a monster movie, I dream about monsters for weeks to come. But, I've had no monster exposure lately, so last night's dream was about grad school again.

Grad school sucks and well, it occupies much of my dream life as well as most of my waking life. Usually, my dreams go something like this: The Professor calls me to the whiteboard, and then asks me some impossible questions that only Einstein on crack and possessed by Satan could answer, and of course, I write something like 47, whereupon the teacher tears me apart to the cheers of my classmates. Last night was different. Last night the Time Value of Money was ‘Alien” and she was chasing my cousins, the Browns, along a very dark beach (with spiders). If the Time Value of Money caught my cousins before I solved the equation, my cousins would be tortured, killed, and eventually thrown to the sharks that were circling offshore. (Did I mention the sharks? No? well, it’s a dream you know and somehow I always dream about sharks.) The only problem was, I did not know what the variable values were for the equation because the “word problem” was written in Russian, and my son could only speak Japanese, and Russian looks kind of funny with backward letters and.... the problems can go on forever. Did I mention the equation dealt with uneven cash flows? No? Well for some reason uneven cash flows was the friggen central theme of my dream, I could not even figure out what currency to use, and if I had to convert it first, and if I should use a excel, or a calculator, or a pad of paper...... oh god, the dream went on for ever and ever. Then I wake up, tell my wife that the Browns and their lovely new baby are in trouble, ask her to call them from work, and then go back to sleep and dream it all over again. By 4:30, when I finally woke up for the day, I had dreamed at least five or maybe even six different versions on this same friggen dream. Once again I was stuck in a continues loop dream. (It happens all the time)

I still can’t solve problem 14 from chapter 3. I hate Grad School