A grand day off

Office-aide job A-OK.

Tutoring job old hat; still A-OK.

Dissertation not A-OK. (Old hat, though.)

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Along with the highschoolers, I have the day off, and so I want to use this empty moment to tell you to watch the first half of A.S. Roma vs. F.C. Bayern Munich, which was played last Tuesday for the UEFA Champions League. It was a fascinating first half. Not the prettiest first half I’d seen, but perhaps the awesomest one (and you know I never exaggerate). Bayern outscored Roma 5−0, and Roma weren’t even playing badly; Bayern were just that good. Their movements on the field were so intricate, so quick, I had trouble tracking them.

It wasn’t my favorite kind of soccer. It wasn’t effortless enough, and it wasn’t politically significant. It was astounding nonetheless.

The game should be available for a while on espn3.com.

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Today, out of love for Martin, I’m going to do some serious cleaning up. I’m going to clean up my bedroom, and I’m going to clean up the books that I’ve left stacked in the dining room. Also, I’ve lost my phone and I need to clean up the house to find it. Mary has the day off, too. Last night, she and I and Martin celebrated by going to the food court in the mall. We got into separate lines; I was counting out my quarters when Mary sneaked up behind me, put a five-dollar bill in my hand, and sneaked away. This melted the heart of the cashier, who tried to flirt with me. … Later, M&M and I went to Barnes & Noble, and though I didn’t have money to buy anything, I was able to look at the fonts.

Dreams

Happy Easter. At church-time I was in the nursery, distributing off-brand Rice Chex to the toddlers. I kept on yawning: “I’m tired.” They were skeptical. “Really,” I insisted, “I want to sleep.”

My night had not been restful. But I’d awakened after a nice dream: I was in Ecuador with my friends Brandon & Sarah; first I showed them my old dorm, and then the dorm changed into the soccer stadium. (In my dreams, I’m always returning to the soccer stadium.)

I also dreamed of Downton Abbey. Lady Edith had (clandestinely) been learning to smoke a pipe. She’d been practicing tricks, i.e. blowing smoke-rings. A visitor had discovered her doing this. “I daresay,” said the visitor, “you smoke better than I do.” Lady Edith batted her lashes at him and blew a smoke-ring. Of course the visitor was middle-aged, and of course he and Lady Edith began an affair.

I know, I know, people always think their own dreams are interesting when really they’re dull as dirt. Still, I’m rather proud of my Downton Abbey dream.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” is based upon a dream of George Saunders’s. It took him 12 years and 60 pages to build a story around that very simple dream. I didn’t like the story, but you can judge it for yourselves. At the mall’s Barnes & Noble with Stephen and Mary & Martin, I used up much willpower refraining from buying Saunders’s first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It’s typeset in Cochin, which is pleasurable to me (though I prefer URW Cochin because the italicized, lower-case s isn’t in cursive). We also ate in the food court and looked at forlorn, expensive pets.