Slacker 101

Over at Maclin's blog there's an amusing conversation going on, sparked by Mac's fessing up to his Finest Moment As a Slacker, which has led to confessions all around, or at least partly around. One person who shall here remain nameless has confessed to having sold her psychology textbook for money to buy a pizza, which as Mac points out, is worthy of the Slacker Hall of Fame. I confessed, in my turn, to having once made a C in a class called "Interpersonal Communication." Think about that for a moment, will you? I made a C in talking to people.

This slacker post follows on the heels of a post about students, non-students, and dreams. Specifically, the question was whether or not that classic anxiety dream, in which the dreamer realizes that he has been enrolled in a class, but the realization dawns only on the day of the final exam, occurs solely in people who actually liked school. For the record, I mostly disliked school. There were isolated things I liked about it -- English, mainly -- but for the most part, and on many levels, school and I were not a good match for each other. And I have never had the final-exam dream. The school dream I have had, repeatedly, involves my showing back up at my old school, about mid-way through my senior year, wearing overalls, or some other item of clothing we weren't allowed to wear to school. The headmistress tries to send me home, and I say to her, "You can't do that to me! I'm 44 years old!" Or, you know, however old I happen to be.

Aelred, who was Student Council President, has had the final-exam dream many times. He also dreams occasionally that he is flying, which is a dream I have never been blessed with. My dreams tend towards the forgetting-about-things genre. When the children were babies, I used to dream that I'd left whoever the current baby was in my closet and forgotten about him or her for a week or so. In the midst of rummaging through shoes in a fit of wild remorse, I'd wake up panting and tearful and have to creep shamefacedly from my bed to make sure that, indeed, the baby was still breathing quietly in the Moses basket, round-cheeked and chubby-fisted and manifestly not neglected in any way.

I still dream, too, about a horse I had as a teenager. I had him from the time I was eleven until I went to college; as my mother put it, I could have a horse or a college education, and I was having a college education. So I sold the horse and honestly never looked back -- except in my dreams. In my dreams I still own him, though I've forgotten that fact for roughly twenty-seven years, and am confronted with the revelation that somewhere, in some pasture, he has been waiting forlornly all this time for me to un-forget, and to come rattling feed in a bucket, calling his name. It's a terrible dream, trust me -- it's as if I were put in charge of the General Resurrection, and the General Resurrection turns out to be what it would be if I were in charge of it. Mercifully, mercifully, mercifully, I am not, and waking from the very suggestion of such a thing is sweetness itself.