So, one sunny Friday afternoon, I went to the library and looked for some books about the haiku poetry of Basho. I found one book up in the stacks and lounged around reading the introduction. The book was about Basho, but they had some fun poems that predated him:

Hitogokoro, ushimitsu ima wa, tanoma ji yo.
Yume ni miyu ya to, ne zo sugi ni keru.

(It has passed midnight
I no longer wait for you,
Pining for sorrow.

Oh, dear, I overslept.
Wanting to see you in the dream.)
--Anonymous and Henjo in Shuui Shuui

Those court ladies sure know a thing or two about poetry, I'll tell ya. So, I checked it out and threw in my pocket and looked at it every once in a while after that.

OK, so I finally kissed a girl at Furman for serious. Which requires much story telling. So, I'll talk about a girl that I didn't kiss for a while first, since the story is more about her anyway. Amanda is a girl with the same last name as me, who was in my first class at Furman, Psychology 21. There was confusion with which of us the teacher was role calling the first couple days, and then we kept running into each other until finally, we met. Then the next winter term, I think it was, I started sitting with her table occasionally and other stuff. So, I knew Amanda. We weren't tight, but we had mutual name recognition, which counts for a lot these days. Then at the end of winter term this year, I started hanging around with her and Heidi while they smoked. And then I started eating lunch with her this term. And then she started hanging around with my other friends Hampton and Adam on the weekends. And then we all became big Waffle Ho's, which brings us up to the present, more or less. Amanda's fun to take to Waffle House, because you always know what she's going to get--a 95 cent cup of coffee. Coffee, I think, is a symbol of adultness.

Even my dreams are disappointing sometimes. Like last year, I had a crush on this girl, and I found out she was in my friend's CS-11 class, which means she was cool. So, soon thereafter, I had a dream featuring her. We were both somewhere doing laundry for some reason, and I waited for hers to be done. We may have exchanged a word or two, but I don't think so. And that was the dream. It was thoroughly unsatisfactory.

The first term this year, Amanda threw a poetry reading. I was really excited about being in it, and it was one of the things that I used to flirt with Setsuko, or so I thought anyway. I read a poem about Mario to open, which the crowd loved. Then I did two other poems that no one really noticed. One was about falling in love with people in the cafeteria. However, that day I went ahead and fell in love with someone without bothering to be surrounded with napkins. This girl did a reading and it was really impressive, really emotional stuff. She looked on the edge of tears by the end of it. So, afterwards I looked at the program and I tried to remember her name, and whenever I saw her in the cafeteria after that I thought about how cool it would be for us to meet and fall in love. I added another girl to my dreams, and that was that.

My friend wrote this really cool thing our senior year when he was crushing on a girl:

I woke up early today to go to breakfast at Carolina Lunch. I didn't go, though, but I had some scrambled eggs in the cafeteria.

This, I think, is a good story.

After I got back to my room, I played around a little, but ended up falling back asleep. That was okay, 'cause I had this really trippy dream. It was kind of an action adventure dream. I was walking around video game style, from space ships to cool little boat houses. Anyway, to get from place to place, I had to cross really big bridges. These were rope bridges, and if you looked down, you saw nothing but one of those infinite voids. For some reason, instead of walking on the bridge part of the bridge, I walked on the rope rails, which is really crazy, but it made sense at the time, you know? Part way through my adventures, I got a pet dog. It was a really tiny dog, though - the size of a rat. In fact, even though I knew it was a dog, I kept thinking to myself how it would be funny if I found out this little gray barking thing was actually a rat. Also, I wasn't allergic to the dog. There was this one part of my dream, I think it was on a space ship. You were there. I loved you. You were just there, and I cared about you. Anyway, dreams are weird.

I also remember snapping back awake around lunch time. I was relieved I hadn't fallen off those big bridges. I looked around the dorm, realized I was where I was supposed to be, and thought to myself a bit.

"Boy, most of the stuff I dreamed wasn't at all real."

Dreams are so fleeting and insubstantial. Usually, I can't remember mine very well. Which makes sense as they aren't particularly vivid or visual. It's more like a floating landscape of self-evident narrative. Everything sort of blurs into the third person. Sometimes life is like that, or so I analogize.

So one weekend, I went to a party and afterwards I wrote my friend a letter that looked kind of like this.