Begin with a dream.

Last night I dreamed that I found Patrick's handcuffs in my home in Troy. I decided I should walk to his house (which apparently was in the neighborhood) to return them. As I was walking up the street, I found and collected more and more little metal fragments. I thought about putting them on my wrists, but decided, no, to put them in my inside coat pocket instead. I saw two men walking down the hill toward me, also in the middle of the road. I was nervous and reacted how I would in real life: I tried not to look and didn't say anything. They were bright, and when they walked by they made me squint so I couldn't see, and I knew they thought I was rude. When I got to the top of the hill, past what I had mistaken for P's house, there was a group of people milling around. Three of them approached me. I noticed one of them was the man I had just passed. He asked me why I ignored them. Did I hate them? I was kind and touched his arm, but I responded that I felt indifferent. "There are so many people in the world who I will never see again, so why should I even bother?"

Ha ha, it's weird how stuff like that happens when we're asleep. When I'm awake, my room is a mess, and I haven't gone for a walk outside in ages, and also my inside coat pocket doesn't exist any more because I stupidly donated that coat to the Salvation Army a year ago.

I'm finding people who take themselves a bit too seriously for my taste. I'm talking about me, some of the time. I'm talking about the girl down the hall: The sex can't be that good. I'm talking about whoever wants to charge patrons twenty five dollars for a seventy-two minute German requiem, the sixth movement of which the choir doesn't even really know. I do not love Brahms, or making classical music even less accessible to the general population than it already is. I will pretend to love it, though, when I am singing, sweaty in all black in the rafters of The Chapel, and trying not to think about my feelings of ambivalence toward elitism.