In the movie, of course, the characters are shown to be amazing because they are vampires and thus have all these special powers. But I think the movie touched me in a different way. The characters seemed amazing because they just were, forget all the vampire business.
We stayed up much too late last night watching the special features on the disk -- it was very hard to turn the movie off. This morning we watched the rest and we were both oddly disappointed when there was nothing left to watch.
Anyway, last night, after watching the movie, I had a dream.
I dreamed that I received an academic job offer, tenure-track, from SUNY Stony Brook (why them? I have absolutely no idea. The school means nothing to me). It was a little unclear why I had applied for such a job, and even more odd that I had gotten it. Something to do with my current department and their (nonexistent) connection with Stony Brook. Something about my unusual (also mostly nonexistent) publication record. I was told that Stony Brook was a very creative, unusual school (I don't think it is) and they were interested in someone like me for that reason.
I thought I would have to accept the offer, and I was a little sad about it. All the way to New York (in the dream, Stony Brook was in upstate New York, though I learned this morning from Wikipedia that it is actually on Long Island). Those long cold winters. At least, I thought, we would be close to my old high school friend Z'bet, who lives in upstate New York. On cue, she came to visit me, very formal in a beige suit (not her at all), and I introduced her to some of my students as "Dr. Elizabeth Fox, professor of--" and I turned to her -- "what department are you in, exactly?" "English literature," she whispered. "--professor of English literature at Cornell University." (All nonsense, she's a middle school social studies teacher.) And then I realized I'd given her the wrong last name, the last name of another high school friend, and I apologized. "Just call her Z'bet," I told my students cheerfully, and then noticed that she was glaring at me, not wanting to be introduced to the students so informally. (This whole section of the dream is crazily unfair to the real Z'bet, who I went around the world with back in 1986. I guess I needed her to play a stuffy academic in the dream.)
There was a lot of to-do within my department about how I would formally accept the offer, and it involved a consultation with my former dissertation advisor, who of course was very pleased that I would finally have a real academic job. I was getting ready for all this, drafting my formal letter and preparing for my formal phone call, etc., when a thought crossed my mind.
I was pretty sure I would not get tenure, despite all the hoopla about what a wonderful candidate I was. I doubted that I would publish much, or be in any way what the university was expecting me to be. That meant that in 5 or 6 years, when I was denied tenure, we would have to leave Stony Brook and come back to Boulder, at which point boos would be 13 or so. What was I thinking?! Here I was planning to wreck their lives, and for what? I didn't want this job! I would have to tell my department, my advisor, and Stony Brook that I would not be accepting the job.
At that moment I could see myself, as if from afar. I was wearing a purple sheath-style dress, shorter and snugger than I would normally wear anything. I looked beautiful. My hair was blonde-turning-white, that aging vampire look, and cut rather shorter than I like -- stunning. It was me, but so unlike me. So beautiful. It was the me inside me, and I was wonderful.
And I woke up.
No comments:
Post a Comment