The Slightly Longer Way Series - Table of Contents
Entry | Notable Places/Events | RSJP |
---|---|---|
Day 0 – Friday, May 05 2023 to Sunday, May 07 2023 | Flight from Edmonton to Tokyo | - |
Day 1 – Monday, May 08 2023 | Train from Tokyo to Kyoto | - |
Day 2 – Tuesday, May 09 2023 | RSJP Orientation Day | W1D1 |
Day 3 – Wednesday, May 10 2023 | Placement test, Kinkakuji/Golden Pavilion | W1D2 |
Day 4 – Thursday, May 11 2023 | Kyo-Yuzen Dyeing Workshop | W1D3 |
Day 5 – Friday, May 12 2023 | Mori Touki-ken Pottery Workshop | W1D4 |
Day 6 – Saturday, May 13 2023 | Ichihime Shrine, Nishiki Market | - |
Day 7 – Sunday, May 14 2023 | Nara, Todaiji Temple | - |
Day 8 – Monday, May 15 2023 | Urasenke | W2D1 |
Day 9 – Tuesday, May 16 2023 | Nijojo Castle | W2D2 |
Day 10 – Wednesday, May 17 2023 | Tojiin Temple | W2D3 |
Day 11 – Thursday, May 18 2023 | Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto Sanjo Shopping Street, Tsubomi | W2D4 |
Day 12 – Friday, May 19 2023 | Kyoto Station | W2D5 |
Day 13 – Saturday, May 20 2023 | Kamogawa River, Shimogoryo Shrine Kankosai | - |
Day 14 – Sunday, May 21 2023 | Shimogoryo Shrine Kankosai | - |
Day 15 – Monday, May 22 2023 | Kimono-Pro | W3D1 |
Day 16 – Tuesday, May 23 2023 | Ritsumeikan Library, Hama Sushi | W3D2 |
Day 17 – Wednesday, May 24 2023 | Domoto Insho House, Kamogawa, Ichijoji | W3D3 |
Day 18 – Thursday, May 25 2023 | Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, Hama Sushi (with Kel) | W3D4 |
Day 19 – Friday, May 26 2023 | Super Karaoke | W3D5 |
Day 20 – Saturday, May 27 2023 | Nothing special | - |
Day 21 – Sunday, May 28 2023 | Demachi Masugata Shopping Street, a long walk home | - |
Day 22 – Monday, May 29 2023 | Nothing special | W4D1 |
Day 23 – Tuesday, May 30 2023 | Kyoto International Manga Museum | W4D2 |
Day 24 – Wednesday, May 31 2023 | Ritsumeikan Library | W4D3 |
Day 25 – Thursday, Jun 01 2023 | Maiko/Geiko demonstration | W4D4 |
Day 26 – Friday, Jun 02 2023 | Final Presentation, Taiko Lab | W4D5 |
Day 27 – Saturday, Jun 03 2023 | Kusatsu-Juku Honjin, Lake Biwa Museum, Omi Hachiman (with Zian) | - |
Day 28 – Sunday, Jun 04 2023 | Omi Hachiman City Museum, Omi Jingu (with Zian) | - |
Day 29 – Monday, Jun 05 2023 | Arashiyama | W5D1 |
Day 30 – Tuesday, Jun 06 2023 | Nothing special | W5D2 |
Day 31 – Wednesday, Jun 07 2023 | Final exam, Osaka, Manga Cafe (with Zian) | W5D3 |
Day 32 – Thursday, Jun 08 2023 | Osaka, Namba (with Zian) | W5D4 |
Day 33 – Friday, Jun 09 2023 | RSJP Graduation Day | W5D5 |
Day 34 – Saturday, Jun 10 2023 | Leaving Zian, Train from Kyoto to Tokyo, Ikebukuro | - |
Day 35 – Sunday, Jun 11 2023 | Shibuya, duo MUSIC EXCHANGE | - |
Day 36 – Monday, Jun 12 2023 | Shinjuku, Sakura House, Sophia University | - |
Day 37 – Tuesday, Jun 13 2023 | Akihabara | - |
Day 38 – Wednesday, Jun 14 2023 | Flight from Tokyo to Edmonton | - |
Final Thoughts | - | - |
Tuesday, May 23 2023 (Day 16)
Random Notes
It’s a little bit more than I promised yesterday, but I’m going to attach all my dreams thus far on the trip, from May 05 to May 22 2023, in a special Dreams section at the end of this post. I can’t wait until I find time to fully upload my dream diary. It’s so interesting that I need a couple of weeks to get used to a place, but then bam, the dream floodgates open again.
Last night was very weird, since I had homework to do and a quiz to study for after writing my blog. Just like the night before my last quiz, my sleep schedule was awfully.. awful, I think I pretty much fell asleep at 9 or 10 pm, halfway through my worksheet, got up at about 2am to write down a dream, fell back asleep, woke at 4am to write down another dream, then finished what was left of my worksheet, then studied with whatever leftover time I had after that before meeting Zian at the usual bus stop at 7:45 am.
But it was surprisingly fine, especially since I had also interspersed a bit of study time all through my evening between other things. I did get a couple things wrong on the quiz but I will probably end up somewhere around 70-80%, near what I got on my first quiz (which was exactly 80%). The homework sheet was fine. The presentation, or what little I had of it, was more than any of the others had anyway, which was reassuring in an odd way. It looks like the actual presentation is next Friday, so it’s coming up really quickly. And heck, RSJP ends one week after that so the ending of the program is also sneaking up rapidly!
We were a little later than usual getting to school because a traffic light didn’t mesh with a bus arrival time, so we ended up just getting some bread from the local Ritsumeikan co-op convenience store and brought our victims to our class to chew on. I had what they called a Yakisoba Roll:
Class swam by without much incident. Lunch was this:
My main dish was the one in the top left, Honkaki Mapo Don. I had two tofu dishes, the first one the mapo tofu in the main bowl, and the second one the same side dish I had yesterday, the one in the top right, affectionally called “Stamina Tofu” on the receipt. It’s tofu with chicken and onion or something like that mixed in, the tray it was on had a more descriptive name but I don’t remember it. Yum, though.
I did take a picture of this week’s menu, although I noted that one of the items above the top row is cut off. There were other free spots they could have put that menu item into…
The one I had yesterday with all the bean sprouts was the Gyu Siodare Yasaiitame in the top left and it was amazing.
Because we had no activity this afternoon, Zian and I were the only ones out of our cohort again that actually went for lunch at the cafeteria. Five of the others went to meet some Buddy or something and skipped the general Buddy interaction time to head off somewhere to eat together. Neither Zian nor I seemed to be invited nor had any idea where they were going, it seemed to be preplanned outside of the group Instagram chat. The 6th member of the cohort didn’t even come to class today — he was in the other class though, and their quiz is tomorrow instead of today. He’s the only one of us eight to have missed any classes and he’s missed two classes now, apparently because he’s a VERY heavy sleeper.
Again though, beacuse there are all these other groups in the classroom we used to exclusively share with the Buddies for lunch now, that room was super busy and rather noisy anyway.
After lunch, Zian and I headed to the Ritsumeikan library, where we both spent around three quiet hours studying and perhaps napping a little. She did a bunch of studying for her quiz tomorrow, while I just about finished prep work for all the remaining chapters/tests in our book — for me, prep work involves inscribing the vocabulary (and some grammar) lists into my notebook, and also underlining and writing down vocabulary definitions on the main essay that comes at the start of all the chapters. I finished doing this for Chapter 6, our current chapter (that we just ended, but that I hadn’t transcribed into my notebook yet), and also our next two chapters, 7 and 8, which will take us to the end of the RSJP. We also exchanged notebooks and textbooks and peered at each other’s work. Her notebooks are gloriously well-detailed and neat.
The air-conditioner in the library was a little bit cold, at least I think I was sitting right under a vent, but the temperature change was insidious and wasn’t really obvious until near the end when I got up to walk around and headed to the bathroom and felt the difference in temperature in the rest of the library.
Anyway, at this point, it was around 5 pm and we wanted to try something interesting, so Zian suggested a nearby sushi place that Mr Tanaka had recommended, and I heartily agreed. Another one of those things where I’m not sure if I’d ever have worked up the courage and/or energy to try it if not for Zian pushing me.
This sushi restaurant, Hama Sushi, was a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. We went to their Kinkaku-ji branch, just south of that famous temple and just east of Ritsumeikan. We puzzled through how to order the various dishes, and spent just over an hour here sampling their various dishes. We ordered via a digital screen located by our table, although the only picture I have of it turned out to not have captured the screen itself in good focus at all. Oh well.
It was cool overall watching dishes go by us to various other tables, although unlike what conveyor belt sushi are supposed to have, there were no random sushi dishes making the rounds on the conveyor belt, only little sushi bowls and other snacks that were ordered by and headed to a specific table..
It was lots of fun. We ended up spending just over 2,000 yen in total after tax, and we split the bill, so it wasn’t expensive at all. I wasn’t really particularly full at this time either, but I had reached a satisfactory hunger level without overeating, and it would have made it more difficult to split the bill if one of us had significantly more than the other. We’re likely going to try another nearby sushi restaurant at some point.
Zian and I then headed home, and caught a couple more evening pictures by Nishioji Shijo as we went along. We’ve been here so many times that the intersection feels so oddly familiar now.
And Mars was dancing alongside the moon in the sky this evening.
I wrote this blog post, and then rewarded myself for all the earlier studying with a little bit of Persona 5 on the Steam Deck before falling asleep.
Dreams
Here’s an assorted dreams entry for my dreams so far on the trip, from May 06 to May 23. I’d specifically like to draw attention to the dreams on May 21 and 22, which are both at least 9/10 Highlight dreams, although some of the others are no slouches too. Also note how many times Zian has already appeared in my dreams. Even Lauren has appeared once already as well, and I only hung out with her for one afternoon thus far!
My dream worlds are amazing!
May 12 2023
- I was working at a company investigating rogue AI incidents, with one particular interesting case that I remember being that a company had used AI to process bears into bearskin floor rugs and then teleport the rugs into a storage room. For some reason, the AI entity in the room malfunctioned and recognized one of the woman employees at the company as part of the storage room, and dropped bear rugs on top of her, trying to pile them up on her. Individually, they weren’t particularly heavy so she mostly ignored it at first, but it started to be a problem when four or five of them were on top of her at once, and while she could wriggle out of that, she couldn’t completely escape the AI entity.
- She tried calling for help but was unable to reach any of her coworkers at first, though she eventually managed to get the attention of someone returning home with a lidless cardboard box of groceries worth $39.60 or something. There was a bit of discussion between the coworkers outside on who was going to use a machine on the outside wall to disable the AI module inside, as the woman got buried in rugs yet again. Eventually someone did it and got her free though.
- In terms of our company’s investigation, I noted that this was the second time today that this company had had an issue with their AI. Ronnie agreed and said that a court case would have to be opened so that an investigation would be done, though it wouldn’t be a full court proceeding with witnesses and all that. This was because Jeremy, due to his personality and as part of his job as a fellow coworker at the investigation company, would also be on the roster of the preliminary jury and would definitely vote to close the case before it came to trial.
- He nodded to this and told Ronnie that he was going home directly for the day after the vote instead of coming back to the office, and Ronnie gave him the OK for that.
May 15 2023
- I dreamt that both Zian and I were students at some school, and we were both staying on the dorms, though we had different rooms, possibly even in different buildings, far away from the actual school itself. I might even have had two rooms, one at campus and one off-campus, as I recall finding and hugging my bolster at some point, which I had left at the other room, as well as some thoughts about how some of my clothes were in the current room instead of the other room as well. This clothes bit involved both socks as well as a PE shirt or some other shirt that I was going to wear today.
- Zian helped me bring a box of things to my room at one point, and I told her to please ignore the mess of items, mostly washed clothes that I had not packed away, on my bed. There were even more clothes in a laundry basket on my comforter. She stayed outside, and then I heard the noise of a toilet bowl located just outside my door being flushed, while I changed my clothes inside the room. There was also a shelf just outside my door, on which was a metallic gadget which wasn’t mine but that I had brought into the room. It was about the size and shape of a small metal tape measure with the measure part retracted, and when I pressed the button on the tape measure, a little bent wire protruding from the device straightened up in the air, and a little sawwheel at the end of the wire started whirring and spinning. It looked like a really dangerous shaving device or something.
- There was also a part of the dream about four different roughly parallel streets connected to one street that was perpendicular to them all, and one main quest with two compulsary objectives and a few optional ones that had to be completed on each street. Each street had things like houses, villas, shops, and so on. The quest only popped on screen when I approached the street that it was based around, and I saw that most of the quests were partially completed but in a very haphazard, random manner.
- I remember a gated villa at the end of one of the streets with enemy red dots on the minimap inside the villa. I also remember an old couple in a shop inquiring if it sold CDs, and I and another student told them that it did not, and I added that there was another shop down one of the other streets that did. Also I remember some of my team mates saying that they had no idea that one of their friends, who was an NPC, had a secret job investigating someone on behalf of some teacher or other authority figure, even though they had known said friend for years. They thought that that was cool. I also saw a quest circle around a house on one of the streets, and a main quest objective to find some documents hidden inside of it.
May 19 2023
- There was a soccer match that seemed to be the final match of the World Cup or some similar international soccer tournament. I believe it was between Italy and Germany. However, it was also an aggregate match, and Germany had won the first leg 2-0 or 3-0 or something like that. For this second leg, Italy outscored Germany and had even equalized the aggregate score four times, but each time they did so, Germany scored again to pull ahead on aggregate even though they were behind in the match. In the end, Germany lost the match 6-5 or 5-4, but did win the competition.
- In the dream world, there was also a contest tied to this that I was also taking part in. The competition involved a combination of fantasy league bracket points, plus points based on watching the actual games, or at least having the TV tuned on to the correct channel for days. Our group of 3 had guessed the final winner correctly, and we had all received a nice score bump for this, so our group was now tied with two other groups for the top spot, and about to overtake them because we were all able to leave our TVs on during the day to rack up points, despite the competition itself now being over. There were other mechanics tied to this as well but I do not remember them.
- One of the other two people in my group was Melbourne, and we weren’t completely sure if his TV was set up correctly because he hadn’t registered any TV activity points with us in some time.
May 21 2023
- This dream took place at and crossed between specific locations on various planets — Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. I don’t remember a lot of specific details but it also involved lots of people who were friends and had a rather wild, couldn’t care less, cartoony vibe to it. Several scenes also took part overnight or at least past midnight.
- At one point, I was bouncing around between canyons on the surface of Jupiter and Saturn, past the soft curfew that we had, with one female friend chasing me as I playfully tried to avoid her while searching for another friend on one of the planets’ canyons. One of the two friends involved here was a fox spirit, I think. I felt like a fish jumping up and above the surface of a pond, and then back down into the water again, and it was a fantastic and very grandiose feeling.
- At another point, a friend and I were trying to decide which planet to meet up at, which was as easy as teleporting between them. At this time each option we had was basically sponsored by some sort of anime idol franchise group or something, which gave us assurance that it would ultimately be fine no matter which one we chose.
- At yet another point, an Earth girl was trying to find me but it was her first time going between planets and she was broke. She took a cashier job at a supermarket on Mars and asked an alien coworker how many credits she needed to save up before she could come find me, the alien was confused but when prodded, eventually gave a ballpark figure of 100,000 credits, which would be good for at least 4 days of spending. But the job only seemed to pay 97 credits a day due to what the store manager said was a salary and funds pinch, and the girl got frustrated at this.
- The manager offered to train her on tax forms and rules so she could maximise her money, and a guy coworker who had started work a couple of weeks ago but had been slacking off a lot asked why he never got trained on this and wanted to join the training as well. The manager said that he hadn’t even read the tax form booklet yet, had he? The guy said that he had indeed looked at it, when he accidentally blew up his employee desk the other day.
- At another point, I was on Mars with Zian and we joined a group of remote controlled car racers who needed more people. They had 8 people and needed 10, so we completed their roster. Zian and I joined different groups, as we were split into 5 groups of 2. We were each given control of an old car, and one person had to drive the car to a designated location, which would trigger the other matching car located there, which the second person would then drive back.
- My partner was in charge of the first car, but the roads were suspended high above the sky and at a weird angle so it was difficult to control the car properly, and going offroad, as my partner accidentally did early on, would immediately cause the car to tumble off the track and the team to fail. Two of the five immediately fell off in this manner, a third was moving too slowly and got crushed by a vehicle, and the fourth and fifth were racing each other before the fourth one purposely knocked the fifth one, turning it sideways and causing it to careen sideways and off the road as well. As the fourth car was the only car left at this point, they were declared the winner and the scene jumped to where their matching car for the second part of the event was.
- The return car was a real car, and eight of the ten of us got into it, with the two winners in the two front seats and everyone else squished in the back seats. The car was barely at capacity at this time, but there were still two players outside — Mom and someone else. I was in the middle of the back seat and beckoned them in anyway, even though it would put our occupant count over 8. However, because Mom was somehow considered a ghost, that apparently counted as a negative person, so both she and the 10th person managed to squeeze in to the back seat as well, and the dashboard still read only 8 ooccupants.
- Much later on, there was another overarching plot about trying to stop doomsday shots with a machine. It was on some planet to start, and the machine, which looked like the drill digging vehicle from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, would summon the doomsday shot to itself once the doomsday shot was fired, and then shoot and nullify the energy ball itself. It needed to be operated by two people, an anthromorphic lion and a forest spirit girl, and it worked fine. Later on, the scene shifted to Earth, and someone summoned the machine there (much to the amazement of a couple of Earthlings who had never seen magic before) and tried to recruit a lion and tree spirit as well, but got a tiger instead of a lion. It wouldn’t work this way though, so the tiger was dismissed and dejectedly walked away, and they picked up a proper lion to do the job.
- There was also a scene involving turning on the TV and trying to watch an episode of some anime, but then realizing that I had already watched it last week, so I was able to skip it this week. This also involved a bathhouse of some sort and someone trying to take a picture of something with his phone, but it wasn’t working too well so I brought him a camera. At one point I was also partially undressed and had to get out and close the bathhouse door properly, but accidentally slid it almost fully open instead. No one was outside though, so I quickly shut it again without incident.
May 22 2023
- This dream started off in some sort of bustling communal cafeteria that seemed to be part of an army barracks. I had a big pile of noodles on a large plate but had to set it down on a corner table because I was called upon to help someone with things. Near the end of this segment, I was returning toward my bowl when I saw someone pouring dishwashing detergent onto my noodles, in a circular pattern over the food. He was some sort of spy, and I tried to catch him, but there were too many people in the way between us, and by the time I reached my food plate he was gone out the back door toward the toilets.
- It was past midnight and past curfew, so no one was supposed to be outside. I was part of the administration team though, an assistant to a prominent female character in my dream that was basically a Goddess, a tall, beautiful, and prideful woman who took care of us all, and that we could always absolutely rely on, though I cannot pin down her specific identity or if she was modelled after an actual character from real life, from Honkai Star Rail, or somewhere else. Anyway, I reported this incident to the Goddess, who came out and looked around the backyard area alongside me and a couple other female scouts, but the man was long gone.
- The backyard area had a campfire with a small alcove beneath it for disposing of stuff, as well as a couple shacks that acted as backup outdoor bathrooms for the barracks of the Goddess’ army. One of the scouts dug beneath the campfire and made the 2×2 square alcove there deeper, from about one square deep to about ten squares deep, with the reasoning that if the man returned, he was sure to use that place as a storage place and would toss his things into the hole without realizing that it had been deepened, and thus might lose the tools of his trade in there.
- The scout also said that she would go off and look for the man, and would keep in touch via one of the Goddess’s helpers, the leader of the scouts, a quiet girl whose special skill was being a telepath who could monitor the wavelength of any of her scouts and would know if any of them ran into any trouble. I told her that the man had blue hair and a 5 letter name starting with B. The scout nodded and left.
- Right after the introduction of this scout leader, a major incident happened. The scout leader alerted the Goddess that one of her scouts, March 7th, was in trouble, and the leader invoked her other skill, which was to teleport herself and one of the people that she was psychically linked to, so that they would in essence exchange places. She vanished, and March 7th appeared, her face streaked with tears. She looked surprised, then figured out what had happened, and quickly made her report to the Goddess and me.
- March 7th said that the neighbouring country, ruled by Hitler, had just launched a surprise attack, and she had been attacked by four men at the very northern edges of our country, near the border with this now-enemy country. She was currently running away from them through the forest, but one of her abilities was a limited sort of prescience, and she knew that she was going to be caught by them and taken prisoner. Another of her abilities was being really lucky and always finding the best way out of bad situations though, so she was confident that she would eventually be able to escape, and she couldn’t let her leader face the four men herself as she had no combat or escape skills, so March 7th apologized to the Goddess for not being able to help out in the upcoming war effort (which she knew about due to her prescience), and said she wanted to thank her scout leader for giving her this brief respite and chance to report in, even though they would not be able to actually meet up at this time. With that, March 7th triggered the return portion of the teleport swap spell, which swapped the two girls’ positions back the way it was, returning the scout leader to the camp.
- The Goddess was very angry at this turn of events, and the next few scenes involve me walking with her as we flitted and teleported between random enemy locations, causing a bunch of havoc and death. Among other things, we flitted to the edge of a cliff by an enemy barracks with tall pagodas made of straw, and she casted fire spells that toppled the aflame straw down to the camps below. We also went undercover into places like an enemy weapon cache where blacksmiths were working, as well as a battle scene near enemy soldiers in some very shallow water, and a murderous glee was on her face as she tossed hand grenades out, killing a bunch of people with them. At one point, someone grabbed one of the hand grenades and tossed it back at her feet, but these were smart grenades and would not explode if she were within their vicinity, so she bent down, picked up the grenade, and tossed it back again, at which point it properly exploded.
- Several more scenes played out here on both sides of the conflict. One further scene that involved just our side was that the goddess was complaining at one point that Asta, another scout, was nowhere to be found at the start of our war. Asta eventually arrived, except I realized that she was actually Debbie. Her face was streaked with tears too, and when the Goddess asked what happened, she said that she had been watching a sad movie with her hubby and had only just saw the summons and the call to arms.
- One scene that involved the enemy side was them marching in to a large lake on the northern sides of our country’s borders, and vastly outmatched locals trying to do what they can to slow down the army. Hitler‘s troops were mowing down all the locals they can find, but three of them, a local commander and two of his young troops, hid beneath a pile of leaves or something just underneath ground level, as Hitler‘s army walked on overhead them. One of them was about to be stepped on when all three of them burst forth from the ground and opened fire, killing an opposing ninja dressed in traditional robes, as well as several ground troops, before being taken out themselves. There were fisherman boats on the lake too, and the invading army took those out as well as all the surrounding native villages. I was there briefly during broad daylight on an island in the middle of the lake, pressed down against the ground and the black and white natural stone in the hopes that no one could see me from the shore.
- Someone wowed at the size of the lake and said that the entire shoreline around the lake could easily accommodate eight battalions, one at each of the eight points of a simple compass rose. Hitler said that he was going to draft and summon until he had at least 50. The invading army also had several scenes where Hitler tried to root out spies in his army or amongst a certain group of people. We definitely had spies but he never caught any of us.
- There were also scenes involving both sides meeting together. The main one that I remember was another spy unmasking scene, which took place in an extravagant ballroom, in front of hundreds of people, mostly women, of high society. Hitler was disssatisfied with the information leaks on his part, and had gathered several of his aides here to essentially kill one off as a warning. I was in this group of suspects, as I was working for him as a messenger as part of my spy duties, but I was very quickly dismissed as a suspect because of a reason that was something like “she’s a good messenger, always very punctual and never wastes my time when she requests to meet to relay a message, always keeping her requested time short and never wasting my time”. So I was let go.
- He narrowed it down to two young suspects, both androgynous-looking helpers of his, then picked one as the victim to die, an apprentice glasssmith or something whose only crime was born to a lousy country and working for a poor boss. I idly wondered at this point why he would select a guy, even an androgynous one, since pretty much everyone working directly for the Goddess was female. Anyway, Hitler left him on stage as he prepared for the execution, and I looked around from my seat near the back of the ballroom, and saw quite a few girls I recognized, and knew as “spies”. Kaiting and Rachel had two side by side seats in the audience and were leaning cozily against each other, I believe Debbie/Asta was somewhere in there, and Zian even came in later and sat down on a vacant chair at the back of the room near me as our eyes met and she smiled at me. I shook her head, wondering why we had so many spies in here risking their lives with impunity. Even the Goddess herself was in the room near the back seats, I realized, and Hitler just had no idea. She was there to ensure that if any of her girls actually did get in trouble, she’d get them out to safety.
- While waiting, Hitler came by to entertain some of the high society ladies, and asked a question about who the most beautiful lady was. A lady asked if he meant who the thinnest lady was, in which case it was some plain-looking girl at the back of one of the columns whose name started with G, but if not that, then it depends on what the woman was wearing and how lucky she was to catch Hitler‘s eyes. One of Hitler‘s favoured women near the front then stood up and said that oh, if this was an issue of luck then she was doomed, as she was always just so unlucky. Hitler said that he always had lots of bad luck too and could never find the spies in his army. The two of them then chatted for a bit, with that lady talking about a new tattoo that she had just gotten or something.
- In the meantime, the condemned guy on stage had decided that if he was going to die, he was going to create a mess of things and try to take out some people with him. As his last request, he requested to be given a microphone and wanted to lead a song for the room, and this request was granted. Being a glasssmith, he had noticed that the ceiling and some of the walls were made of glass fractals, and there were chandeliers hung up on those ceilings as well. He started a specific song whose pitch got higher and higher, getting the crowd to sing along with him as he went along. At the peak of the song, he had the crowd sing something of a certain frequency that shattered the glass ceiling, causing shards of glass to rain down everywhere and the chandeliers to come crashing down. In the chaos, he tried to escape out the door, but Hitler himself pulled out a revolver and shot him in the back as he fled.
May 23 2023
Dream 1
- I was in my Edmonton 4012 house preparing to go on a solo trip somewhere for a vacation, when I heard the news that someone I apparently used to know and who used to be a math teacher had recently passed away, and had inquired about my transition and wellbeing with one of his dying breaths before he went.
- But the news only came with a first name, Michael, so I had to puzzle it out, and thought maybe he was my grade 9 teacher or something. I felt bad about not knowing who exactly this was, and I wasn’t on best terms with Mom and Dad at this point as they didn’t want me to go on my trip alone, so they were pestering me about how I could possibly not know who this Michael was even though I seemed to be important to him.
- In the end, I eventually saw a newspaper clipping — he was someone named Mike Charad or Charod, who happened to be a Math lecturer at the University but had also worked at IST, or its earlier incarnation, AICT, back in the early 2010s, and sort of knew me from there before my transition. But he had long since moved on, and had also been arrested and charged with sexual assault three years or so ago.
- He was freed and had moved to the University of Portland for a fresh start, where he was up until his passing, but just as a normal lecturer, he was unable to get any research grants due to his past criminal record. He had seen my old name on a list of former high school math competition students, recognized my name from that list, and had thus inquired about me.
Dream 2
- I wanted to go on a 2-week Singapore trip from Japan, where I was currently. I had even already booked the plane tickets, and the first plane ride was later today. However, I had been having doubts about going, partially because I had a test today and partially because I would be alone. I could wait until after the test to go, but then I would still miss nearly two weeks of school and wouldn’t get the test results back. I wanted to ask Zian if she wanted to head there during the upcoming 1 week semester with me too, but she had already been to Singapore so I didn’t think that she would.
- I realized that I had booked my flight but not my lodgings, so I went to the basement of our Edmonton 4012 home to use the basement computer there, which had been relocated to near the laundry room door. Kel and Jon kept coming by and peeking over my shoulder despite me repeatedly asking them not to though, so I eventually just said that this was a disaster and shut off the computer, then headed upstairs to turn on and use the other desktop computer in the main hall instead.
- A bit later on, I went to the airport anyway, where I saw five of my friends who were travelling together — this group included Lauren, Allen, and Eileen, as well as another guy and girl. They were stuck in an endlessly long and outgoing umoving customs line meant for those heading out of the country. I had decided by this point that I wasn’t going to go, and I invited the five of them back to my house to rest and relax in. They agreed, though Lauren stayed to keep their place in line for now, and the other four followed me past a much shorter customs line leading back out to the city. I also texted Mom along the way to let her know that I was bringing some guests back.
- When I got home, I saw that a bunch of bookshelves had been set up all over a side room adjacent to the main living hall, with books and board games packed onto them. Apparently my family had just finished setting this up. The four others with me quickly settled down in the living room with their luggage and a nice book to read each.
- Jon said that I was right about the basement area being a disaster, a water main had broken and partially flooded the floor near where I had been using the computer. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind but I didn’t tell him that.
- Snippet: There was also some weird dream snippet about being part of a procession of three cars being driven in a line, and a police officer flagging us down. He was promoting some sort of mirror addon for the car, and while he had three mirrors and attached one to each car, he only had enough screws and glue on hand to finish setting up 2.5 mirrors, so he said the second and third one were both about 3/4 done each and those cars would have to stop by somewhere at some point to get their last screws.
- Snippet: I also remember a game scene at some point from the point of view of a player-controlled lizardman character who was low on health and was attacking a village. He went into an elven hut, at which point the elf inside the hut shot a fire arrow that set the front door of his own hut on fire, but which also immolated and eventually killed the lizardman.
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