#1: I'm positive I had at least one, and perhaps as many as three, dreams tonight before the one I remember. When I briefly regain consciousness, I always manage to convince myself that I'll recall the salient points when I fully wake up...and yeah, it never works out. Anyway, the first element I remember from this one is being at some sort of career fair. It was in a courtyard with wood paneled structures surrounding it, enough to let some sunlight in but not enough where it was oppressive...very reminiscent of the location of UCSD's campus pub and radio station (KSDT). Lan C., a reclusive ex-labmate of mine whom I tried to date (with some success), was there and scouting for a job. We had a very brief conversation and stopped at a recruiter's table before things morphed into me walking along UCI's ring road on the way back to my lab.

Along the route I encountered Kristina S., who is a friend and fellow grad student when I was at Milwaukee. Apparently, one of her sisters had a job in Irvine and she came out this way to live with her as well as finish up her degree, when it turns out her sister bailed and moved elsewhere. She had been living alone in Irvine for months, was leaving in the near future, and I was either not aware of any of this or as is more typical of me, was tangentially aware but chose not to act on the information. The end result is that I felt guilty, but promised to hang out in the near future.

Fast forward again - now I'm in my lab. For some reason, I feel the need to remove my pants and am wandering around in my boxers and a shirt. I'm hanging out in one of the equipment alcoves and wouldn't you know, all these people come barging into the lab. It's a small army of grad students, and 4 professor/administrator types. Turns out a new faculty member has arrived and wants to set up her lab in this space RIGHT NOW. Of course, no one has bothered to inform me that I should have been packing things up in preparation for her arrival, so now I'm having this distressing conversation with her and her 10 grad students. They've literally and figuratively caught me with my pants down (I'm actually squating down with my legs pressed together to hopefully make it less obvious the position they've found me in). The tone of the conversation was civil, though I was annoyed by the suddeness of everything and all the while was trying to figure out how I could get my pants - which were across the room by my desk - back on without being so obvious about it. Another cutscene - I'm in a prep room across the hall struggling to put them on (how can it be this difficult?) and I look back into the lab and see a girl taking all my biological samples from the freezer and putting them on a cart, where they are quickly defrosting. I'm about to express my annoyance (bio samples go bad if you leave them out) when I promptly wake up.

Commentary: Lan will always be something of a mystery to me. She was guarded with what she'd tell about herself, though with time I think she would have opened up more. Unfortunately I caught Lan at an awkward moment in her life, right after she crashed her car and failed out of grad school - she was allowed to save face by earning another master's degree - but before she was sent packing to China. It's a damn shame because she liked to drink, was full of cute sayings, and from conversation seemed willing to make up for lost time spent growing up in a sexually-repressed culture. It's been my lot in life to catch the attention of women when I'm not in a mental state conducive to engaging in sexual activity. I truly wonder how things would play out if I had invited her up to my apartment and fixed us both drinks now that I've got my 'groove' back, for lack of a better word. But enough about my southern Chinese fetish. The appearance of Kristina reminds me of the fact that she contacted me on Facebook months ago and I let it slide. Finally, I'm still occupying my former research advisor's old lab space and I will have to let it go to a new researcher coming in winter, who incidentally is a woman. While I am friendly, even gregarious at times, I place a high premium on solitude and so intrusion in all its forms is something I constantly have to contend with.