so i'm standing around talking to kelli. we've been thinking about getting married, and there's this clinic that does all-exhaustive tests for like every disease known to man. they give you this neat print-out with all of these diagrams of the symptoms, really great stuff like that, and basically the inner workings of the test. cindy alvarez comes out of the center holding her test results -- she feeds albatrosses in fetid swamps and is worried about picking something up there -- i glance at them, she's fine, and the accompanying diagrams basically consists of this silhouette of an albatross overlaid on her body; they only tested her up to the point where the top of the albatross's head was, since that's the only part of her that de facto comes into contact with the albatross.

cindy says to me, "aren't you supposed to be there when they call your name?" i had made an appointment -- many, in fact -- but they're very good about letting you change the date. i'd decided that it made sense for kelli and i to go in together, and apparently there was this appointment now that i'd forgotten about. so i went in, because we were near there anyway. they give me my test results -- there are these great drawings about blood vessels and so on. i have three diseases, none serious (remember, they test you for everything.) but one of the cool things they do is give you the name of someone else with the same disease, so you have someone to talk to i guess.

the first disease is something like spiral cordata -- that's not right but it's something like that. the name doesn't mean anything to me, but there's a "(80)" next to it. at this point i assume this means percentage of the population that has it, but in retrospect this can't be right -- i conclude later that it's the n for "1 in n of the population has this." 1 in 80 seems reasonable; it's not too common, since the disease is for the most part totally irrelevant. same thing with the third disease, also a name i don't recognize, also a disease i don't recognize, which has "(35)" next to it. i don't know exactly what they are, but there are brief descriptions of the diseases and they don't sound bad at all -- just like "propensity for irritation of the stomach" or something like that, nothing really qualitative.

the second disease is called "balloons", and it has a "(0)" next to it; 1 in 0 is unreasonable, and 0% is also unreasonable, so i conclude that this is a new disease that they haven't been testing people for for long. but the person listed as my consort is alan sundell, which i'm really amused by. the report also has an item 2a, which is called "becoming balloons" -- this has no explanation. (the balloons disease is amusing and also relatively harmless, though less so than the other two.) the person listed there is a girl named carrie box, with some middle name that i forgot. i say to cindy, "the name rings a bell, but i think i'm confusing her with someone else."

cindy turns to me and says, "no, remember? that's that girl named currier you met at that party." and i remember that it is, and i remember how amused i was that there was a girl named currier, and i burst out laughing, which wakes me up.

i'm not sure if that was a coincidence or not -- laughter waking you up. you're of course physically incapable of laughing while asleep, i think, but you're physically incapable of doing most things while you're asleep since your motor system is off. but for some reason the intense laughter that befell me in the dream seems more incompatible with being asleep than most, and i woke up at precisely that moment. (there was more to the dream, but the final scene is the one i remember best.)

the other weird part is that my sleep last night went like this: i slept from 12 to 6, then woke up to go to the bathroom, then slept from 6 to 7, then woke up for no reason, went back to sleep, and slept from 7 to 8. i had this dream from 7 to 8, which fits in with my theory that you have longer, more drawn-out dreams, dreams that take more time inside their universe, during shorter sleep periods. i have no idea if this is accurate or not, but i may have just found a use for my weblog.

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