Dream overview

My dreams are telling me I miss high school, which basically means, it's officially too long ago for me to remember what it was really like.

Because while I miss some of it, the only reason I really mourn it is because I will never be in that time space again.  

I miss the mundaneness, of walking through the hallways, talking during lunch, joking around after school, coming home and eating a snack and watching bad tv, 

I was back in school and it was graduation day, for some reason we would have two graduations, one before and one before and one after college.  I ran into a former teacher here and there, they remembered me, even though I never visited them, I felt pleased but also embarrassed since I still sucked at small talk in my dreams.  We went to the library, and it was so cool, like a treehouse.  there were two parts, both had to be accessed by ladders.  The shelves were shaped like branches with no sharp edges, like we were in the kids section of Barnes and noble.

I rationally remember, but also don't remember, the stress of it all, of hating waking up before the sun, tests tests tests, projects projects projects, to be the best of the best of everything, the petty jealousies and gossip, even though I wasn't even in the running. I do remember the raisism though, internal and external, overt amd covert.  The girl with the effortless bangs who wouldn't hold my hand during square dancing because of my Asian cooties, even though this wasn't a problem when we were in the same class in second grade, the portly blonde boy who all the teachers loved, who called me japanese like it was a four letter word and I was frozen, mouth shut, knowing I should say something but instead just stood there feeling the contours of shame in my tummy. Who was going to care, anyways? The gym teacher regularly rattled off his favorite Chinese take out items while he timed my flex hold.  Chow mien, lemon chicken, beef with broccoli.  Did I eat those all the time at my home? Silence.

I found my old binder from photo I.  And while there is only one photo left that I really like, It was a reminder that I did enjoy that class, even though I often did the homework at the last minute like any other obligation. But looking through, I miss the creativity, the obligation to be creative, that while it makes creativity work when you obligate it, it's also like like sometimes telling you to play.  I miss the creativity mixed with structure and method, thinking of an idea and then working on the technique to make it happen.  The fstops, the exposures, focusing the picture and letting it burn, setting it in a cool tub of chemical.  (Things that I learned and  I wrote down that I barely understand now.  It's funny how you can understand something so fully and not know it at all in the future, as if you haven't learned it at all, or unlearned it.  Even though the evidence is right there that you once knew it. )  Not worrying about practicality, society, what it is all for.  Just creating beauty and hoping someone will agree with it.

Nostalgia is Greek for old wound, as I learned from mad men, and Wikipedia, but more memorably mad men.