After having a bad dream

I had a bad dream. The details are immaterial, but if you have had your fair share of nightmares you know that dreams as such have a cascading effect on your day's unruly events. Alternatively, -- which is the best it can get -- you try to get back with your usual self by thinking your week hasn't been great, and this bad dream is just the culmination of your age of horrors, which is another way of thinking it's the end of your bad week or month or year, and you cheer yourself up. It doesn't generally work. Sometimes it's ghouls that scared your bedsheets wet when you were a kid, sometimes it's witches that lurk in shadows; sometimes it's a screening of you losing someone you love, and in other, more terrifying moments, it's about a part of your soul that is so true and so maniacal that you wake up in a sweat, a lot like the times when you were scared of ghouls as a kid. Make a guess about my bad dream. Yeah. In particular it hasn't been a bad week (I'm trying to be overtly optimistic): I wrote a paper I was happy with, my blogs are getting lots of hits, I'm learning Sanskrit, and I watched the latest Indy movie. I even had a haircut today, which is a day of celebration for anybody who's doomed to go bald in the next something years. (Ask anybody who fits into that category if you don't believe me. I don't blame you if you don't. Even my wife doesn't realize how tragic my shortage of hair is to me. At this point I ought to post a recent photo of me, but I don't have any on me right now, and this is a public computer.) On the downside, I'm so busy I can't even tell my right foot from my left and I miss-don't-miss home oh so terribly. There's also a mongrel out on the loose who's lifting material from my blogs, and I haven't even had time to write food reviews or suggest any more Really Useful Stuff. In addition the earthquake in China and the cyclone Nargis in Burma (which was in close succession to the cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh) have made me feel horrible. What's wrong with the world? Are we set for a major environmental disaster within our lifetimes? I think I'll settle for my bad dream.