Dreamed last night that I was sitting in a classroom which looked suspiciously like one of the classrooms in my old high school. The professor, an African American, was punishing another young African American man in front of the class. There is some chance that the blackness of the two (especially the teacher) was somehow attributable to my recent acquaintance with the song "Mr. M'Bow-Wow" in the delightful animated film Hugo the Hippo which recently screened at the Cinematheque (see below). The young black man being humiliated was, it happens, named Miles Davis, though he bore no particular physical resemblance to the trumptet player of that name. Perhaps this is just due to the lazy incompetence of my dreaming brain at getting visual details right - it often provides only vague sketches as a sort of shorthand, knowing that I will accept incorrect images for the sake of continuing to dream - a sort of suspension of disbelief; but then again, I seem to recall that the teacher was also named Miles Davis, as well. Can't really say why. I mentioned Miles Davis, whom I rarely listen to these days, in my post about a friend's suicide a few weeks ago, which may be why the name was floating around my subconscious. In any event, eventually, I found myself enraged by the arrogance of the teacher, who was so clearly in the wrong in what he was saying about this young man that I could no longer hold my tongue, and I began shouting, from my seat to the rear of the class, that he had no right to humiliate this young man this way. Didn't he realize who this young man was? How dare he? Some dim part of my mind realized as I raged that I was probably fucking myself up for good in the class by behaving thus, but - as happens when I lose my temper - I simply could not contain myself.
I suspect that this dream may be obliquely speaking to my recent experiences at UBC, where, it transpires, I have not been selected for the UBC Film Studies MA program. I made a shortlist but not the final cut, and it is highly unlikely that enough students ahead of me will drop out such that there will be a space for me. This renders my last two terms there an entertaining but rather expensive waste of time, forces me to consider what my Plan B is to be (all fog and insecurity at present), and makes it rather a challenge to care about my final assignments, due over the next few weeks. Fucksake, I didn't even ASK how my application was going - couldn't they have waited to tell me until after the term was over, so as not to completely demoralize me re: the four essays I now have to write? If I'm not getting in, it's not likely I'm going to be able to justify continuing to entertain thoughts of doing a Masters somewhere else: it's back to the workforce with me, likely taking whatever shitty jobs are to be had in Maple Ridge, so who will ever care what my grades were?
Gah. Anyhow, I'll slouch my way through the final hoops regardless, what the fuck.
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