they've always been pretty nice though, in real life. ha.

I had this crazy dream that for some reason I was driving around the Broad/Urban Farms area with Molly's sister and we were going to get lunch at Three Angels (she'd never been). We walked in, she decided it was too pricey for what she had in mind, and as we were leaving to go to her favorite Chinese buffet (and commiserating about guilty pleasure love for such things, ha) she saw a totally clean, empty, abandoned table (well not a table really, a section of a window-facing bar area that Three Angels doesn't actually have) with a 20 dollar bill on it. For some reason, in that silent dream-logic ESP sort of way, we both knew with certainty it was not a tip or payment for a meal or anything, it was just lost, with no recognizable owner in site. She grabbed it and was cheerful and we walked out. As we reached her car a young lady came running at us in tears hysterical, saying how dare we steal her money and she knew we'd done it on purpose and she needed our names to file a police report, and that the owners were on her side etc. So we quickly decided to head back to the diner and explain things to the owners as well as her, no problem. Well we went in and one of the owners--one from real life, I recognized her--went off on us. I kept waiting patiently for her to finish and let us explain and apologize for the mistake and misunderstanding, but she went on and on about how this was her friend and this poor girl was putting herself through school and was a wonderful, beautiful, artistic, special person and how dare trash like us stress her out when her life was busy and difficult enough as she tried to make something of herself, "unlike [us]" and that's when the personal insults started, all the assumptions Molly's sister and I were low-life spoiled brats who had never been to school, never tried to make anything of ourselves, didn't have careers or aspirations for such, weren't creative since we weren't in on the local art scene, whatever. My eyes popped out of my skull and my nostrils flared. I was livid in the dream and was like "how DARE you assume such things! You can tell all that by LOOKING at us???" and then I went into rhetorical wheel-spinning mode in my head within the dream, that inner dialogue of "well, you could try to cite all the ways she's wrong, that you have degrees and certifications and meaningful jobs and lots of private artistic outlets and passions and whatever...or you could realize how desperate and defensive even having to cite all that would sound, plus you SHOULDN'T HAVE TO, and anyway, upper hand, not letting people's whatever get to you, etc. etc...." and an onslaught of emotion-fueled memories and resentments of how so many otherwise-great charitable efforts and artistic communities through the years have wound up little more than exclusive popularity cliques and...as all the steam and that was going in my mind as some single coherent approach tried to gain traction among all my conflicting feelings and urges, the emotions and push-pull of it all just was too much and I woke up, a little before my alarm went off. Whew.

It was one of those dreams where your feelings are so damn vivid you almost worry when you next see the person in real life you'll inadvertently hold a grudge against them! And also, wow, it made me wonder how much of that means I have insecurity issues right now. Uh.