Sending hurricane-survival vibes to the east coast from the tornado-prone midwest.

For about the last half of my life I’ve had a recurring dream that I am about to go onstage to perform in front of a large audience, but I’m totally unprepared. In this dream I am often backstage with the other members of some very famous musical group thinking, “What in the world am I doing?” This, along with the “Oh, here’s our new house. My, isn’t it big?” dream are the only two dreams I have over and over again. Last night I dreamed I was performing with Chan Marshall.

I’ve always assumed these music dreams were about performance anxiety, that fears about my unpreparedness for various tasks were being played out in my sleep. Certainly when you have a job like mine in which you frequently stand up in front of people and play the part of a smart person you sometimes feel unprepared. But in my dream last night I wasn’t backstage. I was onstage. And I wasn’t particularly anxious. We were just playing music together. Maybe my unconscious isn’t working through anxieties. Maybe it’s telling me I need to be playing music.

So I think I’m going to buy an electric guitar (maybe a Fender Telecaster) and amp. I’ve been playing for about 20 years, but I haven’t worked at getting any better for a long time. I looked into lessons today, and found a place that charges $15 for 30 minutes. That seems really cheap.

I’ll keep you posted.

Today I took all of the students in my eighteenth-century novel course to the computer lab and had them all log in simultaneously to the Movable Type install I have running in my account on Jeff‘s server. They composed an entry each, saved it as a draft, published it, viewed it in the blogspace, then commented on someone else’s entry.

No glitches. Not a single one. I am stunned. I have never had such a flawless in-class experience with a piece of software. No one got stuck. No one became so confused they couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do.

All this from free software.

I am so going to learn Liz Lawley‘s implementation of MT as courseware.

There will be many who memorialize country music star Johnny Cash and correctly emphasize his importance to American culture. But over at Dooce there is as heartfelt an appreciation of actor John Ritter, who also died this past week, as one could ask for:

As terribly American as it may sound, if I had to pinpoint one constant in my early life, through moving at an early age and changing schools and my parents’ divorce and their consequent remarrying and puberty and all the changes of adolescence, that one constant would be ìThreeís Company.î Jack Tripper was my ambiguously gay guidance counselor…

I loved the show, not because it was particularly good or relevant to me, but because everything was just so outrageous. Even after my parents allowed it in their house, I never fully understood what I was watching, I just knew that the women looked like I wanted to look, Jack wore very cool shorts, and they lived in a place that had palm trees. How exotic!…I never caught on to the fact that Jack was pretending to be gay. In my adolescent eyes, Jack was just a dramatic, flamboyant caricature of a man that didnít exist in my world, a represenation of something that wasnít allowed in my world, a part of life I wasnít even supposed to know about…

Part of me is just sad that he died so young and unexpectedly, but the biggest part of me is mourning the passing of someone who played an integral part in my realization of the world, outside of the sterilized paradigm my parents tried to present to me.

As for me, I’m just wondering what’s going to happen to the PBS kids show Clifford, the Big Red Dog, on which Ritter voiced the title character. I love that show.