  I do very practical things in my dreams. While I do occasionally have a what-the-fuck dream where I’m missing my face or my house is made of dust, but most of the time my dreams are strangely unstrange. I might take a walk. I might eat a bowl of oatmeal. Lately I have had a lot of gardening dreams, which baffle me at their normalcy. Last night I had a very elaborate dream about a strange MP3 player shaped like a crouton. I kept sniffing at it to see if it was, indeed, a salad topping.
-------------------------- My morning routine, no matter what time of the year it is, must include at least 3-4 solid minuets of me prancing around and singing along to a song. It doesn’t matter the song, really, because that’s not the important part. The important part is that I act like a six year old for a brief span of time, and it sets the mood for my day.
-------------------------- My mom tells me that when I was a small kid I had a lot of friends, but she is simply a vicious liar. Before I could read, I was a very social kid. In fact, all my school reports until seventh grade say exactly that. Usually it’s underlined two or three times, ‘Anna is a VERY SOCIAL child! !” (numerous exclamation points optional). But as soon as I got my hands on books, I took The Baby Sitters Club over a rousing game of tag any day. My life was school, ballet, reading, and church. I make it a point to explain I was not reading good literature, thought the occasional O. Henry or Twain made it under my nose. Aside from reading every single Baby Sitters Club and Baby Sitter Little Sister books, I was quite a fan of Dear Americas. The Alice books were a hoot, especially because romantic boys (not my playmates at school and certainly not my mean, messy brothers) were of a new breed to me.
Sometimes I wish I had developed actual social skills, ones outside of school, at that young age. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so miserable in middle school, maybe I wouldn’t be so unapproachable now. But then I think of all those afternoons, all those midnights under my covers, all the rides to ballet- all of them with a book. The adventures I had, however anti social tendencies they bred in me, I’m pretty sure now that they were worth it. Affectionately… Anna 
