I had a dream last night that I was on a sinking ship in the middle of a small freshwater lake. Pine Mountain Lake, if you know it. The ship never sank, really, it just kept sinking and then inexplicably unsinking right before we were about to drown. Also, I think there was magic involved: I remember seeing someone turned into... it must have been pewter... as I attempted to make it to the top deck. I'd just realized I was safe and so was going back to retrieve my contacts from the fridge when the ship started to sink again, for the third or fourth time.

Sometime around eight o'clock tonight all the little things hit me. The breaking point was realizing that I'd just acted like an ass, or a blowhard, for the last few hours of "Teaching in the Community College."

Though neither of those is quite right. I just spoke too often, said too little, and disagreed with my classmates more than I should've. I fell on my sword once or twice, but in my experience self-effacing comedy seems to make up for very little.

(The professor should be commended for teaching a class on teaching, by the way. His own teaching methods are implicitly — and occasionally explicitly — under scrutiny for three hours every Wednesday.)

I sat next to a student who we'll innocently refer to as Pontifico. I've had a few classes with Pontifico, who not only comments a lot but has the rare talent of sounding completely sure of everything he says. Last term I told the Strategist that when Pontifico was very young, an old gypsy woman stole all of his question marks.

Sometime over break, however, Pontifico collected the five magical items he needed in order to trick the old gypsy woman and steal back his question marks.

Apart from their shared love of high adventure, Our Bold Hero and Pontifico have little in common except a certain cynicism — the kind of thinking which, for example, led us to agree that teaching the subject matter is a more important goal for a professor than encouraging your students' moral growth.

(Prof. Goldgar, could you tell us more about 'tolerance'?)

Unfortunately, our combined cynicism was too much for me, and ye, I grew drunk and thoughtless upon it. Who knows if the other students even picked up on this supposed lapse, but suddenly it seemed more like the snowcap on a mountain of many incredibly insignificant failures.

Misplacing my notebook at work, wearing casual dress to the job fair (maybe the lesson here is to get more than five hours of sleep before you leave the house), suddenly all of this mattered, I'd reached a crisis of failure. This was who I was.

I left class feeling like I needed a shower, or an exorcism.

Or maybe just a new episode of Lost.

Also: whether it was the result of expert stalking or mere coincidence, I should also mention that Pontifico referred to me as "Crazy Dan" at one point tonight, referencing an earlier comment by the teacher.

I've always had mixed feelings about that title, but needless to say I never expected to hear it again from anyone other than Jinx.