That Glazed Look: A Safety Zone for Daydreams

Mediterranean is a word well put together. In fact, its pleasant combination of syllables compelled me to stare at it a good long while when class was beginning last Monday (I think) at ten and the projector screen was there in front of us plastering the wall in a map of 16^th century Europe. A scintillating time and location in history, that.

This blog will be primarily about what is going on in my head at times like the one I have just described. A sort of public safety zone for daydreams. Please feel free to share yours (with blogworthy discretion of course).

I manage to retain a good bit from classes, take notes, and enjoy it all while still living a sort of second daydream life behind the eyes. If you’ve ever noticed how musicians get that glazed look over their eyes when they are really engaging their instruments, well, it’s a little like that. Only I am not very musical and it takes a lot of concentration to live at all, so I guess the music is life itself that I am playing, and the instruments…heart, mind, and soul.

These moments of ocular obscurity stand quite farther out in memory when one is caught in them. A prime example was the class period, several weeks back, when the class was in the middle of a discussion during Behavioral Science. I always have a lot to think about in this class, and usually traverse the whole spectrum of emotions in the space of an hour and fifty minutes. Though previously engaged in the discussion, I had connected the topic to an article we had read several weeks before. It was “Social Animal,” by David Brooks, from the New Yorker, and it was about psychology type things. So it wasn’t too far off course.

Brooks pointed out lots of quirky detail of behavior in men and women and they made me laugh. He wrote about the guy “concoct[ing] elaborate fantasies in which he heroically saved her from harm.” Which made me wonder if that’s a typical guy thing…or if that’s a rare kind of daydream? Or if girls concoct elaborate fantasies about saving people too?

And that’s where I was when Dr. Porter looked at me and said, “So what do you think about that, Cassie?” Which was as good as to say, “Come back to earth and join us for a while.” But of course my thoughts had a perfectly good connection to the conversation topic (which now escapes my memory)…I just couldn’t…couldn’t…Well. I told him exactly what I was thinking, because, honest, there was a correlation.

So yes, I do sometimes even daydream about people daydreaming and then daydream about it later to put it on a blog, which, if you are susceptible to this yourself, may find yourself daydreaming about in weeks to come. Good luck with that. As for me, I’m still wondering if guys really concoct elaborate fantasies of rescuing females…

Heralding the Birth of the Second-Born Blogchild

I’m having another blog. That is, the idea came over me this morning as I sat drinking a very milky cup of instant Starbucks and staring glassy-eyed out the double doors in my dorm suite. I had been staring at the hill on the other side of Alumni Field for some time, basking in my general fondness of it and thinking about how it looked like a volcano. And then I realized that I was going to start another blog.

So here I am, pregnant with an unexpected brainchild. I’m thinking it could have come at a better time, but confound it all, what’s that Jewish saying? L’Chaim—to life! Let’s have it then. I’m sure it is due in part to the eschewing of a certain cranial contraceptive—Facebook. My casual statuses satisfied that momentary creative urge but never got a chance to develop into even a paragraph. Even a week of refraining from posting statuses has proved sufficient time to get the creative cells aligning in my fertile brain.

And now?

Now I’m pacing the floor while devouring the remnants of a pint of Blue Bell Happy Tracks. I feel a distinct urge to paint something saffron yellow, for no particular reason. The birds were singing this evening with as much confusion and vigor as I feel at the thought of producing something from my soul again, though it be small and though it come into a world of quickened pace.

My erstwhile blogchild has grown up, distanced itself from me, and retired. I had considerable feelings of angst for it last fall when I came to school, but times have changed, and my writing must change too. This coming blogchild, like my youngest brother, will certainly have a more relaxed upbringing than my colicky firstborn.