So during the most isolating days of this winter, I take a sleeping pill before bed. Not always, and not any more- these days I sleep like the dead- but sometimes all alone on the hill (surounded on all sides by hundreds upon hundreds of acres of wilderness) I struggle with the age old fear of laying awake listening to phantom footsteps. Considering I can get trashed on my aunt's non-alchoholic wine and derive manic energy from a single green tea bag, you can imagine what prescription dose of Ambien does. Knocks me completely off my feet, I trip ballz to use a spankin' brand new term i picked up in north carolina. Then I crash off to a turbulent sleep, wake up every hour on the hour, and have zero dreams. Except one night I do have a dream. Despite the episodic sleep and the light dusting of narcotics, I return over and over to the most vivid one I've had since the age of the lost in the woods on a snowy day nightmares. I'm sitting in a cafe in India with David Hughes and arguing over Global Warming. And I wake up with this picture in my mind- utter clarity- of David Hughes.David was one of the head coaches of at AQ when I went to school there, but he taught for the rodeo and spent his semester eating Dahl while I ate nutella & raclette, he ate frijoles when I ate....lamb? whatever they eat in New Zealand. You get the picture: I probbably only spoke with him on a few occasions. Then he went and started New River Academy which is seeing enormous sucsess, and we kept up one of those deep-running facebook relationships where we occasionally comment on one anothers photos.
So I wrote him about the dream, just for fun, and he wrote back and I wrote back and before I knew it I was driving to New Hampshire (they have cell-service there!) steering with one hand and answering David's questions about education philosphy, and an hour later I had a job offer at New River Academy. There is an immediate opening, for the spring 2009 semester in Chile, and what do you know but they need an english teacher. I hung up the phone and floated out of the car kicked around the streets of Hanover for a few hours, thinking, well I'm glad I had that dream.
