New Residence Papers

Residence just got back to me with a request to do some paperwork.  Turns out, they sent me a package that I was supposed to fill out and then send back, but it never reached me.  Same thing happened to me in Katimavik and CWY.  I wonder what's tripping them up.

Yeah, so there's 17 pages in this thing.  I had to go to the library to get them printed out.

I hate forms... They ask me to date them, and they give these little sets of spaces, two for month, two for day, and two for year.  Most of them have indicators saying which order they go in, but some of them don't.  That wouldn't be a problem, because the assumption would be that the order is the same when it's unmarked as it is when it's marked.  Unfortunately,  some of the marked ones say that the day goes before the month, and some say the month goes before the day.  Did the same person set up this entire form?  I'll just date it in the same order as the nearest marked date space.  I'm lucky to have the birthday that I do.  If I screw up the order, hopefully they won't assume that I was born on the 21st month.


Until I'd come back to Guelph, I hadn't remembered that I have insomnia.  It has a lot to do with the air, I think.  The Northern air is really nice, as I think I've said, and it induces some really deep sleep with some really memorable dreams.  Guelph air is bad, and it induces shallow, dreamless sleep.  I'm thinking back on my travels and trying to decide if Guelph air is exceptionally bad or not.

In Mali, the air was harsh.  Everytime I think back on it, the air here becomes more bearable.  I had some really good sleep there, but I think that's just because of how exhausted I was.  Rural Quebec was fine.  I think I remember that sleeping was one of the few perks of that rotation.  Chisasibi... I lived in some pretty cramped quarters, same with Thunder Bay and PEI.  The beds were pretty terrible, too.  So when I think back on sleeping in those places, I don't think so much about air quality.  I don't think any of the locations were exceptionally bad, though.

I've managed a few dreams since coming back.  Last night I dreamt I was invisible.  It wasn't a typical invisibility dream, though, where you can write it off as "feelings of being unnoticed" and be done with it.  This dream lacked a sense of isolation, because strangely, I wasn't subjected to that foggy sort of "figurative logic" that usually comes in dreams.

In my dream, I was invisible, and I could hardly believe it.  I was shocked because it was so strange and inexplicable.  I went to meet my family, and surely enough they couldn't see me.  When I spoke they were startled and looked around for where my voice was coming from.  I explained to them that I was invisible.  They could hardly believe it, either.  I told them that I didn't know why or how I was invisible, and that I would be looking for a way to reverse the process.  Then I woke up, and I wasn't invisible.  That was pleasantly surprising.

I also had a more standard dream where my I was in Residence at college and I was roommates with my two friends from elementary school.  One of them dressed up in my Mali clothes and went around telling people that he was me, and they believed it.  I told him to stop impersonating me, but he didn't.  Eventually I grabbed him and screamed at him to take off my clothes and stop pretending to be me.  He then transformed into an insect and started buzzing around my head.  I started swatting at him and told my friend that I "hate it when he turns into a bug, because I worry that I'll kill him by accident".  My friend replied "Yeah, but you never do".