Not that we've been abandoned, by any stretch; there have been dozens of younger children in here all morning, brought by parents eager to keep their kids steeped in literature over the warm months, or by those looking for car trip reading material, not to mention the forty or so two-year-olds that came flocking in for storytime. And then there's the fact that registration began today for preschool and school-age storytimes; my own Tuesday morning session is already almost full. No, we haven't been deserted.

Now that the rush has died down somewhat, I've been preparing for my personal, non-story-related contribution to the library summer program. In two weeks, I'll be teaching a couple of courses on Photoshop to some middle-school kids. Even though registration for all the summer classes won't begin until Saturday. I've already had another librarian take advantage of her position to "preregister" her son and a friend for my class. I guess I should take that, and a few other comments I've heard from people, as a sign that these Photoshop courses are going to be popular. I suppose that means that I should put some effort into planning them, don't you think?

Lousy public interest, wrecking my nice, lazy afternoon.

I've begun compiling a small collection of photographs for the class to experiment with, and I'm printing and Xeroxing a bunch of screen shots to use as handouts. Sooner or later, I'm going to have to actually start planning what I'm going to say, but I prefer to leave that step until last. Making student disks is much more wonderfully mindless. Perhaps due to the lovely warm weather outside, I don't feel up to any serious thinking at the moment.

About three quarters of my work this morning has been to repeat, ad nauseam, "Sign-ups don't begin until Saturday morning. No, not until Saturday. No, I can't sign you up now; you'll have to come in on Saturday. Yes, in person. On Saturday." I begin to suspect the clerks at the circulation desk of actively sending the patrons over here to drive me slowly insane. "Why, I don't know if they're signing kids up yet! Why don't you go ask the children's librarians?"

I can see it in the parents' eyes as they enter the room. They immediately begin scanning the tables, searching intently. They slowly drift over to me, their children having been sidetracked by a book or a puzzle. They look at the top of the desk, examining the pamphlets and brochures. Finally, they look up at me. "Where can we sign up for the classes?"

I am just one temple throb away from telling the next parent that "All the classes have already been filled up. Sorry; better luck next year!"

I'd be better able to handle annoyances today, I think, were my leg muscles not aching so terribly. I decided to try the second yoga tape I bought: "Power Yoga - Strength." After about ten minutes, I was made painfully aware that I was just not ready. Maybe someday I will be, but for now, my arms can just not support my body by themselves as I curl into a ball and dangle in the air between them. I switched over to the strength training workout ("Military Muscle") that came with my aerobic video ("Camp Cardio"). I was at least able to complete the tape, though my thighs have been yelling at me ever since. I will improve eventually, right? Right?

Please don't tell me just how far away that "eventually" will be. I'm happier not knowing.

It's amusing; when I had the first dream, I almost wrote about it, but decided against it. For reasons of my own embarrassment, I didn't want to mention the fact that I was ever involved with "that kind" of scene. Why I should be embarrassed, I have no real idea; I have a feeling that the truth lies somewhere around my own fears of public perception of my image. I think I was a little nervous that my personal knowledge of how a bong is used might somehow alter the way in which my words are perceived.

That's nonsense, though. Every day, every moment of my youth has worked to shape me. The notes I took in sixth grade have just as much relevance as the gossip over which I giggled in the seventh. I can't edit out portions of my history just to make myself more palatable for others, and it's not even my place to try and guess what other people might find unpalatable in the first place.

Anyway. That being said, can somebody please tell me why I keep having these dreams? In the first one, I was a single woman in my twenties, living alone in a huge, beautiful loft apartment, and I was standing in my living room, gazing out the large bay window, and holding a blue crystal bong. In the second, the motley group I described above was sitting around a camp fire, telling jokes. In neither of the dreams was I myself; I was playing some sort of character. I'm not even certain that I was female in the second.

Perhaps I should keep a dream journal. My dreams this week have been incredibly vivid; the night before last, I was a sorceress, only I was hiding the fact from my family. They were trying to marry me to a man I didn't love, so I made myself invisible (actually, I just chanted, "You can't see me, you can't see me") and walked away. I ended up trapped in a raging inferno, so I was forced to return and marry the man; he gave me an oven mitt instead of a ring.

No wonder I wake up feeling exhausted in the morning.