I had this dream last night...
A friend has invited me to a blog meet-up at a bar/restaurant. I am nervous but excited to get to know other bloggers and be social. There are half a dozen people at a table in the corner of the restaurant. We make introductions and settle into cozy, warm sharing of thoughts and ideas. It is nice.
I'm the first one to leave. I shake each person's hand, and we exchange kind words. Except for the last person. She tells me she was unimpressed.
I step back. "Great. I get five positive encounters, but now I'm going to obsess over the one that wasn't nice. You could have just said, 'Nice to meet you.' You could have said nothing at all."
I gather my possessions which turns out to be an unusual amount of paper notebooks and folders considering this is a digital blog group. It takes an uncomfortably long time to pick everything up.
I continue to speak, "I can't even storm out properly. So, there's another thing that will not impress you."
And as I finally walk away, I call over my shoulder, "Don't worry. I won't blog about this because it would be too mediocre for you!"
And in the dream, I mean this. I have no intention of rehashing the encounter to anyone, especially myself.
But the dream continued...
I return to the bar/restaurant later. No idea why. I go to the bar area of the building to avoid any lingering blog people and sit alone in a booth. The owner approaches greeting his regulars as he passes through
"As I live and breath!" he exclaims when he sees me. "Is that The Medi-Ogre? Hey everyone! It's the Medi-Ogre!" He claps me on the shoulder and keeps walking.
I grab his arm and demand to know who told him to call me that. He tells me everyone thinks it's a funny name, and he doesn't understand why I am upset.
"You've been through junior high school, right?" I say. "Wonderful time, right? Everyone is kind and non-judgmental, right?" I pause for the sarcasm to settle in. "One day some kid gives you a nickname. You don't like it, but you try to be cool about it, ignore it, wait for that kid to eventually get bored with it. But they don't, and that kid tells all the other kids, and now everyone calls you that name. So you leave, go to another school where you can start over. But they tell your nickname to the kids in *that* school, too. You can't escape it. It follows you everywhere. And you didn't even do anything to deserve it in the first place."
At this point, the owner and everyone in the bar is sad. I say to him, "It's okay. You didn't know." I give him a hug, and we both cry. Everyone in the bar joins our hug.
And the dream ends.
