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It’s only a matter of time.

THE HUNGER PANGS OVERTOOK my stomach as I made my way toward the peanut butter and jelly corner of the dining hall.

Lack of posting, increase in sociability; these things happen.

THE VERY LAST THING I REMEMBERED before waking up this morning was a dream — a vivid, awful dream.

I was listening to the black box recordings of a plane as it went down. There were screams, helpless, awful screams, and panic, too. They were helpless; I, I the midst of my dreaming, was helpless; we were a collective ball of helpless hallucination.

My cell phone began to ring from my nightstand, and the visions hastily ceased. Thank goodness. It’s not like me to have these awful visions, and so I pondered what I might have heard/seen/eaten lately that may have conjured up this nightmare.

But before I could even begin to ponder, I remembered earlier events from my dream. My younger sister, as it turns out, was preggo. No one really knew how (well, we all knew how, just not exactly HOW), or why, but within a matter of seconds nine months had passed and her child was ready to come out of the oven, so to speak.

And wouldn’t you know it, she made it to the hospital. Just in time! All was miraculous, and perfect, and practically celestial…yadda yadda yadda. I bet you’re expecting “The End.”

Wrong.

This was no ordinary hospital. There were not doctors, or nurses, or strange tools or cups to urinate it. There wasn’t even the receptionist wearing the Rainbow Brite scrubs to answer the phone. There were no plastic plants! Were we even certain that this was a hospital? Yes, absolutely.

There was simply a table, in an operating room. And me, and my sister, and the fully-baked bun in her oven, which was currently ready to be taken out and placed on the potholders to cool…so to speak.

And as lady luck would have it, the oven mitts were placed on none other than my hands. Which made sense, granted there there was nary a soul around other than the 2.5 of us. So naturally I quickly sprung into “baby-delivering mode” (a button on my motherboard that had never been pressed…until now). This said mode consisted of me sitting below the table with my hands cupped, waiting for something or rather, someone to drop, and hopefully catching “it.”

Alas, I was wrong again. What seemed like a simple enough task was foiled as I had somehow once again gotten the short end of the stick. How? Sitting there with my hands cupped in anticipation, I was suddenly overcome with some of the most awful, unearthly pains I have ever experienced. My sister, on the other hand, lay cooly on the table, not a single moan nor shriek escaping her laboring body. I had inherited all of her delivery pains, though I was not even giving birth. Meanwhile, there she was. Laying there. Releasing her bun from the oven and, ironically, laughing at me.

Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me the least.

Sooner or later (it felt like later) the baby arrived and I, with my hands cupped, caught it, of course. It was a huge kid, which would probably explain why I was in a hella lot of pain. Despite the child being my sister’s, I felt a great ownership of it. After all, she only carried it for nine months. Big d.

The scene cut, and the next scenario I found myself in was increasingly strange. I was riding in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by none other than my Media Writing professor, Nancy Hanson herself. On my lap, where a baby should have rested, was instead a puppy. I was completely delirious, and raised the dog up in the air in a Rafiki/Simba manner while proceeding to talk to it like it could understand me. You know, like how people talk to their pets.

“Look at YOU! LOOOOOOK! Take a glimpse of your new surroundings!”

I had gone into mother mode, but still couldn’t figure out why the child had turned into a puppy. Forget that, it’s irrelevent; a newborn is a newborn, right? I dismissed the fact that my child was no longer human and instead focused on the larger matter at hand: Where in tarnation was my sister?!

We’d forgotten her, which I didn’t feel entirely guilty about. It’s not like she was on her deathbed at the hospital, in agonizing pain wondering where her child was, or better, where the person who stole her labor pains from her was. No. I knew that she was likely wandering, semi-consciously through the empty hallways of the abandoned institution, looking for popsicles and demanding to be served a beverage with a straw. (Coincidentally, I am only half-kidding about this.)

Despite my half-hearted feelings for my sister at the time, I promptly instructed Nancy Hanson to turn the vehicle around so that I may search for her.

It didn’t take long. There she was, in a trance, walking up a broken escalator. If my memory serves me right, she wasn’t wearing shoes. She didn’t want anything to do with me. She didn’t even want to enter the vehicle driven by Nancy Hanson. Shocking.

And then there were screams, helpless, awful screams, and panic, too. A collective ball of helpless hallucination.

My cell phone began to ring from my nightstand, and the visions hastily ceased.
Thank goodness.

I need to stop eating Sour Patch Kids after midnight.

I AM GOING TO GO OUT on a limb here and say that I’m really not ready for school to conclude.

Ho-hum.