and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

After last call when the bar lights go up and then go back down half an hour or so later so as not to call attention to the cops on the prowl, the drunkards get locked in like Natalie Portman in a Walmart except they don't fret too much about it. They're busy solving the world's problems, you know.

I met an Iranian tonight. Old, probably in his 60's, and happy to be alive it seemed. He rolled me a cigarette off of his pack of Drum and offered to let me roll it if I wanted, but I told him I was no good anyway. We talked for awhile about democracy, then "Bush's Democracy" as he so often called it, and how there is a great divide between the theory and the practice - he didn't blame me, thankfully. He graciously accepted my offer of a beer and shook my hand to celebrate the second day of the new year - the second day of spring - and I thought: he might have something here. Today was so bright and beautiful that it spoke to me, in that soothing voice, which says no matter you got no work done, it's soo nice out..it's okay.. it's okay, michael.. it's okay. I did try to get some work done; even spent 10 hours at the computer lab, as if that's synonymous with getting work done, but in the end it was another night in another bar with another stranger talking about more strange things.

When I asked him about the Iranian nuclear program he laughed a jolly laugh, and I chuckled, as if we both knew the joke. He told me there was no reason in the world that the U.S.A. should think they are allowed, or Britain should think they are allowed, or even India, when Iran was not allowed: "Ridiculus!" he exclaimed, but not with any malice, more with a contemplative sigh. "Twenty-two years," he said, "I've been living in this country. I love Canada. I'm a citizen of this earth, but I'm living in Canada."

He was, in the end, a drunk old man with white hair at the bar, pitted and bulbous and gnarled, but he wasn't any less of a person. Not to me, sitting on a stool drinking without a reason wasting money and generally disrespecting my opportunities.

My roommate kept egging him on, starting sentences with things like "As an Iranian man.. ?" I wanted to punch him. We can all get a bit verbose with a bit of the drink in us but I wasn't in the mood for it and yet my roommate was on a roll. Somehow I find that politics and bars aren't the best soulmates so I try to stick to how's-the-weather and go-patriots. In the end I'm no more lucky than the rest.

I can talk you blue in the face but I lack a certain something when it comes to the gift of the gab. I don't quite have the staying power of someone who can preach to an absent choir. I need an attentive audience. Sometimes I think my ability to read people is a downright curse. I actually stop talking when someone seems offended, indifferent, or downright bored. These are the reasons I will never make a good politician and these are also the reasons I will never be the person that everyone expected me to be. I just can't step up and blab like an idiot if I don't really have anything to say.

All of these things, the Iranian, Bush, Natalie Portman, and the weather?? These are the things that make the world go 'round.. not me. I'm just trying to hold on.