They Don't Travel Or Have Siblings

Had a nightmare that I missed a belt loop  

I miss it too.  Where did it go?  

Well, that's a very different matter, and one that I'm remarkably confused about, but we'll get to that. 

What's more important now is that I recently had a bad dream.  It happens to everybody, and it apparently happens to me more often when I eat half a dozen pickled pig's feet right before bed, but that's beside the point entirely.

Wait, what?

Many people have had that famous dream where you walk into school or work without requisite attire.  Its little embarrassing for your coworkers and/or classmates to see your underthings, leave alone the fact that you apparently didn't notice your lack of clothing until you got this far into your day.  

Well, I had a variation of this, where I was at work, and couldn't figure out why I felt naked.  I wasn't.  I was completely clothed in a fairly standard dress shirt and a pair of khaki pants, but something felt off.  Turns out, the thing that was off was the fact that I had misses the belt loop in the back of my pants when I put my belt on.  Horrifying!  

I have, of course, self-diagnosed the issue here, and it's a weird one involving my pants.  

This is still PG-rated, right?

I have multiple pairs of pants that I wear to work.  Some of them are slightly nicer than others, and some fit better than others (some are better for sitting and others better for walking...it's a little weird), but there is a fairly stable rotation of pants.  There is one pair of khaki pants that would seem to be my favorites.  They fit great, look nice, have a decent color that goes with many different shirts.  Overall, they're pretty solid.  The belt loop is tearing.  It's the only thing that's wrong with the pants, and it's the only pair of pants I have where this is happening.  It's the belt loop on my left side, which doesn't rub up against my desk chair, or my laptop bag, or the seat belt in my car.  I have no idea why this particular wear pattern is happening on these pants and no others.  

Maybe a fluke you say?  Well, I might agree with you if I didn't know the primary reason I bought these particular pants.  That reason, of course, being that the pants they replaced had a torn belt loop on my left side.  

In A World Where...Wait, What?

Well, that screenplay I thought was a great idea at 3AM sounds pretty silly now  

Coming never to a theatre nowhere near you...

I fancy myself something of a creative type on occasion.  Usually, this manifests itself in the form of comedy writing.  

Ooo, you write comedy?  I had no idea.  Where can we see some of your work?

But occasionally, I write slightly more serious fare.  I once submitted a short story to a contest which dealt with a machine that can Predict Your Death.   The resulting book became a best selling book, despite my lack of inclusion, but pretty much everybody who read my story said they at least sorta liked it.  I'll call that a win.  

I also tend to write screenplays in my dreams.  That's where I came up with my future holiday-themed Oscar contender "The Legend Of Kringle," among other great ideas.  The problem is, I rarely remember them, so my opportunities to win further Oscars go right out the window.  This is unfortunate, but a fact of reality.  Well, recently, I came up with a great screenplay while I was asleep.  It was so good, in fact, that when I woke myself up at 3AM with how great a story it was, I made a mental note to remember the idea in the morning.  If nothing else, it would make a great Sametime Status.  

Well, fast forward to actual wake-up time, and all of a sudden, my brilliant idea seems a little half-baked.  The general idea was that the President of the United States starts a new program of surprising people in their houses with an unannounced visit.  He just shows up at your house, and you let him in and chat for a while.  (Already, you can see where this falls a little flat...)  Well, one of these surprise visits goes awry when a presidential visit to a typical affluent suburban neighborhood turns into a nightmare as the president discovers that the family is actually living in abject poverty, well beyond their means.  trash is piled up inside the house, sick people and vermin are everywhere, and there's nothing to eat or drink, since utility bills haven't been paid in months.  

The family's children have discovered that the reason for their plight is that their parents were victims of predatory lending practices, and the president then decides to take up the family's cause and fight for justice.  

Why did I ever thing this was a good idea?  Weird things happen to my brain at 3AM, I guess.  Suffice to say that this won't be made into a feature film anytime soon...although, if it does...I totally want my cut. 

It Wasn't Even That Difficult At The Time

I really shouldn’t have dreams about upcoming calculus tests anymore  

It just goes to show just how much calculus you could do now if you had to.  

So, being a professional engineer and genius, it probably doesn't come as much of a shock to you to hear that I have done some advanced maths in my history.  This includes things like vector algebra, calculus, differential equations, and quantum physics.  It's true.  I couldn't do any of that crap now if I tried.  

One of these, in particular, I'm not 100% convinced I could really ever do.  One of the advanced calculus classes I took when I was in college.  I, for some reason, remember it being a late class, so probably a night course which was the only one available when I could attend.  It has since turned out to be 100% irrelevant to my career goals, but that didn't seem important at the time.  All I know is that I knew exactly how to solve the problems, with no understanding of what it was I was actually doing.  I passed the course, presumably with a decent grade, and went on with life, never having to do that nonsense again.  

See, engineering is so very much not about being able to plug the right numbers into an equation and solving for x to get the right answer.  Engineering (aside from a remarkable long-winded rant I often go into about engineering being the art and science of laziness) is all about fundamentally understanding why the world around you happens the way that it does and knowing how to change it to get better results.  Anybody can plug equations into a computer nowadays, but Knowing Where To Put The Chalk Mark is what makes someone an engineer.  So, the fact that I was able to get through an advanced math course in college having no earthly clue what I was actually doing apparently didn't sit well in my brain.  

To this day (well, strictly speaking, to at least some day last week, but I doubt it'll stop now), I have a recurring dream about that calc class.  I know that I didn't go to the class recently.  In reality, it's because I graduated years ago, but in my dreamland, it's because it was a night class that I kept forgetting to go to because I didn't have to go every day.  Combine the fact that I seem to have skipped that class recently, with the fact that I didn't actually know what the class was about, and we have a test coming up soon results in a feeling of panic that I'm going to fail the course.  This is annoying, and wakes me up.  

I've already passed the course.  I've graduated.  I'm a professional engineer now, and I never need to take a calc test or do math ever again.  Why does this still wake me up at night?