The Virtues Of Good Orange Juice

cannot be overstated, for those of us who like citrus and not soda. My suitemates couldn't understand yesterday why there were more cartons of juice in our fridge than people in the apartment. Their loss, I suppose. I'm down to only two now instead of three like yesterday; I go through OJ pretty quickly, both at home and with the now-regular Cox consumption of Odwalla. Nearly four dollars for a thing of juice. Crazy, really, but the market is there, given that the only other juice-like options are Powerade, Minute Maid, and Fanta. And it's not like I ever finish the $400/semester on my card anymore. It must be weird to come to the United States and find juices in two-quart cartons. Because I'm sure 64 fluid ounces isn't a standard international container size Two liters, maybe. But two quarts seems such a natural size for a thing of juice.

I'm rambling again. Poor readers. Sometimes I think 90% of this blog is a product of my continuing struggle with sleep. Of course, it doesn't help that I rarely get enough sleep anyway, leading to amusingly incoherent thoughts like the one I had passing by Jake's old room in Turman West the other day. [After much consideration, I've decided not to put that anecdote in the public domain.] And then the few times where I am properly awake and thoughtful, I'm often writing about a dream I had a few hours earlier.

Like now.

The dream is fuzzy, and I can't remember whether I dreamt it before I went to class, or after I came back to nap. I was in Japan, and my family had come with me, since my parents have yet to meet Jake. They really only wanted to go to dinner with us, and then they'd go back home. I'd tried to convince them that this was a silly idea, but they seemed unmoved by my argument that a fourteen hour flight to Tokyo might be a bit of a hassle.

I fumed quietly but assented, making them promise that they'd spend the evening with us and then go off on their own. We picked a restaurant for dinner, a Thai-run sushi place. There were six of us; my grandfather, my brother, my mom and dad, and Jake and me. Everyone showed up more or less ontime, and Jake and I managed to maintain a level of relative propriety despite not having seen each other for seven months. We got our table and sat down, and as always used to happen in Maryland when I was a kid, I ended up seated between Dan and Granddad. Which wouldn't bother me anymore, except that Jake was there. I pointed this out, and the fact that we'd probably be sharing food anyway, since we were the only two people at the table who'd eat any raw fish, and my parents agreed we should move around as soon as the soup got to the table. The soup was fresh-cooked ramen in coconut broth. It was really good, but when we went to move seats around, we realized that our table and chairs were situated on a tiny island of tile about three inches higher than the floor. Every attempt to move things around caused someone's chair to slide off backwards, such that they lost their balance. When we asked our server about it, he said it would only get worse as the night went on, since the restaurant would add tables to pack people in like on the Tokyo subway. We couldn't all sit comfortably around the table as it was, so we finished our soup and left.

Dan and Jake had gone out first to go get the cars and figure out where we should go for dinner now, and I stayed back to help Dad with the bill. When we went out into the parking lot, Jake had pulled up next to my parents' rental car in a DeLorean, which he had apparently borrowed from Will. (In the dream, this explanation made sense.) Seated in the back, my brother was going through the DeLorean's DVD collection, and informed me in reproachful tones that Jake and Will did not have a copy of Independence Day he could borrow. I couldn't remember having ever told him otherwise, but apologized anyway, hoping to get him out of the car. Alas, no such luck. It was a DeLorean, after all.