Last night, I had another one of my trademark bizarre dreams — I dreamt that "pickleball" somehow became a professional sport. For those of you not familiar with pickleball, it's a game we played in high school gym class that was essentially the deformed child of an unholy union between tennis and ping-pong. There were many, many good reasons to take pickleball as your gym elective, not the least of which being that it wasn't "advanced weight training," otherwise known as "weight training," seeing as how our school did not offer beginner weight training or intermediate weight training. Also, pickleball was taught by Ms. Panko or Ms. Kesting, who, unlike the rest of the physical education at our high school, both (a) were capable of feeling empathy for their fellow human beings and (b) were not morbidly and ironically obese.

I mean, seriously, if our plane crash-landed in the Andes, our whole gym class could survive for a week off Mr. Butz's love handles. You could fit three of me inside Miss Pantano and still have room for Ian Bonner's overgrown ego! What the hell business did these people have telling me to get fit? (Note, fellow senior-year gym-classers, not one word about "Sally"...)

Back to my dream, I was visiting the high school, feeling invincible thanks to the fact that I've graduated from the wretched institutions of education and the school no longer exercises its vile power over me. (Uh... right... that's not why I'm in therapy or anything.) So, I walk into the gym and for some reason, I join a game of pickleball with a bunch of little sophomores who don't really seem to be getting the concept of the game. Rather than hitting the ball over the net, they spend most of their time crowding each other. Meanwhile, I keep whacking the official pickleball (it's just a wiffleball) out of bounds with my powerful yellow table tennis paddle, and naturally our team loses. I blame the sophomores. But, but, but here's the kicker: the five-minute bell rings and I just walk out of the gym — no getting changed, no having to hang out in the locker room cause having a bunch of sweaty boys loose in the hallways is just an invitation to trouble — I'm free to do what I want.

Not that I didn't pretty much do whatever I wanted back when I was actually in high school, but now that I'm a graduate, the school can't even try to control me.

And I'm walking through the halls again and who do I run into but Miss Young. We both scream like little girls, except in her case, it's socially appropriate. Then I wake up, realize that Miss Young is probably still lost somewhere in the New Hampshire wilderness, and I'm starting another crappy day before six in the morning.