Last night I had a dream — wait, I know. I know that this is no way to start a story because no one likes to read about other people’s dreams. I’d rather listen to someone describe in great detail the consistency of their underarm hair. But this was a dream about a supermodel, so you are required to forgive me.
Jon and I are sitting in the audience of a panel at a blogging conference, both of us typing away on our laptops. I look over to see what he’s writing when I notice that he’s not taking notes. He’s having a conversation with someone on iChat. I try not to snoop, but I am compelled to see who he’s chatting with much like I’m often compelled to rip off a scab. At first I think that the low light in the room is causing my focus to go wobbly, but after I blink several times I can see with certainty that he is chatting with Gisele Bundchen.
I try to hold my shit together as best I can, but I start to taste blood from where I have bitten into my tongue. I lean over, and because we are surrounded by dozens of other people I try to speak to him as inconspicuously as possible. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I whisper, except it comes out as less of a whisper and more of a violent bullet of air right into his ear.
He can feel the anger in my voice, so he immediately tries to calm me down. “I’m trying to explain the differences between MySQL and Perl to my friend,” he answers as if that were the most logical thing to ever come out of his mouth.
“You’re friends with Gisele Bundchen?” I ask.
“Well, yeah,” he says. “I met her on a WordPress message board a few months ago.”
My whole world does a sort of belly flop, and I start to get a little dizzy because what I used to think was right-side-up is now turned on its head. “That’s not okay,” I say to him.
“What do you mean it’s not okay?” he asks. “We’re talking about databases, for crying out loud.”
I personally don’t care if he is talking to her about shoe horns, so I spit back, “This? This is a total betrayal.”
“Heather,” he says and gets closer because I have taken the argument to an embarrassing volume, one as similarly irritating as the time I performed Drunken Cher Karaoke at a party full of strangers. “You’re overreacting. Let’s talk about this later.”
I can’t believe that he would even suggest that it’s perfectly reasonable for him to be friends with Gisele Bundchen under any circumstances, on any planet, and I start to wonder if maybe I had misjudged him, if maybe I should have included a special clause in our wedding vows about shunning all relationships with leggy Brazilians. So I stand up in the middle of the conference and scream in dream-like slow motion: HOW DARE YOU INSTANT MESSAGE A SUPERMODEL.
This morning as we prepared breakfast Jon noticed that I looked a little tired and nervous. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well. I kept dreaming that I was being eaten alive by a shark.”