I'm, like, so past the past

Every so often, I'll have a dream about the movie theater in which I worked while I was in high school: The Pacific Trolley Theaters, located, as the name implies, by a trolley stop in San Diego. The intention was to make the area cute and bustling, as if riders would stop off at this particular spot, take up a movie, visit Borders, stop by Trader Joe's, blah blah blah.

I went and applied for a job there three days after my sixteenth birthday, finally of legal age to work and anxious for some disposable moolah of my own. Not long afterwards, I got a call for an interview, an interview I mistakenly showed up for a good hour and a half earlier, but one that I nailed, and got the job. I worked a combination of usher and snack bar attendant, got to see plenty of free movies ("Mrs. Doubtfire" is forever etched in my memory, as is "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "The Lion King", and "Schindler's List"), and worked with a vibrant group of people which included some high school aged folks like myself, a healthy handful of college kids, and a few older folks.

One of the older folks was this woman named Virgina, who was only forty, but looked well into her sixties due to a hard partying life. She'd intended to get her life straight by taking the job at the theatre, and was a plenty competent employee as well as being hysterically funny and well-liked.

Well, in the dream, I ran into her, and she looked much older and saggier. We were for some reason sitting at a table with some other people eating, and I noticed she kept looking over at me. In the dream for some reason, I was pretending to ignore her. But later on, she approached me, and I did that whole thing where you pretend to notice someone after you've ignored them, and was all like, "Oh, Virginia, that's you! I didn't recognize you!" And she just looked at me for a very long time, in disbelief, and said nothing. I waved my hands in her face as if to say "are you there?", and said, "Virginia, what's wrong?", but still, she said nothing.

Of course at some point in the dream, as is always the case when I dream about the theater, I end up being right back there, usually working there. In reality, the theatre closed, and was converted into a Japanese restaurant. The parking lot now houses a condo complex. But in the dream, I was in the theater, it was completely empty, and I was going through some upper passageway. I think I was trying to find any left over candy or popcorn (though I have no idea why--gross), or maybe trying to escape Virginia. Dunno.

I only reminisce about those days in a positive way, since the friends I had there were fun peeps, and it was good times. Only when I dream about it, it's like my life has gone to shit here and I've had to move back to SD and take my old job from high school from fourteen years ago. It's amazing how I only worked there for a year and a half, and yet it creeps into my dreams all the time.

Dat subconscious be so silly.