Last night I dreamed…
…that KarmaPlus was being run in Folwell Hall. Folwell, at the University of Minnesota, makes frequent appearances in my dreams, since roughly half of my undergraduate career was spent in that immense, old building. I still had the same coworkers and students I do in Korea, but there were lots of people around from previous periods of my life, including coworkers from ARAMARK in Burbank and colleagues from graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
I had to give one of our routine “month-end” tests to a group of low level elementary kids. I was at my desk in our staff room, but I couldn’t find the test I’d prepared. I was opening folders and going through piles.
Meanwhile, the kids were making problems. They’d taken over a seminar room on the first floor of Folwell and some former University of Minnesota Spanish professor (maybe it was that old marxist, Vidal) was yelling at them to be quiet. I went in and passed out some doughnuts (which was one of my Karma coworkers’ suggestions), but that hardly calmed the kids down. And I was running back and forth between our staff room (which was located near the north entrance in the Folwell basement) and where the kids were (on the first floor).
There were all these people with luggage wandering around, and some PA system was announcing departing flights. Not only was Folwell transformed into a hagwon hosting environment, but it had apparently become an airport, too.
I was at my desk and I was finding things I’d written for work in the 1990’s, essays from my time in college, even on essay I wrote in high school. All stuffed in folders at my cramped desk at my KarmaPlus work area. I gave up looking for the test and went back down to the seminar room, only to find that the students had discovered there was a snack bar selling hamburgers at the back of the seminar room. I went up to the man operating the snack bar – an elderly Korean who looked like the man who works the night shift in the 7-11 in the first floor of my apartment builidng. I asked him to stop selling the kids food, and he pointed helplessly into a back room behind the snack bar.
In the room were most of the members of ARAMARK Burbank’s IT department, sitting on the floor around long tables, Korean style, eating lettuce wraps and grilled pork and drinking soju. One of them looked over and saw me standing at the entrance, and called over an ajumma (serving lady) and whispered something to her. She came over to where I stood and bluntly pulled closed a sliding door in front of my face.
The man at the snack bar was still making brisk sales to my non-exam-taking students, who were playing some kind of tag game among the tables and chairs of the seminar room. A group of men in airline uniforms, toting luggage came into the room, and, assuming correctly that I was in charge of the kids, asked me to please control them better.
I gathered the kids and we went outside, into the courtyard south of Folwell that is in fact the roof of Williamson Hall (which is a modernist underground building). The kids seemed happy, chasing butterflies and eating hamburgers. I felt bad not having found the test they were supposed to take. I was reading one of my old college essays, and thinking what terrible writing it was.
Below, a picture found on the internet of Folwell from the air, with Williamson (with its courtyard) in the foreground.
