And as if my actual search for a job weren't depressing enough, my mind's not only decided I should start dreaming about it -- can't blame it for that -- but that I should start remembering these dreams. I don't remember very many of my dreams, and when I do they tend to be amusingly surreal experiences like that dream about guiding 
orv and bluerain to the airport light rail transit system. This may not sound particularly surreal to you, but believe me, in context it was as weird as any display of public art I saw in Singapore, and remember, I was there for the first Biennale. As I recall alligators were involved (in the airport dream).
But for now the depressingly vivid dream has amounted to imagining myself receiving, and reading, in exquisite detail, the letter of rejection from a university I'd applied to and had a delightfully good interview at. It strikes me as memorable that the letter went on for several pages -- most of these letters in the real world finish off their business in three paragraphs, and that by making some effort at padding them out -- and was more apologetic than usual. This doesn't actually mean anything, I know, but it's just one more reason to stay up until I pass out rather than go to sleep.
Another recent remembered dream is a bit more cryptic: in it I was back in Troy, New York, because I needed to make the last plunge to finish off my thesis (which was in fact completed and accepted four years, six months, and 27 days ago). For whatever reason -- though in reality I did most of the writing from Singapore, as far from Troy as it's possible to get and stay on land, and when I was back in Troy I didn't set foot on campus except for meetings with my adviser or to eat at Chirp in the Wall at the Rathskeller until my actual thesis was ready for defending -- I had to be back in upstate New York for this, and more, sharing a huge studio-type apartment with a bunch of students whom I think were undergraduates, based on the amount of noise they made and the glee with which they belly-slid across the huge, irregular, roughly L-shaped plastic table covering most of the common area, which I think was about as long as the graduate student dorm (where I had one room, about the size of a Mercury capsule, in reality). I don't know who my roommates were, but they seemed reasonably pleasant but far too likely to set off fireworks or run experiments on constructing magnetic linear accelerators for iron-infused bread dough for me to want to spend too much time around them. I'm kind of glad I woke up.
Trivia: In May 1638 a Dutch government commission declared tulip contracts could be annulled on payment of 3.5 percent of the contract price. Source: Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor.
Currently Reading: 1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Howarth.