(1/9/10) my boss looks smart

(Entered in paper journal at 9:21 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a restaurant with my old boss EB. The place was an Asian food restaurant of some sort, possibly Japanese. The place looked more like a darkish bar, with no chairs or tables, but a couple of sofas in the center of the room, a bar on the left all, and a smaller bar on the back wall. The floors and bars were dark wood. The place was pretty empty. A few people milled around. They mostly seemed like workers.

EB had to leave. I got my food and sat down by myself. The people milled around closer to me, slowing down and kind of regarding me, not suspiciously, but close. There were pretty girls and young looking, skinny guys. They all looked Southeast Asian, with dark copper skin.

I finished most of my food and was now wading my white, plastic spoon through puddles of something like soy sauce and clumps of rice. One of the young men sat at the bar along the back wall. I sat in a sofa or a chair, at an angle, so that the man was behind me and to my right. The man faced me, his back to the bar.

The young man asked me, trying, with a friendly tone of voice, to mask his annoyance at my presence, "Why are you here?" He might then have told me, "Non-Asian people usually don't eat here." I thought I'd tell the young man that I liked the food, so I liked coming here.

But now EB was back. I was sitting somewhere slightly different from where I had been sitting before. There were now a few white people in the restaurant. I wondered how EB would fit into the environment of the quasi-suspicious people.

But EB, standing by a middle-aged, Japanese woman, pointed to a painting on the right wall and asked some question in Japanese, which I understood (?). EB had asked if the painting had come from a specific region. EB's Japanese was excellent. Even the woman was impressed. She possibly confirmed that the painting had come from the region EB had specified. EB said, in English, that he and his wife GB had gone there for a holiday, and that they had loved the place very much. I was impressed with how cultured EB was.

I was now standing near or sitting at the bar. EB stood to my left, leaning against the bar, obviously trying to talk with me. But now all the girls in the bar (possibly including two blonde twins I'd met one night at the Top Tunes karaoke bar) were all going crazy over EB. They were asking him questions which seemed to prove even more how intelligent he was.

I think EB was trying, as he enjoyed himself with the girls, to make the people in the restaurant feel like it was okay for me to be around. Nobody was even paying attention to me, anyway. I sat down on the chair (or sofa?) and began fiddling with my food again.