Cereal, Barbara Eden, and the Dreaded Faculty Review

Last night, my subconscious staged a bureaucratic opera. I was seated at an absurdly long table in a drab college conference room, the kind with flickering fluorescents and air that smells like paper cuts. My colleagues flanked me on all sides, each with a mountainous stack of paperwork—my tri-annual performance review, apparently—but the documents weren’t about my teaching. No, this was no assessment of curriculum or student engagement. This was a surreal interrogation of my entire psychological file.

There were questions—thousands of them—spread across hundreds of pages. Why did I once hoard boxes of Cap’n Crunch? What did Barbara Eden mean to me in 1972? How had my crush on Bo Derek evolved into a phase of antisocial lumberjack-shirt brooding during college? These weren’t performance metrics; they were personality archeology. Everyone present wore the tight-lipped smile of professional decorum, but their glances hinted at unease, as if one wrong answer might trigger an existential audit. I kept staring at the wall clock, its massive hands dragging toward freedom. I just wanted to escape this Kafkaesque tribunal and get home to do something real—like kettlebell swings.

Finally, the dean rose with the smug benevolence of a man who knows you’re trapped either way. “That concludes your review,” he said. No verdict. No score. Just a round of polite handshakes, the hollow kind people give when they’re pretending you’re not on probation. I left the room feeling like Schrödinger’s professor—both validated and damned. Then I woke up. One sip of hot, black coffee sent a dopamine jolt through my system, like jumper cables to the soul. The dream, I told myself, was nothing but psychological runoff—my neurotic inner life expelling its administrative waste.