I am looking out of the bedroom window of the apartment where I grew up. There is a rope connecting the neighbor's window to the Brooklyn Bridge. A man stands on the rope and effortlessly glides to the bridge. He works on bridges and is accustomed to balancing precariously in such situations, so it's not a problem.

A few minutes later, a woman who saw this decides to imitate. She is wearing inline skates and skates on the rope from the bridge toward my neighbor's apartment. She very nearly completes the journey when she loses her balance and falls into the East River. Several minutes pass before someone pulls her out of the water. She is unconscious but alive.

I turn away from the window and I'm suddenly in a different place. I am in a large house in Vancouver. My grandmother secretly made plans to arrange a marriage for me, but she never told anyone about them. Based on notes that she left behind, a general consensus was formed that one of three possible candidates was supposed to be my wife. Those three women were together in the house. They knew about this marriage but I did not.

I saw a beautiful sunset and ran outside to take photographs. I discovered a large crater where Amish farmers were working. It was a spiral shaped terrace farm full of wheat.

The need to urinate awakens me.

I always hate getting this question, especially when it's asked with exactly those words. I always answer with "New York", and I let the awkwardness linger. Some people respond with asking where I'm from "originally". I say "New York" again, knowing what they are really asking. I am not ashamed of my ethnicity, but I just don't like the question. Occasionally, I tell people that my parents are from China. I hate when this leads to an attempt to say every phrase in Chinese that they know. It's equally bad when they talk about their vacation in China and expect me to be familiar with the area. I have never visited China and the only dialect that I know fluently is Toisanese, which is neither Mandarin nor Cantonese.

I am shopping for canned deep fried seitan. I find the section of the store where it should be, but I can't find the exact product that I want. A woman asks if she can help me. I tell her what I'm looking for and she says that she doesn't see it,but she knows that the store has it. She does not make any attempt to help further.

As I am leaving, I notice that my brother is in the store. Eye contact is made, but neither of us say anything. I am suddenly in a different part of the store and I'm supposed to teach a class there. Due to technical difficulties with a projector, which I should not need, the class is cancelled.

I realize that this store is not in the United States. I'm not sure which country I am in, but I know it's a country that has a totalitarian government. There is a secret meeting planned to be held in the store for revolutionaries. I try to help by setting up a website for them. As I am developing the site, I invent an ingenious method for hosting dynamic content on Amazon S3.

The idea excites me so much that I awaken, but I realized a few minutes later, that this method would only be useful under very special circumstances.

I was often ill when I was young. I had anemia, irritable bowel syndrome, frequent nose bleeds, frequent respiratory infections, and autistic tendencies. My mother insisted on using the services of only one doctor. He was somehow distantly related to me, and that was the basis for the loyalty. He was very incompetent and had no idea what was wrong with me. My sister also had various health problems that he couldn't solve, although they were very different from mine. He gave antibiotics for absolutely everything, with the exception of iron pills for the anemia, which made things worse, because my anemia was caused by intestinal ulcers and iron causes constipation.

On February 17, 1992, I was listening to a radio program on WBAI. It was Natural Living With Gary Null. I had already been listening to his program for over a year. He had discussed numerous natural healing techniques. Everything he said made sense, seemed right, and was backed by research, but I had never tried to apply it. On February 17, he did not discuss any new research, as he often did on the show. Instead, he discussed how people often don't make the necessary changes in their life despite knowing what is right.

I had influenza that day, which made me feel like I was dying. My heightened suffering while listening to the radio program made the words more meaningful. I decided that I didn't want to be sick anymore. I finally understood that I had to do something instead of looking for something to be done to me.

I started by eliminating all junk food/fast food, and I began to take nutritional supplements. My mother initially thought I was taking recreational drugs. When she asked my sister about it, my sister didn't know the proper Chinese words for "nutritional supplement". She tried to say "dietary supplement", but that wasn't said properly and what she said was closer to "diet aide". My mother thought I was taking weight loss pills despite not being overweight. She didn't like it, but she also didn't stop me.

I noticed significant improvements with each dietary adjustment, exercise, or supplement that I tried. This is what keeps me away from fast food. Some of it still smells good to me, but it's very easy to resist the temptation just by recalling how life was before.

Sometimes I encounter skeptics who say it was all placebo effect or there might have been other influences that I don't know about. There is plenty of research that both supports and discredits my methods. I don't care, because it worked for me. Even if it's 100% placebo, I'll stick with it because it works. However, I seriously doubt it. There is plenty of valid science and I have studied it extensively for years.

I had an hour in between appointments and decided to pass the time by wandering around Bed, Bath, & Beyond. An unfamiliar song was playing with some lyrics that I failed to properly decipher. I kept hearing "shake your booty in the world", which doesn't make any sense, because it's not easy to shake your booty out of this world. At the end of the song, I finally heard it properly. The correct lyrics are "see the beauty in the world". This reveals much about how messed up I am.

It seems that they did an unannounced upgrade which was probably the reason for my loss of internet service. Prior to this upgrade, I never had an outgoing message blocked by a spam filter. My first message since service was restored got blocked because the Verizon Spam Filter misidentified my message as spam. I'm not sure why. There were no links in my message and I did not mention any of the common spam topics.

I tried using a different non-Verizon SMTP server but access to it was blocked. I have not yet tried changing the port number.