I'm walking through a building on campus where there are workers doing renovations. A fellow is singing as he polishes the floor. "Careful," he sings, making eye contact, "sharp bits on the ground."

Things have been taken down in the renovation, and there is rubble strewn about. I look around to see if access is blocked off. But it clearly is not, there are many other people walking through the mess.

"Oops," a woman wearing a scarf says, in English, as she stumbles. She catches herself short of falling. At just the same time I feel something sharp prick into my foot, and let out an "Ow!" of my own.

"I guess you have to be careful," she says to me.

Seeing that she is also wearing Crocs, I reply, "Yeah. Especially if you are wearing Crocs."

"Or nothing at all." she says.

I give a polite laugh, but the comment is unexpected, and seems inappropriate.

Going out the door, I sit down on a bench by the entrance to investigate the prick in my shoe. A small sharp pebble has punched right through the bottom of my Crocs. The shoes are a couple of years old and the soles have worn fairly thin.

The woman in the scarf sits down too, and she is not alone. There are two other women with her, one visibly a foreigner, with blonde hair, the other a beautiful Korean woman with glasses.

The woman in glasses asks, "You're a foreign professor too? Did you just start?"

Her accent is not Korean, 'foreign professor too,' she is also foreign.

"I've been here 15 years," I say. "I'm Mark. From the Math department. Did you just start?" I ask back, offering my hand.

"Yeah, I'm Jin-seo." she says. "From Germany. We all just started in September."

The lady in the scarf grabs my hand, but the blond does the introduction for her. "This is Soni, from Japan."

The name doesn't seem a typical Japanese name. As I shake her hand, I notice that the woman has extremely long thin fingers.

Jin-seo notices my ring, and says to the blond "Oh, he's married."

"Lets her fill his hole, doesn't he?" Soni says to her over her shoulder.

"Saucy tart!" Says the blond. I'm not sure whether she is referring to Soni or to my wife, but it is, either way, a little weird.

I start to frown.

Just then, my older brother, Trevor, walks by talking on the phone to James Maynard, the famous mathematician.

Briefly swelling with resentment that Trevor, who is not even a mathematician, should be taking to Maynard, I finally realize that this is all a dream.

I wake up, and wonder. I wonder what the dream was really about. I wonder where I got this impression that Japanese women have long slender fingers. I wonder if I really am resentful of my brother and his big lab. And I wonder when the renovations in our building are going to be done.