Had a job as a food inspector/TV host, inspecting meat at a Chinese restaurant, especially the burgers they had, for grasshoppers. They cooked a bunch of grasshoppers into their meat and I went to tables and cut open people’s burgers to see if I could find any grasshopper parts. The main woman at the restaurant had been away for a week, but she was protesting that she didn’t know anything about it and that’s not why she left. Eventually I inspected a long piece of beef with my partner – a steak that somebody was about to eat. It was about three feet long and half a foot wide, and thin. We argued over whether we should inspect it or not because it wasn’t ground beef. We cut it in half and looked at the piece we cut. Then we cut that piece in half and looked closer. We argued over whether something on the surface of the meat were the two little mouth-clencher-things of a grasshopper. I said they weren’t. Then we agreed we needed one of the microscopes that were back in the kitchen/the inspecting base we had set up. Here I had a little mental detour about magnifying glasses and burning things. I forget exactly what that part consisted of. Eventually someone brought something to look closer with but it wasn’t a magnifying glass or a microscope, and by this time we had lost the suspicious thing we wanted to examine. Somewhere in this process the person eating became agitated. Then there is some blank time where I forget what happened. Then we were inspecting a large piece of white paper, which we both understood to be edible and which felt like the same piece of meat we were examining earlier. Somewhere along the line the TV host aspect faded away. Then an airport setting became apparent. It was a Chinese restaurant in an airport. And eventually we realized that the pad of paper we were inspecting might be made somewhere else besides the Chinese restaurant, so I looked on the cover, and something something, I think it was. Eventually we returned to the girl waiting in an airport corridor, with her various pads of paper, also by this time aware that she most likely wouldn’t eat most of the pads of paper so we probably didn’t have to inspect them. She was a little annoyed, and I became aware that for all my good intentions I was still just a somewhat incompetent airport employee. I empathized with her not feeling it her responsibility to separate the employees from the company with regards to criticism. I explained that it was my first day – I think I had already explained this. Also, she opened up the pads when we gave them to her and was kind of disgusted at the idea of grasshoppers in them, although I explained if she was drawing on them it wasn’t that bad. And then one pad she opened up had instructions for rolling cigarettes and I realized it was huge rolling paper. She took her pads and left and then, something, I can’t remember. She was being asked by some sort of touch screen advertisement if she wanted to join a smoking competition for a chance to win money/cars – a Lexus. On the right side of the screen there were three cigarette brands, one starting with a 3, one with a 6, and one with a 9. Near the list it prompted the user to choose their brand. There was some sort of green swirling of other options down below which seemed like sub-categories of the three brands. Above the list there was a red box like thing that alternated company names – coca cola was one although it felt like a cigarette brand. She hesitated and obviously struggled with the moral/health dilemma, but despite this as well as an echoed parental warning behind her, circled an option on the left of the screen in a green electronic line which acknowledged wanting to compete in the contest. Then I was outside on a street and she was throwing a Frisbee down to me, out of the little airport-room world hovering above and a little bit in the distance. There was a Frisbee throwing sequence here and I gained some insight about how we make decisions and communicate although I forget the specifics. There were also, right before this, or in transition to the down-below-street-world – some flashing numbers and cars – like $15,000 $25,000 or something, in a banner ad-obnoxious style, along with a flashing of a Lexus SUV that was the prize for the contest. I understood that cigarette smoking was supported by nice cars because money allowed you to live in a comfortable enough world to smoke. Nice cars as just another extension of health care, insurance, etc… Then something else happened, but I kind of forget the end of the dream.
