I dream that I've written essays

One of the dreams was about a paper I'd written called "The Fog of Scholarship." The thesis was that scholarship creates a fog around the subject, and sometimes it fills a book or a room. Or else it is there like a ghost in conversations. In the paper I called appearances of the fog in conversations "ghostings," and talked about how the language of scholarship is both guest and host which made the term especially appropriate. This all made perfect sense in the dream, even though now it seems...foggy.

Another essay was called "Multi-colored Pencils" and it was about how constructions and representations of race are articulated in different poetry communities. I remember that it seemed urgently important that I clarify that I wasn't talking about pencils of different colors, but rather pencils that were marbled rainbow (like these or these).

Another essay was called "Compassionate Sentences for Socialists" and it was written in a sort of Mad Libs form with many blanks above fine print descriptions of what should go in the blanks. There were things like "an animal with gentle skin" and "verb to describe the sound of machines" and "a house made out of paper and grass."

I have less time to write on paper or screens. I write when I am driving, or when I am walking home from class, or when I'm falling asleep. I see the words in my mind -- shuffling and reshuffling like scrabble tiles -- but my contact with the materials of writing -- paper, pencils, keys, and screens -- seems to be for typing and to-do lists.

These swans live at the lagoon at UCSB. For the longest time there was only one. Local birders believed that it was the offspring of a pair that had migrated out of the area. When a second swan appeared, the birding listserve was atwitter with the news. So many people were glad that the first swan was no longer alone.