When I started this, was thinking of doing a dream journal, but so far haven’t been remembering clearly enough nor finding words to capture/convey the emotional tones correctly.

This one, towards morning last night, did have the pattern of waking and turning over (and adjusting the cats!) and trying to resume, but this time that was mostly positive – wanting to continue the story, because it was sort of going well and I wanted to continue that; unlike often where something is wrong and I want to get back to it in the hope of correcting something. [Thus, “work on what has been spoiled”]

This one had some familiar elements of student life, wandering around unsure if I had a class schedule or not, and worry about missing something. There were some swirling crowds, like at a popular restaurant at breakfast time. Like Daley’s on 63rd near Cottage.

And it turned out people were claiming spots in an oversubscribed class, by pulling up a chair to this restaurant meeting, like other work groups or classes there.

I was there an sort of participating as a elder statesman type advisor. The convener was sometimes apparently @ShazRasul, but not exclusively. At first it was like a programming class, but doing a group project. This meeting was on the first day and sort of a brainstorming session.

The project seemed to be to solve the problems of how social media worked. From what people were saying, it seemed the base we were criticizing and needed to improve upon was a lot like Usenet. The model we were heading towards sounded like Google Groups.

I jumped in at one point, and in a tone like I was a guest or alum of the group from before, throwing in comments to help get the conversation going, but not for my own grade or whatever ; though it felt like I was going to come off as intruding or pompous. I asked if what we were looking to create would have the role of “interrupteur”, said with an insecure but pretending French accent.

An attractive woman grad student said no, she wouldn’t, nor even simply an “interrupter”. But maybe an “interpreter”, said jovially, even sweetly.

Outlined that role, much like moderator in actual current social media.

By now, Ada Palmer was leading the class — an intrusion of proximal reality, as I am signed up for her Graham School book talk on Zoom this Friday.

Shaz/Ada called on a bearded nonbinary student, who said they were hesitant about the military or policing adjacent role. Everybody was hesitant to reply, as we were not going to be mid-2020 raging anti-police, but everybody had an uneasy time with authority.

I explained that some participants would need to be officially enrolled as auxiliary traffic police, since we needed to be safe stepping into the street and improving the traffic flow, holding up signboard with lanes and arrows to follow.

This was to solve the tie-ups that sometimes happen with right-turners at a particular 5- or 6-way intersection I often pass thru on the way home from a shopping trip on the North Side — where Elston hits Ashland, by the Chicago Actors Studio building. The rightmost lane on Elston, a turn-only, leads to another turn-only, which gets backed up. If you want to go to the second or third lanes of Ashland (the thru lanes southbound) you can do it from that right lane of Elston but may be stuck among the vehicles looking to immediately turn right again onto Armitage. So what we need to communicate to that specific set of drivers is that they should swing out left to get in a thru lane of Ashland. Or should be in the left lane of Elston, not the right — even though it feels dangerous because of contention from drivers on the right.