Post 400 - Who'da Thunk?

Well, I have a couple things i should talk about. The first is that i'm leaving my job. After December 17, i'm going to move back to New York and cease boycott coordination.



I have mixed feelings about this, but i also believe it's what i need to do for several reasons, preeminent among them my loneliness here in Boston, my general incompetence at boycott coordination, and a feeling that despite how exciting and extremely important this campaign is, i really need to be doing something else for a while. I did nothing (four months of it) in between leaving new haven and flying to san francisco for the training in september, and now that the lockout has ended, i would like to look at other kinds of organizing and other ways of thinking about social justice and cities. Boston is a great city. Being here at this local has been great. The folks at the local, particularly the leads and the business agents, and especially the workers who've volunteered their time to make this boycott succeed, are awesome, and i've learned a lot from them. I have very mixed feelings about leaving, and there are aspects of this job which have been inspiring, engaging, fun, and exhilarating, and i'm not just talking about Minnie Driver. But i haven't been able to push myself to really commit to this, and my all-encompassing fear of the telephone makes me, in general, a very mediocre boycotter. I feel deeply privileged to have been able to be on staff at Unite Here, which i believe is the best and most exciting union in the country, and would someday love to return to the union in another capacity - maybe as a worker organizer or as a researcher. Or possibly as a parrot who organizes workers and doubles as the lead singer of a (sexist and homophobic, if you read the interview) novelty death metal band.



I'm going home to New York tomorrow night to take the GRE saturday afternoon. I haven't studied at all or taken any practice tests. I'm understandably freaked. I've made some progress on the grad school stuff in the last few days though, and that's good. And i've also made some progress on the boycott stuff, which is also good, because i want to leave my replacement in a good place. (Flying out to SF on the 15th, back the 18th, moving back to NY either late on the 18th or on the 19th.)



This article is shocking not for the fact that the Sandinistas are making a comeback, but in how baldfaced it is in its description of the Bush Administration's ties to the corrupt right wing elite and determination to prevent a sandinista return to power. Brings one back to the glory days of mined harbors and forty thousand corpses.



Bush saying "we are very firm on the Jan 30th date" makes me giggle. I don't know, maybe it's his tone. Or maybe it's the sheer insanity, the overwhelming violence of this imperial project and the callousness with which the neoconservatives barely even maintain the sham anymore. And then i stop giggling, and i want to cry, break something, or storm something.