freezin for a reason

In which i steal another Yale chant for application to the NYU struggle, and it is met with cautious indifference. people did chant it for a while though.

We started the day off at 8 in the morning with a ridiculous game of "duck duck unionbuster." The last time i played duck duck goose was in high school gym class, after the teacher had pretty much given up on the possibility of getting me or my high school girlfriend or any of our friends to do anything athletic. That was ironic, this was more of a desperate attempt to stay warm. We followed it (and the hokey pokey and red light, green light,) with a wonderfully postmodern picket line which wound to and fro seemingly at random, following no teleology whatsoever, and included random zigs and zags and hopping and jumping and crouching and all kinds of interesting interactions with sidewalk curbs and white traffic lines. The UMass GEO folks came down and brought us these awesome hats which say "UNION SI" on them. I'm wearing mine under my black wool hat, and i look like a total hipster. We chanted, we sang, we stopped having feeling in our feet. Still nowhere near as cold as, say, day one of the March 2003 strike, but this could get pretty brutal. Given the cold, the picket line was pretty fantastic, and folks from Rutgers, CUNY, Columbia, and GESO came down. Among the four Yale political scientists who came down (plus an American studiesist) was JPM, a friend from undergrad whom it was good to see. Maris dropped a new trumpet hook - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers' "Won't Back Down," but the GSOC chant someone will no doubt quote excessively when they write a book/article about this whole thing is the one which seems to be the unquestioned favorite of just about everybody, the "1. We are the union 2.We need a contract 3. A little bit louder: WE ARE GSOC!" chant, with which my own love affair has yet to end.

This weekend will consist of Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood (finished chapter 1 yesterday, and it's really good, which is unsurprising) and hopefully Mike Newell's Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.