i'll be home when i'm sleeping

This is my 2005 year end post. If you're interested, my 2003 year end post is here, and my 2004 year end post is here. A bizarre attempt to narrate both through the viewpoint of a broken cell phone is here.

Before I begin, I would just like to say that I hold the microphone like a grudge. (Best hip-hop video ever, maybe, except what the hell is Flava Flav doing?) I would also like to warn everyone that what follows is to some extent an exercise in Narcissism, and if you just come here to read about GSOC, you're more than welcome to skip it.

2005 was like 2004 in the sense that it was an extended experiment in liminality. I walked all over New York City. I spent a lot of time alone. I spent a lot of time feeling pretty miserable about my interactions with people i care about. I spent a lot of time in my parents' apartment watching TV. Some upsetting shit happened, and i spent large periods of time being depressed.

An entire city got wiped off the map of the United States. Bush got reinaugurated and I made an ass of myself in DC and my friends got tear-gassed and there was a really long traffic jam outside philadelphia and we shared our twizzlers with Stacy in the next car over, who was trying to get to dance lessons in Broomhall. There were earthquakes and bombings and NLRB decisions and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and lots of people write a lot of incisive and not so incisive things about the racialization of catastrophe which it would be inappropriate for me to attempt to summarize here.

I got into grad school. I started grad school. Grad school went on strike. I am still trying to finish my papers. More on the strike below.

I moved to Brooklyn. I spent long hours walking all over Western Brooklyn and up through Prospect Park and across bridges and over canals. I spent large amounts of time in neihborhoods i'd barely ever heard of in the previous sixteen years I'd lived in New York. I saw the Pixies. And the New Pornographers, actually. And MIA. And The Go! Team. And Sleater-Kinney, again. These were all enjoyable.

I found people in NYC with whom i could actually hang out. This was so important for me, particularly last winter and spring when everything was very nebulous and scary.

I found a job for the summer. Well, ok, i was given a job by a very generous Marxist feminist cultural theorist. I spent 20 hours a week poring through St. Clair Drake's papers at the Schomburg and reading through some incredible notes about the livs of "mixed-race" children in post World-War II Britain. It was often overwhelming, but It felt really good to be working and like i was finally starting to move forward with life after months spent on my parents' couch acquainting myself with "Buffy The Vampire Slayer."

A day after i started grad school I was in the union office at an organizing committe meeting, pulling a Josh, i guess, trying to figure out the UAW and NYU and teaching myself how to organize again after not really doing very much of it in any serious and committed way since the September 2003 strike ended. Academic stuff was/is frustrating. I am still, as I write this, trying to finish papers. I think part of the reason this is taking me so long, besides general burnout, is a fear of handing anything substantove in, of being evaluated on my work when i don't feel like I'm capable of producing the kind of work i want to do. And my cohort of first-years is split on the strike. They read this, and I don't intend it in any way as a slight on them, but I also don't really think this blog is the best place for this conversation, so I won't write more, but it's been rough for me, and, I imagine, for them as well.

The Julian calendar is a fairly arbitrary unit of measuring time. While it marks a full rotation of the earth around the sun (more or less,) the dates on which it begins and ends don't really correspond to any otherwise important point in the cycle. Nevertheless, this being a year-end blog post, I'll bow to convention and accede to hegemonic discourses of periodization. So I will conclude by saying that given how fucked up this year has been on a global scale, I feel a lot better about my life right now, without wanting to jinx anything, than I did on December 31, 2004. I'm feeling hopeful about the future, and I'm looking forward to seeing what 2006 holds, (including and in addition to a lot of hotel contract expiration dates.) That seems like enough for now.

[We now return you to your regular levels of blog narcissism]