It's twenty minutes before four a.m., and I'm headed towards my bed (about eighteen inches from where I'm currently sitting.) I should have gone to sleep hours ago, but after I got home from visiting the parents and the little brother, I was unable to refrain from watching the final two episodes of the first season of the wire, about which I have conflicting feelings. It's well written, it deals with the social production of criminality in a far more complex manner thany any cop show I've ever seen, and at times goes to great legnths to make it clear that the cops are not necessarily the good guys or result to simple pathologies about drug culture and ghetto criminality and the genre's well-worn (racist) tropes of psychotic or menacing black villainy. But at times it slips up, too caught up in the righteousness or moral failings of its own dramatis personae, or the seductive aesthetics of blood splatters and bullet wounds on naked sixteen-year old flesh. I hear later seasons are better. Maybe someday I'll have time to watch them.

My goals for the coming year, in case you were wondering, are to figure out how to be an academic in a way that won't make me sick to my stomach, and how to get work done and produce academic work i'm not ashamed of and within a reasonable time period. I want to help build a new future for academic workers at NYU and everywhere else. I want to make our struggle part of larger struggles for social justice in ways that aren't meaningless ISO bullet points or shallow Social Democrat platitudes. I want to level a blood elf mage to 70. I want to figure out how to be in a relationship for longer than two weeks again (If the preceeding sentence did not foreclose any such possibility from the get-go), which, I supsect, will involve me learning to trust myself and other people to a far greater degree than I did last year
. I want to read good books and write good papers and finish my first exam. I want to get a phone call from Phoebe informing me that YNHH workers have won recognition via a card check, but that's out of my hands at the moment. But mostly I want to work through all the shit that was so difficult this past year and figure out how to move forward. Getting my registration out of library-mandated arrears will be a good first step. Finishing the incompletes is similarly something I should have done a long time ago but keep getting stalled by fear and frustration. And thoughts about the union deserve more than to be shunted off to the end of this logorrheaic psychobabble, but I hope that this blog will return to foregrounding those issues rather than crappy music blogging, the aimless diary-style of a twelve year old mind trapped in a twenty-five year old's hairy-backed frame, or half formed and sometimes ill-informed angsty rants about shit I probably shouldn't be writing about. Bedtime.