Every Day and Night/I'm Out of Fucking Time

Le Tigre reference in the title. Ok.

I usually do a year end post at the end of every year. Here, here, here, here/here, if you're interested, in chronological order from 2003 to 2006. And there's a bonus one here. And see my attempt at narrating how i learned to stop worrying and organize. And qualification on said attempt.

This year I'm somewhat tempted to just throw a link here - one of my favorite posts from the last year, and indeed the last four, and a post which i think suggests what animates this blog at its best - a dedication to a global politics of intellectual labor and anticapitalism towards a collective reinvention of the city as a space of social justice and for the transformation of the university from neoliberal profit machine, difference engine, and labor exploiter to a liberated, just endeavor and project. That entry above emerged at a particularly nebulous point in my grad school career and in GSOC's continuing struggle. And i don't know how successful I've been in the intervening months in working towards the goals i lay out. This is no place to air dirty laundry of GSOC strategies, but suffice to say that we have our work cut out for us, and it will not be easy.

I fantasized about dropping out at regular intervals. Like yesterday, hanging out with Josh in Park Slope. I think about going back to Unite-HERE all the time, if they'd take me. My dad had open heart surgery in April. He's doing pretty good these days. I stared at a lot of computer screens. I became a 'preceptor' and went into massive credit card debt. Marna Borgstrom and Vin Petrini made Joe Zaccagnino proud. I passed an exam. The writers went on strike.


It's been a strange year. It picked up towards the end.

Year end post. Yeah, sorry about that. It was too detailed in depictions of personal aporia, union frusrations, academic angst. Maybe I'll revise and post. Maybe i won't. It was an insane and difficult year and I hope 2007 turns out much, much better.

Went to Hoboken last night which was cool - new year's came on the path train and a drunk dude in a funny hat shook everyone's hand. all though the train coming home at 5 am had vomit all over it and i stepped in it, which sucked enormously. Also i hurt my ankle.

Never been to Hoboken before. Lots of people lined outside of bars talking about the Jets. Huge lofts and shy cats and somewhere, I'm sure, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley.

I walked through prospect park yesterday and then down 10th to McDonald down McDonald to Forth Hamilton down Fort Hamilton to the cemetery entrance, and then across greenwood cemetery back to 5th and down 5th home to Sunset Park. The cemetery is beautiful and ancient, mausoleums with ornate masonry and crypts built in rows into hillsides and it was totally quiet and felt like another century except for the odd car that drove by every ten minutes.

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]

After the general awesomeness of 2003 - personal stuff, organizing, academics, (particularly the first half of the year) - 2004 has been a lot more ambiguous. I left New Haven, where i'd fought for four years to build a community i was proud to be a part of, and which i feel a lot worse about leaving than Yale, which is really just another four letter word, with all the complexities of semantics and meaning that implies. I spent four months, or three and a half, i guess, in my parents' apartment being miserable. I took a road trip across the country with Julie, which was a lot of fun, until we neared the home stretch (for me) and everything seemed like it was going to shit all over again. I wandered the streets of New York city, saw friends brutalized by the police state and my hometown under militarized occupation. I took a staff position with the union, coordinating a boycott against two non-union hotels in an exciting fight i care a lot about (but won't talk about much here for fear of MEG googling) and left feeling like i had failed. I wandered up through the boston suburbs in a misguided a deeply masculinist faux-homeric/tolkienite journey in search of myself or some bullshit like that. There have been other good moments too - chilling with friends in New Haven, with Vic in New York, going to Mexico in January and hanging out with K, the arrival of a new cousin(!), Watching the red sox win on TV and participating in the collective urban orgasm that followed (is my use of sexuallizing langauge here problematic?) watching the mets beat the tigers in extra innings at shea with lev and alyssa, the week i spent in arizona, getting to know joey and katharine in boston and meeting and working with local 26 members, the atlantic city strike march, the fact that my 11 year old cousin is now a better guitar player than i am (no joke, he rocks.) But i leave this year feeling, well, ambivalent. Ambivalent and lonely. But i'm also, as i frantically put together applications, (and trying to decide whether or not i can justify going to Vic's party) excited about grad school, whether that happens next year or the year after. And i guess i'm also excited about getting my own apartment in new york and building a new life here. I gotta confess, though - I'm also kind of scared, because i don't want to fuck up again and find myself in the same frustrated state of loneliness and self-loathing and inertia. I guess it's up to me.

spinning dj shadow: entroducing