so i haven't posted to this blog in quite a while. i'm not sure that much has happened to update about...all though, that's totally bullshit- stuff has happened, i just can't think of what to write right now....but to sum up, my job has ended and i'm now looking for summer jobs before going to grad school in the fall. i've been up to all sorts of stuff which i should have blogged about at the time, but now i feel like it's too late...
Whoa....this is literally right out of The West Wing Pilot, just re-aired on NBC immediately preceding the series finale about a month ago, a day on which I was very sad.
A congressman from Georgia was featured on The Colbert Report, who among many other funny/idiotic things, said that the best possible building he could think of to hang the Ten Commanments is a courhouse or judicial building...but then could not name more than three of the said commandments!
[And then Jed Bartlet walked in saying "I am the Lord your God; you shall worship no other Gods before me".......]
[backstory: i just took a trip to san francisco, which i will expound upon and image-ify one of these days, but it may not be until next week because i have a ridiculous lack of time in my apt in the next 5 days and may not get to post picture. until then.....]
so i was supposed to take the red-eye back from san fran and arrive in new york at a red-eyed 5:25 AM this morning, but i decided to go standby on an earlier flight leaving oakland at 1:30 pm so i could actually get some sleep last night and remain a normal person. overall, it was a good ending to what had been a bad plan (the red-eye). the new flight was wonderful, sunny, bump-less, full of great tv and snacks which would have gone unappreciated at 3 AM when i would have been trying to sleep. also included in the new flight was me watching the JetBlue flight-tracking screen in front of me, to see us fly over wyoming and south dakota, two states the prospect of life in which, scares me very much.
free association in my mind: "wyoming........dick cheney...hunting...killing people. the screen says laramie....laramie project...killing gay people. south dakota....abortion ban NOW people!!!!"
i had just seen the SD governor's signing of the abortion ban on JetBlue's lovely choices of MSNBC and FoxNews, and it actually freaked me out to be flying at our cruising altitude of x thousand feet (see if i was actually a quality blogger i would have looked up the actual number of feet that we were likely at, but alas...) over South Dakota. I mean, what if we crashed? What if we crashed and I was somehow accidentally impregnated in the ensuing chaos?? Or what if I actually lived there? THAT was really somethign I could not imagine, which is probably why the red-stater's hate us. I mean, I've lived my ENTIRE life in the state of new york. when i venture upstate, it's still to the liberal bastion of ithaca. I take my first actual vacation as a working gal and where do I go? San Francisco!
I mean, how liberally closed-minded am I!
This was the first time I'd been to the west coast of the U.S. and thus the first time I'd flown over south dakota, the closest i'd ever come. and x thousand feet was too close? i don't know.
But seriously, I sort of felt trapped in my inability to do something about the situation because I probably have so little in common with the people in favor of this decision that a conversation would be ridiculous. I usually think I'm a rather open-minded, listening, type of person who can usually relate to people of different sorts even if i don't agree with their politics. I mean barring that we discuss politics in that case....ho hum....I don't know, I just feel sort of useless and unengaged with real issues. Which really makes me not want to move to san fran or berkeley, where I'd be even less engaged with real issues. But that's another post.
I was talking to my parents the other day about the movie Paradise Now, which I saw a number of weeks ago, shortly after it came out in theaters (maybe only in new york- i don't know). She seemed a bit shocked or dismayed that I had seen it and was asking me what it was about, even though she seemingly already had some idea, and right before she asked if it portrayed Israel in a negative light (of course she would ask that), she said "So, it's a day in the life of a suicide bomber?"
I responded "not exactly," and tried explaining the plot to her in brief, but later on realized just how much of an oxymoronic paradox her question in fact was, in light of the movie. Because really, there's no such thing as the life of a suicide bomber. Or at least that's what the movie makes you believe. Only the death of a suicide bomber. One doesn't become a suicide bomber until that particular act, at which point (s)he is no longer alive. So that's sort of an interesting idea, isn't it? That we jujdge and come to know these individuals purely based on the circumstances of their death, with little regard for how they lived their lives or anything occurred previous to that point in time.
I want this in writing. (does a blog count?) if i ever lose the ability to perform necessary functions on my own- if i need tube feeding (indefinitely), a respirator, etc., i don't want it. i just want to die and let nature take it's course. it's excessive, unnatural, unpleasant and an improper use of resources. at least that's my personal decision.
now i don't have to discuss it, because it's in writing for the whole world to see.
signed,
me
i love pbs and i love to read and i'm not going to be ashamed that sometimes, i'd rather be home reading or relaxing than out doing something more sexy.
as odd and possibly pretentious as this sounds, i'm finding a very strong personal parallel with the pbs program i'm currently watching focusing on what it was like for blacks to come out of slavery and try to establish themselves as free people.
i think that many of my problems over the past few years have stemmed from the fact that, as much as i've pretended not to, i'm always concerned about waht i'm supposed to do, what it seems like i should be doing, and reconciling the conflict of what that means to different people.
and most importantly, i've been floating. i feel like i haven't comprehended the reality of control over my own life; i haven't recognized how my every day reactions very directly relate to my happiness and fulfillment of what i've want.
the show, a remarkable one i've seen ads for and highly recommend (check local listings!!), was making the point about what it was like for slaves to go from being the labor, working on farms, to the point where they owned their own farms and were making the decisions and all involved with that, rather than just "doing" the farm. i really identify with that, and i don't think i've fully realized the degree to which i've been ignoring that, hiding behind things like guilt, past mistakes, and other things.
an update on my post from september regarding money, etc. i ended up going with the salmon nation card, which i've been enjoying for several months now, and maybe makes me feel just a little bit less guilty (appropriately or not) as the new york lifestyle of conspicuous consumption slowly envelopes me.
A December article from co-op america addresses the issues well, and basically accomplishes in one article what took me several weeks of research. And in fact they accomplish even more, because somehow I didnt' even figure out that Ithaca's Alternatives Federal Credit Union, which I obviously already knew about, also has a credit card and that even though I've left Ithaca, I can still join by doing online banking with them. Something to investigate.
I think that my blog has lost whatever small bit of momentum it once had, because I'm really not doing any great work, or even good work, or even mediocre work really. While I've been keeping the sadness and uselessness that comes with that at bay fairly succesfully in my actual life, it seems presumptous and silly to continue to presume in my online life that the title of this blog is remotely relevant. i mean i want to be doing the great work, but this seems like more than a hiatus. i mean i just don't know where to begin, and i seem to be falling to the trap of not doing it at all.
Simultaneously, I've been getting really increasingly sucked in to all this sustainable food policy business and it seems kind of silly to me that I presume I can make a career of it, or have some impact on other people's foodways, when it's pretty much an uphill struggle for myself even.
I just ofund this amazing report put out by the Food Trust and Philadelphia Health Management Corporation out of Philly that talks about the relationship between acces to supermarkets and health. I've been thinking a lot about this lately and how I've generally been interested in food market, even before I foudn this whole area of sustianable food etc. Some really interesting research I would like to do at some point (maybe a masters thesis if i go to tufts?) would be to study different immigrant/ethnic groups and their food markets and how that relates to their health. My friend and I were discussing this the other day- why it seems like Asian immigrant groups have been so much more successful at integrating an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables into their ethnic markets. Any ideas?
So I may start another blog based on my attempts at integrating more sustainability/health/local-ness into my own diet......
i don't understand how it's possible that i have absolutely nothing to do at work, and thus, more free hours at a computer than anyone could possibly need, and yet i still can't accomplish much at all of what i want to. i constantly have thigns i want to post on this blog, but i always forget them, as i posted previously.
i recently found a bunch of cool sites where you can make your own wiki or other easy-to-make webpage. one of them is called 
but i've barely gotten the chance to put on there. i mean literally ONE LINK! but i hve lots of ideas. i wonder if i can still have the crappy website that i made on the cornell server. i haven't even tried to look at it in months.
and i signed up for this free class from "barnes and noble university" don't laugh which is about making websites. it started last week and i'm already behind. i'm not buying the book- if it turns out that i can't do it without the book, then i'll just be a delinquent student. apparently my boss did the same thing with an astronomy class last "semester." now she's taking italian with the other woman who works in my office.
anyway, i just find all this frustrating because i feel like i'd be a more fulfilled person if i could have a cool and real presence on the internet and oh, i don't know. is that silly?
maybe one day i'll remember the actual things i wanted to post.
Who would have expected the public face of Cornell, Tommy Bruce, VP for Communications and Media Relations, to lay the smack down (ok, that is a little too 1998 but it seemed fitting) on GWB via his "terrorist" detainment policies.
Background:
Jose Bove, a French farmer and alter-globalization activist was scheduled to speak this afternoon at Cornell ILR's Global Unions Conference in NYC, and then again at a student organization sponsored event on Monday, but was detained yesterday at JFK airport and then sent back to France. The story seems to vary but has to do with him not reporting past prosecutions for "moral crimes" in his application to enter the United States without a visa as part of the visa-waiver program. However, Kate Bronfenbrenner, ILR researcher extraordinnaire and organizer of the Global Unions Conference, was indirectly quoted in Newsday saying that he had a visa. Regardless of the details of the incident, the staffs of both Senator Clinton and Rep. Hinchey (D-NY) seemingly came to his aid in investigating the matter at Cornell's request. And Tommy Bruce, often at odds with Cornell's activist groups, for his insistence on refusing to back down on issues in which he thinks Cornell may look bad, said, "When researchers and scholars are denied first-hand experience and world experiences about the issues at hand of this conference, then we all lose."
So basically Bruce stood by Bove and his GMO-crop burning, McDonalds'-window-bashing self at the expense of making Cornell sound subversive. Maybe Bush-'n-crew will accuse Mr. Bruce or even Cornell's brand spankin new president, Dr. David Skorton, of University of Iowa, of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. mwahahaha.
I'm pretty bummed that I can't go to the conference anyway, especially since I'm right hear and it sounds amazing, but I'd have to take time off of work, where I literally sit here and do NOTHING. An inside source tells me that Cornell is attempting to bring him back to the states another time, but they (and I) doubt it will work. He seems to be resigned not to even attempt to set foot in this country until George Washington Bridge is out of office.
"For the moment, I'm not going to ask to come to the United States. . . . While
Mr. Bush is in the White House, I am not going to ask to come back," he said.
"They don't want any discussion that can affect all the things going on with
globalization. They don't want people coming from outside to discuss it."
i feel like it's been ages since i've posted. much has happened, nothing noteworthy of course, just lots of musing and spending time at/near lincoln center being highly involved in "cultural arts." i hope to post related pictures shortly.
just fucking pissed at myself...who am i becoming? i sit here reading all about my options for "new york restaurant week" and am stunned to find out how successful the coca-cola boycott has become, including a number of high-brow colleges in my own city. i have become involved in nothing. not even as an observer as i once was. it's all about the daily grind, the creature comforts, the netflix, not yet the going-to-the-gym, but probably one day soon that too. i think i'm overly concerned about money and my future. it seems like every decision i make has to do with one or both of the two. and i still feel like i can never catch up- there's always more and i'm always missing out on so much. it also seems like all i ever do is clean my room and it never seems to be clean for more than 5 minutes. goddamn it.
wow, it's munich all over again. can't they figure out how many people were killed before they alert the newswires or the families? well, this is almost as bad. one guy survived whereas NOONE survived munich.
the movie was amazing, however. if only the mossad could hunt down and assassinate the corporates in control of the mine, too...
omg, i feel like i could write a thesis on this stuff- there is so much back and forth, so many articles and blog posts, and comments, and critiques, and critiques of critiques- i feel myself pulled to engage in it, even though it bothers me that so many wonderful (and less wonderful) people are wasting their time on it, when there are so many more important issues that jews need to be talking about. maybe i should have been around in the 60's-80's, when we weren't so goddamn concerned about ourselves. just let it lie!
but yet i feel drawn to comment!
and i should be working on my grad school applications and other more pressing, immediate issues. time to get my act together again. or do i want it together, anyway?
well, i'll work on a longer, thesis-like post about this (like the transit strike post which hopefully someone read [somone, if you're out there, please raise your hand :( ]), but in case i don't post until later,
happy new year to all, may it be filled with peace, health and happiness. i'll be partyin it up with darya and diana and maybe some other folks, but first tonight- fondue!
so i'm procrastinating with my grad school (MPH) applications, because i'm a bum and because i fucked up enough already so that my recommendations are going to be a bit later than i had hoped so my evil subconscious figures i might as well wait to finish the rest of it anyway. which is idiotic. but now i'm having second thoughts- i don't know, there are so many other things i'm interested in- and i just spent a fun filled day of looking up cool people and their organizations and thinking about cool non-profits i could start and building bridges between issues and people and organizations in my head (what i ALWAYS do that NEVER accomplishes anything) and now public health looks so, well....narrow. you know? but then i remind myself that i can always be involved with other things as a citizen, a lay person, but i'm just afraid that i won't really do it then. i'll just fall into the trapping of boring bourgeousie comfortable life that i'm falling into now, and that will be it. i haven't even gotten that involved in the co-op for god's sake.
in other news, yay- i found out that my friend eli might be going to public health too! (although he's a year younger than me, and i don;t think he's applying straight out of undergrad. is he?)
well, i've spent the last 5 days worrying about whether there's going to be a transit strike, planning for such an event and listening to my boss (who lives 3 blocks from work) and others complain about how these people make plenty of money and have no right to strike, given that they don't seem to be exploited. and you know what?
they almost had me convinced.
but now the strike actually came, as i couldn't believe it actually would, until i went to bed last night thinking that it might actually be a reality. not 100% sure of what i was going to do, i ended up having a pretty easy time of it, ditching my plan of takign the LIRR to jamaica and back to penn and then catchign the special shuttle run by my hospital from 34th to 68th. instead, my roommate, who works for the parks department, got me a ride with her in a parks car that someone drove from prospect park up to their offices at 106th and central park, and then i just had to walk down from 96th st. it actually worked out really well for all of us- i got the ride, and i made the fourth person in their car, which allowed us to take the brooklyn battery tunnel into manhattan and we flew right through the tunnel and up the fdr; otherwise they would have to have gone through queens and up and around on the triboro, which supposedly had mad traffic. my worst tzuris was the fact that I picked this day, of all days, to forget my ipod headhones at home. we should all be so lucky for the duration of the strike.
i'm still a little bit torn, given that this incredibly powerful union is causing all of this trouble for workers who make a lot more money than many new yorkers, these being those also likely hardest hit by the strike (i.e. those payed by the day or the hour, not salaried). while i don't agree with bloomberg's bullshit claims that their actions are "morally reprehensible," i do wonder if they couldn't have just settled for binding arbitration.
i wish i was more knowledgable and understanding of the details of the issues, though, because i don't even know that much about things like arbitration, how they work, how things would have turned out for the MTA and our train conductors if that had been chosen as an acceptable solution.
The concerns I've been hearing are echoed in the comments posted on the transit workers union's blog, where many angry "anonymous" folks have been venting. However, a number of strikers and supporters have responded, also in the comments, raising good points like:
A question to all who condemn the strike should be: would you take this
job, at their pay and conditions?
And:
how about when you go to work, is there anybody taking a piss a few feet from you or maybe some pervert playing with himself. how about your bosses do they write you up for wearing scarves in the winter time or maybe take you off the job because your top button on your shirt is not buttoned?
Some of these same issues are raised today in a NYTimes article, in which Dr. Marian Swerdlow, an author and former train conductor says:
"The working conditions are more physically onerous, the treatment by managers
more disrespectful, and the abuse from the public more hurtful, than any other
group of public workers in the city experiences."
Also from the Times article, Dr. Snyder, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in Newark:
"Transit workers, because of the schedules they work and the conditions they
work in, are often in industrial environments that most New Yorkers have left
behind a long time ago," said . The idea that a motorman has to scramble to
find a place to urinate on a busy day is not something most of us face on the
job."
The article's premise is that the TWU has both unique motives and power, because of the nature of the jobs and the power they have to fuck up the city without destroying it. While I agree with the anonymous commenter from the TWU blog who questioned whether critiques of the strike would fill their shoes for a day of working in the tunnels, I don't know if the extent of Swerdlow's remark can really be proven. While en masse, they may have to deal with some of the harshest least sightly things, I'm sure there are plenty of other government workers in equally bad conditions, with equally bad treatment. [Please correct me if I'm wrong.]
Much to my suprise, the Daily News' Juan Gonzalez has pointed out that this strike had been planned in impeccable detail, and was ready to go forward last week. The additional days only bought Touissaint more time to organize the strike and perhaps some slight bit of positive publicity, making him seem like more of a flexible guy. [Except I don't really buy Gonzalez's argument on that last point; I think the union seems even more unreasonable now, becasue the 4 days led to a better offer by the MTA, which they rejected, looking perhaps less flexible than ever.]
The intervening days since Thursday, did, however give Touissant and the TWU the ability to recruit support from other unions into their cause, although I think it would be totally absurd if any other unions including Metro-North or LIRR struck in "solidarity." Yes, I feel morally reprehensible for putting the word solidarity in quotations, and maybe it's my newly-salaried, rapidly-bourgouisifying-ass talking, but I don't see what that would accomplish. The strike obviously can't go on forever, although things will get REALLY fucking interesting if it lasts through Christmas or longer, and I don't see what additional striking workers will do except mess up everyone's lives, and cost both the city, the union and the workers lots of money. In the words of the fictitious (read: obscure West Wing reference coming) Dalton Millgate, "Screw the fruit loops, Sam."
But I was really in denial about all of this actually happening, and thus am surprised that it was really so well orchestrated by Touissant. I keep feeling surprised that they actually seem to be happy, that they are inflicting all of this on the city. While, it's not worthy of the extensive fines, it is very annoying, and the fines are still there for the union, and I don't see why they should be cheering, beyond being an example of the mob mentality. I didn't understand before how the city gets all of those workers to pay the steep fines, but then I felt very dumb when someone explained to me very simply that the union pays and then takes it out of their paychecks. which brings me to my next point- my unease with the fact that the board of the union gets decide on this strike for the thousands of members, some of whom may have practical or ideological objection to the strike. so, i've heard vague bits and pieces on websites, message boards and by word of mouth, about the ability of individuals to show up for work and strikebreak. having subscribed to the TWU's email list for updates a few weeks back, this evening i received a message from them (apparently the email list is supposed to only be for union members) with the following attached flyer:
"A message to any TWU Local 100 Member who is thinking of crossing the picket line from your 34,000 striking brothers and sisters: Think before you act. Is it worth it to lose your Union soul? Is it worth it to make 34,000 life-long enemies? Is it worth it to stab your co-workers in the back? In your heart, you know the answer is NO. Don't Do It."
I will continue to ponder what I think of that. Meanwhile, more info available at Gothamist.
Good night from one of the Upper East Side, where I'm camping out at a friend's.
i just found this on a west wing message board in a message someone wrote a while back:
" After all, if not for Leo, Jed is a Dartmouth professor emeritus who used to be a politician, Sam is a frustrated lawyer, Toby's never won a political campaign, C.J.'s is a self-hating corporate spokeswoman, Charlie's followed his mother into a D.C. police cemetery, Donna's wondering why the cute Minority Leader of the Wisconsin House of Representatives has never noticed her, the nice blond on his staff, and Josh is a Congressman from Connecticut, 118th out of 200-odd Democrats in seniority, with no chance ever at a Committee Chairmanship, and has probably spent the last 7 years asking failed Presidential nominee Hoynes, "Why didn't you listen to me?""
uh, so sad. RIP John Spencer 1946-2005
yes, brooklyn jews is a new organization trying to bring more unaffiliateds into the fold in brooklyn, one of the organizations hostingthe dec 24 jewltide celebration in park slope. which you should come to. b/c i'll be there.
but for the purposes of this post:
i'm sitting in the central branch of the brooklyn public library reading a 1996 village voice article about queer/yiddish culture that i found while googling alicia svigals, the klezmatics former violinist, in an effort to try to find out more about her partner ellen and their children. [she's sort of an idol of mine since even before i had a klezmer violin lesson in her apartment when i was in high school.] i just heard her perform in the second floor meeting room of said public library- a highly disorganized chanukah klezmer concert with adrienne cooper, the unarguable foremost female yiddish vocalist at least in the US of A. meanwhile, two men with black kippot and beards sit across from me at this table doing some project on a dell computer while arguing in hebrew.
all of this i find very ironic- you know, the friction between the real jews of brooklyn, the jews that brooklynites of other ethnicities picture when they hear the word "jew," and the new jews of brooklyn, the ones looking for cheap rent in droves, the ones hosting or attending the aforementioned jewltide party at a club in park slope.
[Edit: I just finished the article and it's fucking amazing. you have to read it. it also reminds me of why i'm obessed with tony kushner and portnoy's complaint.]
