Feverish triathlons in Virginia

I realized I missed a bunch of happenings because of my hectic two weeks. Alas! So, not this past weekend, but the one before that, Elly competed in her first triathlon! The entire preceding week I'd been out of it and kind of fever-y, and finally bothered to take my temperature before we set out for Charlottesville, home of the C-ville Spint Triathlon. It was 102, but I decided that sitting in a folding chair and cheering was not strenuous enough to warrant not being present for this momentous event.

Elly had been training for several months. You'd think she'd, say, done other races before, since triathlons aren't exactly the easiest sport. You'd be wrong. Yep, this would be the first race of her adult (post-high-school) sporting life. She did great! She was solidly in the middle of the pack. Given that she had a virtually antique bike and only the information of her stalwart training handbook to guide her, this is pretty impressive. She did really well on the swim (not surprising, since she was a competive swimmer in high school) pretty darn good on the bike, and had a tough time on the run. We're thinking of doing a relay, which would be fun! Any bikers out there?

Anyhow, I got some pictures, and the tylenol took down my fever a fair bit, so I was only slightly delirious, and this made for lots of enthusiasm in my cheerleading style. A good time was had by all.

Workin' my hiney off - discovering Baltimore

Train interns to go across the country and talk to workers in garment factories; Check!
Go to Baltimore for a week to help people get trained to work on various summer union organizing drives for a month;
Check!
I need a day off; my life is filled with amazing experiences. Both of these things are true at once. And I thought summer was supposed to be a slower time?

I also realized recently that I am incredibly homesick.

I walked into a cafe in Baltimore about half a mile from the training looking for internet access...there wasn't internet access at Johns Hopkins (at least not for conference participants) and I was getting desperate to check my email. The only words I can use to describe the sensation of entering the cafe was "coast warp". It was as if I'd walked out of Maryland and into Sonoma County. Other people I was with commented on it, too. Was it the vegetarianism? The mustard-colored walls and political 70s music? Perhaps the white verging-on-hippie counterpeople? There were things that reminded me that I was much farther east than this flashback would have me believe — I think our waitress actually sort of hippie-bashed at one point. I had to look at the weekly paper a few times to remind myself that I wasn't home in some new cafe that I just hadn't been aware of before.

This week was good but tough. We were in the dorms rooms of Johns Hopkins and the schedule was 8am to 9pm every day for a week. Since I had lots of my other work to attend to as well, I was sneaking off before breakfast (7:30 am. Yowza!) and sneaking back after the day was done, usually around 10:30pm. That made me a Tired Max.

We learned how to do traditional union organizing house visits (well, traditional according to that union) and everybody got to go out and practice the visits with co-organizers. The crowd was an amazing mix - it was 20 members of unions, most of whom had held some kind of leadership position (one person had been a shop steward for 19 years!). There were a handful of students (8 or so) who weren't very familiar with union organizing. We grew pretty close in for the week, and shared some powerful experiences. I expect that from a training, in a lot of ways, but this was a very multi-racial, multi-generational, largely-working-class group. I'm somewhat conflicted about pedagogy of the training, and I was kind of bummed not to go on a visit (but understandable - other folks needed more practice, and I'm not going out on a campaign) but I was otherwise impressed!

Other totally random and incongruous highlights:

• I set up a virtual Nation-State at nationstates.net thanks to my dear, geeky pal and co-worker Jilly. She has one and I became intrigured. So far, so good: it's a Democratic Socialist state with a reasonable economy, good political freedoms, and compulsory voting. It recently became a UN member. Hee!
  
• There's a lesbian bar in Baltimore. A nice one, at that! Some of us had a lovely time shakin' our groove thang there, and the DJ was very amenable to suggestions. It had much more floor space than the dear ol' Lexington Club - I guess that's what can happen when the square feet aren't located in the California real estate market.
  
• I learned the historic art of "duck-pin bowling" - it's a variation on bowling with much smaller pins and balls that was invented in Baltimore, and home to one of the few remaining and best-preserved alleys. It was a hoot!
  

MIA in blogland

OK, well, now it's really been too long since I've written. What happened? After the Memorial Day Weekend Lockout, I had some catching up to do. In fact, I'd planned on writing a bit for this very blog that weekend, but haven't scraped the time together since. I had gone to Philly the week prior for a meeting, and this past weekend I went back to Philly for my pal Molly's Training for Change workshop, "White People Confronting Racism 1". That was something of a whirlwind tour, and the training was 9am to 9pm Saturday type of affair. After a leisurely Sunday where I caught up on sleep, this week has been all about three intensive days of training my work's 16 international interns, who all leave Friday for their respective countries. Whew! Tomorrow's the last day of training, and boy, am I wiped. There are two more interns coming later, so we do it again for them in a condensed version over this weekend. If you haven't heard from me in a while, that's why. Not an excuse! But I am a little busy. June is pretty packed, and there's a seven-day trianing at the end of it that will take me away to Baltimore for a bit. Other than that, the travel has abated somewhat, and I've been mostly in DC.

On the not-work-related side of things, WHEW, is it HOT here! I'm having a hard time adjusting - I sweat pretty constantly. Not that all y'all need to know this, but hey, if you know me, you know I'm all about too much information.But as my dear mother often says, "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity." I don't think she's referring to herself, but I am — I think my brains melted out of me sometime mid-Monday.

There was a pretty serious thunderstorm here Tuesday, which was amazing. Safely ensconced in a Thai food restaurant on a date with Elly (where we had decided it was too hot for a picnic, and I'm glad we did) I watched, gape-mouthed, as hundreds of lightening bolts and sky-shattering thunderclaps raged outside. Which was all very lovely until it dawned on me that we had to bike home. Yipes! As much as I was convinced that I would be a human lightening rod, and that my nervousness about this fact would somehow encourage the lightening to find me, we were fine. The rain was refreshing. I'm worried about when actual summer hits, but I think this may be it. Elly and I need to invest in a fan that's talled that a foot & a half, which is what we've got now. This is your mundane weather report for the evening.

The life of my brain, when not melted out my ear, is doing better. I've gotten to plough through a book about the Weather Underground that I'd wanted to read for a while, the Ron Jacobs one. I'm also trying to embark on reading Das Capital, but it's tough without a study group-slash-cheerleading effort. I also just got Paul Kivel's new book about class, You Call This a Democracy? and I'm very excited to get started on it.

In other news, I've been drawing cartoons lately. Jeff G on my friendster testimonial mentioned that I might put them up on the blog some day (I had thought about it a while ago) but I think I'll actually do it. Huzzah!

That's all the news from maxland to report...