something to write home about

I got my appointment for my second round of top surgery: June 7th! Which is bad timing. But in this job, it's all bad timing. Wheee! I perhaps will be able to swim publicly by the end of the punishing, swampy DC summer.

Also, I turn 30 in less than a month. I am a forgiving Taurus, but have you planned? You should be planning. There will be a party. It will be at my house. Also, my birthday falls on Mother's Day, a Sunday.

file under "wouldn't happen in SF"

OK, so I have tons of work to do. There's a big strategy session this weekend, there are folks coming in from out of town, union and labor movement allies meeting about a campaign I've spent most of my USAS career pulling together. But I took this time to tell you, dear reader, that R. Kelly keeps coming to my gym. That's right, he and his whole entourage came walking through the locker room as I haplessly laced my running shoes tonight, much to the delight of many of my fellow gym-goers. First, I was like "ooo!" and then, I couldn't get that darn Chappelle Show episode out of my head.

Meanwhile, at my day job, students at UVA who were sitting in for a living wage just got out of the clink this afternoon, workers at U Miami are on day 13 of a water-only hunger strike and students are on day 4, CU-Boulder students are on day 5 of a hunger strike for a sweat-free campus, and we're all freaking out about where everyone decided hunger strike was the tactic of the day. Ack! USAS national staff are notorious for trying to talk students out of hunger striking. We worry. Oh, do we worry.

Back to the action...

absinthe...

makes the heart grow fonder. Well, it's crunch time in student-labor organizing land. I'm in Philly for a few days, then Raleigh, then Charlottesville. It's a busy time but I thought I'd stop to post, since it's one of the few creative activities I don't have time for these days. Elly, for those of you who don't know, will be moving to New Orleans mid-August to support our comrade Catherine Jones around work she's been doing since the hurricane hit. If you don't know Ms. Jones, you should -- check my earlier posts for her blog address.

On the other hand, I will be looking for a new job come November. That's the big topic of my internal debate right now...should I stay or should I go elsewhere? DC has grown on me, I must admit, and I've given myself one more year to be outside the Bay Area, since I'm really not quite done with the non-California world yet. I really love the house I moved into, and my housemates are awesome. We're just not sure how long we can fight off the march of gentrification through our living room. Eventually, we suspect our landlords will get greedier than they already are, given that the house is crumbling in places beneath our feet. But back to the original job question, it'll be something in some facet of the labor movement. A local? An international? A community-labor coalition type job? Organizing or communications? Well, I guess we'll see what's out there by the time I apply.

I scheduled a consultation with a top surgeon last week. That's pretty exciting stuff! I'm hoping to be under the knife and back out from under it by Summer. At least while I have health insurance. It'll be a tough scheduling process, but at least my job doesn't require regular heavy lifting...only during my annual 'this-office-is-a-fire-hazard' cleaning fits. We're an organization with three cubicles and almost ten years of history, it's understandable I suppose.

OK, that's enough of an update. I need to sleep.

oh lordy

it's been a month since my last post.

I got to see a bunch of my far-yet-dear Bay pals, but as awlays not nearly enough. I returned from vacation to the longest consecutive number of days I've spent in DC since last summer. Nice! Besides a road trop to UVA for an organizing training weekend, I'd stayed put and have been working out from under the pile of emails that the World Social Forum/UVA campus tour/NCOR/Our National Conference month o' insanity left me.

Of course, now I'm in Philly. Apparently it's snowing buckets in California, as it did while I was there. Now it's 73+ degrees in DC and Philly, where I write this post. A friend once said to me about this wacky weather and its connection to global warming, "Well, we all thought this was coming, but I thought it would be in my 40s!"

I don't have anything particularly brilliant to post, when I do, I'll post it. In the meantime, "Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious!"

first day off for a while

hey folks,

so after I got back fro teh World Social Forum, that weeked was the National Conference on Organized Resistance where I was on a panel, and a bunch of my pals were in town to do trainings. The following Tuesday I got on a plane for SF and began working around the clock on our humungous national conference. That, thanks the dieties, is now over. It was fun while it lasted, but not I'm in the middle of my first 24 hours of blessed not-work-time for a month. Whew, indeed.

If you're a pal of mine in the bay, call me! I'm here until Sunday.

How time flies.

Hola Comp@s,

A whirlwind tour if ever there was one, I've spent the last few days muddling through various communication attempts, attending many inspiring and some not-so-inspiring panels, attempting to find workshops, and generally hanging about in the Parque Central area of Caracas.

Highlights included:
* Varios amazing conversations with my co-delegates the reductions of which are forthcoming

* Proposing the Stop Killer Coke campaign to the Assembly of Social Movements of the World Social Forum (hereinafter 'foro') in a huge, packed auditorium

* Hearing Hugo Chavez (in person) bust out in 'Sombrero Azul', a classic resistance song of El Salvador, as a tribute to the recently passed leader within the FMLN, Shafik Handal

* A brief morning hike through the mountains surrounding Caracas

* There were several labor forums, and a workshop on the recovered factories movement. One of my fellow co-delegates had an enormous memory and history of various socialist-communist tendencies within the US and their geneology, so I spent an evening wiht rapt attention plying him for information about the whole universe of Trots (which I really didn´t understand all that well, I have to admit)

* Every morning that I walked by the rooms workers were cleaning in the hotel where we stayed, the TV was tuned to Canal Ocho (the government station)

* Today I saw one of the cleanest, best-ventilated garment and shoe factories I'd ever seen (and the first I'd seen in person, I've seen many videos and photos) as a government cooperative project

* A guy from Bogota and an elderly Brazilian hippie helped me to find the place where free buses took people to the airport.

hola de venezuela

allo compañeros,

I"m here! There"s not much to report, but the delegation I"m with will be checking in today. There was a looong bus ride with a beautiful view, crazy fellow Foro-goers, and many people wanting to smoke who"d been on planes for 15-hour stretches. Check bck for updates!

Yours,
Sr. Max

my new favorite (apolitical) website

I was looking for software that could facilitate making a flip-book. Instead, I found a site where you can make a web-based flipbook on the spot. Who knew? It's amazing!
So I promptly made this:

http://www.fabrica.it/flipbook/flipbook_player.php?id=1135382226-68502125&r=index.php&keyword=&p=1&type=

It is silly. I highly recommend making one yourselves.

miscredited

I get a call from my credit company. Apparently, they've spotted something questionable in my recent purchases. Turns out, yep, someone exploited my number somewhere and bought something with it.

I called them up and the automated voice listed all my recent and potentially suspect purchases. I immediately knew which one it was by the amount, but the descriptions were lacking. When I spoke with the operator, she also knew — it was the attempted purchase of an x-box listed as a "business service". She offhandedly mentioned that the Left Turn Bookstore purchase was mine, right? Now I'm not the most paranoid person out there when it comes to these things, but I'm not sure what it says about a. their tracking capabilities and b. my personality that the operator could determine that a medium-sized purchase from a lefty bookstore was clearly mine, and an x-box clearly was not. Perhaps I should pay cash for some things and charge different ones to keep 'em guessing. In this case, however, it really did work to my advantage to be predictable, even if that means I now don't have a credit card for holiday shopping. Go figure.

don't read my blog...

Read my friend Catherine Jones's.

Here:
http://floodlines.blogspot.com/

now for the actual update

Dear readers,

I am lapsed. However, I find you all to be forgiving in that way that only static, relatively anonymous audiences can be. It's a cathartic process for me, really -- but a boring or not frequently updated one for you.

Since I went to Indiana, (begin tangential anecdote) which also held a gay bar where a DJ doing his best to accomodate us attempted to mix "House of Glass" into bad house music into "Raspberry Beret" and on to the extended mix "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?" It was ugly, but not his fault. What were we thinking? (end anecdote), I've been a few places. Philly, Collegeville, and Philly again; back to a 9am flight to Durham, 48 hours later to a day in DC, and topping it off with Kalamazoo, MI all in the same 8-day span. I'm real glad to have not been on a plane for almost three weeks, and I'm not even supposed to be on one again until I head off to Cali to see my lovely Bay peeps.

Did I mention that the greatest irony about the Indiana trip is that (for those of you who know her) Mary Gray arrived in DC the same day I left for Indianapolis? And she's in Bloomington? We basically switched places during one of the few times we could see each other. But all's well that ends well, and we finally got to meet up on her trip out here to the AAAs last week. Whew! It'd been just over a year, after her lovely wedding to Catherine in Louisville.

Things that have happened:

• I moved to a queer collective house just up the road. I now have six very nice housemates, seven including the cat, in the heart of a gentrification process that has us facing condos every which way. I hope we can hang on here for a while longer, I love it. This process also ate all remaining scraps of my free time and sanity for a while. Now I have things like a bed, and blankets, and even shelves, so it's settled.
  
• I had a relaxing and cooking-laden couple of days off with Elly's family attributed to the genocidal fiction we clal Thanksgiving. I refused to deal with my cell phone, and so did my cell phone service provider, during that time.
  
• The first snow hit DC, and I still haven't stopped biking to work. What's wrong with me? This is only my second Eastern winter. Someone talk sense into me before I lose my nose to the frostbite.
  
• Elly and I joined the local Y and it has a climbing gym. I spend time I should be writing posts scrambling up walls, whenever the work lets me.
  
• I will be going to Venezuela this winter. That is exciting.
  
• I have been working like mad and consequently neglectful of my friends. This is bad.
  
• As a sanity preservation maneuver, I watched the latest Harry Potter movie and liked it.
  

exercises in futility, aka the democratic process

I had one of those snaps the other day. Now, I owe y'all a post about what I've been up to, where I've been, etc. But I thought I would post this.

I did one of those automated action alerts about immigrants rights--I believe it was a DREAM act one, but I can't remember from whence it came. Honestly, I get so many action alerts in a day I can't keep track. So I get this asenine response from some hapless DiFi staffer and I don't know if it was the lack of sleep, the utter inanity of the response, or a lingering homesickness that wishes I could rid California of the plight she wreaks upon us through sheer electoral power alone; I simply HAD to respond. I'm sure whatever intern was stuck reading this immediately put it in the "wingnut" category, but this is what happens when I'm working at 2am and suddenly get this kind of email from DiFi's office. It's a task they signed up for, goddammit.

Anyhow. She wrote:

On 12/5/05 8:38 PM, "senator@feinstein.senate.gov" wrote:

December 5, 2005

Mr. Max Toth
[my mailing address]

Dear Mr. Toth:

Thank you for writing me about a possible blanket amnesty.
I appreciate hearing from you.

I do not support blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants. As
the daughter of a Russian immigrant, I understand the hope and the
optimism with which countless others view our country. I believe
America is rooted in a tradition of newcomers working hard and
building a better life for themselves and their families. We must
balance this tradition, however, with our ability to integrate new
immigrants into the American society that follow the proper
channels to legal immigration. Our ability to accept immigrants and
our immigration policy must support and strengthen families, create
economic opportunities, increase scientific and cultural resources,
and fulfill humanitarian commitments.

Again, thank you for writing to me. If you have any further
questions or comments on this or any other issue, please do not
hesitate to call my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

http://feinstein.senate.gov

Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html.


to which I replied, in a fit of pique...


Dear Senator Feinstein,

I appreciate that your office responded to my email. To be frank, we strongly disagree on a number of key issues. Given your stances on many concerns that I would find important, I'm basically appalled that you still identify as a Democrat, and I can't wait for the 2006 elections, and hope that an actual progressive candidate runs as a challenger to your post. When or if they do, I would gleefully work around the clock on their campaign until you are forced into the retirement that we, the people you purport to represent, so richly deserve. I find it particularly galling that your base of operations for years in the state of my birth is our beloved progressive bastion of San Francisco, home to many hardworking-if-undocumented people who are terrorized into poverty wages, otherwise known as a substantial portion of the economic base of California.

Until then, unfortunately, I am required by our supposedly democratic political system to beg you to bother to be progressive. We both know that will not happen unless poor people are able to scrounge the campaign largesse required to be properly represented. However, as I feel compelled to do what I find just in this society, I will continue to send you missives about what I'd like you to do were you to actually represent me and scores of people who live in this city, as well as the state. Were you to suddenly change your views around this issue and a number of others (say, your continually hawkish stance towards the war we're waging in Iraq, among others) I would vote for you. Lots of my friends would, too. But as of now, I apologize to people that I was sufficiently unaware of electoral politics such that I made the mistake of voting for you in the first election I was allowed to participate in. At the time I was under the impression that "Democrat" and "progressive" were synonymous. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

As a senior Senator who attended Stanford, you couldn't have possibly missed the ways that US immigration policy throughout the course of history has been terribly racist, arbitrary, and designed to supply a vulnerable and easily-exploited workforce that could be deported at will. The title "Chinese Exclusion Act" doesn't leave much room for nuance, for instance. Nor for hope or optimism, if your ancestors were Chinese immigrant men in the 1800s. Low-income immigrants to the U.S. not only built the infrastructure of this country (that wasn't being built by enslaved Africans) but had to fight, and many died, attempting to guarantee the freedoms that spawned many deferred dreams--usually through labor organizing. The Democrats are supposed to be the champions of struggles for justice such as these.

For a more current analysis, I'm not surprised when I hear from many undocumented workers that it was not, in fact, a desire to fulfill a romantic notion of an American dream that led them to, say, risk their lives crossing a desert to be greeted by armed guards or worse, but in fact, the total economic devastation of the agrarian economy of Mexico due to cheap US imports dumped on them through NAFTA, wrecking their only means of supporting themselves and their families. So I don't care where your parents immigrated from, but I bet they got a fairer shake than the people who clean your office building, or mine, because of the color of their skin and the US's foreign policy towards their countries of origin. I know my Hungarian immigrant relatives did, even though I'm the first person to graduate college on my mother's side of the family, nor were my ancestors spared lung-destroying, gut-wrenching work in Pennsylvania coal mines. Because our families immigrated from Europe, we had access to infrastructure that this country has never granted equally to immigrants of Color, either by law or by selective enforcement.

So now I'll ask you to change your position. Will you? You know it's unfair. There's still time for you to create economic opportunities for people by allowing them to work free from the constant threats of deportation that employers use to force inhumane conditions upon many of those who make our state function, not by denying them.

Your constituent,
-Max Toth

Her office's reponse to this was to re-send the original email. Go figure.

indiana's techno hookah

Tonight I arrived in West Lafayette, Indiana. I haven't been to Indiana before, and after a bit of getting lost with my two co-workers, we made it to our host's house. It was 11:15 or so and none of us had had dinner, so it was suggested we try the hookah bar, whose kitchen is open late.

We arrived at a strip mall-esque compound where a large sign proclaiming "hookah!" and two bouncers 'neath greeted us. Inside the bar, many a college student puffed away and we were seated in the warehouse-sized space. The special part though, was that it was playing classic suburban gay bar techno, complete with disco strobe light. And there were two, count them, two wide-screen TVs with the sports channels blazing away. So we ordered our late-night Lebanese repast and caught each other bobbing along to occassionally to the "whumpa-whumpa" soundtrack.

I was in DC for the three days prior to this, then in Philadelphia staying at Molly's house while she's away in New Orleans. I trucked around the area all that week, stopping only briefly to visit the beloved Kingdom of Vegetarians Chinese food restaurant, home of round-the-clock vegan dim sum.

Also, I moved this past weekend to a room in a queer collective house in DC, which means cool housemates + Elly and I have proper amounts of space to ourselves, which is healthy. I ran all over heck looking for a new mattress, but craigslist did me right and a free-but-in-great-shape queen size mattress is now mine.

OK, past my bedtime, more later.

carving and baking madness!

pumpkins_pie,
originally uploaded by mtoth.

I went to a pick-your-own pumpkins and apples farm with pals from g-town, elly, melissa & marissa. Yay! We returned triumphant and promptly carved pumpkins and made that apple pie, which unfortunately looked better than it tasted, but oh well.

coast to coast

That was the name of the local hardware store in the town where I grew up (for the first half). But that's not why you're reading my post.

Almost liek a pilgrimage, I returned to Boston about a week shy of when I'd gone a year ago. It had been my first campus trip, so this year I celebrated my anniversary of working for USAS at the Harvard campus giving workshops. It's a good time of year to visit - lots of brick and leaves, and the wind hasn't quite gotten bone-chilling yet. I tried in vain to go to a famous vegan restaurant near where our gracious host lived, but the timing didn't work out. We did go to a club with a candle-wick bowling alley where a truly flabbergasting performer, Leslie and the Ly's. At first, I had no idea what to think, and she could probably lose some of the karate-chops, but her ode to gem sweaters was truly amazing.

I also found a particular headstone in the famous Granary Burying Ground that had left an impression on me as a 13-year-old tourist. As I explained to my comrades on the trip, many times my family vacations included trips to the local cemeteries - it's a side effect of having somewhat goth parents. Later that day, I'd get on a plane and land that night in Los Angeles.

I was reunited after a year with my beloved sleeping bag, patiently awaiting my northward return, only to leave it behind in Los Angeles. Fortunately, my co-worker was notified that I'd left it behind in time to bring it back to me. Reunited, and it feels so good.

I got to hang out with Shana (see: friend blogs) at her place in Long Beach for a couple of hours, which was great becuase we had tons to catch up on. Other than cruising around LA in a ridiculous Buick rental car (they were out of compacts), I didn't get to see much outside of the UCLA campus (which is nice, don't get me wrong). I even missed seeing my aunt, which was a shame because I so rarely get to go to SoCal. I'm actually pretty fond of LA, and got to at least call my mom and get the story straight on where all she grew up down there. San Diego, mostly.

My returning flights left something to be desired, but it actually worked out better than planned. Plan A was that I'd fly back to Boston, sleep in the airport, and get on a flight to Baltimore. Yuk. So instead I got trapped at LAX having been directed by an airline-check-in-counter-person to miss my flight and rebook to DC directly for $100 - I was willing to do it, but apparently that was all fiction. Without car, a dead cell phone and no charger, I instead was stuck in an LAX terminal for six hours. There was an incredibly sweet Welsh guy on vacation who chatted with me about my iBook, then we wound up ranting about US's position in the global economy, arrogance, consumerism, and bad foreign policy. I love it when that happens! After he caught his flight, I made my way to a restaurant for a veggie burger (look, people, I was desperate) where I sat at the bar and got engaged in a conversation about police brutality, racism, the environmen, travel and government administration in suburban LA-sprawl with an awesome woman knocking back a couple of margeritas to ease a flight to Australia for vacation.

Now I'm in Philly again, I can't believe it was March when I was last here for work. Molly took three weeks off work to go down and help out in New Orleans, with my pal Catherine Jones at the clinic and with cleanup in general. What she's seeming is incredibly intense, and I hope she'll post it somewhere. In the meantime, I get to crash at her apartment.

Signing off...

a drawing...

dirt_shirt_sm,
originally uploaded by mtoth.

I drew this for a conference. Ha! Enjoy.

the first step is admitting....

I'm addicted to sudoku, the logic-number-puzzle present in the commuter version of the washington post that our intern gives me every morning. I thought you should know.

I went to Nashville for the first time ever, and while I didn't get to see much of it, I was impressed! I'm off to Boston for a week, then Los Angeles, then Philly, then either Knoxville or West Lafayette, Indiana.

That is all for now.

A lot can happen in a month...

And yet here I am, just updating you now. Well, here's the monthly update, because I'm tired of apologizing to people who've found my blog for the first time in such a state of disrepair.

Two days after my last post, I went to a Direct Action Medic training in DC (mostly to see who else was there, and it was organized by a pal), and then Elly and I decided to embark on an 80-mile bike ride to our friend Ginny's farm in Culpeper, VA. Yep, that's what I said, EIGHTY MILES. The first day we took off around 3pm, and were foolish enough to think that we'd make the whole trek during the day. It rained all day, which added to the insanity of it all. Most of the trip involved hugging the 10 inches of gutter on the side of some pretty hairy highways with Virginia drivers wondering what we were doing there. Crossing offramps on a bicycle is not for the faint of heart.

We made it to one of the town-landmarks as night fell, and decided to call it a night. Sloshily stumbling off my bike at the firs hotel we saw, the Days Inn Manassas had some bad news for us: they were booked up. We'd have to cling yet again to that scrap of concrete highway planners dare to call "shoulder" for another two miles up the road in the dark. When we arrived we decided that order-in Thai food and sleeping until 9am would be appropriate remedies for our ailments. I thought I'd never again be able to feel various parts of my body, including the left section of my right palm.

It was honestly about 10am the next morning by the time we hit the road, and slogged through to Culpeper. It wasn't raining so the ride was quite pleasant, after we got over the part where our quads were screaming. Er, and the part where the sun was pounding us into the concrete. I had to wring out the padding portion of my helmet, twice. Eww!

The town of Culpeper, after you bike past all the big-box stores on the outskirts, is kinda cute. Elly and I decided that it was time for an iced beverage of sorts. After crawling up to the first cafe and watching the proprietor lock the door in front of us, we got a hot tip on a good air-conditioned cafe. We sat for a bit, caught up on calls, and set out for the last 7-mile leg -- described to us in an email as "very hilly". Indeed it was, even my San Franciscan sensibilities were stopped short by the last mountainous hill, the top of which held the turnoff to Ginny's farm's 1/2 mile driveway. We were there! It was worth every aching, numbing, almost-breaking-up-or-turning-around moment. We were greeted by Ginny and a hoarde of smiling Georgetown folks, cooking lovely meals and telling us to shower/sit/make ourselves comfortable. Which we did. We also went swimming and jumping off rocks at a lovely creek out back.

The following week I went to my first DC United game with several folks from the Worker Rights Consortium. They trounced Salt Lake City, and Elly even got into it. It was pretty astounding to see how much these dudes whomp on each other in person. There were some very foul fouls.

Labor Day weekend found this student-labor activist shamelessly slacking. Elly and I had talked a lot of trash about getting to Six Flags, and gosh darnit, we did it. First we spent a whole day on apartment home-improvement, becuase we live together in a tiiiiiny studio. We had committed to find a bigger place by September, but that was just too crazy. So instead, we put up more shelves. Which has helped considerably. The next day, off to Six Flags we went. There was a crazy water park, and we went with Elly's childhood pal Amy and her 12-year-old sister. I let them do all the really crazy rollercoasters. I went on the pseudo-Pirates of the Carribean type ride (I'm fond of water and skeletons together, what can I say? Avast!) and the wooden rollercoaster. On the water-park side, there was the humongous funnel that had a feeder slide going into it - it was so huge, they'd only let people go on 4- or 2-person inner-tubes that looked sort of ilke waffle fries. I thought my heart was going to slide out of my nose during the drop, it was truly freaky. There was a huge wave pool that Elly eventually got to enjoy, any many twisty water slides. Afterwards, our pal Molly picked us up and took us back to the apartment where we indulged in an embarrassing pop culture movie viewing.

Monday we all trucked out in Molly's car to a beach on the western shores of the Chesapeake Bay. A hot tip from a local took us to the only free beach for miles, where it was us and maybe six locals. Elly was chased ashore by jellyfish, but by the time I waded out things were less dangerous. But all the people were sifting through the sand and combing the beach intensely, with what looked to be gold-panning operations involving collanders. Eventually I went up to a woman and asked what she was searching for, and she blunty replied, "shark teeth". Shark teeth? "No, really, that's it. Shark teeth." I believed her, but I wanted to know why, and what they looked like. They were little tiny, black, and she said they were prehistoric - teeth petrified in some unknown shark-dinosaur-graveyard long ago that washes up on this shore. Later on, another nice woman who brought her son and little dog down to the shore explained a bit more. There are many of the big teeth at the community center, she said, but most of those have been picked over so what's left are the little ones. She tried to get her son interested in the search to no avail. She also had thought it was busy that day at the beach - which had topped out at 15 people. The warmth of people there was amazing, and the search for shark teeth compelling. I brought home about ten.

Part of my slackiness was due largely to the realization that Labor Day weekend may be the last non-working weekend I have until January. I may be exaggerating, but according to my calendar right now the first unscheduled weekend is Oct 8-9th (which may still be booked), and then Elly's birthday weekend (the last one in November).

I spent the next week being in shock about Hurricaner Katrina, and feeling thoroughly useless. I've heard frmo most everyone I knew down there, and all the radical organizers are organizing, and reading every grassroots account and article I can get ahold of. I have quite an archive and I inted to post it here.

Sept. 10-11th, Elly went to her Grandma's house in South Carolina, and I hung out with the crazy kids at the Living Wage Action Center, checking out a series of workshops they'll be running on campuses all this next year. The next day I took a three-hour-each-way bus trip to Philadelphia to catch up with Mazzy, since she was out with her parents for a wedding of her childhood friend. We walked around Philly and talked for five or so hours before I got back on a bus and trekked into DC, accidentally missing a conference call while trying to catch the last train home.

Last weekend was our big national leadership gathering. Both spaces that we'd requested to host it fell through at the absolute last minute (despite having been requested in mid-August), giving us the very real possibility that we had 30 leaders, a half-day training and two trainers and nowhere to put us all. Sharon had given me the heads-up that The People's Institute was up and running despite their offices and the homes of most trainers being destroyed by Hurricane Katrina -- and they needed trainings to get their feet back on the ground. So I arranged to have them run an Undoing Racism training for our leaders, which was amazing, and I'm so glad it worked out. Given the space issues, we were all scrambling like crazy but a couple of contacts I'd made came through. Whew!

Now I sit at the Rennaisance Grand Hotel in St. Louis, where the national Jobs with Justice conference will begin in seven or so hours. Which means I should probably sleep, but instead I'm up working, and catching up - which includes posting here. So here you have it.

It's going to be a very busy October, I think - I'm in Chicago next week for a Fair Trade conference, then Boston for a week (brr!) and from there to Los Angeles (yay, Cali!) and back to DC for a bit before setting off to the Lehigh Valley an hour outside of Philadelphia. Indiana for a regional conference after, perhaps Michigan, possibly back to the SOA protest in Georgia. But it looks like our Winter Conference will be in San Francisco! Let's hear it for a hometown conference. Anyhow, if you don't get a post outta me soon, that's why.

Thanks to whatever audience perseveres in the face of my sporadic posting!

Day of the Fire Alarms

OK, this is by no means a significant contribution to the world, but I'm sharing anyway. Today at the building which houses my cubicle, there were four false fire alarms. Apparently some folks were doing work on a floor and something they were doing kept setting it off. The first time was funny, and the rest got shut off quickly. Which was merciful.

So I go off to the gym, am almost through my workout, and what happens? Yep! There was a false fire alarm. Now, at the gym, the fire department sits right across the street. The firepeople out sitting in their lawn chairs laughed at us briefly, then got their equipment and sauntered across the street. It took about 10 minutes for them to turn it off.

Chicago, y despues Montréal

We had our big, all-USAS-all-the-time combination Regional Organizer Training, International Intern debrief and three-day National Summer Retreat. I basically got to see the inside of the UNITE-HERE building and lots of students for a week, on about 4 hours' sleep a night. Yipes! Whew, it's over. Now the semester begins.

After a leisurely week at the office (we get three days off after the confernece, I took the first two m-t) I got on a plane this morning headed for Montreal. I'm meeting with my (hopefully) future top surgeon, Dr. Brassard, today at 1:30pm. Since it was too expensive (and too much!) to flly back the same day, I get to bum around Montréal for a day.

The biggest problem is that what little French is left in my brain was replaced steadily by Spanish, so i keep wanting to respond to people with "gracias", etc. and it's taking me longer than usual to orient myself to maps. But I do remember a lot. I always seem to understand more of languages than I feel comfortable speaking, I'll have to get over that eventually.

I'll post pictures when I take them!