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!