First long entry in a while:

I got really excited by a book i found at Labyrinth (one of the coolest bookstores around.) I was there looking for a book on demoicracy in Mexico for a friend, which, unfortunately, Labyrinth didn't have. What they did have was Eve Weinbaum's brand new book To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia. Weinbaum went to Yale as an undergrad and then was involved in founding GESO as a doctoral student. She's also worked with UNITE (according to the book jacket.) I've just read the first chapter, and although i'm not certain that i agree with some of the statements Weinbaum makes about the relationship of the global justice movement to state power, i'm probably also reading the wrong things into some of her statements. These are, after all, movements with complex and diverse relationships to the state and political parties.

Anyway, i'm working on this senior essay about a yale strike, and i've found that stuff written by people who've been involved in the struggles that have been waged against Yale's greed and power over the last seven plus decades (see Deborah Elkin's wonderful dissertation for more of the early history of labor and dissent at Yale and in New Haven) has been really helpfull for me in figuring out, to use some organizer jargon, what's at stake in the struggle we continue to wage here.

I'm at my parents' place in Manhattan, bored out of my skull, trying to make sense out of the last eighteen months of my life, and watching this digital cable shit my parents got to compensate for me and my brother being out of the house. The whole vegetable thing isn't workin for me. I still haven't finished all my work from last semester, i'm convinced that at least half the work i did turn in sucked due to stress, overcommitment, and fatigue, but i am excited to start seriously writing this essay, and excited to send the corporate criminals who run Yale packing, shut down the school and instantiate new forms and structures of teaching and learning.  ¶ 1:19 AM