Skiing in Tahoe for Spring Break

Found on Flickr --  by Scott Thompson

I am so excited! My friend Kevin, a whip-smart fellow grad student in English, has invited me and some friends to stay with him for a five days at his boyfriend's gorgeous house in Tahoe. Yay Kevin and his retired-at-30-and-bought-a-house-in-Tahoe-because-he-invested-ridiculously-well-in-the-tech-boom boyfriend!

I haven't been skiing since I was like 16, when my mother sweetly took me, my high school boyfriend, and my best friend up to the mountains. My family used to go up to the snow every couple years before that, so I am hoping it's going to be more like riding a bicycle and less like html coding, which I am truly slow and stupid at when I haven't done it for several years. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see if I can stay upright while charging down mountains. I love the thrill of speed on the slopes, and I will just have to not eat much in order to be able to pay for the ski rental and lift tickets for as many days as possible.  Otherwise I'll have to go cross-country skiing, which is cheaper but  no fun at all, as in my opinion it's like walking, but harder, whereas downhill is more like

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Union-Busting in the Midwest

Call me what you will, but I hear "union" and it makes me think of the US's days of manufacturing strength, of the power in numbers, and of the little people banding together to support each other against those wishing to exploit them. This class struggle is something that is particularly pertinent  to remember, in my opinion, when we know that it's the billionaire Koch brothers who have been financing the governor of Wisconsin and encouraging him to take down the unions there.

So when I hear on the radio about various Tea Party-led efforts to take unions down in Wisconsin and Ohio, with a focus on the public sector, it makes me wonder how our supposedly democratic values have led us to this. And simultaneously, in Michigan, the Detroit schools are getting their legs cut out from under them -- just as I marveled about California's cuts to the UC system: when has cutting back on education ever helped a people succeed?

I may be especially sensitive to these events because I have been in a TA union for the last six years, and that union has made sure I was paid fairly, received health care, and has generally made me feel that in a big system, I have a voice.  I feel lucky, as what happened at New York University under President Bush, stripping grad students of the right to organize,  removes most of the few rights we have as employees, and any pull we might have.

The Huffington Post has a cool feature: best signs from the protest in Wisconsin! I think the first one is my favorite. I just hope that the power of the protests in the Middle East and the American Midwest sends a message that a nation is not a group of individuals, but a collective, and that we are powerful when we stand together.

Some inspiration from Norma Rae:

UNION
Norma Rae at MOVIECLIPS.com

Grading, Grading Everywhere and not a Space to Think.

I am working three jobs right now: one of them is as a  "reader" working for the University of California at the wage a barista would make, grading the papers of the best and brightest in an upper division English class, which means I spend hours and hours pointing out all their missing commas, explaining terms they misuse, and occasionally getting excited about a new argument or a clever turn of phrase.

Marking with the bloody red pen

However, even with sixty papers, those moments of joy are few and far between. Lots more frustration tends to weigh down the scales.  Also, we had some friends who got their PhDs a couple years ago come back to visit Santa Barbara this weekend with their adorable blond little toddler, and I spent the weekend ricocheting between hanging out with them and grading. Talk about a lack of motivation to get that pile to shrink.  Finally finished yesterday -- it took me literally all day to grade 20 papers because I had completely reached the end of my rope. I haven't had to grade that many papers in like a year -- last quarter, something about the combination of the class and the time section was scheduled (6 pm on a Thursday!) meant I had only about 28 students total in my sections: less than half the number I am grading this quarter.