Unionizing issues: Self-conception of the Organizers.

The national union who's providing advice is giving us training, but it's the weekend before orientation, which is too late to revise the lit and get everyone "on message" for a big event.

I emailed the national union liaison, and stated my understanding of messaging, which she confirmed (I had listened carefully to her at the one strategy session she appeared at): you have one message of "would students be better off unionizing?", and everyone just has to agree on that, and you have a savvy face-to-face campaign that unites people around that.

But, as much as I'm trying to get people to think communications now, there's 2 members of the committee that have personal issues bound up in unionization, and they're trying to get that out there.

One is a self-styled student activist who came in under the new financial aid package (5 years at $19,000!) but wants to stick it to the admin, and wants to have everyone agree on that. He uses really inflammatory language, and makes a point of saying we're a "democratic" organization and "open to all voices", but I never feel like he listens to me when he talks, and usually it means that he wants to say what he wants using the organization as a platform... He doesn't seem to realize that unionizing and self-expression can be two values that can be at cross-purposes.

He's also a short, balding, kind of fat gay guy who's out to lunch and has inadequacy issues with being an academic... He's also also researching queer activism in another country - a tell-tale sign of trouble, b/c you can tell he's caught up in activisism as a self-conception, but will bear no real consequences if it fails (much like white liberals who were blase on health care; I wish I knew how to put the little accent mark over the last e in "blase").

He also gets caught up in organizing small stuff (e.g. discounts for union members at local restaurants!), but tries to put me off on the agenda when I schedule important stuff (e.g. do we have a coherent communications strategy).

The other guy is the son of profs but is all about being a "unionizer". He points out that our logos are "traditional union logos" (that use a shark), and he wants to sing union songs and talk about solidarity, but he doesn't realize that people find it weird and classist.

So, I had a conversation at the OrgComm (=Organizing Committee; I'm on it) meeting about postive and negative impressions about the union. The long-term members themselves came up with stereotypes, including:

- divisive/confrontational/aggressive.

- radical/Trotskyite.

- privileged complainers pretending to be hamburger slingers.

I thought it was helpful, but the chubby ugly gay dude wrote up the minutes and he had this in there:

How much should we raise ‘admin’ which sounds confrontational? Should we avoid mentioning it?

[the fat ugly gay dude's name, writing in the 3rd person]: but we do need to convince everyone that the administration is bad. We don’t need to go to the center, we need to move the center towards us.

The worst part is that he went on this emotional rant and talked over me, and he's not invested in the struggle, and he's leaving for anthro fieldwork in the winter, so he can fuck things up and just waltz out!

I think I will -

- talk to an ally on the committee and maybe a neutral member to see their impressions of the meeting.

- remember that we seemed to have consensus that literature is a neutral starting point.

- keep the long-term goal in mind of making sure angry rhetoric doesn't enter into meetings for incoming students, or any meetings at all.

- remember that I should wait until the AFT-IFT people talk, because maybe they have ideas.

Perhaps I was foolish for prematurely raising the issue and forcing the fat ugly gay dude into this public stance, but I needed to have some sort of messaging consensus to revise the literature!

Visit Home: Observation of my Mom.

Just like she says most every visit the past few years, my mom just randomly turns to me and goes, "You wouldn't believe how fat people are getting, there's some real porkers up here, you *never* used to see as many people as bad as that, even just a few years ago!", and then she offers to take me to Wal-Mart to see them.

"I couldn't even get around this one person in the aisle the other day," she was like.

Visit Home: More on the Ride Home.

My one friend from high school who's now getting her ph.d. in social psychology also keeps saying she has the hardest time getting her students to understand abstract concepts like that you can look at behaviors from different theoretical lenses in attempts to understand them, some better and some worse, and that these ways of looking at behaviors are socially-constructed/cued -

- that is, until she hit on her "spit" explanation -

- where -

At the beginning of that lecture, she asks for a volunteer for 2 extra credit points, then has them "deposit saliva" in a spoon, and then for 10 minutes she talks about the health benefits of saliva, and reads off descriptions from the American Medical Association about how good saliva is, how you'd die without it, etc., all while walking around the lecture hall holding the spit in a plastic spoon and people are wondering what she's going to do with it, and then finally right after a "raise your hands" poll where she asks people if saliva is a good thing and everyone pretty much agrees, she walks to the seat of the person who volunteered and is like, "Well, you know, since this is so valuable, I feel bad I deprived you of it, so why don't you eat it" and tries to shove the spoon in their mouth, and at that everyone goes "Yuck!" and gets grossed out, and she explains that what's in the spoon hasn't changed, but what we call it (spit vs. saliva) and our reactions to it has.

Then, the rest of the semester when she's offering different theoretical explanations for behavior, she's like, "You know, spit or saliva!", and she says students get that a lot more, and she has better answers on tests now.

Visit Home: Ride Home.

I got a ride north from the train station for the long weekend with a friend from high school who's doing her doctorate in social psychology.

She says that when she meets people for the 1st time and tells them that she's a social psychologist, she typically gets 1 of 3 responses:

- "Thank G-d, kids in our high schools really need good counsellors these days."

- "So you're a social worker?"

- "Can you prescribe drugs yet?"

New neighborhood update: New black postlady.

I was mailing a small package the other day and had re-used a bubble envelope and scratched out the previous sender/recipient and then written next to them me and the new recipient under "From:" and "To:" respectively, and when I went up to mail that and after the (black) postlady had asked me whether there was anything hazardous liquid perishible (sp.?) etc. etc., I was like, "Is that okay that I scratched out the addresses and put these on?", and she, very seriously and with a pissy face, was like, "Actually, no, but it'll get there."

Then, I was like, "Now that's honesty, if I ever get a new shirt and I want to know if it's ugly, you know I'm coming to you," and at that she laughed and smiled and batted her hand to me as I said bye.

Parasite update.

I was at dinner with a ton of people the other weekend, and someone's friend was a 2nd-year med school student.

When the parasite that I had had got brought, he asked me a lot of questions, including how it affected me, and I told him that it was a head-trip to find out that I had these two 2-cm worms living in my body.

"Is that really so different from having a sore throat?", he was like. "An infection is foreign organisms too."

He also could not believe that when I told the local black post lady about my parasite, that she was like, "Whoo-whee, I am so glad that they shipped us over here."

My bet is that at some point he repeats that story.

One thing I really love about West Africa...

Oddly enough, it's really a cinematic culture!

I was thinking of this the other week when I went to go see a Senegalese movie about 7 passengers taking a cab for 200km together, which has musical numbers. The whole thing was so fresh and fun, like the whole first number was the cab driver getting together 6 passengers and everyone deciding whether to wait around for a 7th passenger to show up, or to all chip in and pay for the seat of the 7th person and go sooner.

"I remember, when I was in Ouagoudougou" (sp? - the capital of Burkina Fasso) that there were 3 major cinemas for the city and they each had like 2-3 screens and showed movies from like 9am until 10pm at night, many of them really interesting local things like a documentary about JPII trying to find apparitions of the Virgin Mary for every nation in West Africa so they'd all have a national saint.