This past week…

On the eighth day of rain, weather came through the kitchen wall. I looked up from the student manuscript I was writing comments on and saw the wrinkles and bubbles where the new coat of latex paint was being attacked from underneath. I put my finger on the surface and it came away wet. Water was making streaks from molding to baseboard.

A dear relative of mine spent time in an ICU.

I hardly ever thought about the Iraq war.

I experienced the strange importance of having a relative with a serious illness.

My room smelled like mildew.

Two undergraduates told me how much they appreciate my written feedback on their stories.

I thought often of my time as a nurse’s aide at the Portland VA hospital, where I occasionally worked in the cardiac ICU.

I sat in a union meeting listening to a pep talk about how all good activists need to put in more volunteer hours at this crucial time in the bargaining process. I got felt so angry I almost got up and walked out. I felt so angry I almost quit the whole process right there. I felt so angry, so angry. (But who was there to blame?)

I wondered how much money my employer paid the premier public relations firm Siegel and Gale for the rebranding initiative that resulted in its just completed absurd name change (from New School University to the New School).

I read a Times Op-Ed about the need for the U.S. to take the lead in deciding what’s to be done with Arctic sea lanes as they are freed up by all that melting ice.

A student sat in my class and declared, “Nature doesn’t do it for me.”

Hyacinth sat in my office chair and said, “I want to see you get back to writing.” “Yeah,” I said, “so how come when I see you over at the union office, all you ever say is, ‘Make more phone calls?’”

It dawned on me that it’s probably already too late for me to learn the rudiments of the Valerie Plame affair. That it’s probably like language acquisition—there’s a certain time in the life of every political scandal that’s optimal for learning all the ins and outs. If you miss out then, you’ll never catch up. Also that if I just make a face whenever the name Judith Miller comes up, I can get along quite well at the dinner table.

On Winston’s birthday he and I had a big fight in the food co-op. He was mad because I arrived late for our shopping date and then spent a long time talking to a neighbor. I was mad because I’d left a union meeting early to meet him and ended up being late anyway and then was just trying to be neighborly and meanwhile a dear relative of mine was in an ICU and I’d been looking forward to spending a nice quiet evening, not having everybody mad at me.

I realized that a day without bargaining (or even a union caucus) is a day full of sunshine.

I told Greg I feel like Moses. Yet another day I have to exhort my people to trudge on through the desert. They don’t want to go. They’d rather sacrifice to a golden calf. They’d rather be slaves in Egypt. Why, I wonder, do I bother with this spineless crew?

My employer, the New School (formerly New School University) held an event in the courtyard underneath my office window. A chamber orchestra played. Employees handed out free bottles of water with the “new New School” logo (it’s blurry, or, as the PR has it, “the logo is not fixed but rather it has multiple states to exemplify a school that is active and alive”). They handed out stacks of printed infomercials for the institution: “a legendary, progressive university made up of eight schools bound by a common, unusual intent to…bring actual, positive change to the world.”

I opened the New York Times to see that the lead article was about how my union and GM had just announced that health benefits to union members would be cut back substantially, long before the contract is even up.

I made large numbers of phone calls to faculty members who mostly were not home. I didn’t leave messages on their voice mail. I taped up oodles of posters and fliers; some I posted with thumb tacks. On the 7th floor of the New School’s 12th Street building, which happens to be the floor where I teach my creative nonfiction class, right door to the New School’s famous Orozco murals, I taped a notice of the membership meeting where we’ll be voting on the strike right next to the description of the murals, which celebrate The Worker and The People and such. Before posting the flier, I wrote on it in purple ink: WWOD (What Would Orozco Do?). At the top of the flier, a heading reads: STRIKE OR SETTLEMENT. I circled STRIKE and drew a purple arrow that connected that word to the rest of my message. To my astonishment, the flier was still there the next day when I arrived on the floor to teach my class.

My dear relative got better but was still in the ICU.

Wilma was declared the fiercest Atlantic hurricane on record.

This week, I anticipated what the union veterans promise is “the real crunch time in negotiations—the point when you’re just bargaining around the clock.”

I was too busy rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic to worry about The End of the World.