After Winter Comes the Spring
It’s been a long winter, though global warming made it stranger than usual. It’s frightening, in fact, and is increasingly worrying. That, and the fact that all the bees are dieing. I worry, sometimes, that our generation is going to get interrupted by ecological disaster much in the way that the radical baby boomers got caught up with Vietnam. What a tragedy, and I’m afraid to think the implications through.
My partner of four years and I broke up last month, which has caused a major shift in my day to day life. It’s a strange thing to all of a sudden have the hours of your day thrown up in the air and to have very different social interaction. It’s not a pleasant thing by any means, but we both view it as a positive development, and we’re excited to see what the future holds for us.
I’ve begun taking a sleep aid for my DSPS, called melatonin. It seems to be helping significantly. The effects of the pill, which is a dietary supplament and not a drug, are fairly mild and you really need to use it in conjunction with altering your behavior, by doing various things to relax before bed. I can’t just hop off the computer and go to sleep. The side-effects seem to be grogginess and mild nausea in the morning. I seem to be a lot less nauseaus when I take it easy and get something in my stomach when I get up. And as for the grogginess, I’m used to being kind of out of it in the morning anyway, so it doesn’t really bother me much.
My bike will be arriving in May, and the nice weather has me itching to go out and ride for hours. It’s really unbelievable. It will be custom-made for my size, so for once I’ll have a bike that fits me. It will also be brand new, so ideally it will be the last bike I ever have to buy. I plan to go out for a long ride every morning as soon as I get up as part of my “light therapy,” another DSPS treatment. Basically, you expose yourself to sunlight or a special lamp for 30 minutes to 2 hours after waking up each morning, which sets your internal clock right. It’ll also help me get the hell back into shape after spending the last year on my ass.
I quit my job at Walgreens shortly after the breakup. Today I finally got another gig at a certain coffeeshop where I plan to organize with a certain revolutionary union. It’s a very exciting prospect, one that I’ve been wanting to pursue for literally years. I shot an email off to the organizers of the campaign today, and I’m starting to get my union materials together. I’ll also need to touch base with the local members scattered across the state, and hopefully some of the organizers can come up to talk to us.
SDS is making slow but exciting progress. The SDSWiki is a lot of fun and continues to grow daily, and I’m considering writing a proposal for a new international student news service to cover all the various student movements around the world, of which there seems to be a new wave in the global north as well as the south. The local chapter is coming along, despite my setbacks with getting caught up organizing this or that other thing. I’m going to really need to focus on this during the last month of school if we’re going to have a prayer’s chance of meeting throughout the summer and having a good recruitment drive in the fall…
The action camps are coming together, but there are some worrying obstacles such as a venue. Aside from that, many people are excited about it and are putting enormous energy into it. I’m trying to limit my work on it because I have so much else to do, but I’m temporarily bottomlining the Soup for a Democratic Society working group, which will run mass-cooking workshops and feed the campers.
On a final fun note, we had a southern New England SDS “meeting” yesterday on the beach in Newport, RI, hosted by the Salve Regina SDS chapter. We did a go-around of our various chapter activities, perspectives on how SDS ought to proceed, and how we ought to collaborate as a region. Once we got that out of the way, we played a little bit of frisbee, had a little BBQ, and enjoyed the beautiful weather and beach. It was a very nice opportunity to do some socializing with other SDSers, and I think it was well-representative of the different stages chapters are at in general. We had a handful of high school students who were committed but were having trouble getting anything off the ground, a couple of really solid university chapters, and a couple others that were starting to make progress. It was a long drive, but I’m glad I went. Maybe next time, though, we can have a conference call instead…