Vacation?
For the first time since last year (at this exact week) I am taking a week off. Even after my testicle surgery I was forced to work as much as I could to get my article out. Now I find myself with no pressing deadlines and I am trying to relax. I don’t know how to do it. What do people do?
Mostly when I’m faced with this situation I dream big about how productive I will be when I return to my work. I plan to become a master of Marxist dialectics. I set writing schedules that Marx himself could not keep. And I don’t relax. So now I am really trying to avoid all of these traps and just hang out for a week and not think about work. Impossible, but at least I’m not going to moan about Foucault over dinner.
Instead, I’ll moan about the Democratic National Convention. I don’t know why they don’t just lead with big posters of Bush/Cheney bathed in red and then give explicit examples of just how badly they have fucked it all up. I guess they need to walk a fine line and are actually courting people who may think that the last eight years are not so bad. It’s all so delusional and odd. I thought poor Ted Kennedy was a sad and inspiring sight at the same time, thundering from the podium like the insistent ghost of a past era. Our favourite moments on TV are where they cut from Obama to McCain and you realize what a cadaver the old bastard really is.
On the Canadian front, it looks like the federal leaders will contort themselves into an election any day now. Hopefully they can avoid this as I can’t take the media overload that two simultaneous elections will produce. Also, I don’t feel like going through the angst of wondering who to support. The NDP? Jack Layton has betrayed the left in so many ways in his pandering to “working families.” Who is he speaking to? But it is also against my instincts to disengage totally or throw away my vote on the Marxist-Leninist Party or the Greens. At least the NDP has the potential to stand as an (ineffective) bulwark against the worst instincts of Canadian neo-liberalism. They ain’t no CCF. I showed my students a video of Tommy Douglas speaking and they were amazed at how good he was. Jack Layton should just show the same videos – try to reclaim that heritage in some way. Instead he chips away at the Douglas legacy and the very idea of socialism. What does he stand for? Nobody knows.
I will at least enjoy putting a huge fucking NDP sign on my balcony and watching the condo board go into fits trying to get me to remove it. The campaign is only 36 days long and I can easily ignore them for that long! They shouldn’t have been so fucking pernicious about the bird feeder issue!
