When all you have to do is introduce and make sure it's not crazy is when you start repeating yourself.

The real dream, though, is I basically want to just teach semester long courses on Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K. Le Guin. See you in the most marginal university department you can come up with.

Forgive the title, please. Today was a big step forward for the rights of graduate workers at Columbia. There's no reason to think recogntion is a sure thing, and because the Bush-appointed NLRB has more like a latrine than a legistlative body, we could be in for a disappointment. But it was still pretty inspiring, and at the end of a week in which I seem to be waving a sign as often as not, it's a good note to end on.

Gotta make sure the Greek is justified. Hint: it's probably not. I want to have a PSA in which a bunch of grad students are given free liquor and get predictably tanked. Then, they're asked a series of increasingly difficult questions. First one to say something in Greek gets thrown in the tiger pit. The best I can predict for myself is that the tiger might not be hungry anymore by the time I get there.

Still mapping imaginary things, here. These are my maps that constitute a spatial representation of this novel. See previous posts for exactly how long I've been occupied with this thing.

I sure hope this doesn't end up being a waste of time, because it feels a little crazy. I don't even know what's going to make it into the presentation, let alone the paper. But you know what? Sometimes you have to know where the pigeons go. Unfortunately, the less literally you mean that, the better.

Exhibit A: people who profit from environmental disaster, seeing in it what John Oliver has called a "catastrotunity," should be stripped of their assets and expelled from human society. Exhibit B: the next five years would be a good time to buy property somewhere that will be habitable when the atmospheric temperature breaks the 3.6 degrees farenheit threshold that scientists say is both probably inevitable and certainly disastrous.

Dilemma: would it be unethical to buy property in a place in part because you think the value of that property will rise as a result of climate change and ecological catastrophe? Probably not, provided that it isn't accompanied by preventing anti-climate change measures for the sake of that profit. Among the most heinous things I can basically guarantee about the next twenty-five years is that those who are now stringently denying the existence of climate change will turn around and profit immensely from the land-rent speculation when we start to see the effects in more of the United States.

But dragging the covered wagon over to somewhere that won't be ruined by flood or drought? That just seems like good sense. If I disappear one day, look for me north of the 42nd parallel.