Sun 6 Nov, 20:34
Dark, clear cold
I wasn’t going to post today: it’s Sunday; the luteal phase is slowing me down. It’s an hour earlier than it feels since we “fell back” last night and lost an hour, or gained it, depending on whether you prefer sunlight or darkness.
I fell asleep during an early-evening meditation hosted on Zoom tonight. Before it, Erik was talking about cosmic reality. He emphasized the commonplace profundity of the fact that our galaxy’s Sun and our Moon are the same size relative to Earth, that that’s what makes eclipses possible. We are in eclipse season of course, having surpassed the one in Scorpio (theme: intimacy), about to undergo the one in Taurus (theme: retention). Whether it’s due to these cosmic events or not, I’ve felt a little crushed lately. There’s not a lot to be gained by fretting, however much a productive distraction it seems. I woke up with the nausea that has marked the week before I bleed for the past four to six months and fought the tide of it all day. J tells me Erik has said that nausea is always somewhat existential. This doesn’t help, but it is funny.
I see a post from our union that says the UC has the right not to pay us for the work we do not do while we’re on strike. This is also, somehow, funny. They are inviting workers to sign up for picket duties, twenty hours a week, and in return we receive $400/week. I wonder if workers are restricted to picketing at their own campus or whether, for example, I could work the line at Cal (instead of Santa Cruz, where I am enrolled and employed) and receive this compensation. It might be nice, J says, for you to have something to do while you’re not working. Something social, more like a real job. He is contrasting strike work with my virtual teaching assistantship, which I do from home, and which has little meaningful interpersonal opportunity.
Taurus eclipse theme: retention. It’s difficult to see this all back on the table. Still on the table. To see the table still so unhappy, unstable. Like others in my cohort, the burnout was just scabbing—well, wrong word—we had just started to put ourselves back together again, most of us moved away, or making furtive plans to do so soon. We will achieve our research in spite of the university, has been the sense. We met last week over Zoom, not all of us, the fourth-years of our department, and excitedly, hungrily caught each other up from where we were to where we are. We were barely starting to open up in those first few months before we lost the chance to be there for each other. Survival trumped vulnerability, rawness discomfited connection, distance destroyed closeness.
This loss took place (in anxious isolation) in the wake of the wildcat strike, so it is no wonder I am scared of this upcoming one, even though it is huge, union-backed, even though it is across all campuses. I am scared of the power of the emotions matching or surpassing those of the wildcat strike. I am scared to miss it, miss out, not have people to go with away from SC, with Ryan MIA and the cohort dispersed. I am scared to crack, if not shatter, my memories of Cal by picketing there for the sake of Santa Cruz. It does feel like a betrayal to leave the girl who loved Berkeley behind, to complicate her, stain her with poverty. But she’s always been a public school kid; and artists don’t mind fighting for their money. The strike starts one week from tomorrow.
