CUPE 3903 strike, day 19

Was my last class on November 5th? Where did that time go? What the fuck have I been doing for the last nineteen days?

I’m including weekends in my Strike Count, because

1. if they were actually at the bargaining table, the disputants would be working through the weekends, and
2. all the days are bleeding together.
   

Of my goals for the strike period, I have accomplished most of the first one and none of the others. I’ve been reading my IP textbook every day for not less than a week and I’ve finished 220 pages. I figure I’m averaging about ten pages an hour. If there were a remedial legal reading class, I would be in the front row. What’s really killing my time is I’m highlighting the shit out of the book: the further I get, the more significant everything seems and the more I highlight. The last two chapters will probably just be wall-to-wall yellow.

I’m only partially to blame for not accomplishing my other strike goals:

• I’m sure my course summaries would be a masterpiece by now, but my puppy ate my laptop power cord -- not his first offence -- so I’ve been biding my time reading and highlighting and stealing other people's computers until a new cord arrives;
• my IPilogue assignment is canceled altogether [Damn you, CUPE 3903, look what your avarice has wrought! that was a 250-wd assignment for god's sake!];
• my seminar on "Termination of the Lawyer-Client Relationship" would have taken place yesterday;
• my apartment’s toilet likely continues to run, but I wouldn’t know because I fled Toronto the day after the strike began;
• likewise the smell in the front hall of my apartment [read: the entire apartment]; and
  
• as for curing heart disease, if the answer lies in sitting around eating my parents’ food, I’m surely close to a breakthrough.
  

Composing this list has been disheartening, and I love bulleted lists. I'm no longer ambivalent about the school stoppage. I can't shake the feeling that nothing I'm doing is enough and everyone is getting ahead of me. Historically, this has in fact been the case. I have wasted two solid weeks of free, no-strings holiday, and while my classmates have no doubt devoted nine hours out of every ten to forging themselves into better, faster, stronger legal automatons, I have spent the day

• making coffee, drinking it, then making more, then taking pills for the headache inevitably induced by the coffee;
  
• reading about Hillary as secretary of state;
• reading about Hugh Jackman;
  
• trying to determine if I have synaesthesia or if I just want to have it;
  
• deleting dormant/unread/annoying blogs from my RSS reader;
• adding things to my girlfriend's reader without her knowledge or consent, despite the fact that she has never used a reader and has explicitly stated that she has no intention to start; and
• making bulleted lists.

That's two bulleted lists and I don't feel any better. I'm going stir crazy. I'm having nightmares that combine conversations with exes, hunting the Most Dangerous Game and high school football into one bizarre transaction. You would think I would be having the dream about having to write an exam for a class I've never been to, but no: it's killing people and football.

I must get out of here. I must get free. Please resume negotiations.