Have a magical fucking day

I spent the last weekend in balmy Orlando, FL at the AFT Higher Ed conference. Care to guess which vacation destination the conference was held at?

That's right, I spent three magical fucking days at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World, paying outrageous prices for rum drinks and beer at the pool, all because they knew they had me captive for the duration. Three days of employees wearing over-sized cartoon hands telling - nay, ordering me to have a "magical" day. Three days of the happiest fucking place on earth.

And three days of wondering if Goofy was going to tap me on the shoulder for even thinking of saying the word "fuck," or any of its variants. God, is it nice to be away from that whitebread wholesomeness. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck fuck. Fuck.

That said, overall, the conference was a worthwhile endeavor, even though it did provide moments of despair about the state of some faculty unions. As my partner in crime Dave mentioned, these events serve as a reminder of how far ahead of the curve graduate employee unions are in general.

The panel that I moderated went of with only a minor hitch, even if it was, as one attendee put it, "B-O-R-I-N-G" (discussions of mob tactics not withstanding). I particularly enjoyed a presentation on strategic planning. The other sessions I attended were notable for their general pooh-poohing of the concerns of graduate employees and other contingent faculty - which was to be expected, I suppose.

The real fun, however, was seeing our good friends from the midwest, AP and Kamper, who are rocking their respective state feds in Michigan and Illinois as field representatives, and visiting the Magic Kingdom with them - even if "Pirates of the Caribbean" was closed, "Space Mountain" was broken, and the "Enchanted Tiki Room" horribly modernized. A magical fucking time was had by all.

It makes it all the more difficult, after a weekend of doing something that I love, to come back and slog through the work that I don't really want to do. Blah. So there's my story for the weekend. Thanks for skimming.