Hi Everyone!

Because of the World Cup, there’s been a lot of discourse online about Ranch Dressing. There have been a slew of posts from tourists praising the condiment, and countless stories of them chucking a metric ton of it in their carry-on bags only to be confiscated by TSA. Now, for someone who has had the opportunity to eat ranch my entire life, it’s easy to forget that this condiment is a distinctly American creation, created in Alaska by a plumbing contractor and now almost ubiquitous on any veggie platter. Point blank: it’s never been that exciting to me compared to the lexicon of other condiments at my disposal, and to be honest, I can’t even remember the last time I tried ranch. 

Yet, with all of the hoopla surrounding it, I felt almost obligated to give it another go, so at breakfast, I decided to see what I was missing. As I poured it into a condiment cup, I noticed the subtle off-white color with flecks of green sprinkled throughout. Then, I sat down and dipped one of my tater tots into the dressing and ate it. Immediately, I was surprised at its creaminess and herbaceous flavors. I have to admit, ranch is fantastic.

It only took a bunch of tourists to come to America for me to rediscover an amazing thing that I take for granted every day. I can’t wait to find out what other things I have been overlooking when a bunch of tourists come back for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

With that said, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

Monday was our second and last day at Disney. However, instead of going into another diatribe on what makes a Disney Adult, I want to take this time to write about my favorite character that Disney has ever made an animated film about: J. Thaddeaus Toad, Esquire, or for short, Mr. Toad. In The Wind in the Willows (a short film as well as a novel by Kenneth Grahame), Mr. Toad is a wealthy and eccentric adventurer who has become obsessed with cars. After he accidentally buys a stolen car, he is jailed and has to escape and clear his name¹. It’s truly a rollercoaster of a movie, with the narrator of the animated version describing Mr. Toad as “the greatest literary characters of all time” (No way in any regard would this be a case of an unreliable narrator).

While not as flashy as some of Disneyland’s top attractions, there is a ride that puts you in the seat of Mr. Toad’s car for your very own Wild Ride (Side Note: Disneyland Park is the only Disney Theme Park in the world that features a Mr. Toad-themed ride). In honor of the special occasion, I put on my Mr. Toad shirt and marched over to the queue. While I have heard some confusion and dissatisfaction about the events of the ride, including one cast member who said “I would have to be high as a kite to enjoy that ride”, its lunacy and chaos are what make it memorable. You crash through gates and buildings, run through TNT crates, and cause a ruckus on the streets. While you are ultimately in the controlled environment of a dark ride, it embodies every part of what I imagine are Mr. Toad’s adventures, even if it takes a few creative liberties in the process. More importantly, the scene of him driving is notably absent in the film, so one is essentially creating cinema. 

I will be honest, my first experience with Mr. Toad was through the ride, not via the animated feature. I actually only just watched the film recently so I could have a better understanding of the plot to explain it to y’all. I still remember my first ride, when a cast member made a joke about me having the energy of J. Thaddeaus Toad. I also appreciated the fully articulating wheel that makes you feel like you are driving the car while having absolutely no control over its movements, but the ride’s ability to combine a sense of adventure, chaos, and light-heartedness into a story that is memorable by itself even without previously watching the source material is what truly made me fall in love with Mr. Toad. Disney is often known for turning a ride into an opportunity for immersive storytelling², and there is no other ride that does a better job of it in my opinion.

In many ways, this story is a perfect example of what this newsletter is about. Sometimes when you go off the beaten path, you just might find your new obsession. Regardless of whether or not I have encouraged you to appreciate the wonders of Mr. Toad, I hope I encouraged you to have your own Wild Ride.

Nothing for this week! I only had a day between getting back from Disney and going on my next adventure, so academics had to be pushed to the wayside. 

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I am part of a union, specifically The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or UAW for short. You may notice that there is nothing about education in the name, and I could not even begin to answer why I am a part of this union and not some other one. If we are being honest, while I joined up and have been a member for a semester now, I also had no clue what being a part of a union entails. My only reference point is Season 2 Episode 15 of The Office, where the warehouse workers talk about starting a union and executive Jan Levinson immediately shuts them down with threats to close the branch. (This is the second time in the past month that my main reference for a major adult life situation is from The Office. I guess it shows the ubiquity and its ability to condense the banality of working life into a comedy, even if I was not working at the time).

While I had absolutely no clue what about anything regarding unions, I was invited to an almost all-expenses-paid UAW labor retreat that they refer to as “Summer School” at Cal State Los Angeles (CSULA). Marked as a collection of trainings on organizing, member education, and coalition building with no prior labor experience required, I figured it would be an excellent crash course in understanding unions and my role in one. This did mean, though, that I had one day back in the Bay Area before I headed back down to Southern California.

I got up Wednesday Morning and huffed it to my local Amtrak station, where I joined the SFSU crew headed down to the conference with me, and we started our 9 and a half hour commute (7 hours 30 minutes from Northern California to Bakersfield by train and 2 hours from Bakersfield to LA). As someone who only a month ago took a 10-hour flight and ended up 5000 miles away, to take almost the same time and end up only 500 miles away hurts me at the very core of my being. On the bright side, though, I did get to see both Fresno and Stockton.

When we arrived at CSULA, we all checked into our student apartment that we would stay in for the entirety of the trip. Stepping into the dorms immediately threw me back to freshman year at Georgia Tech. The off-yellow walls, the wooden furniture, alongside outdated kitchens and those itty-bitty mattresses that they use to torture college students, all were the same. I guess if you’ve been to one collegiate dorm, you’ve been to them all. I also learned that in addition to the shared bathrooms, I would also be sharing a bedroom (I guess this is part of the collective solidarity that unions talk about).

After we settled in, the SFSU crew headed into Downtown LA for welcome drinks at Precinct LA. Immediately upon arriving, I was digging the industrial style with neon signage, right up until we got to the door where the bouncer informed us of the $25 cover fee. We immediately pivoted to the nearby Grand Central Market Food Hall, and I got an order of pork, beans, and cheese pupusas at Sarita’s Pupuseria. As I was waiting for my food, I noticed signage indicating that this place was featured in the movie La La Land, and since that is my favorite movie of all time, I grabbed a picture of me sitting in the seats. It’s not too often that you get to eat at the same restaurant as Seb and Mia.

The topic of discussion at our meal focused mostly on the tram car running up and down a hill (known as a funicular and, don’t worry, I made sure everyone else knew the name of it too), so naturally we walked over and took our short 298-foot round trip up and down the 125-year-old Angel’s Flight Funicular³. Fun Fact: This is known as the world’s shortest incorporated railway. 

And to wrap up the night, I accidentally locked myself out of my dorm room while taking a shower, so I had to frantically knock on the other dorm room and have one of them call the RA on duty to let me in. I honestly don’t know how I survived freshman year all those years ago. I didn’t let my keys leave my side for the rest of the trip.

On Thursday morning, I followed the mass exodus of union members from the apartments to the Student Union, an apt location for the Summer School Sessions. From the walk alone, it was obvious that this was a large labor retreat, but I didn’t realize the sheer size of attendees. were over 500 union members at this Summer School across the Western States with a range of jobs. Some were autoworkers, some were university faculty and teachers like me, some were state scientists, and there were even some blackjack dealers from Vegas. Everyone here was doing so many different things, yet they were all working together in the union. 

We piled into the ballroom for the first main session, and it was here that I learned more about unions. The speaker gave a brief history of the UAW, which was founded in 1935 and has collectively bargained its way to higher wages, employer-paid health insurance plans, cost-of-living allowances, and more for union members⁴. However, those victories were contextualized with the current tumultuous state of unions. While union membership reached upwards of 33% in the mid-1900s, it has since fallen to 11.2% in 2025, and a lot of those losses have caused wages to stagnate and worker-first policies to falter. The speaker put it quite simply, “Lower union density leads to higher wealth inequality”, and “Higher union density leads to more political, social, and economic reform”.

With that framing in mind, I was off to several classes and workshops that would take up most of my time at the retreat. The structure of each day was as follows: There would be one big group session each day, where guest speakers would come to talk to us (One day, UAW President Shawn Fain stopped by to give us an overview of current UAW initiatives, and, on the other, the UAW-endorsed LA Mayor candidate Nithya Raman visited to tell us of her campaign). Then, we were placed in a specific class each day to develop skills based on our union knowledge. I was placed in the Internal Organizing: Growing Membership Track, the class for those with the least union experience. Then, to finish out each day, we would go to two workshops of our choosing to continue to develop skills required for strong unions.

Throughout the classes and workshops, I was surprised to learn more about the Summer School’s pedagogical strategies. While we would get some strategic framing for each session we attended, they emphasized individual discussion, synthesis, and practical application of the skills as we were learning from them. In the Internal Organizing: Growing Membership class, we were given the components of effective 1:1 organizing, using the SMART method for asking others to do things (Throwback to 🏃A Hectic Start To The Year 1/11/25 for more info), how to strategically frame conversations with others, and assessing coworker needs and connecting them to the union. Then we were asked to create our own SMART asks and discuss them with everyone, and finished with SMART goal setting and creating an 8-week plan for growing membership based on a hypothetical scenario. 

In the Asking Open-Ended Questions workshop, ran mostly by the moderators asking open-ended questions to us, helping us understand the use of investigative questions (those meant to learn more about the other person) vs. agitative questions (those meant to help people connect the dots on why to join a union). Then we were thrown into a roleplay activity surrounding organizing at Monsters University. 

There was also the Facilitating Participation workshop, where we think, pair, shared about strategies to facilitate before a meeting, and a roleplay of a meeting facilitation where I facilitated so well that 3 people complimented it in the debrief.

In a Creative Campaigning session, we learned of the unionizing strategies in southeastern states that have been less prone to unionization efforts, and then we were asked to come up with our own creative strategies for a problem that one of the local unions was facing. 

Even in the How Auto Workers Unionized At Ford workshop, the most stereotypical classroom setting, the presenter would sprinkle in opportunities to ask synthesis-aimed questions throughout the lecture, making us reflect on how unionizing of the past could be used now as well as in the future. 

This is not to say that these sessions didn’t have confusing parts for a newbie like me. I was presented with my fair share of union terminology and jargon that was presented as common knowledge. Acronyms like VCAP (Voluntary Community Action Program), CAT (Contract Action Team), OC (Organizing Committee), and NEO (New Member Orientations) were stated at face value, forcing me to learn along the way. Likewise, numbers like 80/20 (the ideal ratio of interacting with another in a conversation, 80% listening / 20% talking), and 30-60-10 (a pseudo-sociological breakdown of how the workforce is receptive to unions: 30% are automatically supportive, 60% are neither a quick yes or no, and 10% are strongly against unions) were sometimes presented as tacit knowledge. Yet, regardless of these confusing parts of unionizing, through the practical, more embodied parts of Summer School, I left with a better understanding of unions and our local efforts at SFSU. 

The part of this retreat that stood out to me the most was not the sessions themselves, though. It was the people at them. It was refreshing to be at a place where everyone was energetic and enthusiastic about making real change. What’s more is that they never gave me flak for being someone without prior union knowledge. They didn’t make fun of me having to look down at my name card whenever someone asked what local union I was in (I finally memorized it, and it’s 4123), and everyone would just casually shout “left” to make sure everyone would raise the correct fist for pictures.

While my adventures in this newsletter lean towards being overwhelmingly optimistic, it doesn’t capture my at times pessimistic view about the state of the world. Here at Summer School, I was surrounded by a group of people who were practical in their understanding of the world, yet exuberantly optimistic about making a real difference. This level of realistic optimism was inspiring and makes me a bit more hopeful about building a better future too.

Unions don’t just work hard; they play hard too. Over the course of the week, I also got up to my fair share of shenanigans. 

Thursday night, Kara took me on a whirlwind tour of Downtown LA’s Little Tokyo. We started at Kaminari Gyoza, where I got myself a pork gyoza teishoku (set meal). Alongside an incredibly crispy main course, I was treated to a clear pork soup, cabbage, spring rolls, edamame, pickles, and pasta. I was a bit confused about the pasta part, but it was tasty, and I already had too many questions swirling in my head from union stuff to even consider asking about that. 

We spent some time walking down Little Tokyo proper, frequenting several of their many tchotchke shops where I almost bought a blind box several times, and stopped at Cafe Dulce for brick toast. Despite its name, it was slightly croissant-esque and drizzled with sweetened condensed milk. No questions, though, just enjoy.

We ended the night by heading to Benny Boy Brewing for that night’s UAW Summer School Social. Part brewery, part cidery, owned by two cats (not really, but they did make their presence known), and recognized for its extensive beer garden, we walked into a DJ playing Emo/Emo-Pop throwback songs, making it an excellent opportunity for some people watching. I grabbed a Moscow Mule cider while Kara and I analyzed the dancing in the crowd: What I thought was a mosh pit, Kara told me was actually just headbanging, yet headbanging, interestingly enough, is a precursor to moshing. I also got to talk to several other union members to hear about their experience in their fields and some of the collective struggles we all have been facing. 

After Summer School on Friday, I joined some of my roommates for dinner. After half an hour of exploring options that were both walkable and affordable for a couple of graduate teaching associates, we landed on Aloha Food Factory, featuring plates with mounds of Hawaiian-inspired cuisine. I grabbed a plate of their savory yet sweet BBQ char shu alongside rice, veggies, and a scoop of macaroni salad, and as someone who has been to Hawaii, I can say that Hawaiian macaroni salad hits different.

We then walked from there to a Union Dorm Party! Similar to the dorms, it had a throwback to Freshman year vibe to it. All that was missing was a table of Beer Pong. It’s probably for the best because I would have smoked everyone, not because I am particularly good at it, but because I have heard reports that there is no undergrad campus party culture on the West Coast. I heard through the grapevine that there were plans to start karaoke, but we got rowdy enough that the CSULA cops got called on us and we got shut down before I could sing “Firework”. What can I say, unions party hard!

UAW President Shawn Fain stopped by to give a talk during Summer School, and in his speech, he recommended watching Tommy Douglas's "Mouseland" speech. While this version has been animated with cute mice to follow along with the speech, at its core, it still remains an allegory of the current political system.