Sometime in my second year of college, Katie, whose birthday it is today, so happy birthday Katie(!), told me that she didn't think of Pittsburgh as her home anymore, that New Haven had become the center of her existence.  At the time, i was in this mode where i wanted New York to represent an escape to normalcy and humanity from all the fucked up things i saw Yale University doing to its workers, to its students, to its city, and to the world.  I didn't want to think of Yale as the center of my social existence, and i had yet to really establish enough of a relationship with new haven as a city to have it feel like a home.  Sometime in between the GSA Town Hall meeting at which Bob Proto decimated the argument that graduate teachers and researchers were less deserving of a voice on the job than pipefitters like himself and hundreds of graduate students, both those inside YUAG and those locked out by the administration demanded answers from Susan Hockfield, and September 25, 2002, when seven hundred workers, pastors, community members, and students put ourselves on the line to demand that the university negotiate in good faith with its employees - all eight thousand of its employees seeking collective bargaining agreements, and with the community as well, my imagined locus for "home" shifted from the hudson river to the Elm City.  I think this process was really inseparable from the organizing that i was doing and from all the shit that happened over  the summer of 02 and the craziness but also exhilaration of the buildup to war and to the march strike.

 

Now i no longer live in new haven.  I've returned to my parents' apartment in New York, returned to aimlessly walking in great 4 mile long circles hoping to bump into people i know so i don't feel so damn lonely and then feeling dirty and awkward when i do bump into folks.  The problem is that New York doesn't feel like home anymore, but i'm kind of stuck here.  And i need to get off my ass and find a job but i'm worried that that will keep me here and that that isn't where i should be.