nostos and algia revisited

If the enjoyable and often powerful week in arizona was about learning to be gracefully useless and sometimes invisibly useful, (carrying stuff, poring over possibly fraudulent signatures for the execrable anti-immigrant police state "Protect Arizona Now" Prop 200 ballot initiative, and taking care of drunk people, mostly the last five days of driving were more ambiguous -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes euphoric, sometimes infuriating. And now i'm back in New York, trying to find work - browsing idealist, and considering other options, and trying to, as Shikha would put it, "process" the sensory and emotional overload of the last two weeks and of returning here and attempting to get out of here as soon as possible.

The Mustang was fun to drive in until it stopped starting, in Sutton, WV, in Katie's parents' place in Pittsburgh, in a gas station near Hershey, Pennsylvania, where i became so frustrated i hurled my cellular phone into a pile of gravel and split the battery open, (Bizarrely, it still functions, but i am probably giving myself cancer at an even more rapid rate than before,) before the exit toll of the NJ turnpike to the Holland Tunnel, and then terrifyingly in the middle of the Holland Tunnel itself. When the car started again in the tunnel, it held through a pretty scary ride up west street and the west side highway to my parents apartment, where Julie dropped me off, and then promptly gave out in the middle of the cross-bronx expressway as she was driving alone back to New Haven. It's in the shop and will hopefully be fit to drive soon, but the whole situation really sucks for Julie, and i imagine that breaking down on the cross bronx expressway at like 10:30 PM was not a particularly fun way to start one's final year of undergraduate study.

I'm not sure i want to write much else about the last two weeks here - i wouldn't want this blog to develop some sort of colonial travelogue aesthetic, and there are all sorts of things i haven't founds the words to deal with yet,. Similiarly, i'm debating wheter or not i want to keep blogging. I'm gratified that friends read it, but i'm not really sure right now what i'm getting out of it or whether i'm putting into it what i should be. So we'll see what happens, i guess.

I saw three college classmates on the street this morning, not one of whom acknowledged my presence. So am i that big of an asshole, or is that just what the expected ettiquette is towards us slothfully unemployed layabouts from the upwardly mobile yuppie set?