i would walk five hundred blocks

I've spent most of the last week doing three things - furnishing my apartment, exploring the neighborhood, and going on really, really long walks which tend to wind up in the east village in a roundabout way. On Monday, i walked up to Pacific st. and back and then took the R train to court street and walked to the east village.

On tuesday I walked into Brooklyn heights and over the bridge and down Chambers all the way past West street to North End avenue, where i hung out with my grandparents in their new place for about an hour before their dinner guests showed up and my grandmother, who i've always called "Babu" because i couldn't pronounce "Bubby," which, for all the goyim, is Yiddish for grandmother, when i was a baby, told me about when she worked a s a gym teacher at Dalton, an uber-elite and exclusive upper east side prep school, before becoming pregnant with my mother. My grandmother was at one point a truck driver for my Anarchist great grandfather Zacharias, after whom i'm named. I knew she wound up teaching dance at NYU, but i had no idea she'd ever taught gym, much less at a place like Dalton, where the kids, her students would make fun of her for being from the midwest and from a not very wealthy family. Both my mom''s parents are originally from Illinois. Their parents were immigrants from the Ukraine and Belarus. My grandmother grew up in a small town, my grandfather and his brothers on the South and West sides of Chicago. They met at a Young Communist League meeting at UIUC. My grandfather was there on a football scholarship. My grandfather ("Zayde" is yiddish for grandfather) is a diehard White Sox fan. I mentioned to him that the Whitesox are in first place and have the best record in the AL, something i know because of my post-Boston rekindled interest in MLB. Then my grandfather told me about when he was a kid, living in post "Black-Sox" scandal Chicago, (when seven players on the 1919 white sox conspired to throw the World Series) and so few people went to white sox games that the stadium would open its gates after the second inning and kids from the neighborhood could come in for free and sit anywhere they wanted and watch the games. Seeing my grandparents was immensely fun. I left them, walked up to Washington Square park, and then around the NYU campus for a while before hopping the D back to Sunset Park.

Yesterday I decided to walk to Williamsburg via Park Slope, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill, mostly to see if i could. It got a little hairy around the Williamsburg Street BQE onramp, but it gave me a much better sense of the geography of Western Brooklyn. I've spent very little time in Williamsburg. The neighborhood took off as the "next big thing" when i was in high school and spending most of my time either in the Bronx or on the LES, which was not yet nearly as gentrified as it is now. Generally, when i have gone there, it's been via the Bedford L-station, which is the hub of all the hipster gentrified over the top williamsburgistry that's forced rent into the stratosphere and led to plans to demolish half the neighborhood and build luxury condos for the post-Yale set -- the ones who actually make money -- to inhabit, and driven the folks who lived in the neighborhood - particularly the latinos - further south or out altogether. I can count the number of times I've been in Williamsburg on one hand, and until yesterday, i'd never approached from the south. Walking up Bedford Ave from Williamsburg Street, through the Hasidic and Latino areas gave me a new perspective, made me cognizant of how disjoining the "break" between Hasid, "Hispano," and Hipster really is. Walking into the Bedford-N. 7th st. Tasti-D-Lite (i needed a hit of something real cold and mushy) after walking the legnth of the neighborhood's volatile cartographic disjunctures was immediately disorienting and uncomfortable. So then i doubled back to S. 5th, walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to Delancey Street, met my dad outside where he works, and had dinner with him.

And today i walked to the east village via the brooklyn bridge again, and my face is all sunbirned, and I feel like tomorrow I should walk east instead of west.

Having my own place again, for the first time (not counting Boston) since the two years I spent on Bishop street is good but odd, as if I have suddenly forgotten how to exist without my parents in the next room all over again. It's been a long year. (Actually 15 mos, but three and a half of those were with the union or in Tucson or in the non-functional mustang of doom.) I feel a lot better about myself now than i did last July, but i think my life still has a ways to go before i'm ok with where and who I am.

My bedroom's pretty much good to go, which is exciting, though we still have to figure out what we're doing about the living room area, which is pretty small. And i still need to figure out what enrolling entails.

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