28.5.14

If anyone ever needed an editor (or: thoughts on #nyaway)

Well, that was a week.

Spent the last few days marveling at Cambridge's and Brooklyn's ongoing pedestrian build outs, reveling at the astonishing three point birthday gift from the suddenly clutch Maxi Urruti, consuming an amount of pizzausually necessary to feed a little league baseball team, blowing money on public transit and overpriced coffee and diner milkshakes, taking fastidious notes on discussions regarding the nuances between the Jamaica Plain and Somerville subspecies of hipster, discovering that despite years of begrudging indifference and cavalier West Coast snobbery Boston is actually a pretty cool town, especially on two wheels; avoiding emails about this brow-furrowingly problematic but possibly necessary regressive street fee back home, and smiling to myself while listening to a half-dozen languages and taking in a whiff of that explicitly Only-in-New-York scent at the midpoint of subway creosote and stale urine. More than all of that, though, I spent the last week meeting up with people I forgot I truly loved and cared about, some of whom I haven't seen in as many as seven years, others of whom I’ve been tremendously close to and forgot could make me laugh so hard I had to pull over while biking. Maybe it's a side-effect of celebrating a birthday on this trip and feeling increasingly age-conscious as I get ever-older and ever-more cantankerous and boring, but the pattern of my interaction with my friends and couch-hosts became obvious: all these people, many of whom removed from my life since the college dorms or other seemingly done-and-buried chapters of my life, were out pursuing their passions, navigating this weird late-twenties-in-America, online-dating-horror-stories, is-this-actually-my-career-now excitement/malaise that makes up the variety of cheap longform thinkpieces and sitcoms, and doing so with aplomb, and opening up to me about it with grace and charm and candor. It's perhaps the best birthday gift of all (sorry Maxi) to know that the all those cities on the other side of the continent are chock full of gracious people willing to share a couch, bicycle and (most importantly) stories about the What Has Happened Since chapters of their lives, with the corollary that we immediately pick up Wherever We Left Off and eagerly keep in touch and share photos of Whatever Happens Next in the years to come. Those reminders that everyone’s getting older, graduating, navigating, negotiating… and NOBODY KNOWS WHATS HAPPENING but you’re all DOING and BECOMING terrify me but inspire me to keep up my end of the bargain and hopefully do something worthwhile with my own time on this next journey around the calendar. Plenty of unanswered emails await (sorry, Bus Project and Oregon Walks, probably a bad time to take a week off), so I’m certain my end of the bargain is cut out for me. To all those that I connected with this week: you should all come visit me in Portland, where the beer's cheap, we don't have sales tax and the water's usually potable. It meant more than I could ever type on a trite social media platform to see you and relive our past, present and future, especially if Donovan Ricketts kicksaves are involved.

You didn’t all have to tell me that hanging out with me reminded you of how loud I am, though.

Onward!

18.5.14

Thoughts on the Movement Building Training

Just wrapping up an exhausting, overwhelming, and marvelously transcendent weekend in Denver with 80 courageous immigration rights activists from around the country. I've always been drawn to social activism and progressive politics, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't absolutely star-struck by the tenacious work-ethic, optimism and sense of purpose displayed by these folks who experience and organize against injustices on a more visceral, emotional, personal level than to which I will ever be familiar. Knocked my socks off to meet people overcoming impossibly difficult circumstances to become the next generation of community organizers and social activists well-poised to leave their mark on making our communities, country and our planet an indisputably better, more just place to live. May I work my ass off in the weeks and months ahead to advance our shared cause and be worthy of association to the struggle for equal rights; I'm returning to Portland energized and focused to work with Bus Project and Causa Oregon to mobilize voters in Oregon around the Driver's Card Campaign.