i've seen a lot of emails, blog posts, facebook stuff, etc about the horror of the killing rampage at VA-Tech. Yes, I agree it was horrible. But I honestly can't really get myself to feel a tremendous amount of grief. or fear. Maybe I'm just an insensitive person too caught up in my own life. I'm being completely honest here. I can't relate to students in Blacksburg, a town I've never been to, and fortunately haven't added school shooting to the list of paranoid fears in my head. Honestly, memories of the LIRR shooting by Colin Ferguson still loom a lot heavier when I think about random acts of violence.

And that's just what this was- random. Unless they can find evidence of some widespread condition or problem that can explain a large percentage of the variance, of the reason why the shooter would do something like this, it will remain a random act of violence.

In general, I have been much more concerned about ongoing large scale problems, violent and otherwise, which have been documented to kill more people than the crises, the anomalies. It's hard to get over the shock value of the school shooting, the sexiness of the car accident. But if you think of the numbers of people being killed every day by diarrheal disease, the rising tide of death in Iraq (the 127 killed in bombs today), it tends to put things in perspective.

Not to say that I don't often awaken with a startle in the middle of the night for fear of violent night intruders (based on personal experience). So maybe I AM just insensitive. Who knows. But come on, if we're praying for these victimes, the least we can do is also pray for the families of folks sent over to Iraq. and for the folks themselves.

Update: So, there was obviously a lot in this post that was highly insensitive and reductive. Now that more information about the shooter's mental state have become clear, I am embarrassed by some of the earlier assumptions I made and hope that I will not be judged based on. Yet, I have decided not to remove this post, as it remains accurate to my feelings at the time.

In an effort to improve the academic/profesionally-related content of my blog, I've neglected to post about my life for a while.

Things have been quite busy, between schoolwork and assorted extra-curricular involvements, teaching hebrew school, cultivating friendships in Boston, great friday night Shabbats at the Kavod House, and assorted other events.

Two weeks ago was the Labor Seder that a bunch of Kavod House folks and others organized- it was great to see my new Jewish community come out so strong- about 135 people showed up with minimal PR effort. There are some really strong labor campaigns going on here in Boston that we highlighted - I think I'm finally getting involved in a community that I feel really proud of. (Until I move again...

I stayed here for spring break and did not much of anything, but had splendid little visits from Lucy and her 2 roommates and from Gracie, who was here for an impressive conference at BC.

The following weekend (last weekend), I went home pre-Pesach and returned for this past Thursday's wonderful FOOD Symposium, which I mentioned in my previous post.

Currently doing stats homework, listening to my default selection- Idan Raichel - and eating some very yummy quinoa tabouli-ish salad that I just made with stuff that was around:
quinoa, 1/3 tomato, 1/4 cucumber, 1 celery stalk, fresh cilantro, fresh dill, feta cheese, lime juice, salt, olive oil --> yum. my new fave pesach food. would be even better with scallion or red onion.

Bloomberg Gets It About Food Policy

As last Wednesday's NYTimes reports in Farewell, French Fries! Hello, Sliced Apples!:

But from a policy perspective, Mr. Bloomberg has taken on more food issues, and provoked more controversy, than any New York mayor before him. As a result, he has the potential to change the way more New Yorkers eat — whether in the haughtiest dining rooms or the poorest home kitchens — than all the city’s food activists and restaurant critics combined...

“The tools are now all in place to achieve significant progress, but it depends on whether the city decides to use the tools,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and former member of the Clinton administration.

The article states that "Last week, New York state agricultural officials announced that the state would soon have its first food-policy council," which was confimed by a Daily Intelligencer story last Monday. Unfortunately Tracie McMillan of the DI thinks that "minutiae involved in favorite sustainable-food efforts like getting New York State apples to the neighborhood deli and ensuring that community-supported agriculture-buying clubs are affordable to the poor" are mind-numbing...

Passover, Collective Action & Food Sovereignty

cross-posted on JCarrot

Passover used to be the only time that many of us focused so closely on the ingredients and labelling of products we purchase and consume. Growing consciousness of our culinary footprint has made this an almost daily occurence for many; as other posters have outlined, these choices can make shopping and eating very stressful, especially on Passover, when our choices are more limited.

I’ve failed at the ultimate food-labelling challenge, my attempts to find any Kosher for Passover certified Fair Trade items, for a Seder or the rest of the Chag. Equal Exchange suggests Fair Trade chocolate for the Seder Plate, but these items are not Passover-hechshered, a concern for some. At a Labor Seder I organized in college a couple years ago, held after Passover had ended, we substituted 4 cups of Fair Trade coffee for the 4 cups of wine (yes, I know this seems antithetical to the themes of “reclining” and freedom that are important to the Seder experience), and I’ve always thought that current struggles for Food Sovereignty should be at the forefront of our remembering our experience as slaves and our going forth from Egypt to freedom.

Which is why I was super-excited that the FOOD student group at my school pulled off our 2nd annual symposium yesterday: “Power in the Global Food System: Mapping Food Production and Food Sovereignty in the 21st Century.” One panel focused on “Food Sovereignty,” a term coined by the Via Campesina global farmers’ movement at the 1996 World Food Summit. Two activists recently returned from the World Forum for Food Sovereignty in Nyeleni, Mali presented a promising picture of global alliances formed at the forum to promote several goals including:

the RIGHT of peoples, communities, and countries to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies.

While some of the speakers at the sympsium focused on the role that consumers have to reform the food system where legal and international trade venues are failing, the Keynote address by Marge Kilkelly, and other remarks, were a welcome reminder that it is important to set a balance between individual consumer responsibility and the power we have for collective political action through democratic government and other channels. While our power as individual consumers is great, it is easy to get caught up in worrying about every single purchase to the extent that it prevents us from devoting time to participation in some of the larger structures of social change, especially where food is involved.

Nigel Savage’s February letter outlining the need for collective action on sustainability issues within the Jewish community struck a chord in emphasizing the need to balance individual and collective action. Although Nachson took the first step of courage in crossing the Red Sea, we imagine that he was guided by the confidence that his people stood behind him collectively. This balance is important to prevent the burn-out that can come from bearing the full burden of the food system’s ills each time one makes a purchase or feeds oneself.

An exciting part of the Symposium was the amazingly 50% local snacks and reception cooked up by a CIA grad at my school. I spent the entire day grumbling about how I couldn’t eat any of the food, only to decide at the last minute to partake in the mesclun, beet and potato dishes at the reception, as it was a unique opportunity. Though I still feel guilty about violating my self-imposed “must be made in Passover-hechshered kitchen” rules, I resigned myself to practicing what I preach about the spirit of the law being sometimes more important than the letter. So, I’m actually quite glad that I stepped out of my comfort zone and struck a balance of engaging with others in the “collective action” of eating locally and making individual consumption decisions.

Film can be a great tool to spur collective action- we closed the symposium last night with a screening of brand-new documentary King Corn, about two twenty-somethings from Boston who road trip to Iowa to grown 1 acre of corn for 1 year. The film’s blend of comedy and catharsis is entertaining and informative. It will be traveling to colleges and with your help, potentially PBS and small theaters around the country- check out King Corn and purchase the film or organize a screening in your city. As folks in the audience suggested last night, King Corn may be the spark to galvanize the social movement to change our industrialized food system and promote food sovereignty.

Seder con Salsa

(cross-posted on the Jew and the Carrot)

This evening, as my roommates and I were finishing up an exhausting round of stripping the dirt and chametz from our kitchen, I found it unfortunate that I had to throw several jars of salsa and tupperware of chiles down the garbage disposal. I wondered if the disposal could handle this amount of “hotness,” as an American garbage disposal would presumably not be accustomed to such intensity. Probably spurred on by the choice of packaged foods available and promoted by the local supermarket’s “Passover Aisle,” American Ashkenazi Jews traditionally retreat into the deepest recesses of Jewish culinary tradition; to me, it seems completely unnecessary to eat cold fish jelly or kishke for 8 days straight.

One of my best Passover experiences ever was completely opposite of this and possibly my most profound. I was studying abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico in spring of 2004 and Pesach fell during the week my peers and I were “studying” on the Oaxaca coast (for real– we toured an eco-cosmetics factory and several other program-related excursions), on a beach called Zipolite. Given the fact that rural Oaxaca does not have any Jewish population, as someone who traditionally observes Kasher L’Pesach strictly, I didn’t know how I would survive on my own, so had a package sent to me in advance by my family containing all hechshered non-perishable items such as the ever-delectable canned boiled potatoes. Somehow, my program of15 college students from around the country had 6 Jews that semester, so we had spent a couple weeks planning a Seder held on the beach for all of the students, our teachers and van drivers who traveled with us around Southern Mexico. We had to improvise on the Seder Plate items– replacing the traditional maror with chiles, the parsley with nopal (cactus), the charoset with guacamole, the roasted egg with a round fruit (kiwi or maracuya perhaps?) , the shankbone with a can of Manischewitz beets I had with me; the ultimate substitution was tortillas for matza for those of us who were not actually keeping the holiday strictly (everyone except me). Since we were aseder-2.JPG bunch of idealists studying social movements and NGOs, we used sections of the Love & Justice in Times of War Haggadah, created by Micah Bazant and Dara Silverman and tried to translate most of it into Spanish for our drivers and one of our teachers.

Unfortunately, that attempt was a failure and they were so bored that they headed back to their rooms to sleep after our Seder’s highlight: dunking in the Pacific to re-enact the crossing of the Red Sea. My colleagues from that semester often refer to the Seder in vivid detail despite the volume of wine that we imbibed. I have to say that it was one of the proudest and scariest moments of my life- amazed at the incredible relevance retelling of the escape from slavery in Mitzrayim had for our studies of the Zapatistas and other indigenous movements, unsure of how my traditions would be perceived by my peers and my Mexican hosts.

Although the seder was definitely the highlight of Pesach that year, the entire week spent on the beach subsisting off of matza, avocados, coconut milk (drunk from a straw stuck in the coconut) and odd cold canned items from my survival package, was probably the closest I’ll ever come to understanding both the freedom from bondage [stress] and the hardships simultaneously experienced by the Israelites on their journey from Egypt.

I was in an utterly different world from my New York childhood, and while I loved it, the combination of fear and exhilaration I tasted still seems like such a visceral reminder of the themes of the Exodus story. While Chagim celebrated in comfort, creating family memories are certainly wonderful, I wish everyone the opportunity to celebrate human freedom and the blooming of the natural world in a unique, experiential way; it is humbling, awe-inspiring, challenging and fun. To another Seder con Salsa!

The Revolution Will Not be Televised, But it Will Present at a Conference

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a new book by Sandor Ellix Katz, who I will hopefully hear speak at The Food Project's 2007 Urban Agriculture conference: Farming the City:
Changing the Way We Think about Food, Hunger and Health, in a couple weeks.

That is one of three conferences I plan to attend in April. On the preceding day, April 13th, the Radcliffe Institute is hosting a conference on Food and Gender with an AMAZING speakers' line-up, including my former professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg, economist Amartya Sen and activist Vandana Shiva. I am super-psyched for this one.

10 days later, I'll be flying out to Traverse City, MI to attend the Kellogg Foundation's 2007 Food and Society conference as part of the Food Project's BLAST Youth Initiative- also very excited, despite the many days of class I'll be missing.

I feel like this recent burst of energy and publicity around the food system is part of a revolution, but I also have to admit that going to conferences where talking heads, no matter how radical their talk is, sit around in climate-controlled rooms with catered lunches, is not what strikes me as a revolution. Of course, I am currently in academia, but one would think that in such a practical discipline as food policy there would be a little less banter and a little more action. Well, I hope to blog through the conferences and let you know what progress is being made. One sign of hope is that one of the keynote speakers at the Food & Society meeting will be the head of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, who were the major force behind the "Boycott the Bell" campaign- they pick the tomatoes that go into most Taco Bell and Pizza Hut products.

For now I leave you with the ever-relevant lyrics to "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" by Gil-Scott Heron, on which the title of the book is based:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

create your own visited states map. I've actually added 4 key states since in the past 2 years North Carolina on Spring Break 2005, California in March 2006, and Louisiana and Georgia this past December/January.

Free Tax Software

It's spring break, so that means, in addition to trying to get some work done, I'm doing things like playing around on slickdealz.net, where I found this free tax software from H&R Block, and watching House Oversight and Gov't Reform Committee Hearings on Political Interference in Climate Change Research. There are some crazy people on C-SPAN...

BOJAC

BOJAC: The Best of Jewish A Cappella has been released...and we're not on it! boo!

big surprise there...

biking

i really want to get a bike-- I haven't biked much ever and certainly not at all in years, but the distance to school is onl 3.5 miles and I think I could handle it if I worked up to it and worked on safety. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any bike storage in my building....but i really would love to get a bike. looking at craigslist, broadway bike school, my bike and bikes not bombs. any suggestions?

Workers approve a new Stop & Shop contract - Boston.com

the Stop and Shop UFCW workers approved a new contract. It's a good thing we didn't choose their campaign for the labor seder. Although we could still highlight their recent victory...

my recent post, Raise Your Voice for Darfur (part II),cross-posted on Jewschool, was picked up by USA Today's "Blog talk: other voices from the Web" site! but has not yielded many comments. i think it was rather boring and unprovocative. not sure why USA Today would like that.

Raise your Voice Against Darfur (Part II)

In the past few weeks, I heard words and music and saw visual footage from several wonderful folks promoting action on the genocide in Darfur, both sponsored by different segments of the Boston Jewish community. The first was a benefit for AJWS at the Kavod House, advertised in the first "Raise your Voice Against Darfur" post on jewschool ,where the wonderfully talented and inspiring Minna Bromberg sang a collection of her own works and mostly Pete Seeger- folk songs. The concert also included teaching about our responsibility to act on Darfur from Rabbi Or Rose of Hebrew College, and a brief column about supporting targeted divestment from Sudan by Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes.

Then, a week ago Tuesday, Tufts Hillel sponsored a dinner with and lecture by Nicholas Kristof, who has been a lone passionate voice in the public sphere on Darfur.

Although I was at the May 2006 DC rally and have remained [very] marginally informed on the issue, these two events marked a more specific mental engagement with the issue on my part. Nick Kristof presented footage of some individuals he had met in recent trips to Darfur and neighboring Chad, which, coupled with his commentary about their situations, seemed difficult for the audience to take. My initial reaction to the lecture, was that it was overall pretty good but not stunning. Kristof alluded to the regret we would feel, as Americans, in the future, if we looked back and saw that we had done nothing. In the same vein, he seemed to list future reflection as a primary reason for which we should act and encourage action by others on Darfur. To me, this was initially pat at best, and disconcerting at worst-- I couldn't imagine that this was his primary reason for continuing to visit and write about Darfur, in a way to which nobody else has come close.

I remembered some things he had said at the dinner, when he was asked how he has the courage to return to such dangerous situations knowing he has a family and a life back home. He didn't really have an answer except to cite the bravery of the people in Darfur and the fact that they are always in much more danger than he, who goes in for brief visits and can always leave.

While I came away from both events with a sense of sadness that we are doing so little, that so few people care, and that I have expressed such minimal interest in the issue in the past, I didn't necessarily come away with specific plans for action, beyond suggestions Kristof had given, to continue the phone calls to legislators and awareness promotion that has been characteristic of the campaign to this point. This doesn't strike me as entirely enough of a solution for a public campaign, given the lack of government action on the issue.

But I must consider the level of bravery exhibited daily, weekly and monthly by Kristof, and by Awatif Ahmed Isshag, a 24 year old woman in Darfur, the subject of this amazing LATimes story, who has been tacking a monthly "newspaper" to a local tree for 10 years, reporting about the mundane events and atrocities in her community. I cannot imagine the courage and bravery it would take to do what Ms. Isshag does and her continued passion for journalism and hope for her future.

So since, I don't have the time to commit to a full knowledge and analysis of the situation, given other time commitments, I shoud stop sitting around and criticizing what I perceive as a lack of strategy and nuance on the part of Kristof and others, and be brave enough to fit one small action into each week so that maybe, Awatif Ahmed Isshag, and peers like her, will be able to live out her dream of completing a Masters in Economics at the University of Khartoum and leading a development company.

(cross-posted on Jewschool)

Regulating out Butter & the Secret Jewish Coke Stash

this is the problem with government regulation:

"This artificial trans fat is the kind that New York City health officials decided to ban from restaurants, citing health studies that show that even a couple of grams of it a day can significantly increase the chance of a heart attack. Whether natural trans fats have the same health effect is still being explored by scientists, and some researchers believe the natural ones may actually be beneficial.

But to the Food and Drug Administration, which is in charge of most packaged food labeling, there is no difference between the trans fat that occurs in cows and other ruminant animals and the kind that is artificially created and favored in large-scale food manufacturing."

It perverts science and creates irrelevant law while missing half the problem.

The article in today's NYTimes talks about why some bakers are being forced to switch from butter to processed fats in order to avoid the small amounts of natural trans-fat it contains. This totally proves Michael Pollan's "nutritionism sucks" argument.

It's also reminiscent of some of the seemingly bizarre and arcane aspects of Halachah, Jewish law, especially involving Kashrut. We have some written or oral code, whether it is the Torah, Talmud or Federal Register, and since someone once wrote it, even if some detail now (or even at the time as is the case with the FDA rule) makes no scientific or common sense, based on the spirit of the law, the status quo is to follow it to the letter, sometimes even erring on the side of stressing those details over others that are actually useful.

Of course with Pesach coming up, I'm thinking of the restrictions on kitniyot, which have all sorts of serious impacts on the way people who don't eat meat observe the holiday. I would say spending 8 days worrying about finding protein sources pretty much zaps most of the brainpower that could be spent on, you know, thinking about what it was like to be a slave in Egypt and how we can work towards liberation in our own lives and world. Some might argue that that's the point, but that doesn't seem to be the intention, correct me if I'm wrong.

In other Pesach-related minutiae of food ingredients, I found this thorough blog post about why non-Jews should be excited Passover is coming up. At least if they are looking for soda without corn syrup and don't feel like heading down to Mexico. I had a similar epiphany myself recently, while learning about the make-up and uses of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in a nutrition class. Suddenly the annoying task of looking for Ou-P soda each spring became somewhat ironic, when I realized that there might be a whole segment of the population unaware of this secret source of sugar-sweetened Coke that they could have access to, if only they lived in an area of high-density Jews and happened to know about the intricacies of Jewish dietary tradition for Passover. I doubt it actually affects that many people, but it brings up so many interesting questions about production--

How much non-HFCS soda is produced for the Kasher L'pesach crowd?
Is it actually profitable to Coca-Cola/PepsiCo/Cadbury Schweppes/etc. to do so?
Why do they do it?
Do they need separate production facilities?
Would other consumer segments be interested in purchasing a similar product for [clearly] different reasons?

cross-posted on the Jew and the Carrot

traveling the internet

Bill Bowles is traveling the world, and the internet. After receiving an email from a mutual friend about Bill's impending adventures around the world, I checked out his site, and found a very cute intro video using the NYC Subway system as a visual (and auditory) metaphor for his planned travels of the internet, or rather, his world travels which will be posted daily on the internet. Bill sails this week for London aboard a freighter.

Inspiration

It's amazing how much sun and warmth affect my ability to be inspired and interested in the outside. Or to see the glass as half full, how much the cold and winter make me dwell on my own problems and necessities. In the past 72 hours of temperatures above 40 F, I have cooked my 2nd pot of lentils ever, gone to the gym twice, and started most of my homework for next week. Oddly enough the latter two are the astounding feats to anyone who knows me. Hopetfully this kick will continue.

Other moments of inspiration include when I pass by Ben Shahn's work quoting Maimonides (pictured at left) each time I walk to the Tufts Hirsch Health Sciences Library.

And finally, I have sung Psalm 118 Verse 22:
אֶבֶן, מָאֲסוּ הַבּוֹנִים-- הָיְתָה, לְראשׁ פִּנָּה , a thousand times during Hallel but somehow never knew that it was the meaning behind the Bob Marley lyric, literally translated "The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief corner-stone." Special Blog Points to the first person who can name the Bob Marley song. cuz, you know, so many people read this blog.

Gastronomic Gatherings

Several food-related items I intended to post in the past few months:

• A 12.27.06 NY Times article, You Are What You Eat: 2006 and the Politics of Food - New York Times, capitalized on the meeting of the minds: Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser spoke in various forms around the NY metropolitan area last fall. The article catalogued some of the ways that food policy became mainstream news, including the e. coli outbreak, talk about obesity, Omnivore's Dilemma, The Nation food issue, Wal-Mart going organic and the trans-fat ban, that made 2006 as "the year everyone discovered that food is about politics and people can do something about it,” according to Nestle.

If there was a need for validation of career choice, I think it arrived.

Also, a shameless plug on the theme of 2006 food news: I don't think I ever mentioned my piece on the e. coli epidemic in Balance, the Tufts Daily's Nutrition and Health Supplement.

• Another 2006 morsel: Interview of Eric Schlosser in the Guardian. I still haven't seen Fast Food Nation, but also haven't met anyone who has.
  

shooting on st marks

So about an hour after my post yesterday, nicole informed me that there was a shooting of a cop (by another cop's husband) on our corner in Brooklyn.

This Daily News report of the shooting is particularly ironic because one of the reporter is Veronika Belenkaya, who wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun with me, and was the reporter who did the inside investigation of the bouncer at that club in the E. Village where the college student was killed last year.

p.s. this blog needs a f---ing facelift. specifically the sidebar on the right. oh well, one of these years...

I miss New York.

It comes in waves, but when I'm in the middle of a wave, I miss it a lot. I don't know if it's the actual city of New York that I miss [and the city thus includes the sprawl around it, including Long Island, but as such: sprawl, and not for its own sake, in and of itself], or just the fact that that's the metropolitan area I'm familiar with. That is to say, [that's my new favorite turn of phrase, which I don't use nearly enough] if I was from some other city but had spent some time in New York, would I sill miss New York or would I miss the other city. Clearly impossible to tease those out.

My neighborhood in Cambridge is not entirely quiet, and the quiet/semi-quaintness of it is somethign I very much enjoy, but at times a wave will wash over me and I'll have a visceral image of some random smog and traffic-choke street in an outer borough, with non-english music blasting from a silver minivan, and I feel pangs of loneliness. I definitely more and more think about living in Northern California (maybe Marin county if I can afford it. or Oakland) or western Massachusetts, or maybe even somewhere more adventurous, but it seems like I may end up back in New York just out of sheer practicality.

Things that I take for granted, like the fact that I'm able to switch from my normal speech/dialect in the context of stories or quotations to a New York accent- this amuses people from other parts of the country to no end, and I don't quite understand why. Isn't it just like a bilingual non-accented English speaker being able to insert accented words from the other language into non-accented English speech patterns?

--Speaking of which-- I've received numerous comments of late, upon meeting new folks, about how I don't "sound" like I'm from Long Island. Life goal number 1: Check! --

But yeah, the way I explained it to someone recently, is that, you can easily find lots of diversity--cultural, economic, gastronomic, etc.--here, but you have to seek it out a bit harder than you would in New York, (at least the parts of New York, I'd be able to afford and want to live in) where it's just in your face, all the time. Which can get overwhelming, especially when combined with all of the development, gentrification and clear efforts ot marginalize that diversity and push it farther away from the "civilized" parts of New York that attracts the
throngs of tourists.

But any other place seems like sort of a joke, in comparison.At least any place that claims to be diverse and doesn't immerse you wholeheartedly in one particular culture, which as a different option would be fine, but this half-way, half-assed situation is just always a little depressing when you know what it's like to go all the way.