This post by Rick got me thinking about some things that I've been thinking about. I used to be involved in a lot of activism, organizing, and radical-style community building and education. In fact, I almost dropped out of school because there were other projects that I spent more time on... anti-war organizing, medic organizing, Food Not Bombs, traveling to protests, organizing health trainings, this, that, and et cetera.

I burned out, a little bit. Then I graduated, took a job at a teensy tiny community-oriented non profit organization in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and sort of stepped back from a lot of organizing, and stepped back from my connection and involvement in a lot of projects that meant a lot to me, that I had put a lot of energy in to. To some extent, I felt that some of them had run their course. I stopped being vegan and started cooking really good meals with yogurt and cheese in them.

A year and a half after getting my diploma, I'm settling into a life that I might occupy for an indefinite time period. I'm feeling really settle-y. I might have this current job for several years, I want to pay off debts, save money, and importantly, I want to live somewhere where I don't have a move-out date in mind. Except for my eleven months in Bridgeport, I haven't lived somewhere uninterrupted for more than three or four months at a time since I was seventeen and moved out of my parents' house when I went to school.

And now as I'm getting kind of settled and Growing Up just a little bit, I'm wondering how I want to re-insert myself into movements for change; how I want to participate in valuable work and projects. Because, really, while it's nice to have a Real Job, it is *not* the thing in my life that I want to take the highest priority. Being employed is a priority. Job = Life is not an equation I'm interested. I want to be a part of a larger community and I want my participation to be defined by doing positive work.

And I am feeling that defining that participation in Change - standing for something larger than myself, as Rick phrased the question - is a long, long way away from how I defined it three or four years ago, when I was all to willing to scream things at the top of my lungs while cops were arresting me. It's a long way away from two or three years ago, when I was interested in teaching people how to be healthy and safe so that they can scream things at the top of their lungs while cops were arresting them.

There's so much room to build infrastructure to ensure that radical communities can support radical change-oriented projects. The question is, how? And, now that I'm in New York City, where do I start? That's something I'm working on.