i was bouncing in my seat all day at work yesterday. a big package had been shipped and i was to pick it up not far from my office after work. a big, exciting package. i tried to play games of patience but they weren't working - by 2 PM i was already ready to bolt, and i'm usually not so antsy so early! i finally left and walked to the pickup address and got a big box, bigger than i thought it would be. it was awkwardly large, difficult to carry; i took it to the subway and had to be very careful - with it hoisted on a shoulder i kept bumping the box against awnings, cielings, and just anything hanging.

games of patience... the metrocard machine wouldn't take my debit card after repeated swipes and i had no cash - what was i to do? finally, another machine accepted it. i got on a train. i got a seat and kept the box close by, with my hand on it, so that it wouldn't fall over. good - my shoulder and arms were tired from the walk to the train station.

my stop. another spell of wrestling with the box, which is like a sail in the wind, hoisted on my shoulder. down the stairs from the elevated train, across the street, and to my apartment.

i set it down on the floor of the living room and look at it for a second, trying real hard to resist the kid-at-christmas phenomenon. i put my keys down and take off my jacket, and i have to go to the bathroom. games of patience. then i take a knife and carefully cut off the tape. games of patience. it takes some wrangling to get the box apart, and when i do, it takes some further wrangling to take out this mass of bubblewrap and paperwrap. games of patience. slowly i unwrap what i can, using the knife where i need to. and then, there, in the middle of my living room, sits a Pogliaghi Italcorse from the early 1970s.

My future Sunday Rider.

aaaaaaahhhhhh.

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.