whew! Leaving tonight for London. To visit schools. too frazzled to plan. pms-ing too, I think. The WORLD pissed me off yesterday. It seemed like nobody was really listening to what I was saying. I hate that feeling.
Last weekend I stayed up all night for the first time in a while. Me and some folks I know who are toneburst or toneburst-affiliated, had been invited up to Portland Maine to spin/play beat music. the event was held in an ex-porn movie theater. The seats were mostly still in the rooms (what's soaked into that fabric...eugh). It all just confirmed my feeling that Portland is a sketchy town. Except for Shalimar of India, which cooked us some fabulous food. But at the show, it was such a sketchy vibe. Unsafe feeling. A young crowd, seriously pursuing various substances, seemingly hell-bent on getting bent. Many young whiteboys gratuitously shirtless with bad 'tribal' tattoos, exuding belligerence. I enjoyed the music my friends and other guest artists played, but the atmosphere was pretty weak. However the ride home at 6:30 a.m. was damn amusing. Some of those guys are the funniest people to be deliriously tired with. And I have never before felt my whole self reborn at the mere smell of coffee.

1/15I will never again complain about my boring life. My ex-notex is now ex. again. And no new reasons for it. I feel like we are refining out the exact issue that we cannot seem to meet on, the fact that we relax in different ways. Is that really all it is?

1/14 Of course, as soon I start saying how uneventful my life is... we're getting evicted. Not immediately, but our whole household has to be out by May. this really sucks. We don't have a lease, but I was just talking with my housemates about asking for one. I wanted to sign a three-year lease and sublet for the time that I'd be away at school. Did I mention how much I've loved living in my house? There are 5 of us, in the right-hand half of a three-story house next to a basketball court. Around the corner, literally three houses away (or across my backyard), is the apartment building where, on one side, one of my best friends and three other friends live, and on the other side, where my ex-notex lives. My other closest friend lives four blocks away. I am seven blocks from a part of town that has the resteraunt/club that hosts most of my favorite bands, a slew of Indian Restaurants, an ethopian restaurant, a good cheap chinese restaurant, an art-supply store, a food co-op, a couple nice cafes. dammit, I love my neighborhood. It is also one of the few really integrated areas in Boston. (Although that's changing.) But it's really important to me to live somewhere where i can see all different types of folk walking around. Can I afford it? Rent around here is going thu the roof. Our landlord is remodeling the place so he can double the rent. howl! Goodbye life of the past 3 years. this really sucks.

1/13 I don't seem to have much to say these days. All day I sit in an office with a nice big window, and no living thing comes by. I get about 5 phone calls. you may be thinking that's not sucha big deal, but since most of what I am supposed to do is coordinate the actions of students and teachers and make sure the paper is flowing when and where it should.. and NO Profs and NO students are on campus for the month of january... well it's a little quiet. I get kinda lethargic. I was actually missing cafe work, or working in an art supply store, just because then fun people came in all the time. Any people came in all the time. As I ponder my single-ness (romantically speaking) of the past seven months before ex became kinda not-ex (again).. I think part if it may be related to the fact that I am the only staffperson in a small office at the end of a long hallway on the fourth floor of a brick building built on landfill at the END OF A FUCKING PENINSULA. ya think?

1/8 I read this article in last week's Manchester Guardian weekly review about the Latin Kings and Queens in the Bronx. Really interesting stuff, and also a better-written article than what you'd find in most newspapers. Not too sentimental, and very informative, and not too, well, offensive. I had heard rumors about this new movement in the Puerto Rican gang scene from a couple friends, but this was the first full explication. Apparently, the Latin Kings and Queens are mobilizing themselves as a force for positive social change. This includes dealing with machismo and homophobia within their scene, as well as dealing with education, self-sufficiency, self-determination, history of the colonization and exploitation of latinos and chicanos, Puerto Rican history etc. It's pretty amazing to read it, and it's clear that they're inspired by stories of the Panthers and the Young Lords from the 1970s. For a good breakdown of some of the black, brown, and yellow power movements of the 1970s, you could actually check out a back issue of Giant Robot, I have it at home, it's got Jenny Shimizu on the cover (a great mag of what seems like roughly pan-asian-american culture, including nearly every intersection of asian/pacific americans with pop culture i.e. djs, musicians, artists, graffiti writers, other writers, models, actresses -abroad and in the U.S.)\- go read it!). Anyway the article ended of a kind of chilling note, if you know anything about the history of those movements. It has Hector Torres (I think that was his name) talking about how some older folks who were in the Young Lords and the Black Panthers said to him "you guys are doing a lot of the stuff we were doing 20 years ago." And all I could think of was let us not forget what happened to those movements. Shot by the police, firebombed in philly, homes raided and necks broken. The "Drug War." What happens to people when they start talking about social justice, especially economic justice? Well, what happened to Martin Luther King when he started talking about a march against poverty? what happened to Malcolm X when he started talking about how poor whites and poor black and brown and yellow people oughta get together, how people should think about class? What happened to BOTH Kennedys (although they were awful about Cuba) when they started talking about economic justice?