hometown

I'm out here for a week, spending some quality time with family, old friends, real mountains, and a few million pine trees. My flight landed just before midnight; by twenty hours' time later I had ridden three metro buses and a ferry, consumed 3 astonishingly good espressos and one pink kashmiri chai, and also a Widmer Hefeweizen and a Pyramid Apricot Weizen, complained about the weather, had lunch on the Ave with two JSIS faculty and ran into a third in the bookstore a few minutes later, spent a combined 3 or so hours in University Bookstore, Magus Books, and Open Books, walked from the UW campus to Wallingford, seen both my sisters and my mother and the cat, eaten clam chowder, counted upwards of 50 Obama posters/buttons/bumper stickers, and picked California poppies from the sidewalk.

Today involved pho and cream puffs, more public transportation (with Blue Scholars on the headphones), more superlative coffee, this time in the company of one of my Turkish TAs whom I hadn't seen since Orhan Pamuk's reading at Elliot Bay Book Company way back before he got so famous, EBBCo. itself, a photographic hour in the Seattle Central Library, actual progress on some freelance editing work, a Lebanese movie, and the best Thai food I have had in six months.

I love New York tremendously and have no intention of leaving anytime soon, but it's nice to be reminded how sweet life is here, too.