If you haven't heard from me for years or are just hearing from me now, I've missed you and I'm glad you're back. All my email files from the time my access was cut off have been destroyed by NYU, which means a lot of you were sending me mail that I'll never get to read now. I'm also only now beginning to salvage bits and pieces of my old email address book from NYU's current server. If I haven't contacted you yet, please write!
It's going to be an intense year for me, but also a reflective one. My amazing parents, who are in no financial position to be this generous, have invited me home to Queens for a year so I can take a break from teaching and finish my dissertation. I'm excited about my research topic and it looks like I'll finally have time to devote to it. And for the next several months, I'll be taking serious steps to learn what some of my personal issues are, and resolve the ones that have been keeping me from growing all the way up all these years.
But don't worry, I haven't gone completely serious and boring just yet. In a weird twist of fate, I've been invited to present my first academic conference paper at the Northeast Modern Language Association in Toronto this April - but it's not on my dissertation topic. It's on Final Fantasy! I also had an article posted online recently at myvideogames.com - check it out when you have time and tell me what you think. And although I've severely scaled back the time I spend on organizing for political change in this wasted world, what organizing I have seen and had the privilege to be a part of in this year has been consistently awe-inspiring.
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops and Chinese Staff and Workers Association are evolving in essential ways, and they're moving quickly and confidently to meet the new challenges facing our city and our world. Meanwhile, the new Lower Manhattan Residents Relief Coalition has become a significant emerging force for organizing the communities that still live and work at "ground zero" after 9/11. Much of this work was initiated by the people who worked on the campaign to elect Kwong Hui - a first-time candidate who became the Green Party's most successful runner by far in this year's New York City Council elections!
The new content, when it comes, might carry a slightly different timbre from what you're used to hearing on this site. Much of what I've seen in this time away from school, both in myself and in the "real world," turned out to be difficult for me to face. But it's also taught me that now, more than ever, the things which do not kill us only make us stronger. And you know something? I can't tell you how glad I was to find that out.