A workmate told me yesterday that, at some point, she will end up living where her sister and brother do. Right now, that’s Austin, Texas. But, it could be anywhere.
Really? I asked. Like, you’d move anywhere to be near them, even it was a place you despised?
Yeah, it’s just the way it has to be; it’s the way I want it to be, she responded nonchalantly. Plus, place is place, to her. Any place is fine.
For me, that way of thinking is downright revolutionary. Place is my thing. It’s what I think about first. Though, as I near 30 years old, could that be changing?
When my mother bustled around dealing with our tropical fevers in the Dominican Republic and how to get clean water, her brothers were back in homeland Chicago living drama lives that she only learned about later. While my grandparents moved around the world, my father was in college, not really sure where his parents were, or when they’d be in touch. That said, my nuclear family is incredibly close. My brothers are like my limbs. One lives in LA; the other in Bali. I miss them, but I’m used to the idea of not always being with them, or not always being with my parents. Hence…. my obsession with the concept of family members in one location, one landscape, one place, where the young come back after they’ve wandered and the old grow to know the cracks in the sidewalk, the particular hue of a thunderstorm, the smell of the air. Where knowledge and love get passed back and forth in a place that seeps into your bones, no matter what kind of place it is, no matter your inclinations.
I’d like to think that I’d permanently move to the flat fields of Nebraska or the pollution bustle of Tokyo if my brothers were locked into life there, but I don’t know…
Does home = family? Or a broader community? Or a place that makes your whole being light up?
Last night, Fired Up opened in theaters across the country. By now you probably know the movie’s conceit—two high school football players decide to join their school’s cheerleading squad so that, rather than crushing skulls at football camp, they can spend their summer surrounded by hundreds of women in short, pleated skirts. Sure, it’s not going to win any Academy Awards. But I do have to give the movie props for inverting the most common stereotype of male cheerleaders out there—that they must be gay. 
Since when do birds need help to migrate? Turns out that humans are playing lead parent for some whooping cranes. Resurrected from near-extinction, these 5-foot tall birds were called “intolerant of civilization” (imagine!) by a 1946 NY Times article. Why? Because they need a square mile around each nest. A group called Operation Migration is trying to get the birds back to the east side of the continent. Volunteers dress up like a bird, fly an ultralight plane and lead the birds to Florida. With one trip under their belt, the birds then know their own way for next season. My favorite line in the article: “Already, it has come to this on planet Earth: men dressed like birds, teaching birds to fly.” The whole concept is debatable: one on hand, brilliant, on another, a horrific foreshadow transformers-style.
I was in a Shakespeare lecture class when word reached uptown that a plane hit the World Trade Center. Not knowing what this meant exactly, the professor, who would have made an excellent Woody Allen impersonator, made a joke about the Cadillac that looks like it crashed through the Hard Rock Cafe. Our next class with him was two days later, at which point he apologized for his poor taste in humor. He admitted that he had no grasp on the tragedy that had taken place. And he came to this lecture with a mission. We were reading Titus Andronicus, and he wanted us to come away from it, forgetting about iambic pentameter. If we were to learn anything, it was that vengeance is poison. 
Here’s a nifty little tool I’ve been trying out to improve my writing hours: 
A few weeks ago, I outed myself as being