So, I am back in the USA.

While I was traveling through Europe with my family (in a mini-van, a very American vacation), I received an email from a dear friend that he was getting married in two weeks in NY. Could I make it?

No, of course not, I wrote back. I am in Spain, and on my way to France. My ticket back to Bangkok is already purchased, and then I have a week there to tie up loose ends and say goodbye before making my way slowly back to SF and ... who knows?

But, after I said goodbye to my family at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and then took the RER back into Paris by myself, and spent a few hours wandering the streets, window shopping (in French the expression is "licking the windows") and making my semi-annual pilgrimage to the Picasso Museum, I was flooded with the tediousness of being utterly on my own, and filled with regret about all the weddings I had missed. I went back to the airport and climbed on the plane to Bangkok. And when I got off, I logged on to the Internet, checked the direct flights to New York, and booked a ticket. In less than 24 hours I'd packed what was left in my apartment, handed off my student to a new teacher, texted my entire phone book and told everyone to meet me at the bar for a goodbye drink, and was on a 17 hour flight to JFK. Goodbye Thailand. Goodbye my peaceful, cloistered life.

Interestingly, I can't get anyone to tell me this was a bad idea. You can spend 6 months saying goodbye or you can spend 6 hours, but it all amounts to the same.

I will add that it's also not for lack of affection that makes it possible to go so abruptly. If anything, it's a surfeit of affection; if I'd allowed myself to think about all the people I cared about in Thailand, and the pleasures of my life there and all the happy memories, I may not have had the strength to leave. But, spurred by the momentum of all the traveling I'd already been doing (did I mention the mini-van?), and the adreneline of an imminent departure deadline, I jerked up those roots as if they'd been in wet soil.

The downside, of course, is that it's utterly shocking to find myself back in NYC, seemingly (and literally) plunked from the sky. The weather is beautiful. It's spring, and the parks are all bright yellow green, women are in skirts and men in short sleeves, the East River road lousy with joggers. Lynn Marie's neighborhood is not much changed: same church next door, same German beer garden on the corner, same sqare-faced dogs nosing around the lamp posts and fire hydrants. What's different is more money. A new apartment building has gone up, with beautiful, thick-glass windows. Every other block there is a swanky cafe -- here, in the neighborhood two blocks beyond the avenue I absolutely would not cross when I first moved to Manhattan in 1998. The faces on the jogging path are mostly white, and a pretty young woman I encountered on the footbridge was wearing a t-shirt that said Choate. Just over her shoulder, I could see the projects.

Manhattan increasingly belongs to the trust fund babies, said an acquaintance of mine over coffee. She has been living in Stuyvesant Town, a sprawling residential development on what used to be outskirts of the urban center, the closest Manhattan has to a suburb, for twenty years. Last year Stuyvesant Town was bought by developers for some-odd billions of dollars. The new owners have hired private detectives to trail people who have rent-controled apartments, trying to catch them in some violation of their lease so the owners can boot them out and rent the unit at five times (or more) the current rate. Most people who live in NYC are not poor; they are just average, but there is no place for them. I am reminded of a line in a friend's poem, describing how lightening scoops a hole in a tree, like a butcher ripping the heart from a sheep. That seems to me what is happening to the middle class in New York.

So, I will stay here a few more days, seeing as many friends as I can (one from Bangkok and I are having dinner tonight at a Thai restaurant on 58th and 9th; I've only been in town for 72 hours and I am already nostalgic for Asia) and attending a conference on politics and the Internet on Friday. The definite upside of NYC is that it is jam-packed with smart, ambitious, agitating individuals, and I am lucky to know some of them. If I haven't been able to sleep the last few days, it's probably only partially due to jet leg (my poor body doesn't know what clock it's on) and mostly due to stimulating conversation. If truth be told, it's this energy and sense of being plugged in that I came back for. In Europe, I remembered how nice it was to argue politics, to be among beautiful buildings (Bangkok is a lot of things, but pretty is not one of them), to exchange wry remarks with shopowners and fellow commuters. (This last one is surely my fault for not learning Thai; they are witty there, too, I just don't know it.) My boat was beginning to drift in Bangkok, and I needed a quick trip to shore to remember what solid ground felt like, if only so I could push off from it again later.

Tomorrow Boston. Sunday San Francisco, in two weeks DC, then New Haven, then Idaho to see my family, then Kentucky for another wedding (the first one was beautiful, I have no regrets and am grateful I was able to be there), then we will see how things look. It is all a bit crazy, but it is a life.