I live in Sunset Park.  I buy my weekly produce, tofu, and eggs on 8^th Avenue; indulge once in a while on the best hot dog scallion bun you will ever have at Doe Bakery on 4^th Ave near the 59^th St. train station.  When the health nut inside surfaces, I jog to the park to look at the New York City skyline on clear days, and on sultry days, watch families sprawl out on the lawns, fanning themselves while drinking cooled Jarritos or jugs of water.  I make sure to kick or hand back any wayward balls from sporting games played by the young and old.  I like seeing the same group of boys skateboarding and pulling tricks near the playground.  I’m convinced there’s a lot of knowledge in those wheels.  On the street, I’m always surprised to see a white face among the yellow and brown ones.  They seem to materialize around the lonely looking Polish market situated in a basement that is close by, and the famed tragic, dive-bar called Irish Haven where The Departed starring Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed.  The first time my Indian roommate and I went in to have a beer, an old white man who did several tours through Asia accosted us with stories of Thai prostitutes and other “Oriental beauties.”  The last time I went there, the bartender was studying hard for her naturalization test, every once in a while repeating president names out loud, sounding bulky with her Irish accent.

My knowledge of this place is daily and intimate.  I moved here in the summer of 2009 from Oakland, California in order to temporarily try on the heavily caffeinated or heavily drunk, nose-in-book graduate student costume.  But unlike Halloween, I found this wasn’t as fun, at all.  When I first came to Sunset Park, Brooklyn to see my future home, I was infatuated with the trees, the proximity to decent Mexican food, a Chinatown; actually, I lie, Brooklyn had me at her bridge.  While crossing the Manhattan Bridge on the N for the first time, I felt my shoulders relax, as if she came up behind me and kissed me on my neck.

I live on the first level of an apartment that was originally a two story home with basement.  Tony the landlord, a cute, demure bespectacled Chinese man in his 50’s, noted he only wanted students living in his apartment.  I was suspicious at this request, but was enticed by the affordable rent.  I politely inquired about the number of rental units he had in the area.  He replied, just one, this one.  Contained, I thought.

The g-word.  Often, it’s brought up as an apocalyptic force, something that is inevitable, bound to happen when the mobile artistic class shows up with their education and weird ideas, which can turn into poisonous yuppy-fication.  You know, the Starbucks kind of neighborhood, where interactions among people are tightly scripted/colored, and the environment is too sterilized for the kinds of daily intimacies I shared with you.  And like many people who say yuppy, hipster, and Starbucks in the same breath when commenting on gentrification, this line of thought usually goes nowhere except maybe a really satisfying angry dance in your head.  So, where to?

I want to go home.  At the end of the day, that’s all you and I can really do, whether home is in Park Slope or Flushing.  And this isn’t the “I give up,” or “I’m tired, I want to go home;” but, it’s an interrogation of home: Is my sense of home defined by four walls and a ceiling?  Where am I coming from?  How do I come home?  Who am I with?  How well do I know my home?  What am I doing for home?  What is my history with “home?”

So, where to?