Saturday, January 3, 2004, 1:30am

It is now January 2nd. My return flight to California is scheduled to leave on January 17th. I am very scared about returning to Berkeley, but I am just as scared about staying here. I need to be spending all of my time here activly preparing to return to Berkeley. I decided a few days ago that I needed to keep a log of the work I am doing and the things I am studying, to help maintain my focus and to give people a vauge general idea about where I am putting my energy these days. In all likelyhood, I will probably extend my plane ticket and stay in Boston for an extra month. I can see no strategic reason why I should return to Berkeley so soon, especially since I am homeless there and it is the middle of rain season. But the only way I can justify changing my return date to myself is by keeping a log of how I am spending my time when I am here. I am so fearful about my future. Keeping this log will help me make sense of my tangled life, and help me deal with my fears. So...here's what I've been up to in the last few days:

On New Years Eve this year the subways in Boston were free between 8:30pm and 2:30 am, presumably in an effort to keep drunk drivers off the road. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to try to organize a massive last subway car party, similar to the one we had for my friend Oren's birthday last year. I called Oren up to propose the idea. I wanted to go party hopping from place to place, and have a last subway car party each step of the way, and pick up new people as we went. I knew that it would only require a gentle push to get it started, and then it would quickly become mayhem. But Oren wasn't interested in trying. I considered just riding up and down the red line by myself with my accordian and getting off at random stops, but I was in a really bad mood, and I didn't want to play music by myself.

And so I ended up staying in on New Years Eve, being too panic stricken about the state of my life and the state of the world to be in any mood for a party. I spent the night watching the South Park marathon on Comedy Central and eating junk food and moping around the house. At around 1:00 in the morning, I finally got fed up with how pathetic I was acting. I decided that the first step to changing my mood was to eat some real food. So I spent half an hour frantically cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen until it was a functional cooking space. Then I asked my sister to come downstairs and give me a cooking lesson. She taught me how to make Thai stir fry, with green curry and coconut milk and Tempe. As I reorganized the kitchen, I imagined in the back of my head that I was preparing it to be a Food Not Bombs cookhouse for my neighborhood. When the stir fry was done, I found out that I had added way too much curry and the food was too spicy to eat, so I put it away in the refrigerator and decided to try fixing it tommorow.

On January 1st, I spent the morning cleaning and reorganizing the computer room while listening to Democracy Now. As I organized the room, I imagined in the back of my head that it could become a public internet lab and 'I.M.C media production center. for my neighborhood. I thought about all of the dysfunctional computer labs in the East Bay that I want to fix up when I go back to California. I need to spend my time in Milton getting refamiliarized with network maintanance so that I can help organize an anarchist tech support network when I go back to California. Once the computer room was in working order, I began working on my sister's webpage. I built a basic template using PHP and Macromedia Flash, and scanned in some of her artwork. At night I salvaged my Thai food experiment by reheating it and mixing it with another can of coconut milk and a bunch of chopped up carrots and sweet potatoes. It was the yummiest thing I've ever cooked for myself. I'm starting to slowly overcome my fear of cooking.

When I was surfing the web I checked out Mike Gregor's web site for the first time, and got the idea for an "Ask Doctor Mike" column for the Food Not Bombs web newspaper I am trying to organize, where people could email him with questions about vegan nutrition or cooking tips.

Today, I began work on my own webpage, using the template that I created for my sister yesterday as a starting point. It is gruelling work. The first steps seem to be the hardest. This web page will be clumsy and awkward at first, but over time it will improve. I just need to stop doubting myself and I need to overcome my fear of being judged.

I spent alot of time today thinking about the Sunday Bread And Jams meal in Porter Square. Technically, Food Not Bombs no longer has any official role in the meal, ever since Eric was pressured to step down as meal coordinator. It is impossible to understand the history of Boston Food Not Bombs without examining the history of Bread and Jams. In going through a box of papers I had rescued from the FNB house in Brighton last spring, I found some old Bread And Jams flyers, including the original flyer for the Sunday Meal. Interestingly, I also found a detailed twenty page organizational assessment of Bread And Jams, done by a management consulting service in August of 1995. Presumably, the report was written by outside consultants who were contracted by the organization to do a formal study of the organization, and make reccomendations for how to improve it. I plan on typing up the chapter which analyzes the Tuesday night Bread And Jams meetings, because it reminded me so much of the Wednesday meetings that East Bay FNB holds every week at the Long Haul. I wonder how Bread And Jams responded to the findings of this study. I wonder what would happen if a similar study was done on East Bay Food Not Bombs. I wonder what kind of expertise I would need to develop in order to conduct such a study myself.