where I'm at

I am in Albany, NY. I just moved here last Sunday. I am going to be interning at the Albany Free School. I start training next week. The community here is real different than lawrence. There are lots of community organizations, but I haven't figured out quite how they all interact and are supported. I went to a space last night called the Federation of Ideas, which designs itself as a community center, much like Solidarity with free internet and a lending library. but it doesn't affiliate itself politically, cause it wants to keep itself accessible to the people in the neighborhood. Mostly they just practice mutual aid. One thing that was a good sign to me was that they had 3 youth at their general meeting (like between ages 10 and 15) They listened part of the time, talked part of the time, and one of them is planning a showing of the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe movie.

I was just comparing Albany and Lawrence based on Wikipedia stats. Albany occupies a space of 21.8 square miles and has a population of 95,658. Lawrence occupies a space of 28.7 square miles and has a population of 80,098 people (as of 2000 census mind you) 30.7% of Lawrence's population is between the ages 18-24. 19.3% of Albany's population is between the ages 18-24. There is a lot smaller population of people my age here than in Lawrence I think, or a lot of people might be my age but have families. I am excited to start going to the school and get to know more people. Also, the weird thing about albany that makes it seem large to me besides being north-eastern (large buildings, row houses, etc.) is that it is bordered by several other cities including Rennselaer, Troy, and Schenectady. I think Albany draws a lot of people from nearby towns for jobs because of the state capital here. There isn't one particular main drag like in Lawrence, instead there are several. The free school neighborhood that I live in is quaint, everyone knows everyone else, and there are usually sounds of children or people in their yards or in the streets. The neighborhood is gentrified in the fact that all the people that live on my block either work or have students at the freeschool (and have a majority of white inhabitants) compared to the other blocks around it having a majority of black residents. There are 63% of the population of Albany that are white and 28% black, compared to 83% white in Lawrence and 5% black. It definitely challenges my internalized prejudices about how to socialize, like the cultural differences and how that effects who I make friends with. I found out Albany is known as "Smallbany"