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There's something about Pittsburgh...

I’m back. It’s so pretty here. The trees are so fluffy.

Pittsburgh looks like the part of North Carolina where I spent a lot of my childhood, central to western. Rolling hills, big rivers, fluffy trees. It’s like being lost at home. The scenery is familiar but the roads are all different!

I felt so much relief when I got into the Lyft and we hit the road from the airport to my hotel. The driver immediately started to try to convince me to move here. Are they all paid by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Recruitment? Every single person tries to talk me into moving.

I would say that I don’t realize the toll urban poverty takes on me until I get out of it, but I do. It’s just sharper when I get out. Feeling safe is such a shock.

No one should have to live in the conditions that people in poor neighborhoods live in. Who created this? No one wants to live in a dump, yet people throw trash on the ground faster than I can pick it up. No one wants to be homeless or strung out on the streets, yet so many are. Does the guy screaming at the corner store, literally screaming, really want to be, or is he altered in some way that he is out of his mind? I’m guessing the later.

Everyone should have a chance to live in a clean, safe and quiet place.

The cost of living is very low here.

Yet I can’t imagine leaving the Philly area. It’s not so much that I have that many friends, though the few I have are precious to me. It’s that it’s been home for so long. Everything else seems foreign.

Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv, Conshohocken… I don’t know, but I gotta move.

My day job directly addresses one of the downstream effects of urban poverty, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do something about it. But it’s hard to concentrate when you’re always afraid.

It didn’t used to be this way. It used to be so nice, diverse, friendly. Now it seems to be nothing but crazy and violence.

I want to go to some kind of home… I just don’t know where home is anymore.

Even the parking garages seem beautiful.