So I don't think I have the balls to be a capitalist. I really don't. I've been scouting for this house for my parents, as explained earlier, as a retirement home, as a home for me as I pursue my career (current timeline is: '05: teaching purely; '06-'07: SAS certificate part-time while teaching; '08: teaching purely; '09: Assistant Principal and enrolled in CUNY's Urban Ed PhD program, through '12. At that point, I'd be 30, I'd have been in the system for 10 years (teaching 6, admining 4), and I would be ready at last to be a principal. Which already makes me too middle-class in my thinking.)

But, no, more to the point, I don't have the balls to be a capitalist--not only have all the listings that looked OK already fallen under contract, but the two "bargains" are all out in the black part of Astoria. Yes, there are black people in Astoria, and this is soemthing I've only discovered now after two years--I mean, I knew about Ravenswood, but there's also Astoria Houses. The point is, leftist though I am, and teaching at a school surrounded by projects on basically all sides, it doesn't quite show when I show up in the projects--I look like pretty much the same racist as my today-returned landlord, who, while enlisting me in her home-improvement projects (which I would love to learn about given my future stewardship duties), was very careful to ask about whether or not my new putative roommates were black or not. Of course, she hadn't asked this before, and I had already internalized this racism in my screening of roommates. So what does that make me? At what point does complicitness become collaboration outright?