By way of introduction

Greetings! Welcome to my new blog, a thing people definitely create in 2021. I've recently been inspired to try to write more, so thank you for reading. I will go ahead and guess that anyone reading this knows me fairly well, but I'd like to introduce myself anyway because that's what people did when they started blogs in 2004. 

My name is Jim Dunne. I am a Boston ex-pat who has been living in Syracuse since September 2014. Syracuse is a lovely place that sometimes makes it hard to love. I love the neighborhoods, parks, the distinct seasons, the food and beverage scene, and walking around. I am frustrated by local leadership that seems intent that people will only come to live here because it's where their job is, rather than emphasizing and nurturing our many advantages as a region to make it an area where people want to live. I am (or at least I try to be) an advocate for voting rights, democracy and representation, transportation justice, workers' rights, and our wonderful and unfairly maligned public schools. 

In my personal life, I am the lucky husband of a wonderful, supportive, and extraordinarily patient wife, and the father to three amazing kids. I like baseball, Pearl Jam, and beer. This blog will be mostly focused on local advocacy and interest. There is a very good chance I will give this up in a week, but humor me for now, huh?

I chose the name Connecting Syracuse because I have found that, for a region that sells itself as a place where you can get anywhere in 15 minutes, the city and region are often frustratingly disconnected. Disconnected politically, disconnected economically, disconnected in terms of representation, disconnected in how easily and quickly you can get from one place to another without access to a car. It's also an attempt to better connect myself to the place. Though I've lived here a number of years, I still often feel like an outsider, and the provinciality of the local political institutions are a constant source of frustration to me. So I decided to write about it.