Crayons to Chaos: rolling queasily into week two

Ways NOT to get to adore Queens (at least if you're me):

Get on a bus packed to the gills with fellow j-students, an instructor (though not yours), and two cheery representatives of the Queens Borough President's office.
Begin to traverse the huge borough, stopping intermittently to meet with community leaders, a fabulous city council member (Flushing's John Liu), and a chamber of commerce rep determined to transform the sleepy Rockaways, once known as the "Irish Riviera," into some snowy Miami waterfront, with luxury condos (underway) and high-rise hotels ("they'll come," he gloated).

Fail to take commonsense measures to control my rising vertigo, like looking ONLY at the street instead of out the window, and also fail to keep caffeine levels up to ensure that I don't feel like passing out.
Embarrass yourself, therefore, by falling asleep during the last community meeting --- which is only with the director of the fscking Langston Hughes Library, and thus fail to ask him the question that most comes to mind: whether his center's outreach, in addition to schools and African-American churches in Elmhurst and Corona, calls out to the gay community, or whether he instead enforces the silence (perhaps begun by Hughes' biographer) on the many gay leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.
Watch as the bus spends only a soupcon of time in Astoria, my chosen beat for the reporting class, and don't demand to get off the bus right then to walk around. Have it not occur to you, because you're frankly so sick and sleepy.

Talk about rousing all my fears at once, about physical aptitudes: but then, it's why I stay away from buses. In retrospect, I'd far rather have spent the day walking around Astoria and talking to folks.

Still, it was good to see the Rockaways before the oncoming "renaissance;" to know what Jamaica and Elmhurst, home to so many of my former students; and to become impressed enough with Jackson Heights that I was sleepily surfing apartment ads last night. And I'm sure Queens became more real to a great many of my fellow travelers in the process.

That was all day Monday: I'll write up Tuesday separately, methinks. (And I promise to do the meditation on the RW1 group that I promised, before tomorrow's seminar.)