Crayons to Chaos

the valentine's day mystery

The Queens Supreme Court building, on the outside, is an anonymous building that could as easily house a school or insurance company as a courthouse. Inside, there are a few stabs at grandeur in the courtrooms, but this building mainly attends to its largely sad business: making the wheels of criminal prosecution and defense run as smoothly as can be desired.

And our peripatetic crew, the Queens subset of RW1, had an assignment: have a look at the innards of just one case, preferably a homicide (Dale was remarkably insistent on that fact). A recon mission by just two of us, on Friday, had produced a sort of Delphic mystery, in which officer after bureaucrat claimed that the entire Queens court system was about the shut down for the high holidays. That claim turned out to be largely accurate, but we managed yesterday to slip in before Rosh Hashanah turned every civil servant (and NY City parent)'s schedule to mud. "Go down to K-6," uttered one of the oracles on the seventh floor, "they're having summations and charges."

Thus were we in at the end of a trial in which every single New York City trope - race, class, class consciousness (which is different, says the woman who knows Marcuse only from the mutterings of others), gender, guns, religion - danced through the behavior of two defense attorneys, a young district attorney, a judge who served in the NY State Assembly under Nelson Rockefeller and two defendants, once fast friends, who didn't look at each other during the trial. I'll not use their names in this post - and if they've not been published yet, I'll likely not do it if I post the story.

But this is not the story. This is the diary. I will tell you that we had a verdict that day: see if you can tell, from the descriptions here, who emerged, relatively, the winner.

As the door opens, the family fills courtroom: from tiny girl in knee-high boots and her young slim parents; a pair of middle-aged women in matching frizzy ringlets; a guy with dreads and a huge suitcase, who I first think is a lawyer.  The right side of the courtroom almost filled.

At the defense table, one lawyer is around my age, chubby, hyper: in the hallway, he introduced himself to some of the family members and muttered strategy, and throughout the pre-trial prep keeps updating the family members about what's going on. "They're discussing scheduling..the last witness hasn't arrived...."

The other defense lawyer, sitting at the other end of the table, runs his hand over his hair to calm it and obscure his bald spot, as if he were going to be on TV. He drums his fingers on the table: calmer on the surface than the other, he's a performer waiting to unleash. He also makes eye contact with joshes with the slim South Asian woman across the aisle, even though she's the DA. “While we’re waiting…can I read that?”

This stage goes on for what feels like forever. with lots and lots of muttering across the aisle.
Lawyers must cultivate extreme patience, like revolutionaries. The families  look into space blankly, as if trying to pretend to themselves that they’re not really here, that this is not happening. The jury, which at that point includes alternates and has 3 Black men, 6 White men, 4 women (2 Asian, 1 black one white) and 2 Hispanic men, looks tired as they stare forward.

Finally the bailiff calls us all to order, and the two defendants: young thirtyish men, one with a gym build (his neck alone has more muscle than my entire body) and the other slim, nervous, both in Italian suits and near-perfect shoes.

dancin with the z crew

And as I warned (see post below), here's your introduction to Father Brady - a loose, overgrown version that's not likely to see the light of day. Comment and guess where you think my next neighborhood story came from?
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When Schoolbooks Are Like Fires

Bree Sanders, a willowy 12-year old with waist-length dark hair and a soprano giggle, grins when she talks about the fashion show she helped direct last year at her school, the Albert Shanker School in Astoria. Her sister Jessie, shy behind an oversized pair of glasses, takes a moment to say what she likes best about school. “I know I need to study harder,”  she says softly.

The 72-year-old man beside her says quietly, patiently, “You know you can do it, right?”  Jessie nods, but the grin of certainty is gone, especially when he follows up with “Remember that seventh-grade problem we did together?”

He then explains to Bree and Jessie’s mother how Jessie, given a not-simple math problem, “went ahead and did it,” even though she had been told she was “fifth grade level” in math. He then repeats his question to Jessie: “You know that you can do it?”

Jessie stops mumbling and looks directly at the white-haired man. “Yes, Father, I do.”

In the 13 years he’s been pastor in his old neighborhood, Father Edmund L. Brady – who just retired as pastor of St. Margaret Mary Church in Astoria, Queens– has become known to parents, schools and city administrators as as someone who takes action on education issues.

Brady and his parent group don’t completely blame teachers or administrators for the problems they work on. “The system is organized against them,” says Brady,  citing the pressure of constant standardized tests, curriculum changes, and shifting classes  - the woes that cut across the educational spectrum. Often, “organizing means finding unexpected allies,” he says, sometimes at the highest levels, to support the “hard work of committed teachers who are trying to navigate the potholes.”

over hiss over dale

So what happened? Did I let the blog go entirely? Did the depressive extreme of the bipolar spectrum I described last month - last month? - send Chris into a tailspin from which she hasn't yet recovered? Has the opposite happened, and my writing been such a rousing success that I don't care about blogging any more? Can you tell anything by the fact that I keep shifting back and forth between first and third person, as I try not to let October go the way of September?

Besides, one of the things I've learned in the interim is that my work at the J School is better when I write here-  when I share my experiences on the beat, the things I'm learning, the way I did with my very first story. I should have done the same with the second; I should have written every day  (as I'd started to, below) about the fearless Father Brady. But I was drowning, and disoriented by the emotional roller coaster of RW1.

It is,of course, the intended course of this reporting class - that every bit of weak or cowardly reporting, every un-tight paragraph, every sloppy referent gets slashes  on paper and references in conference and "I'm worried." This only intensified, to the nth degree, with the arrival of Dale Maharidge -- Dale's brilliant, encouraging in general (he looked at my clips and liked them) and ruthless in his editing and coaching.  He also puts grades on things and thus gave me, recently, the first C+ I've gotten since a psycho Cinema professor accused me of plagiarizing a paper at Binghamton. 

In the meantime, ALL the stories have had to happen are on a far-shorter lead time than I'm used to: some in one day, like the two AP daybook exercises (one of which I bungled so badly that it was irreparable), others in 2-3 days max (reporting Monday, class Tues-Wed, deadline Thurs).  Thus every story already feels half-baked when I submit it, then is justly pilloried, and so on.

This is, of course, exactly what I'm paying for; but it gives the whole experience, as I've been saying lately, the emotional quality of being battered. You feel great - interviews are great, you're learning things, you get nachas for this or that small thing  in drill - and then BOOM the crit puts you somewhere over the edge.

Dale's got used to seeing me in tears, and likely doesnt take it seriously any more: I am honestly trying to put an end to these hissy fits, but it's not as easy as it sounds. (Likely I should eat more. I've lost 7 pounds so far, simply from not having the time, inclination. or money to eat. I've never been this way, and I do think it's made me more brittle than I need to be -- it all gets tied in with trying to keep my fatigue levels at bay, managing the caffeine and my meds and so on and so on.)

Meanwhile the sense of overall deadline pressure really sets in with the other classes - Reporting on Courts and Trials, Critical Issues in Journalism, the law class and the masters' project, which is a long, 5000+ word magazine piece on a matter of some import. You sort of feel like you can't handle any of it, until the effort even to write a pitch feels leaden.

Then you wake up, shake it off, and soon are back on the high of the work -- pushing, meeting people/talking to them, and trying to ride the pulse of the stuff scheduled for you as well as the reporting.  (If you think it's just me, check out our class' loose group blog, The Ten Month Beat.)

Now that I've reverted to second person, it's time to get specific again. But much of the above has held, I was reassured to learn, for many of my classmates. Not that it hurt any less. Until - as  I said to Cynthia Cotts, my master's adviser, last week: "I'm talking to you about this big project, and part of me firmly believes that I'm incapable of writing a postcard home to my mother."

Still, I have some faith that at least some of my beat stories will ultimatelt turn out OK - and I'll post here, tomorrow, the most recent one, which I actually like quite a lot. I've met and been welcomed by some wonderful people in Astoria, thanks largely to one former student from La Guardia Community College.

I chose Astoria as my beat, and decided to keep it (after flirtations w/others, like Fort Hamilton – too far! , Marble Hill/Kingsbridge (too scary!), snd so on) largely because of the inexhaustible mix of cultures on every block,after getting  I had gotten a whiff after teaching at La Guardia, where I taught students from Uzbekistan, Nepal, both Koreas, all Chinas, Bosnia, the subcontinent, and up and down Central and South Americas. Suzanne is one of the reasons I stuck with Astoria, even after I learned that there were 12 other J-06 types (including this blogger, who writes largely in French) who'd chosen the region. Oh, but I have my Queens secret weapon, I thought in total arrogance.

Now, I think it's more like they have me. At least I hope they will begin to think that way.

A striking young Trinidad native in her early thirties, Suzanne has, through her activism on behalf of her three children, become a presence in many of the schools in District 30. She's someone that students approach when they're upset: in the time I walked around with her, two or three grownups did the same, to which I was introduced as "my professor."

As we talked, that first day, she walked me around some of Astoria I'd not been to the last time: through  low-rise streets with small brick attached houses and apartment blocks, Greek and Italian restaurants and churches - including Mt. Carmel, a century-old building in blond stone and ordinary brick, with a notation of mass times: ENGLISH 7 A.M., SPANISH 8 A.M., ITALIAN 9 A.M., ENGLISH 10 A.M., VIETNAMESE 11 and so forth. (Mt. Carmel is, in fact, where I was to spend the rest of the week that I wasn't at Columbia.)

As we began to cross 30th Street, she said about one of the apartment blocks: "Graffiti. We haven't had that around here until recently." Spoken like a true homeowner, though she's a renter -- spoken like a community leader, anyway.

"So many people from India are coming to the neighborhood," she said as we walked past  women in glorious salwa kameez and Hindi names on doctors' offices. Then she put me back on the train to go off to the community board meeting - but also to get ready for what turned out to be just my first interview the next day with Father Edmund Edmund L. Brady.

A slender white-haired man of 72, Brady turned out to be so much of a story that I ended up spending Wednesday and Thursday afternoons with him -- meeting alternately with him and with members of his "Z Crew," the youth empowerment group I'd first heard about from Suzanne. That's when I met Bree and Jessie (not their real names), as well as others who had been part of the group's First Big Battle -- a struggle to gain clarity on the issue of school uniforms. Along the way I heard enough about gangs in the schools to think of it as a separate story.

Father Brady himself turned out to be an old lefty: he was trained by Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in community organizing, back when he was in Bushwick in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of the 1977 blackout.

My second Astoria story turned out to be a profile of him -- one I'll post immediately after this, even though I'm theoretically in the process of revising it for publication. If you look closely at that story, you'll see what my next one after that was: and soon I'll be writing yet another education story, ALSO from that wellspring.

In between, though, has been My Week in Law Enforcement, which I'll throw up here tomorrow night -- as I'm journaling my day, tomorrow, at the Queens Criminal Court.  In the meantime, I have some hopes that my masters' project and my first paper for the Covering Courts class will help me revisit Book of Days, which I've neglected even worse than here. Now that I think of it.

Time to plunge back in - with phone calls and prep for the week. I'll try to think of it as getting back into Dr.Who's Tardis, to hurtle toward  new worlds and fresh horrors, small victories, and likely a bit of comedy along the way.

dancing bipolar

Here it is the day after Labor Day, almost exactly a month after I started this blog - so jazzed1 so hopeful! so scared! -- and we've already had more than a week of silence.  Not that I haven't started posts; I have a couple thousand words written after three days in Astoria, when I had just met one of the more extraordinary people I've met in a while and interviewed some young women and men who offered windows into Astoria I'd not expected. I was so overwhelmed with trying to get that done, and equally overwhelmed with the flood of information, that every time I sat down to write I grew literally dizzy.

I was also, of course, trying to run away from how horrible and inadequate J was making me feel -- a reaction expected, if not planned, by those who run it. I learned on noon Friday that Robert MacDonald, the director of admissions here, lays it out like this: "September, you're overwhelmed. October, you're depressed. November, you start to suspect that maybe you'll make it through."

I hadn't heard any of that when I was on the train Friday, having had the story I'd slaved over all weekend justifiably popped by Stacy,  wondering if it was too late to get a refund of all Uncle Joe's and my dad's money, if I decided I just wasn't up to this. I was already freaked out by  the facebook of the class, in which I learn that 22-year-olds here have published books and that other masters' students include Alex Poolos, former managing editor of Women's Enews,  and Dina Temple-Ralston, whose book about Rwanda I've already praised in the other blog -- and panicked after meeting the wonderfully genial and terrifyingly no-nonsense Dale, who made it clear that two stories a week were going to be torn apart and renewed. So that those two stories being red-inked beyond easy repair had me crying, terrified.

I guess I am/was conflating September and October, in MacDonald's schema. The whole concept did remind me of the old saw about law school -- "first year they scare you to death, the second they work you to death. the third they bore you to death." It sounds like we get all three right away.

Talking to my classmate Elsa, just now, I learned yet again that we all feel this way. Elsa said gently: "I think we'll get through it." And the whole thread has made me come up with a new answer, for when people ask how J-school is going. "Oh, it's pretty bipolar."

I wanted to get this intro out of the way before I go back and tell you about the week with Father Brady and the stor(ies) that resulted, let alone the intros to writing about the Mayor's race and other tidbits thrown our way during the second half of orientation. I also know I haven't introduced Dale properly at all -- or talked about Josh Friedman, who gave me (and many of us) a framework for what's happening in New Orleans. But that will be, I think, my next Book of Days piece too.

Meanwhile, as this week blazes forth I'll have Patti Smith/U2 as my soundtrack - just with slightly altered  lyrics: "I'm dancing bipolar/In the air I spin/Some strange music draws me in/Makes me come off like some heroine...." Like some heroin/e, indeed.

surfing through thickening waters

My goodness - here it is Wednesday night and I've not written a scrap here. I'm actually deep into thd next story, but before I get into that -- the education story -- I thought I'd catch up on what happened with the other, and give a taste of today's lecture from Sreenath Sreenivasan, as I begin to process my couple of days in central Astoria. The next post will give you the whole mishegas about Father Brady and the kids of IS 171. (and if that doesn't bring you back, what will?)

Monday morning, Stacy kept three stories from the class to read aloud. Three she read in their entirety: Mariana'a vivid glimpse of Corona, Diane's of Long Island City, and Matt's no-one-on-the-D-knows what orange-alert-means piece. All tight and somewhat funny. The other, all she read was the lead: that was mine.  I was pleased that she liked it (tho she revised it to bring the "topical" stuff forward), and tried not to be neurotic and take personally that she didn't read the whole thing aloud. Even so, I was irrationally pleased to see my work highighted at all.

Her feedback on the story itself was, I think, right on: she zeroed in on holes in my reporting that I knew from word one would damage the story a little (e.g. the job description of Kim's fiancee, Garni' full name) and hard data needed (demographics of the nabe). I actually do want to email Jen to gdt the former and revise the piece.

Then it was time for Lynell Hancock's lecture on educstion, which was absorbing and scary all at once; I'll review it briefly later, but for now I wanted to take my impreasions of Sree's Smarter Surfing.

We began with a broadcast of Robin Sloan's famous "EPIC 2014." You've likely seen this before: it begins: "In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline....."

Then before plunging in...a bit of Sree's llfe:

Sreevanisan was born in Tokyo and went on to Bhutan,  and then to Moscow -- "I was a good little Communist" -- then high school in Fiji before moving on to the Upper West Side. His father in Kerala, aghast that his son is a journalist, "framed the MASTER OF SCIENCE degree."  He runs the New Media program here, writes for Poynter, and is the Tech Guru at ABC-TV.

and as I write, I learn that a few others have J-school blogs: and that this lecture has already been live-blogged, last year, by Sam Guston (now at the NY Post). I am, of course, not fast enough to truly live-blog this.

Recommending Firefox, he speaks of an "online kibbutz" of programmers working to fix it, and of all its features (including FoxyTunes, whch I never knew about -- it  lets you manipulate iTunes from the browser!)

He spent an enormous amount of time on Google's many functions, giving special attention to Maps, Alerts. and Translation (noting that "the Firestone tire recall story was broken by a pair of Texas journalists who didn't read Spanish" but could use such translators.

orange alert turns astoria blue

So after the long post below, I managed to craft something with only 3 interview points, as advertised - and even kept it closer to the assigned 700 words than I'd ever thought I could. It took me all night, of course; I filed at 4:30 a.m., went home and to sleep, woke up at 11 convinced I had screwed it up. But a morning e-mail from Dale, my instructor, calmed that core fear, while sending me into another convilsion:

Aha, another night writer. I took a break tonight and flashed in
here, this is not really an edit, but a few comments. First, KUDOS
on getting details. Nice, nice, nice. But you need to make the lead
more immediate. Again, this is insta-editing on the fly, but I think
I'd lead with that Egyptian, especially in light of London. Take us
right into a scene with that person. Also, work on getting fuller
quotes. But I like, like, like a lot of this!

Always go with your first instinct: I should know that by now. So after consultation with Stacy, I did just that, and edited the rest of it. Here it is, prior to full edits by anyone but me (and a little help from Rache, who helped pace me through the all-nighter):

 

Stacy Sullivan/Dale Maharidge
Chris Lombardi
POS: ASTORIA
20 August 2005

Orange Alert Blue for Generation Y
Chris Lombardi

"I try to avoid carrying anything," the young man says matter-of-factly. "Or at least to carry less stuff."

A common resolution for any subway commuter, especially a young  man with many places to go: but the young man, Nordin K, 27, is not just making conversation. Here in Astoria’s “Little Cairo,” where young girls ride bicycles in full headscarf and old men in white pants brood over tiny cups of Turkish coffee, he’s explaining how he avoids having his day ruined by someone else’s fear.

Beside him, his friend Garni,24, nodded. “You don’t want to appear threatening.”

For these young Egyptian immigrants, the everyday hassle of commuting is magnified by the fear that someone will decide they’re terrorists. This fear has increased in the past weeks, in the wake of the London bombings  on July 7 and 19 and the July 22 police shooting of an unarmed young Brazilian mistaken for an Al-Qaeda suspect. 

“You have to always be thinking about it,” Nordin says.  He finishes his lunch, the sounds of the café pulsing around him.

 

listening to astorias

Report back, back half an hour ago after spending six hours on the beat: I don't think I had enough follow-up questions, and made some stupid mistakes -- never got occupations and phone numbers for enough people, but in general I think I have enough for a story.

Time to decipher what I've scrawled in a now-half-filled steno pad (I thought my handwriting was improving but not yet). I walked around all day with two minicassette recorders, but they seemed an unnecessary barrier in such quick conversations. And I told you I over-report: I talked to exactly twice the minimum number of people required for this assignment, thus making the all-nighter possibility more of a reality.

Some notes to help me grasp toward a story:

Getting off the R train at Broadway, I made a beeline this time to that senior center; I really wanted to get some old people's voices (and thought, selfishly, that I might get enough interviews to come back here earlier). The guard at Bffy- Dellamonica Senior Center waved me in when I said I was with Columbia J-school: I stupidly assumed, since I had heard Astoria was "saturated" with  us, that he knew all about it.

Not so. The Center is part of Catholic Charities, and permission from on high is required. In the time it took for me to find that out, I had a nice chat with the assistant director, who is also an adjunct at La Guardia (though in the nursing program), who told me to go to a local diner for half an hour, till the director was free.

So I went off to Sanford Diner, where I made my first approach - asking a couple at the next table, "I'm a journalism student at Columbia, do you have a few minutes?" The couple, Chris and Erica, smile; Chris, an intense, balding young man with a ready smile, works in nonprofit fundraising at Columbia, and has a friend who went through J a few years back. That calmed me right down: "I'll warm up on you1"

Have their daily lives changed because of terrorism, orange alerts, searches?  Not much, they say -- they both take the subway to work every day. But "Mostly we talk about it," said Chris. "We talk a lot about what the city's doing -- what it might mean for our civil rights."

  They're moving to Boston next month; not because of terrorism (because of a job opportunity for Chris and out of a desire for a better standard of living than they feel they can afford right now), but "I'm kind of relieved...I feel like I know something will happen" eventually, he said. "When I'm down in the tunnel and hear a noise, I wonder what will happen."

On the subject of searches: they've gone round and round about them. The subject of profiling -  a constant theme - came up for the first time here: "They're not able to profile," Chris says, "which is kind of counterintuitive." They'd both heard some story on NPR that the reason for all these searches was that some Al-Qaeda communication had advised acolytes: "Stay away from stations with checkpoints."

Neither has been called out to be searched: Chris says "I think I would object. It's not voluntary! You have to use public transportation, some people have to use airplanes -- there's no choice involved. No, it's not cool, b ut it's legal" because of Patriot Act, he says. He then quoted Ben Franklin on liberty vs. safety, and said "I think we are headed to a police state."

Chris, who's Greek and grew up in the neighborhood, said the current situation had sort of radicalized him, pushing outward the liberal politics he inherited from his public-school-teacher parents: "UFT types?" I asked, and he smiled.

The next interview, after I got turned down explicitly at the senior center --  not turned down but deferred, 'Fax us something and we'll plan it" which is tantamount to not possible with this story -- couldn't have been more different.

Maria Sherbatsky is an Eastern European immigrant of about seventy, who was in the  neighborhood today for the Feast of the Transfiguration, which celebrates a subtle moment in the Gospel with a harvest celebration (a sort of Byzantine Succoth, from the looks of the photos). Her first response to the terrorism question, then was religious. "I'm a woman of prayer," she said. "I pray for the conversion of the terrorists, that they realize what they have done; I pray that the war ends."  Still, in her daily life? She breaks out into a smile. "I lived in New York, and when I come to New York. I still use trains." What about the searches? "I wish they had some sort of detector to make it go faster," said her companion, a somewhat younger woman who refused to give me a name. "People are in a hurry it's difficult."

Then it was on to the Euro Delights Cafe, to talk to a pair of twentysomethings: Jenna Soleo, of Astoria, and her friend Kim Coleman of Chicago. Roommates at SUC-Geneseo, they both  now find themselves getting married soon (not to each other). They could be any of the skinny girls in my classes at CCNY or NYU (though with the gloss of the skinny millionaires I joke chased me out of San Francisco).

"I'm living in denial," says Jenna, a doctoral student at CUNY Grad Center who says she still takes the subway, and that  "It hasnt stopped me from flying." In Italy and other countries,  she noted, cops have machine guns [referring to carabinieri, we later agreed] and that security seems even more stringent in smaller airports in the U.S. 'In Kalamazoo, I was practically strip-searched."

As for the subway searches: "I feel like they're making a good effort," she said. "If something were to happen...I don't know if it can actually be prevented."  She sighed. "I give the terrorists more credit than I used to." Then she explained why:  on 9/11 she watched the Twin Towers burn out her window and made it downtown before the trains stopped running, finding herself amid the disoriented people covered in ash.  This makes her sensitive to people in places like "Montana -- I was at  a conference there, and people all over wanted to claim 9/11 as their own. I was a little annoyed."

Civil liberties concerns? "I studied the Middle Ages," she says,  and these kinds of convulsions "always happen when there's a crisis." She also pointed out "We get searched in a lot of places -- like the public library."

Kim, a quiet blonde with a slow smile, says fear of terrorism only comes to her "in flashes," often when she's traversing Chicago's many underground spaces. "Will this happen in Chicago?"  But it was when I asked about civil liberties concerns that the conversation took a surprising turn. First, she told   of seeing a South Asian man trying to do something at his bank and being told that he'd better never travel without over three forms of I.D. , or else "you could go to jail." She was shocked, she says: 'I guess cause of Patriot Act?"

Right after 9/11, said Jenna, "one of the bodega owners around here got beat up --and he wasn't even Arab....They can say all they want that they're not profiling."

Then came the surprise, for me: Kim adds that her fiancee is from the Middle East, and they're moving to Jordan next week for his job. "My family all thinks I'm going to Baghdad," she says wryly.

listening to astoria, part one

Astoria is HUGE: something I could have figured out sooner with a simple look at a subway map (the end of the N line to the East River), but instead had imposed on me in 80-degree temperatures that made a 2-hour wander through about half of it feel like the Long March.

I approach from Long Island City, a longish walk through auto repair shops and edges of the BQE, into west Steinway Street's Housing Supply Row: lumber, bedding, rugs. Then out of nowhere, the first human store: BRIDAL BOOT CAMP, as if once you've built your dwelling (somewhere amid the low-rise  buildings that peep from the side streets) your next step, obviously, is the glitzy wedding.

Eventually a more commercial strip develops. At first just that disheartening mix of working-class chains we all love/hate/depend on: PAYLESS. RITE AID. SALVATION ARMY THRIFT STORE. 99 CENT SHOP. as well as the inevitable STARBUCKS. Eventually some older shops peek out, idiosyncratic second-hand clothing and family diners, some with Italian or Greek names. Though at the check cashing/Western Union outlets, the Arabic and Sanskrit embedded within the logos betray the origins of more current residents, as does CROATIA TRAVEL, with its current deals on JFK SPLIT/JFK ZAGREB. 

Similarly, on the block where the Italian Heritage Association is located,  restaurants next door to PASTA FINA and the like chime their dissonance: TASTE OF BEIRUT, MEDITERRANEAN CAFE.

Finally Steinway gives over almost completely to the Little Egypt/Lebanon effect, with old men in white pants looking skeptically at me over their small cups of coffee and young girls on bicycles in full headscarf. I make a note to come back tomorrow, though I have to turn around if I want at least to see Broadway before I go back to Columbia. The heat is, after an hour, beginning to get to me (not a small thing when you have MS, though for me not as bad as most), so I know I won't be able to walk quickly.

On the way to the latter, I glance over at side streets, to relieve the eyes from retail. And that's how I discover 30th Avenue, with its smaller cafes and families on the street, the Bosnian newspaper and simple diner with a hand-lettered sign: "Balkan Food," and amid it all a stalwart Irish bar, the Quays, complete with loud, heavily accented owner taking a smoke out back.

Then it's finally time for Broadway: I walk in the direction of a senior center, and as I did the neighborhood became  more definitively Greek, thrift shops named   OLYMPUS and SIPA diner and real estate offices with Greek as well as English notices. I get so absorbed that I don't notice how much more numb my paresthetic feet have become, or that my long red skirt is about to be caught under my sandal.

Those who know me know what comes next: I caught my fall well, I thought, and my long skirt didn' fly up. I did  issue a loud, involuntary yelp that brought folks running, and I ended up having to reassure <i>them</i> that yes, I was all right. I even told one of them I fall all the time (which I likely shouldn't have done, but maalesh).

Still, it was my signal that it was time to turn around, now that I had a tentative plan for this morning. I'm going to start where I ended, at the Greek diners, waiting strategically for the hour when commuters are done hurrying their way through. Then I'll see if I can stop by the senior center, and walk back to Steinway along 30th, ending with the old Egyptian men if I can,

And I'll try to be inspired by the wonderful session we had last night at the school with David Isay of NPR, who played us clips of some of his amazing radio documentaries, like this one about people who work in Texas' execution chamber, or this one that came about when two young men in the Chicago housing projects were given tape recorders and told to record their lives. Isay''s  message to us was relatively simple: "People are hungry to talk." Ordinary people are dying to tell their stories -- most of the time, no one ever asks, he said.

I'll report back later tonight and let you know what kind of stories I heard, on the way to turning it into a soft news story. I think I've set myself up for the kind of all-nighter I hate, but we'll see!

the existential question

How are you doing?

That's the question people are already asking me, even this early in J-school -- a question I've been sort of afraid to answer. Now I'm about to ask it of a random group of people, in a completely different context. And it's making me ask the other too.

How are you doing? When you think about it, it's kind of an existential question. It can mean anything: whether you have a stomachache, whether you're lonely, whether you still can't believe George W. Bush is president. It can mean that ever since Homeland Security rounded up your neighbors after 9/11, you don't trust anyone.

Or it can mean that J-school is already scaring the shit out of you.

As the tagline and my first posts suggest, this blog is occasionally a visit to my deepest insecurities. And I knew this program was going to send them flaring: I don't think I knew it would happen quite so quickly.

I've just survived my first big drill/seminar, in writing short news stories. My slow typing necessitated that my stories be quite short, and that I not have time to go back and rewrite.And out of seven, I ended up with two that were good, one presentable, three that needed rewriting and 2 that were ut and out blown. Meanwhile, around me were these young Turks -- this one has a fellowship and has written for the Boston Globe, that one files home to New Zealand articles of international import, a third wrote a page for each of my small paragraphs. And only 3 of us will get any  scholarship money from J in the fall. I find myself terrified that I've made all the wrong choice.

Deep breaths: not time to cry yet, or to give up. Time to start asking people that existential question.

Because I have a story due on Saturday, and haven't started actually reporting. And it's about how people are doing in the wake of 9/11, the London bombings, and the reality that NYC is a top terror target. How's that for an (ahem) easy question?

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.)