Am I a bigot? Am I going to h-e-double hockey sticks? These answers and more within!

I hate Christmas advertising so much. I know that’s a negative opener, but I haven’t had a TV in my house (good for watching anything but movies and channel nine) for about four years. Now, thanks to a three play special from cablevision which makes it cost only marginally more to have phone service, internet access AND cable than just two of the three, I can watch CSI at anytime of the day and despierta con el mundo latino en la manana! With a little help from my lovely Jamaican cable installer, Wayne, I can be bombarded with messages like these:
“Get me beauty, get me sexy, get me beauty and nothing, nothing I need, get me victoria’s secret.”
“Now is the season, now is what brings us together, now is why cable vision developed optimum vision, now is what you’ll always remember.”
Ok forget Christmas messaging, everyone knows it sucks anyway. I just changed the station and HAVE YOU SEEN PAUL WALL? What a freakshow! How can he make that face and be taken seriously? Plus if you’re so hooked up with jewelry, why are you always wearing the same pimp juice cup of pink diamonds necklace? Get some new shit! We’ve all seen that thing!
I can also watch what’s called New York One. Its channel one, and it seems to be a way for new Yorkers to raise their paranoia about all city events a few notches. You can get weather forecasts every ten minutes, (its cold now, it was cold ten minutes ago and its going to be colder ten minutes from now, capece? Wanna know if it’s raining? Look out the window!) traffic reports (just buy a metro pass and forget about the BQE,) and unending coverage of whatever local big deal happens to be going on. Right now, the Transit Workers Union is negotiating their contract with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and they aren’t getting what they want. So they’re doing what every union does when it isn’t satisfied with an offer, threatens a strike. Which is all well and good except it will KILL New York City to be without public transportation. Seriously, I can’t even imagine it. I wont be able to go to work, at all. No one can drive below 96th street with less than four people in the car, there will be NO busses, no trains, and if you think you’ll be able to get a cab you can think again. They’re talking about all these ways they’re going to make getting a cab affordable, like having them pick up a bunch of people at a time and having flat fare instead of distance rates. Great except that few of the cabbies know a damn thing about it and when they interviewed some of them their responses were hilarious! Everyone had a different idea about how they were going to get multiple parties to split fares. Its going to be so hysterical and disorganized, just mass confusion, with tons of late, stressed out and pissed off people. I kind of cant wait. So it was supposed to start last night at midnight so New York One had this outrageous countdown-to-strike clock going, like 6hours49minutes32seconds but with a stupid dramatic graphic of a clock as if we cant all see when midnight hits. So, so dumb. It’s like the king five satellite center in Seattle, the desk with two laptops where they cut to for the breaking news, I think they just turn the camera forty degrees. Anyway, it didn’t happen, now they’re saying Tuesday at the earliest, so that’ll be another excuse for a countdown. I say give the bastards whatever they want! We cant live without them and so they deserve to be compensated extremely well! Just hold off embezzling your average three billion dollars off transit revenues this year, MTA! You can always raise rates next year, you’ll get by!

So the question on everyone’s mind after last weeks expose on subway race is AM I A BIGOT? Its on my mind anyway. So, am I? Am I a bigot? I don’t think so…then again, do bigots ever think they’re bigots? No they just think they’re right! But I am right! I’m just making observations… that’s really how people are…am I supposed to not notice differences? And is it not a general expectation that people will at least in some way begin living according to American social morays? Do I sound like a grand dragon?

Bigot: NOUN:
One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
prej·u·dice (pr j -d s) NOUN:
An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts.
A preconceived preference or idea.
The act or state of holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions.
Irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion.
Detriment or injury caused to a person by the preconceived, unfavorable conviction of another or others

I’m definitely not strongly partial to my own group, unless you mean my personal collection of friends and family, which may be the case. And my adverse judgements were NOT made beforehand or without examination of the facts, however they may be unreasonable, and somewhat be based on preconceived preferences or ideas, No detriment or injury, yet…though that is number four, perhaps I’m gearing up to it!! That does it. I may not be a bigot, but I think I may be letting my prejudices get the better of me. How would I talk to a bigot, make her see the error of her ways? And how should she go about changing her feelings? Ah the great equalizer! Education. I am feeling a new years resolution surfacing. I resolve to learn more about the modern cultures of southeast and east asia and their respective immigrant communities (with the exception of the Japanese, thanks to the strong Seattle/Japan connection have a lot of exposure to Japanese culture) and hopefully become more understanding and less of an ASSHOLE about their public habits. Even having said that I can still hear my inner voice saying “Why is it your responsibility to get with someone who hocks loogeys loudly,frequently and shamelessly in closed quarters? Because they speak a different language?” Shut up inner voice! Can’t you see? That’s bigotry! BTW I did hear that after the SARs epidemic, the Chinese government had to outlaw public loogey hocking and spitting in the street to try to control the spread of the disease. Apparently its like the national pastime. You would think they ate a lot of dairy. Oh shit, I’m not doing good so far. Seriously, after January first its Gung hay fat choy all the way. And I’m gonna go eat a Shabbat dinner with some orthodox strangers on a Friday night. I saw a bunch of them posted under events on Craigslist and if I can find someone to go with me (Sarah?) I’m going to go and see what’s really going on in these houses. No more hasid-bashin’ for me either! I’m gonna be half Chinese half Hasidic by 2007!
I know I haven’t really been talking too much shop lately…I guess nothing of too much interest is really happening in the salon, hair wise. I’m just on the quest to learn to do the perfect blow out. I’m getting better, but I really do suck. I taught myself to blow dry left handed, like with the dryer in my right hand, brush in the left, and I have little to no left hand dexterity, so I think I have to relearn it all right handed, which now feels SUPER awkward. God, it seems so simple. Speaking of simple, you know how in every religious tradition, there is some parable or other which sort of scares you into being super nice and gentle especially to those people who test your desire and ability to be so lest you be harsh and mean to God, or the messiah or some avatar in disguise as the worlds most annoying person? Well, I’ve got mine, and I think I’
ve failed the kind-to-the-messiah test. There is an Israeli man, of about 40years old who is an assistant at the salon. He is simple, and while I know that I usually change names to protect identity, this one is just too much for me to bear. His name is Simon. A moment of silence for how hard it is for me to pretend that its easy to go through my day not calling him you-know-what.
His English is terrible, so at first I thought it was a language barrier problem, because he seemed normal enough just like such an annoying person that you couldn’t believe he was for real. After a while of working together and knowing his history (he has been here ten years) I realize that he’s probably retarded, and that’s why his English is so bad. He is no taller than me (which, combined with grey hair, beady eyes and small hands puts him unequivocally in the horrible little man category) Basically, whatever affliction it is he has makes him the most socially irritating person you could ever imagine. He has absolutely no manners in English what so ever, so the fact that he takes it upon himself to make sure and know what everyone’s responsibilities are for the day and remind you of them means that he is barking orders at you about things you may already be in the middle of doing. He only speaks in one tense, and it doesn’t really exist its like an infinitive gerund “I’m go store buy milk?” “You’re come to train?” I tried to help him learn the right way to say thing about a hundred times then gave up. “Yes Simon, I’m take train, I’m live Brooklyn.”
He not only doesn’t have tact, but doesn’t even realize that such a thing is necessary, he yells for peoples’ attention across the salon WHILE shampooing someone, flanked by two other assistants also with clients. He asks questions that you would have no more probability of knowing the answer to than he does, like where is so and so when you just walked out of the bathroom. You can tell him anything time and time again, even something simple like don’t drink out of that cup, its Ludmila’s and she brought it in for herself because she gets cold sores. He will look at you like you asked him what moon dirt tastes like and (and his English is DEFINITELY good enough to understand “don’t drink out of that cup”) you will absolutely see him the next day drinking out of the cup. If someone is in the middle of eating and doesn’t have time to finish their sandwich, they wrap it up and put it to the side in the back area. I can’t tell you how many times he has finished peoples’ food and they come back and their lunch has been eaten. He stares right at you while you’re working for minutes at a time and when you look up to be like “what?#@$%!” he just stares more, cocks his tiny head and smiles like “what?” I’m telling you, one hour in the hood and he’d be nursing broken bones. The real kicker for me is that he has NO sense of personal space at all. If you turn around without looking, you’ll trip over him. If you’re standing in the middle of the salon watching something, he’ll come and stand so the edges of your shoes are touching. He will come stand right next to me at the sink when I’m doing dishes with his back to my arm and look out at the salon like he’s just standing leaning against a wall!!! It’s AMAZING!!! He used to try to hug me all the time, or worse, dance with me to whatever music was on in the salon in this real Israelo-European clubby way. I put the immediate kibosh on that. No way. I have my limits. I’m not a real touchy person to begin with and I certainly can be hugging someone when it’s all I can do not to be landing a right hook to their grill. I know I’m going to hell because he probably can’t help it, but it feels like he does the stuff on purpose! How else could he be so annoying?? God. Maybe I should be a grand dragon. But seriously, for this holiday time of goodwill and cheer, I’ve had to start pretending that he’s the messiah in disguise and I never know when he’ll reveal himself so I have to be super nice and tolerant. He drives everyone else nuts too, it’s not just me, but I have more trouble keeping my annoyance in check than the others seem to. So I’ll just keep pretending he’s on his way to taking us all to the promised land and maybe it’ll help. I’m sure a lot of people found Jesus annoying, after all he called everyone sinners and said their religion was outdated and now we count down to his birthday and talk about how much we need him. Well, the Jews still don’t…crap. I guess we just aren’t cut out to like annoying people.
Look, I am not the one to tell you how I tried to learn to speak Vulcan as a teenager, nor can I tell you bilbo baggins family lineage or recount the story of the mists of Avalon. I never saw any of those Star Battle movies that the kids love ( J ), and while I liked Quantum Leap and X Files, they both starred a somewhat hunky male main character and had a lot of funny one liners that kept me interested. What I’m telling you is this; although I have the fantasy imagination of a cockroach, I LOVED HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE!!! Ok? I admit it, IT WAS GREAT. I stayed awake and in the theatre for the entire two and a half hours. That is a four star review as anyone who has tried to go see a film on a lark with me can attest to. It was funny, brilliantly cast and acted, although I think they could have cut a budget corner by not hiring Gary Oldman to be the unrecognizable face of Harry’s uncle that appeared for five minutes in glowing embers, but who am I? And did anyone actually appreciate that Lord Valdimor (who may or may not come back to life in the end) was Ralph Fiennes? I didn’t! Take away a man’s nostrils and you take away his identity! It was totally dramatic, had very few fight scenes (key) and provided a total escape. So, continuing in the vein of my life as an apology: I’m sorry I talked so much smack about grown people unabashedly reading children’s books, raving about the next one coming out, and critiquing plotlines and character flaws of dark lords on public transportation. I can see that the Harry Potter series is actually very entertaining and in the face of modern life going to wizard high school looks really good to me too.
I spent six hours getting to and from Trader Joes today with one stop for the bathroom. Any questions? I love reasonably priced organic raisins as much as the next guy but Jesus H.! Long Island should secede from the union. They’re not a state you say? Well, fine. Give it to Connecticut! All the houses have outer shutters; they’ll fit right in. Yesterday I was walking along 120th between Malcom X and Fredrick Douglas in Harlem, duh. Two lovely overhearances: One guy, walking alone took a deep breath from a evergreen bough he was carrying and as he exhaled it out with a cloud of breath into the cold, cold air he said “Mm! I love that smell!” Me too! And there isn’t enough room for Christmas tree lots here, so they just set them up on the corners and the you can smell it up and down the block. Number two: There was some construction going on on the top of one of the beautiful brownstone townhouses. Men walking around up there, belaying down the side of the building and all those tremendously unsafe things we’re all used to seeing construction workers do in the holy name of development. As I was walking towards an elderly black lady out with her granddaughter, she called up in a surprisingly loud voice (probably a founding member of some AME choir or another) to the construction workers, “You bein’ careful up there baby?” From a hundred feet up “Yes ma’am we are!” “Good! You watch your step now, y’hear?” Again “Yes ma’am!” Very sweet. It made me miss Mrs. Alexander, cause I’m sure she talks to construction workers all the time (I can hear what she’d say to that too! “Shit honey, they men aren’t they!?” )

subway race and what down and out smells like

It is de rigueur and more than a little cliché to move to NY and write about the subway. But, I’m going to. I hope to avoid hackneyed subway commentary by focusing on some hilarious details of train riding as well as the larger contributions that the ol’ underground iron horse makes to the city that never sleeps. I have decided that a lot of the ways that New Yorkers are, and that consequently New York is, are determined by the subway and the socio-political atmosphere thereof. Let us examine. New York is racist. Applying my subway theory logic, we can look critically at said racism and at least begin to understand it if not fully adopt it for ourselves, which is tempting but to be avoided; best not to become a bigot if you have the chance. I tend to think about Racism and prejudice a lot, as anyone who has been keeping up with the under currents of this blog knows, and now that I’m daily immersed in what appears to be a fossil environment of racism on the Upper East Side, its really on my mind. For the last week I’ve been helping Judah do some receptionist hiring, writing want ads, screening resumes, doing initial interviews etc. All part of my greater plan to make the assistants hate me! Remember? I’m still on it! We sit together, he and I, in the hot cramped, miserably disorganized Israeli definition of an office downstairs and look over the resumes people sent to us from our Craigslist ad. If he thinks that the person might be black, for instance they went to a certain school or live in an undesirable borough, he tells me to erase the email. I told him I think that is disgusting, makes me feel sick and btw is totally illegal. He said he would agree (yeah right!) but Chaim doesn’t like to hire them, thinks they wont be able to know how to deal with their bougie UES clientele. I can’t really argue with him, maybe they wouldn’t, but maybe they would! Who knows? I know when people of color are good at something they’re usually better at that thing than anyone else is. But I wouldn’t want to hire a black person in this salon for their sake; I would never want them to have to experience the kind of racist comments that occur in the salon, the underlying feeling that they’re not right for the job or the weird nanny tension of three or four West Indian ladies sitting waiting for their little blonde charges to finish having their hair done. That’s another thing I really didn’t understand when I came here. I would be assisting, and I would see a woman (it didn’t really occur to me yet that she was black and therefore might as well not have hair) sitting on the bench where clients wait for shampoos or for stylists to be free. So I would see them and think, I wonder who they’re here to see??! Should I get them shampooed? So I would ask, and they would invariably look and me like I was totally out of my mind. I’d say “Well, can I get you some tea or a (poorly foamed) cappuccino?’ Only to be met with refusal accompanied by the same look of total amazement. Then I would see them leaving with a little kid who had just gotten a haircut, and who either had a white dad with seriously powerful genes or had been adopted from a Russian orphanage. It took me a while of turning my head to see into baby carriages on the Upper East Side to realize that all these West Indian women were nannies for the wealthy Jewish women who felt now was the socially appropriate time to have children, but can’t fit parenting into their busy social schedule. Just the other day I was shampooing an older Jewish guy. We were making shampoo chit-chat, I had done his wife’s color last week so he felt like we knew each other, bless his heart. So he says “I’m doing good, my daughter has a second date with this guy this weekend and he’s great!’ Me (guileless;) “oh yeah? What’s great about him” him; “well, he’s white and he’s Jewish! What more can I ask for?” Me (in my head;) “ A god-damn lot! Howard Stern is white and Jewish and I bet you wouldn’t want your daughter dating him…” Me (in real life;) “Oh yeah? That’s awesome.” Him (confident he’d found a friend;) “Yeah I’m just so glad she stopped dating the wrong kind of guy, that this guy seems perfect.” Me (knowing and dreading the answer but powerless to stop myself from asking;) “What defines the “wrong” kind of guy?” Him (totally unashamed to say it) “Blacks.” Me; “Wow!” Him (backpedaling hopelessly;) “I like them (!), I have all kinds of friends (all kinds of wealthy Jewish friends,) but as far as dating goes, aside from being a male and a female I don’t see how you could have anything in common.” Me (wondering about if I could crush his skull with my bare hands during his conditioner massage, and silently retracting everything I’ve ever said about how interracial relationships are too hard to be worth it and pointless to attempt;) “Actually I think black people and Jews have more in common culturally than Jews and Goyim. Can I get you a cappuccino?” So. On the other side of the coin, lots of people still hate Jews, and they feel ok talking about it since for the most part we aren’t exactly economically marginalized. As per my earlier theory about racism and subterranean commuter society, lets look at the train! Train-taking Jews (which until that hyphen could have been confused with a Jew Taking Train, which is a whole other topic) either travel in groups, arguing loudly in a language that to the non-Semite sounds like an oncoming bout of asthma, a dog eating chicken bones. Discussion could be about Midrash, your husband’s best friend’s unmarried daughter or the exorbitant price of kosher meat, all bear the same level of intensity. Or they’re alone, rocking and reading from a small book that I always assume to be Torah or Mishnah or something but could just as easily be a Hebrew romance novel, or the screenplay of Mrs Doubtfire in a fancy binding. On top of this unique behavior, they don’t look well at ALL. Their intense scholastic tradition seems to have come at a price: the complete neglect of the body. Almost all Chasids on the train are considerably overweight, a fact which is exacerbated by the amazingly unstylish and ill-fitting clothing that the holy one, blessed be he, commands his chosen people wear in public. A word to the wise, whether devout or secular: if you’re shaped like humpty dumpty, avoid loose high-waisted pants and suspenders. I won’t even mention the wigs and “nude” hose. Their eyesight is uniformly poor in all cases, at all ages. As if the vision of their children is destroyed prenatally by parents reading 8-point Hebrew text 12 hours a day. The pasty Ashkenazaic skin tone belies a lifestyle long on slow-cooked food and fluorescent lighting and short on fresh air, leafy greens and exercise. It makes perfect sense that a large group of people that insists on sticking to socially unrecognizable customs and keeping completely to themselves would end up being generally disliked. Plus, if you block the subway isles with strollers full of bawling, under-disciplined red-haired kids enough times, and pretend you don’t notice that no one can get by cause you’re so busy rocking back and forth filled with the holy spirit, people are gonna start to hate you, even if Madonna thinks you’re the coolest. It’s just human nature. Speaking of people thinking Jews are cool, I had the unique (to me) experience of being cornered at a party by two hipster converts to Judaism, (actually one guy hadn’t yet converted but was so enamored with Jewishness that he felt it was just a matter of time) as they told me how lucky I was to really be Jewish, even though I told them I wasn’t really religious. It was like they thought my blood was cool! “Like, both your parents are Jewish? Cool! You probably think we’re so weird!” And I did! They had both grown up catholic; the woman a beautiful Filipina girlfriend of one of the stylists at my job and her friend, a handsome gay man who came to NY from LA to be a musician. I have heard people talk like that about many different things, being black, being a dancer, being a Sufi, you know cool stuff () but never EVER being Jewish. It was bizarre, I know being funny is cool, being smart is cool, being wealthy is cool, there are things that Jews generally are that people think are pretty enviable but I have never heard of people wishing they were Jewish. You can have it! Take my anxiety, please! And my mom’s too while you’re at it! You woulda thought the coolness would wear off living on the Upper East Bank. No examination of racism would be complete without checking my own prejudices and the cultures that push the buttons of my lower nature. As I have acknowledged before, My personality doesn’t seem to mesh well with the cultural habits of east and southeast Asia, work I have to do admittedly, but again the train’s close quarters exacerbate even the slightest distaste into a full blown dislike. On Sundays, the F train from Church, and probably before, to Jay Street/Borough hall is completely packed with Chinese people. Where the hell are they going, I’d like to know?!?! China? Did I accidentally get on the Beijing bound F? “This is a Great Wall bound F train, next stop Li-Zhen province, standclearatheclosingdoors.” What all-Chinese event is happening in Downtown Brooklyn at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings? I have to be at work at nine thirty so, to make sure I’ll be on time, I’m on the train by 8: 15. Weekend trains are as dependable as the starting time on a Pakistani wedding invitation. Now, its nothing personal against the Chinese, but I wouldn’t care who you were; at eight fifteen on a Sunday morning if you’re speaking a language at a high volume (and I think the intelligibility of Chinese depends upon being spoken at a high volume) that sounds like different sizes of whirring drill bits intermittently hitting an aluminum frying pan, I’m going to feel resentful and probably wish you would disappear. There are other reasons for what I have perceived to be a pretty pandemic (no pun intended) anti-Asian sentiment here in New York City. Most prominent is this; despite the approach of Christmas, thanks to a totally morally reprehensible and opportunistic media, most of us dependants on large-scale public transit have our heads filled, not with visions of dancing sugar plums but rather of what our demise would look like after contracting the dreaded Bird Flu. Every day you hear or see headlines in the bullshit tabloids that pass for newspapers over here, that with the high rates of travel from outlying areas of Asia, the Avian flu could spread from the three dead geese on the shores of lake Zhi-Shui (that despite the widespread panic seem to be the only known Avian Flu fatalities) to a global epidemic of unforeseeable proportion. I don’t care how non-mediated you are or how much you don’t fall for these yearly pandemia scares, ‘cause no one could be more out of it newswise or in more plague possiblity denial than I am. The fact is that Chinese people seem to have, per capita, more racking coughs, more uncontrollable viruses and less propensity to cover their mouths (They really don’t do it! Its wild! Just coughing away with no conciousness of the reality of airborne viruses. Maybe the covering of the mouth is just a false sense of security perhaps but when someone is hacking their last, squished directly next to you, it seems like the least they could do) makes even me wish that there was some other, non Chinesey way to get where I’m going. THE UGLY TRUTH!! Added to which I have the memory of my Fung Wah bus trip back from Boston where some young bleached out yellow blonde Chinese ASSHOLE guy was playing Chinese pop music (which is CRAP! Absolute CRAP. Sounds like a team of drum machines and local Karaoke veterans won a week in a recording studio to record 80’s tech-pop b-sides in mandarin,) on one of those hand-held tape players at top tinny volume. It was killing me! Despite the extremely irritated looks exchanged between my African American neighbors to the front back and sides, no one said anything to him! I couldn’t believe it, I was about to turn around and curse him out from six rows ahead but his batteries ran out. Asshole. That kinda set me off on this whole noticing the Chinese lack of regard for public space thing. I remember my aunt’s girlfriend once told me after a trip to China that she could understand why there was such a difference in the Chinese and the American conceptions of good driving (she’s very diplomatic, used to be a nun, probably doesn’t want to give up her hard earned place on the right side of the pearly gates.) She said that China is so crowded and there is so little room for each person that they don’t have anywhere near as large boundary zone for personal space, nor do they see things as moving in straight lines, which explains the difficulty in lane changing and left turning. That’s fine, just cover your mouth when you’re in the final stages of succumbing to the Avian flu on the train. By the way, I was talking about all this unpleasant racist shit on the phone with my sister, trying to decide if it was too nasty to air to the rather liberal and PC readership, which it may well be, and my mom whispered that if we are going to talk about this sort of thing, than we have to use the land line, and not the portable phone. I think that both answers the offensiveness question and some others yet to be asked on the topic of paranoia. Please refer back to the “the Neighbors” episode. What’s the fear here? That The Chinese Anti-Defamation League may have tapped our phones and is, as we speak, recording the conversation and planning our convictions and well-deserved bamboo/water torture sentence? That they’re going to impose a vengeful trade embargo and we’ll be responsible for a wordwide shortage of rice, backscratchers, shotglasses and undershirts? What it must feel like to be that worried about what people will think. It can’t be good. Homeless people. On the train you really find out what down and out smells like. In Seattle you walk, or even drive, by people sleeping on the street and feel a twinge of sadness or guilt. Maybe you give them your leftovers and you keep it pushin’. Never do you have to walk into a 6’ x 25’ box and have to scan the place for the source of the stench. I had NO idea at all what so many people who don’t have a place to clean themselves, and have conditions that may or may not interfere with the body’s ability to heal, smell like. I am not making a joke here, I really didn’t know. It is AWFUL. It’s gangrenous. If you walk into a crowded train car and there appear to be a bunch of unoccupied seats in one area of the car, don’t even bother walking over there. More than likely someone is stretched out over three seats and all the adjacent seats smell far too rancid to occupy. People totally ignore the person, and the smell and just move to the other side. It’s very strange. Last night I sat down and noticed there was a guy asleep across one of the three-seat panels who had puked several times over the barrier and against the door. A really weird looking African American man who, in a perfect world where health care was accessible to all might have been better able to regulate his thyroid production, got on and started reading hustler in the seat across from the puker. I was surprised he sat there, considering. He got up to get off the train and stood right in the bile and didn’t even notice when his heel slipped leaving the car. So alarming and so, so gross. Once I was across from a homeless man taking up five seats, sleeping on a standing room only train. He was passed out, snoring, and mumbling and totally impervious to all the dirty looks and angry energy he was getting for taking up so much room. Suddenly, after being asleep for at least 45 loud and crowded minutes, the conductor says this is York street, or whatever, and the guy wakes up, like he has somewhere to be, says “Oh shit!’ gathers up all his bags and blankets and dashes off the train. Bizarre. The first few weeks I was here I was totally amazed by the sleeping on the train. People must be SO tired to fall out as fast as they do. Little did I know; that’s two hours of rest I could be getting every day! A few weeks ago, I was dozing off on my way home when I was awoken by a group of mosquitoes with tiny guitars and shakers sitting on my shoulder and singing mariachi songs. At least that’s what I thought it was, actually this Mexican guy, who had sat down next to me and was listening to Mariachi music on his headphones so loudly that it woke me up, yet he was sound asleep and drooling. In a large part, New Yorkers’ lack of compassion for anyone but the wealthy comes from having to deal, in a very up close and personal way with everybody’s nasty personal habits and problems. The moneyed elite are an exception since they are so monetarily blessed that they can keep their smells, arguments, coughs and prayers to themselves. It’s on the hush, just between them and their driver, and possibly their nanny. I also choose my books more carefully when I know I’m going to be reading on the train. Everyone else, who is also trying to avoid staring shamelessly at the people around them, invariably checks out what you’re reading. So you don’t want to be seen reading anything really corny. Plus, especially at night, you want to project a hard image. You want that “don’t even think about talking to me, much less mugging me when I step off the train into the deserted station even though there isn’t anything I can do about it if you do” kind of look. I wouldn’t have thought about the effect your reading choice could have on this until I was reading this bell hooks book called All About Love, which has a large sub title that reads “ A warm affirmation that love is possible.” So there I am on the F at 1 am, trying my Seattle, car-having best to look hard, while at the same time broadcasting my secret fear that love may not be possible and that I want to read an expert’s assurance that it is. That does not work. Affirmations about love: not hard. In an effort to appear cool, literary but not too obtuse, I started reading Still Life with Woodpecker, a Tom Robbins novel. What dreck! I can’t believe how popular his writing is! It was all about a princess of some imaginary eastern European country, exiled to Seattle (of all places) and some outlaw (the cooler word for criminal) who wants to blow up a sustainable development conference in Hawaii but ends up getting drunk and dynamiting a meeting of the UFO Believers of America. It was inane and after 50 pages I purposely left it on the seat when I got to my stop. Hanif Kureshi (Buddha of Suburbia and Gabriel’s Gift) makes for a good subway read, not so complex that you can’t pick up where you left off and compelling enough that it makes the time go by quickly. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenedies was fantastic, subway or not. Jonathan Frantzen’s novel The Corrections is amazing. I think it might actually be perfect. Just the right balance of depressing minutia, and sweeping universality. Great characters, great plots. A real, grim picture of the American Caucasian psyche; born in the 50’s, surviving today in the Midwest. Get it on tape if you must, you can listen to it while you wait to get through Husky traffic on Montlake! Of course now that its winter, reading is out and knitting is in, sweetie. Everyone who is anyone is knitting on the train. It’s like a seasonal virus that every woman within a 50 mile radius of Williamsburg all contracted at the same time. I’m sure book sales are plummeting. Barnes and Noble yarn section?

breaking the silence

Wow writing can really feel like a burden! I’ve been putting it off for two weeks, procrastinating to the point that I actually went out and bought books ABOUT writing rather than writing. To add to which injustice, even though I’m wracked with guilt about not writing, I have nothing to write about! Good lord. I want to come back normal next time around. None of this fancy pants artsy shit, I want to work in an air conditioner plant, or a Detroit auto assembly line and drink beer after work, fall asleep without brushing my teeth and marry a homely blonde who wears sweatpants, lots of eyeshadow, and curses like the owner/operators that both her parents were. I guess I’m comin’ back as a man. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Hey, that’s not a bad opener! Maybe this writing thing isn’t so bad! Anyway, these last two weeks have been great and not great simultaneously. Mahdis moved out and I miss her. Work and moving been HECTIC for both of us, so we haven’t been able to spend much time together. Since we were like an old married couple for the first month and a half that I was here, it’s a little weird. I’ve been record-breakingly anxious for no real reason except that I’m far as hell from home, miss my old life and haven’t been able to get to a dance class in the last three weeks. LAME! Plus I’m on the train an easy two hours a day, which is long, rank and gives a girl opportunity for an intensive immersion in lives of the mentally ill and less fortunate. I haven’t been in touch with my Seattle people as much as I was, and I can feel relationships shifting. Not that its all bad, its just a little scary and anxiety producing. On the other side of the coin, I’m making some new friends, some really cool women who I met through my friend Asa in LA. Last week we hung out in Harlem, ate fried fish and waffles. Yesterday we went out dancing in the E Village, drank several too many Caiperinhas and went to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and fries at a swanky 24 hour diner (swanky + diner = ?) One of the girls goes to a free dance class up at 114th between freddy d and adam clayton powell. I’m going to go check it out next Thursday. Yesterday, I finally got my ass back to class at Djoniba. It was the best dance class I’ve had since I got here. Really refreshing and fun, even the dressing room wasn’t that bad. The class wasn’t crowded and Ousmane SALL is one of my favorite dance teachers. His Sabar is light and birdy, funky and spirited. I feel about 100 percent better than I did yesterday, despite a burning urethra from all the lime juice in those stupid drinks. Work is fine, the new receptionist that they just hired had the nerve to ask about overtime and was fired for being “late” two days later. You do the math. The one receptionist from Kentucky who helped train me and was the only other person who worked over the time that Aleksandra (the Slovakian chick) was gone, never showed up to work the day after we threw a launch party for a small bath and body product line. She called a few days later, and said that she thought someone at the party had slipped something into her drink and she had been blacked out for like two days. It was inferred that she felt it was one of the ManeSh’mafia guys, all of Judah and Chaim’s friends and cousins who come in, and sit and drink espresso in their beautiful, outrageously stylish tailored clothes and flirt overtly with women young enough to be their children. Mane Sh’ma means “what’s up” in Hebrew and since they not only look Mafioso, have the strangely attractive, dark charisma and bravado of the old school family organizations, but are also in the wholesale diamond district, I call them the ManeSh’mafia, you’ve got to see these guys. That said, I really don’t think they slipped her anything. She gets wasted enough to black out all the time anyway, and the shmafiosos get enough ass on their own accord without having to roofie anyone let alone a 20 year old kentuckyite who drinks beer and thinks expensive jeans are dressy. She just didn’t want to work there anymore and didn’t have the cojones to quit. In further remarkably efficient efforts to make all the other assistants hate me, I’m helping Chaim and Judah write an employee manual. They are breaking ground for several massage/facial rooms downstairs and their existing business is so disorganized that if it weren’t for the wealth of their clientele they would be up shit creek without a paddle. I gently suggested that now may be a good time to start thinking of things like mission statements and business plans. They know its true, when it comes to making money, its time to get American. So they’re having me help with the writing and formulation of policy. Not the most thrilling but nice change of pace, and nice to be appreciated. I finally have a bedroom, with a bed in it, and a dresser, courtesy of Craigslist in conjuction with Yehudini the magic mover. I met him in Rego Park, Queens and we drove to Long Island to pick it up. He was SURE that the people we were getting the thing from were black, cause of the neighborhood I guess, but I told him I didn’t think so from talking to them. I can tell an old white guy on the phone. Sure enough the guy with the dresser looked like Mickey Rooney, in his depressing post glory days. His son was a house DJ, and he had a small yippy dog that looked even tinier when he held it against has sizable paunch. A word about the driving between LI and QNS, you are really, really taking your life into your own hands on those freeways. Numerous parkways, expressways and other euphemisms for concrete death river merge and morph into each other with little or no notice. People drive at breakneck speeds so you cant even slow down to exit, which is bad enough without some of the exits being blocked off with metal bars and no warning until you’re speeding towards a barricade with no way to re-enter traffic. As we listened to French newsradio detailing the horrors of youth race riots in Paris which, according to Yehudini, are another perfect example of how “Blacks” refuse to get with the program and become law abiding members of society, that if I lived through it that I would do no more online furniture shopping. So far I’ve kept my promise. Funny story: I told Yehudini to make sure and bring his son to come help us, mostly cause I wanted to see him but in part cause I thought we could use the help. When he picked me up, the kid wasn’t there. I asked where he was and Yehudini said he was too into his computer to be torn away. I told him to tell the baby I was mad and that he better call me and apologize. You know, just to tease him a little and let him know we wanted him there. Kid stuff. So Yehudini says to me “ Do you want to date my son?” You could have knocked me over with a feather! No, Jesus No! Not at all! I just like the kid; he has a sweet spirit! My god, I’m almost 30! (as an aside, I accidentally typed “I’m almost 23” there by accident and genuinely laughed aloud when I saw it written. Almost 23! Ahahahah! ) “Hey, I don’t know, maybe you like him! I’m a cool guy! I know how life is! These weird things happen, Ashton and Demi are very happy together.” I stressed that I didn’t in any way think that it was appropriate for him to feel comfortable with a 30 year old woman dating his 17 year old son, and were I truly interested he should chastise me thoroughly. I had to stifle laughter the rest of the ride home. Mahdis’ friend, who fled Iran for reasons of persecution and has since biked and run from like Ethiopia to Senegal and Alaska to Brazil for peace (just look at all the good its done! Bless his heart. He’s going to run the perimeter of the states next though, so that oughta do it) helped Yehudini move the dresser up the stairs. I didn’t know his athleticism when he was doing it and kept worrying that it was too heavy or that he’d hurt himself. He didn’t. I had some great learning days at the salon, did a lot of color this last couple of weeks. Everyone is getting ready to winter in Florida and the Cays and getting their highlights in shape. That’s the accessory of choice for the UES set. Everyone has a condo on the East Side, a house in the Hamptons and a beach house in florida which is just so much work with the upkeep especially with these damn storms! One strange woman with very short hair came in and spent a good three and a half hours in the shop to get three inches of hair perfectly platinum. It’ll be totally grown out in two months. What a monster waste of time. Learned how to help someone who has dyed their hair far too dark back to a normal dark shade of brown. It’s an ugly process, with some very bad in-between stages, during which Chaim in his typical hilarious and mellow fashion turned the chair away from the mirror and told the lady not to be scared if she saw the halfway stage. Basically, you use bleach, 20 vol, all over the cold shaft of the hair, then go back to the roots with it after you see the tint lifting. Bleach the roots, hopefully not getting them too light, and rinse the whole thing. Then deposit whatever level you need, taking into account the underlying pigment, just to the roots, let process 20 min, then apply to the rest of the hair shaft and keep an eye on it, cause it will deposit pretty quickly and you don’t want it to get too dark all over again. Ta da! You look the same as you did before you started the whole process except now your hair feels like horse tail and will be brassy in three weeks! Enjoy! Then, speaking of horses, I helped one of the stylists with her client who decided that she needed to be much blonder for the winter. Which would have been unremarkable except that the week before she had been thrown from her (giant expensive) horse and broken 11 ribs (out of the 12 possible) and her collarbone. What with the sling and the percodan, it was probably not the best week to be in and out of the shampoo bowl with a full head of highlights for a bleach and tone process that takes 2+ hours on a good day. She was truly miserable by the time she left. She couldn’t even sit to have her hair dried. Vanity; it’s a hurter

djoniba story

I am a 29 year old woman of Eastern European Jewish ancestry. I have dark hair and eyes and yellow tone skin that is only brown after direct sun exposure. I am not black. Nor will I ever be. I like who I am, or I try to anyway. As a woman under constant attack by media culture and consumer sorcery, its not always easy. I dance. I have chosen to do west African dance. Its an interesting choice, and one I have to think about a lot in many different situations when my integrity or my authenticity is called into question. I just moved to a new city. When I was at home on the west coast I danced with a woman, my best friend, with whom we created a dance community that made sense and was authentic for anyone who came in with an authentic spirit no matter their skin color or ethnic background. Now I live in New York City. Where nothing happens without regard to color of skin or ethnicity of background. Dancing here is different. In some ways different in a good way, there is more going on, more variety, more motivation through competition, more music. In some ways, in a bad way, more crowded, less accessible, more competitive spirit, more predjudice, more body odor, more ulterior motives for dancing. So this story is illustrative of the strange way that you are tested for your authenticity and integrity as a non-black, new coming West African dance student in New York City. Sat evening class at Djoniba Dance and Drum center right off Union Square on 18th and Broadway. One of the best times to dance because the class is in the big studio with a wood floor that doesn’t get sweatslippery towards the middle of class like the rubber floor in the back studio. So I always try to be there from 630 to 9 on Saturdays. The downside of the class is the changing room. When class gets out, enough people to crowd the large dance studio and make sweatsteam run down the mirrors, cram into a space the size of a tiny manhattan studio apartment, including the square footage used up for two toilet stalls and a shower. Not to mention these are the selfsame women who have just sweated out the studio and provided the aforementioned competitive ulterior motivated spirit. The air is the dressing room is heavy with humid human odor and insecure comparison. It is impossible to get undressed without bumping someone else in various stages of disrobe. For me, coming from our comfortable studio with 10 students and immesureable love, it is an untenable situation. I cant get undressed and cool down and redress in that room, I just cant do it. So I wanted to leave the class just a little early so I could rinse off and put myself together before the water buffalo stampede. Unfortunately I had been dancing close to the front line of the class, so it wasn’t so subtle that I left early. I know the rules of the class however, and I know that if someone ahead of you leaves for any reason, which happens somewhat often, if someone cant do a step, has a cramp or has to go to the bathroom, you have to step up into the empty place in line and the person behind you the same and so on…So I didn’t really think it would be a problem. As I stepped out of the shower, and toweled off quickly, a European woman (with an accent from somewhere) came in to the dressing room with a disapproving expression. “You caused chaos in class leaving early! You didn’t tell the teacher and you just left, it was a huge commotion. You better wrap something around yourself, don’t bother getting dressed and run in and apologize to him.” Now, I may be new in NYC, but Ive been to a lot of dance classes in my time. First of all, I know all the drummers, and the teacher. I know they know people have to leave class sometimes. And they know I don’t want to undress in a superbowl half time locker room. And I know that I am no more likely to run in front of a dance class in a towel to prostrate myself in apology to anyone than I am to buy a ski-doo and try to navigate the atlantic ocean and arrive in Gambia’s capital city of Banjul to plant a flag on the beach. As I was reeling from the woman’s ludicrous suggestion another woman, who I remember as being African American but might not have been, came in and said to Europeana Accento “Did you tell her?” Like she was the representative for the whole angry class. I proceeded to get dressed, redo my hair and makeup and leave the studio. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars do not come into class to apologize to Elhadj in a towel. I called him after class to make sure he wasn’t mad and to apologize if I had been rude. He said he had no idea what I was talking about. Im sure he did, but it was already over and probably not that big a deal to him anyway. He told me never to think about it again and he would see me next Saturday. Unusual occurances have kept me from class for the last three weeks. Knowing what I know about the culture and the way things work, I think Ive got a touch of the evil eye. Some jealousy, some questions about my authenticity, my integrity. But I’m going to Boston this weekend, then I’ll be back, and I’ll be in class, and I’ll still be white, and this will still be America, where I can decide to do west African dance, decide to do it respectfully, well and to know myself and my place. Im sure the same thing wouldn’t have happened if I were a new African American student at Djoniba, but there isnt much I can do about that. If something doesn’t present a challenge, it usually isn’t worth doing, and this kind of subtle subterfuge story is the challenge of the dance community. Pay attention to how you are treated, is there more than meets the eye? Usually. So, change when you need to, apologize when fully dressed, know yourself and whom you’re dealing with and always make sure the person behind you knows to fill your spot.