I’ve forgone the usual tourist spots – statue, park, empire, landmarks from You’ve Got Mail can and will wait – I’ve been too harassed with this process called "settling in" that I’ve simply been whizzing by in subways, feet exhausted, arms falling off from heavy lifting, always tired, and hardly ever getting to settle down. The city has indeed gathered its huddled masses on her steaming streets, oblivious to its human traffic, crawling ass to ass. The only moment I had for hushed contemplation came on the way from the airport. Crossing the river, a wall of skyscrapers rose up like an army of giants pounding the night sky. Even my Haitian cab driver silenced his Creole rapping on the CB, instinctively understanding the need for it.
So I was back at ground zero with no furniture. But I decided to buy bedsheets and pillows anyway, because I’m a positive person. At the counter of the linen store, the cashier tried swiping my card. No deal. She tried another register. I waited for 30 minutes of futile swiping. Both registers bleeped angrily before suddenly shutting down, and the store manager gave me horrifying glares, as if I was transmitting an infectious virus from the Philippines via my Visa. It was a brand new card, too. That damn U-Haul.
In panic, I ended up buying an overpriced, understuffed mattress, ordered a desk at target.com, which will arrive by the time I graduate, and am using my suitcase as a shelving unit for clothes which will soon be rendered unseasonal. My flatmate, who already lived in the apartment, still remains a mystery as she is away on vacation. Uncharacteristically, I will refrain from judging her by her book covers (DaVinci Code and The Alchemist mingles uncomfortably with Still Life With Woodpecker and Salman Rushdie).
My small group classes were the chance to prove ourselves worthy, or conversely, reveal ourselves as shams. I don’t know what Anima felt, the only other girl from the Philippines and probably from a South East Asian country, but I was definitely taken aback at the amount and quality of work we were expected to do. Hard work I don’t mind, but covering the upcoming Republican National Convention? That must be a hidden circle of hell special for Michael Moore extremists.
One thing I am looking forward to is my neighborhood beat. Because Manhattan is the overplayed equivalent of the Simpson sisters on MTV, J-school students are assigned to cover lesser known, lesser wealthy neighborhoods in remote boroughs. Do stuff like talk to the locals and scam for info, but avoid getting arrested for loitering. Out of a hat I picked "Bushwick" as my adopted hood for the semester. Groan! A Rep Con and a boondock with the unfortunate name of the party’s presidential nominee? Could writing be any more challenging?
I googled Bushwick and instead of a Republican backwater, or even teeming immigrant ghetto, Bushwick turns out to be an old town in Brooklyn that was known, in ye olde days, as the beer capital of New York (how can you go wrong with that?). It was a settlement for German immigrants who put up breweries, naturlich, but has since been laid to industrialized waste and remains to this day a blighted relic of a town now populated mostly by non-whites. Have the attempts to revive and revitalize this historic but decaying section worked at all? Or will the neighborhood, gone to the dogs, be relegated to a past remembered by aging residents no more, only excavated time and again by gum shoe-gazing journalism students? If I title my piece "Bushwhacked" will it be ripped to shreds by my humiliation-loving professors?
Nice meeting you, Manhattan, but I must hop off. You’re just too full of yourselves, literally. Bushwick, here I come.