This is Brooklyn

Brooklyn defined itself for me tonight.

I've been struggling with a way to describe it to those of you that have never been here.  Brooklyn is an odd place.  It's not necessarily where you go when you visit NYC but it also isn't a place you forget to go to like the Bronx.  The Bronx is one of those mysterious places you always hear about but which you never venture to simply because you're not sure what to expect once you get there.  Is it Yankee Stadium or is it sketchy?  I still haven't been there...

My night tonight was Brooklyn, nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

I finished work in the financial district of Manhattan, two blocks from the World Trade Center...or what it has become.  A mecca of tourist wanderers poring over various colored maps frustrating Wall Street traders who can't pretend that the world below Canal and east of Battery Park City holds more precedence over that of the screens of their iPhones and blackberries (blackberrys?).  I spent two and a half hours at Vino Vino, a wine bar in TriBeCa, soothing my palate with a soft California pinot noir since that is what seems to relax me, Matt, and Eleni the most.  Since we can't get California out of our system, we might as well ingest and insert some of it into our blood.  An Israeli couchsurfer of mine joined in on the wine frolic and similarly cooled to a calm Santa Cruz beach afternoon.

I let Eleni convince me to go to Williamsburg (hipster Brooklyn) for a taco and one last drink at her staple bar - Night of Joy.  It doesn't take more than 30 seconds of just saying the word "taco" for me to agree to an evening jaunt in New York's hipster haven where I find it hard to distinguish one male from another since they all seem to sport the same 1920's mustache and plaid shirts.  Simmer midtown Sacramento with a sprinkle of New York City for 20 minutes and - voila! - you may now inhale Williamsburg to your heart's finest pleasure.

So, we were in Williamsburg.  After getting over my surprise at having to explain (again) what Mexican food consisted of (because, honestly, who doesn't know what a quesadilla is? Green enchiladas? Come on!) to my Israeli couchsurfer, Shachar, we started walking towards Night of Joy which just happened to house - if but for a few hours - Eleni's "friend."  While we were practicing our ability to scan for creepers while walking under the highway overpass, we spotted one tiny storefront fluorescently illuminated and what appeared to be a sign on the makeshift bar that read "Welcome."  What more blatantly caught our Catholic-school-girl-who-is-used-to-corny-religiousness eyes were the twirling, blow-up crosses flying from the ceiling fan.

We all pretended we weren't staring until Eleni and I instantaneously agreed that it was a good idea to walk over and see what was happening.

We walked into a small room, looking as if it were being renovated complete with dry paint rollers, fist symbols haphazardly placed on the walls, and a ladder as the center pedestal of the four white walls and psychedelically orange tiled floor.  Nathan and Michael were holding up the bar...or what seemed to be one.  They yelled at us to come on in and placed a beer in front of each of us and asked if we wanted a shot of rum to go with it.  It seemed like a bad idea...for about 5 seconds.  And then I realized, "Well, what the hell?  I'm either all in or I should leave."  So, I took both.  I was given Nathan's stool to sit on, Eleni got the ladder to perch upon, and Shachar got the stool that had previously been turned upside-down on top of this "bar."  We asked if it was a bar.  They told us it was the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center.  Google those names.

And that's how the night was.

The three of us slumped in this white, open prison of anarchy and dreams.  Eleni and I, who have shared almost 10 years of questionable life experiences, and Shachar, our Israeli couchsurfer who held his own in a debate about whether Jesus had really spent 40 days in the desert with the two of us Bible-blooded girls from Sacramento who hail St. Francis High School as one of the biggest defining periods of their lives directly before spotting flying crosses on Lorimer and Meeker streets in Brooklyn, New York.  We sat in a circle...well, Michael stood behind his "bar" that turned out to actually be the front room of his home.  Eleni and I were sneaky enough - and, let's face it, cute enough - to be allowed to take a peek at what was behind the bar and a semi-closed, similarly white door, and found it to be a home inspired by Ikea catalogues.  We spent over an hour comparing Michael to Woody Allen and hearing his story about how he actually met his doppelganger after throwing explosives out his window during the filming of one of Woody's films on the Upper West Side back when explosives in New York actually made people giggle instead of cringe.  We watched Nathan take shot after shot and then inwardly drooled at his West Virginia accent that, once we acknowledged, he quickly tried to transform into the typical Queens one...which attracts about 1/10th of the ladies.  He was instantly advised to stick with West Virginia.  Eleni pretended to be interested in the do-it-yourself, 80's craft book.  I helped choose lounge-appropriate records.  I'm not even sure what Shachar was doing since I was completely immersed in the fact that I felt I was in another world.  One far below Brooklyn.  We had walked off the stage of our life's performance to rest our bodies before ultimately having to return from behind the curtains.  Time stopped in the Sacco & Vanzetti Cultural Center.

We even looked through a hole in the wall to see "Take me to your leader" literally flashing before our eyes.  When we peeked around the corner to see where it was being projected we saw nothing.  Just Michael's bed.  The flashing light was coming from somewhere.  But Eleni was still perched like a treasure beneath the spinning blow-up crosses proclaiming "I love Jesus" and various versions of the same idea.

All of a sudden it seemed like it was time to enter the stage - the same way we came in - and press ourselves into the world again.  We were sent off with encouragements to stop by anytime we "needed it", whether it be in a day or a year.

We crossed the street to Night of Joy and it was as if we had been refreshed.  God had refilled our fuel tanks of life.

I left soon after arriving there.  My "normal" life of work at 9:30am was calling along with the reminder that I had 14-hour days for the next three days.  As I was waiting for the B48 bus that takes me almost to my dirty, cement doorstep, a young guy came up to me and started speaking to me...although it was in horribly broken English.

"How are you?"
"Good, thank you."
"How old are you?"
"How old am I?"
"No, how old are you?"
(Ignoring him)
"How old are you?"
(Bus pulls up - I jump in and sit down a few seats behind the driver where he can easily see me)

Then the foreign guy starts knocking on the window.  The bus doesn't pull away.  The foreign man starts banging on the window.  The middle-aged, Brooklyn-specific woman tells me that someone is trying to talk to me.  As I look up at her, the driver asks if I want to speak with the man outside.

"I don't even know who he is."

The woman looks surprised: "Oh, that's creepy."

The driver: "You don't know him? Well, let's show him what he deserves.  Let's leave him here.  You're in good hands, sweetie.  Don't worry."

He shut the doors instantly and pulled away.

After a few more minutes of the motherly, but feisty, woman and the driver simultaneously arguing and agreeing that the encounter "just isn't cool", the driver believed it was time to share his poem.  He had written a poem in college, some 30 years before this moment, that he had kept memorized in his mind.  It was about New York.  He recited it for the whole bus to hear as he drove and picked passengers up and dropped them off to their homes.  It wasn't lyrically-eloquent but its emotion and verve were enough to make you remember the moment even when you feel as if you've had enough of this city and its quirks.

At the end of the recited poem by the MTA bus driver who had put 7 children through school, a man in front of me simply professed his love for what it said about our community (yes, now it's "our" community, since I feel as much a part of it as anyone else on the bus) :

"A 12-year old Puerto Rican girl spoke to Mr. Bloomberg when he was here in Bed-Stuy a few weeks ago.  He gave his whole speech and then asked if anyone had anything to say.  This little girl stood up and said, 'Yes, Mr. Bloomberg.  I may be poor but not in my heart.'"

Hurricane Irene

I've been through a lot of strange weather in the past few months but I never thought I'd have to survive a hurricane...more like a "hurricane."

My life was hot and sweaty until I got to Oklahoma.  Then it just turned into hot, sweaty, and sticky.  And windy.  It all made sense considering the day before I arrived in that midwestern sprawl of a city there were tornadoes twirling through it.

Then I drove to Arkansas where I was met with more humidity and a temperature that made you want to just sit down on the pavement and wait to walk the last 10 minutes to wherever you were going.  Time moved so slowly there that I would've thought it normal to see someone just stop walking, stare in the direction towards where they were walking, then slide down to the ground and inhabit a square of sidewalk until the sun went down and it was deemed cool enough to continue onwards.

New Orleans was too hot and too humid.  I didn't realize it was possible to have weather like this.  By this time I was growing accustomed to the humidity but not to the record-breaking temperatures.  I'm pretty sure mercury was trying to spite all of the area's inhabitants by raising itself as high as it possibly could.  One particular day was so hot that I - and being from Sacramento where the weather normally flirts with 100 degrees regularly in the summer didn't help - told Christo we needed to leave the street fair early and stay inside with the AC on all day.  I was practicing my homegrown, suburban housewife skills...I can forgive myself only for the fact that that was the day the city broke the record for heat.  In NOLA I also got my first bouts of summer rain for the roadtrip.  Rain in California in the summer doesn't exist.  It's a hard thing to get used to.  It practically ruins a California girl's summer day.

Birmingham was more heat but luckily I scored big time with my lovable hosts who both were firm believers in a cold AC all day, every day.  It was also my first time on the trip where I had to wait for it to stop raining for me to go swimming.  This is also a strange thing for a California girl.  Almost incomprehensible.

From then on it was me and the rain dancing a delicate waltz with the heat being an ever-foreboding presence waiting and ready to slip in at whatever chance it got.

Then comes news that there's a hurricane coming.

A hurricane is coming? To New York?

My first discussion about this conundrum with Eleni proved our California-ness.

"Fuckin' global warming."

No one here took it seriously.  Everyone's prediction was that it would pass us up or be too weak once it got here.  Then, the day before it was supposed to hit, everyone started to take notice.  News anchors and reporters were urging everyone to watch the weather reports and pay close attention to the path our new friend, Irene, was paving towards us.  After work on Friday all of the markets were packed full of scurrying New Yorkers tossing whatever they deemed hurricane-worthy into their mini baskets and creating lines for the registers that snaked around various aisles.

The next morning I went to the market and didn't know what to buy.  The city was shutting down at noon more or less since MTA was stopping all subway and bus service and the world knows that New Yorkers don't own cars.  Effectively, we all were being put on house arrest.  I ended up buying what I normally buy at the market for the week: a lot of vegetables, even more fruit, bagels, a loaf of bread, almond milk, pita chips, hummus, a few other items that I know my mum keeps in her pantry.  For some reason the only thing I thought hurricane-worthy was a box of Pop Tarts.  You can't argue with that.

I spent all day cooped up in my bedroom watching "Mad Men" and texting Eleni a couple rooms over about how we both believed our butts were truly glued to our beds and our eyes couldn't be turned away from Don Draper for more than one minute at a time.  Or two minutes if it involved getting up for a beer.

All four of us that live in my apartment - the two California girls and the two windy city ladies - cooked dinner.  We attempted to do it together but there were too many of us in the kitchen so we took turns and all created our own dishes.  We reflected on the hilarity of it taking a hurricane to get all of us to sit down and eat together for once.  Every once in awhile we'd stand by our 7-foot tall windows and subdue our jealousy of people walking around outside simply for the fact that they were walking around.

Eventually we all fell asleep fully updated on where the hurricane was, its wind speeds, how much rain was expected, and how soon it would be before the hurricane hit.  I woke up three times in the middle of the night and tried to look out my window but only saw rain in the light's reflection on the wall across the way.  I heard wind but nothing out of the ordinary.

When I woke up it was as if Saturday had never happened.  We were still being told to remain inside and that many areas of NY/NJ had substantial flooding and damage but that didn't match what we saw out of our window.  One of my roommates even complained that she had slept through the hurricane.  Another one commented on the amount of food we had in our house...we figured we'd last a month if we rationed it well but that our liquor supply would definitely be the first thing to run out.

I ended up being called into work that night.  Subways were still non-functional but the restaurant paid for all of the employees' taxis to and from their shift.  I watched mini tornadoes form up and down the street from my perch at the hostess stand.  It ended up being really busy at work because everyone was sick of sitting inside.

In all it turned out to be a dud and New Yorkers acted exactly how New Yorkers would: they ignored the problem until they couldn't any longer, overreacted, then when it was over they said, "What the fuck?" and continued on with life like nothing had happened.  That's pretty much how life is here.  A lot of "what the fuck?" and nonchalance.  I like it.  I always knew I had a California girl's personality and an east coaster's mentality.

But, anyway...I survived my first hurricane.  In New York.  I even haggled with a cabbie over my cab fare and won.  I'm pretty sure New York has accepted me now.