Bad Habits

When I was in Beirut I tried to write everyday or at least three times a week, but as you can see I need to get back to it with regularity.  A lot has happened in the past two weeks with my effort to start a block association.  Some of it has been good and other parts of it have been not so good.  I'm learning a lot about political action and have gotten to the point where I'm realizing I have to apply lessons I've learned from teaching and love to deal with the characters in this saga.

A number of years ago a first grade teacher who was a colleague came into the teacher's lounge and said.  "You won't believe this but I just did the craziest thing."  One of the boys in her class, who was aggressive by nature had hit another child.  The hitter was a challenge and my friend had met with his mother a number of times because of poor behavior.   The mother didn't want to hear about it.

"I told his mother that when he hit the other kid, I was afraid that he would hurt his poor little hand."  The mother melted and was finally open to working with my friend.

I realize that the only way my block can get out from under the grip of BRC is to say we are trying to fix up the block for them because we know that BRC is dedicated to helping people.  It is as crazy an idea as my friend's, fixing up the block to make life better for the people who are messing it up, but it is the only way I can figure out how to get them to stop bending my ear about what a wonderful job they do.

My next challenge is our new city council member, Mr. Corey Johnson.  We approached him about our project because he was new and we thought had no previous history with the BRC debacle We began working to schedule a meeting with him at the end of December and they finally came up with a date for early February.  We went to the meeting and his Chief of Staff met with us to tell us that he was too busy and called away to another meeting.  The meeting with the Chief of Staff was a waste of time mainly because he couldn't offer us anything other than a Love Your Block grant application that was due a week later.

I went to a meeting last week at the local Democratic club because Mr. Corey Johnson was going to be there.  I pinholes him and had a long conversation where he said some really stupid things, similar to 'urinating in the street isn't illegal' or 'the children in the projects have it much worse than the children in your building so why should anything be done about the quality of life on your block.'  Turns out he was the head of the community board that let this shelter be built on our block.  He came over to me after he spoke and whispered in my ear that he really wanted to meet with us and I should call his scheduler on Monday and tell her to make an appointment for soon.  I did and was told it had to go through the regular channels and I needed to send an e-mail.  A day later I got the response that he's so busy with the budget he can't meet with us until April.

I'm angry that such a jerk was elected to office, but I'm also practical, it is very clear that he doesn't want to have anything to do with our project, probably because he doesn't even now what it is.

Many years ago when I was still dating and felt like all rejections were coming my way, I finally came up with a strategy to come out on top after being rejected.  I called it reject the rejector.  I realized that it wasn't that I cared that much about the guy, it was that I felt so bad about being rejected.  If a man told me that he couldn't see me anymore and just wanted to be friends, I'd sit right down and write him a Dear John letter (remember this was years ago).  "I'm so sorry but I can't see you any more but let's just be friends."  I figured and it turned out to be right that nobody was every going to write back to me and say -- hey wait a minute, I rejected you first.  But another thing happened when I used this approach, the man became deferential and very respectful if he saw me again.  Once I did the rejecting I could move on with my life.

So now I'm going to figure out a way to reject Mr. Corey Johnson and being that he is no smarter than any of the men who rejected me, I'm hoping I can put this whole miserable thing behind me.

Opening a Can of Worms

I loved blogging from Beirut (http://walkinginbeirut.blogspot.com)  and have  missed writing an account of our adventures while living there.  I took it back up briefly with a trip to Portugal last February but never finished the last entries I planned to write.  

I dabbled briefly with writing about walking in Franklin during my year of living in a rural town in upstate New York.  Somehow in Franklin there just wasn't enough to write about.  I'm not a nature person who can wax elegantly about the creatures that I avoided seeing on my walks in the hills.  I did observe a turtle cross four lanes of traffic at a most unlikely spot.  As each car approached, it pulled back into its shell and then carried on when the coast was clear.  True, I kicked myself later for not talking out my cell phone and videoing it.  Never occurred to me to write about it.

Today I was listening to the novel Americanah about a blogger who did a blog entry on racism that I thought was brilliant.  Listening to this book reminded me of the pleasure of writing about thoughts and experiences.

As I was describing my day to Andy, I realized that I had come up with a blog idea or better yet a blog idea had found me.  It is actually an old story. If you want some background you can go to a blog my daughter and I started three years ago (http://dearmrrosenblatt.blogspot.com).  It was interrupted when I moved to Beirut.  

So it is now two and a half years later.  During the time I was away from West 25th Street, the BRC shelter settled in and changed our neighborhood.

To be clear when we moved to West 25th Street twenty years ago, it was a challenging place to live.  There were parking lots on every corner and our street was empty canyon.  There were plenty of people on the street during the day because of all of office buildings and businesses but at night it was dark and scary.  I remember walking down the middle of the street at night because the potential for danger was greater on the sidewalk and in the crevices that passed for doorways.

There were no supermarkets and few businesses that catered to residents.  A deli was on one corner and an XXXrated video store across the street.  The only thing this part of town had going for it was it is the most convenient location in all of Manhattan.  I have walked to the Battery as well as to the George Washington Bridge.  Midtown and the Village are just a saunter away.

Manhattan "developers" finally figured this out and there was a ten year building boom as 30 and 40 story buildings sprung up along Sixth and Seventh Avenues.  With the buildings came amenities.  If you love good food, as I do, there is no better place to live than on my block.  Fairway is on one corner, Whole Foods on another corner, Trader Joe's down the avenue and the Union Square Farmer's Market just blocks away.

It is hard to understand how anyone could think that this would be a good location for a massive homeless shelter, but that was what the city came up with.  BRC took over an office building and opened its doors to drug addicts, sex offenders, pedophiles, the mentally ill, and men who were facing real challenges.

Mr. Rosenblatt called me and my neighbors rotten, unfeeling people who didn't care about the homeless.  He told us, with a straight face that this shelter was going to be a big improvement for our community and actually raise our property values and improve the quality of our lives.

Needless to say, that is not how it turned out.  The quality of life on West 25th Street has become a challenge with men hanging out on the street, peeing and spitting in our doorways, lighting up joints as they exit the building where they are in drug treatment programs, and haranguing people passing by with, "can you spare a buck for coffee" or "loose joints."  When was the last time you heard somebody offering loose joints?