My Neighborhood

I looked over my last two posts and noticed that they just seem to really paint my neighborhood in a really bad light. So I thought I'd put up a post about the things I like about my neighborhood.

Every weekend so far, there seems to be some soccer game in the field near my apartment. There is some sort of Latino-immigrant soccer league and people come out with their kids and stuff to cheer on the teams that come out to play each other. Sometimes it gets pretty funny to watch because the fans not only rag on the opposing team (though there really isn't a "home" team and an "opposing" team) they also rag on the fans of the other team...all pretty light-heartedly.

I also like that there is the creek near me, though now that i live further from the metro station, i don't get to walk by it as much. Nonetheless, when I am sick of being at home (of which I am a lot these days as I try to pull together my dissertation proposal) I go out for a walk and there is enough natural scenery around here that it makes for some nice walking.

Speaking of walking, I can walk to the supermarket, some cool restaurants run by immigrants (which to me means really really good food! Immigrants who service immigrants have cultural food pride.) There is an ice cream shop near me. The metro station is not too terribly far (though the walk is now a nice 20 minutes). I found a super great farmers' market- sells only local farm stuff so types of veggies and fruits are a little limited to what's in the area but super yummy- that is only a 10 minute drive from me.

My neighbors all seem fairly nice, though they all do have a tendency to play really really really REALLY loud music. My upstairs neighbors pose more of a noise problem than my neighbors across the way. But the guys upstairs seem fairly receptive to turning down the music when it gets to be too loud. I once went up in my pajamas on a Saturday morning to try to make them feel bad about having loud music before 10 am on a Saturday. Hey, I think the guilt was deserved. They did disturb my lazy saturday morning!

So even with the recent gripes, I think I still like my neighborhood. It is especially easy to like it on nice cool sunny days like this.

domestic violence

Tonight my spouse and I helped a neighbor with a domestic violence issue. We helped her call the cops, bring her to the commissioners office to file charges, and brought her to a relative's place to stay. The guy is running around my neighborhood somewhere. They had dated earlier in the year but he assaulted her, so she broke it off with the guy. She moved but he apparently found out where she moved to and basically stalked her for a bit. Then he acted all nice, apologizing, brought down her guard, she let him in so he could shower and eat, then demanded that she give him some money. When she wouldn't, he went on the rampage, assaulted her and then stole her keys to her new apartment. That was today. He wouldn't give back the keys and she was, understandably, upset about it. They were fighting in front of my window. I am glad that we and another neighbor were able to help her out a bit. (Oh, the nice thing that came out of this was that we met a new neighbor, she's been here for a few years and seems really nice.

So my neighborhood kind of scares me. All in all, I like my neighbors) the part that makes me scared is related to my last blog post. This adds to my fear. I don't understand human anger...well, I guess anger of any sort very much. I don't know its limits. Will this guy, out of his anger at us for stepping in like that, try to take out his anger on us? Anger that he was going to reserve only for that woman? Apparently he not only stole her keys and beat her, but raped her and stole her pay check (which she had just cashed).

Two years ago, a woman I knew from work was killed by her ex-boyfriend. She had broken up with him and had kicked him out of the apartment. I don't know how long they had been dating but I think for a long time (maybe 11 years? they have a kid together). In any case, he came over to her place one night. An argument ensued. The woman told her daughters to go into the bedroom while that guy was there. Essentially, the guy stabbed her several times in the abdomen. He was wearing gloves and so there were no prints on the weapon. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. One of her daughters had to call 911. She died before she got to the hospital. I worry at times about the child they had together ("my momma's dead because she was brutally killed by my poppa"). He got indicted for manslaughter. Prison time for manslaughter is less than prison time for being indicted for stealing a car here. I guess we know what our priorities are here.

So here is my plug. If you or anyone you know is in a domestic violence situation, here's the number to call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Here is the website information: http://www.ndvh.org/ It is a national organization and they can put you in touch with the organization in your neighborhood. Domestic violence is not limited to particular age, ethnicity, socio-economic class, gender, or education levels. Emotional and physical abuse is considered domestic violence.

Though I like people, I don't always understand them

So sometime in the past year, I posted about how my neighborhood makes me feel uncomfortable. Yesterday, walking home from the metro station, I crossed the street at a stop sign. I crossed because I saw a group of young men, in their late teens to early twenties I think, hanging around on the sidwalk trying to look cool, tough, what have you. As they covered the entire sidewalk area and the grassy area adjacent the walkway, I decided to cross the street. I am uncomfortable walking through the midst of a group of men. I admit it, I don't usually trust men in large groups...but then again, I am not sure I trust women in large groups either but that depends on where, when, and how old the group is.

As I crossed the street, I passed in front of a van. When I got to the other side of the street, I began to notice that someone in the van was yell out the window- something about a bitch and something about being run over, and maybe something about next time. I was pretty certain it was meant for me, though I didn't try to show signs of registering it. There were no other women around, as far as I could tell and I was the only person crossing the street.

So, what was it that makes people do things like that? These are acts of agression. They have a lasting impact on me. I have been violated as if they had punched me in the face. What are they angry at, what did I do to them? Why did they think that it was reasonable to do that? My spouse said that there are many reasons why people do that. Sometimes it is because they are angry. Sometimes, they are just sadistic assholes who want to posture in front of their friends and one just gets caught up in the power of being nasty to someone else. Are they taking out their frustrations of feeling a lack of power in their lives out on me? I can't help but associate acts of agression with anger. Somehow doing that makes it feel better to me...that somehow people aren't really sadistic, but that some emotion, something else took control of them and made them do it. Because if they had their wits about them, they wouldn't have chosen to do that. But I might be wrong...and this is the part that perplexes me and makes me sad. Maybe the guy who did that to me would have chosen to do it again, even if he did know me and knew what an impact it had on me and he wasn't angry, and he was by himself (well, my guess is that really, only a psychopath would do it by himself because one typically only attacks someone if one knew that they had back-up readily available)...and...and...That in the end, there is an element of sadism in human nature. That people do things just because people like to bully other people.

So, that is twice in two years in this neighborhood that this has happened. My husband tells me that this is can happen when you are one of the first few into a neighborhood. This isn't the only thing that has led me to feel unwelcomed in this neighborhood. I get stared at when I walk around here. The curiosity stares I am okay with. It is the glares that I get from people, the once-overs, the look me up and down and then the stare of aggression in the face that communicates" Yea, I stared at ya, whatcha gonna do about it? You do not belong here and you are invading my territory." This leads me to my next wondering. This wondering makes me angry and terrified. I don't want to move. I have a right to be here. But maybe I am being pig-headed. Maybe it really is unsafe for me and I am not paying attention to the signs. Maybe one day I will get beaten-up, raped, run-over, what have you because some one is in a bad mood, is with their friends, is just in the mood and wants to bully someone else. Then that bullying leads to something with terrifying results for me and they dont' care...even when they sober up and see my maimed mangled body on the ground. Humans are capable of this, look at Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda....it is possible for it to happen here too.

Am I misunderstanding people? Are they better than that? This is one of my deepest fears about people. I don't understand bullying and my imagination runs amuck.

I like people.

Okay, so I have admitted it. I like people. I really like people and no matter how hard I try, I always end up liking people. I am such a sucker for a good story and ya know, people are just chock full of 'em. People live pretty darn interesting lives, have fascinating interests, peculiar takes on things and story-worthy events that occur in their lives. If you are patient enough, you can see the beauty in their lives or the wisdom they've gained about the world. It really doesn't matter how old they are nor where they are from.

Of course, sometimes people annoy me, do things I don't agree with and make me mad. Sometimes mad enough to want to hate them. But in the end, I get suckered into liking them when I really think about them as human beings and I just listen to them closely.

sigh...I am such a sucker for the human race and all the members of it.

something for everyone!

Tonight, after waiting an entire summer, I finally saw Snakes on a Plane with my dear significant other. I am afraid of flying (well, it is the plummeting part I don't like) and my darling dear is afraid of snakes. My stomach has yet to uncoil. The snakes part really wasn't that scary to me.

I wonder what else could they put in that film that would touch on everyone's fears. In the movie, there was a hypochondriac on the plane and by golly, germs EVERYWHERE! At the end, the black man gets the white girl (hitting on white male fears of sexual incompetency; note, in the pelican brief, the romance that would have taken place between denzel washington and julia roberts was taken out of the movie- hmmm...) and there is even a guy they think is a homosexual (hitting on heterosexual male fears- reinforced by snakes chomping on male genetalia).

They could put in the following: a nuclear war, aliens, terrorist suicide bombers with a nuclear warhead attached to his or her body (hey, is that a nuclear warhead in your pocket or are you just really pissed to see me?), time, space and interdimensional warpholes, ghosts and lost or possessed beings, monsters, roaches (maybe that is just my fear), ebola virus (more scary than avian bird flu because it turns your insides into gooey black stuff, anthrax is not as contagious), killer bugs (like spiders gone wild, army ants or pissed-off killer bees), an economic depression with rampant starvation, psycho robots...anything else i forgot?