Week 2 in NYC (Takeo)

My second week, work-wise, is not enormously interesting to transcribe... it was mostly data entry, calling people to come to workshops, and researching ways to publish Urban Word's new book. Oh yeah, I performed a couple of times, but that's pretty self-explanatory. It's going well. But I think far more interesting is a more personal reflection on New York in general. The following is from my personal blog...




Carmen Alicia Rivera
Isais Rivera
Juan William Rivera
Linda Ivelisse Rivera

There were four Riveras who died in the World Trade Center. I do not know them. But seeing their names at the World Trade Center site this morning made me break down. There was everyone's names up there. White names, black names, Arab, Chinese, Latino, Japanese... It has been six years and I have made it to New York to find that when those planes hit, we all died in that explosion. I visited today, this hot summer day, and that gaping hole in the sky was the most mournful blue sky I had ever seen in my life.

Two months have passed since I last posted. A lot has happened; things I've decided not to mention on the blog because they've been mentioned in the New York Times. Suffice to say that I've found myself in New York City over the summer in between my two terms of being an RA, essentially living out on my own and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the greatest city of the world every day. It is quite the respite after the horrendous media debacle. Well, maybe not a respite-- but regenerative nonetheless. Being an RA-- and a nationally humiliated one at that-- comes with certain things that can wear down on you over an extended period: being anchored to one spot, lack of privacy, an omnipresent panopticism everywhere down the hall. Here, in New York City, it is impossible to stop exploring, and I can blend comfortably into the bustling anonymity.

I love this city. I love Brooklyn. I love the statues and the piss stains, the summer trees and urban sprawls, the simultaneous heat waves and thunderstorms, the kindly paraplegic panhandlers and the brutal NYPD cops, the homeless poets and millionaire Hampton-home-owning executives, the blonde-dyed-hair rich white girls with Forever 21 bags and the low-jeans-sagging puertoriqueño grimacing as he bobs his head to his iPod, Chinese taco shop owners and pizzeria guys who hate you the first time and love you the second, pastrami and pizza and the thousand places to get "New York's Best" of each, the train (not "subway") and talking like you know how to use it. On the F train I've seen Mayan flutists and evangelical preachers. Between the tracks today I saw rats, Red Bull cans, and an old man's cane. And I saw Manhattan shroud herself from full splendor during sunset adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. This city has the best, the worst. A utopian dystopia, New York contains the world.

New York's fourth of July fireworks are the greatest in the country. It was a symphony of light in four movements. I went, awestruck at the thousands of Brooklynites who made it through the rain to gather, gaze upward, and join everyone else in applause. I thought about the metaphor of fireworks. Gunfire. Bombs. The revolutionary primordial America. Gunfire. Bombs. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. I began to wonder if I was awestruck by the symbolic destruction, or by the eight-year-old Haitian girl standing next to me who asked her mother: "Where do fireworks come from? Meteors?"

Which brings me back to this morning, sobbing at ground zero. The debris. The ash. The patriotic graffiti. There was patriotic graffiti. On the back of a sign there was: "R.I.P. World Trade Center," "God Bless America," "United We Stand, Divided We Fall!" and two twin rectangles. My God, I thought. This is where it all started. This was the moment my generation was born. This was the starting point that led to the daily mutual destruction of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers. I thought back to all the old footage, the screaming, the people jumping from thousands of feet up, the ash, the smoke. We didn't learn. We just fought back. Continued to do what we were best at.

But as I walk the streets of New York I begin to understand America. The millions of faces, every combination of human being possible, individuals flashing by as if to some tense Philip Glass soundtrack, you see a big bang of sorts just walking down the street. The marvels of creation. This city is large enough to be the quintessence of imperfection, through the worst dehumanization one can find the most resilient humanity, and thus boundlessly authentic, boundlessly human. In comparison, the Bay Area struggles through an identity crisis of too many Starbuckses and the ubiquity of places that accept credit cards. You use cash in New York, and you can get mugged. But c'est la vie.

The tragedy of 9/11 is now more real to me than ever. Nationalism aside, when New York was struck, we were all struck. Maybe four of me died in there.

But in any case, I'll continue to roam the streets, catching glimpses of what it means to breathe.