#littering

Feeling good

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5 Things I notice while living in NYC (and not from an outsider’s perspective, I was born and raised here)

1) There’s alwayssome incident happening the involves police presence. Today, there were cops at my job. I work at a public middle school and I saw cops on the 2nd floor. I didn’t know what was happening but someone probably got assaulted or hurt in some way because there was a stretcher leaning against the door to whatever room it was. I didn’t look into the room as I passed by because I didn’t want to appear nosy. Then when I arrived at my train stop, there were cops all huddling around some guy. I knew that they weren’t just hanging around because they all looked very serious and concerned about the situation. 

2) So. Much. Fucking. Trash. Walking into neighborhoods like mine, you would think a tornado struck a landfill nearby and blew its trash onto the streets. 

That’s near a train station that I use sometimes. Seriously, what the fuck? Did some asshole just dump a trash can onto the ground or what? I see shit like this every day and it never ends. Can we please have some clean streets for one day? One day! I saw another asshole today, some white guy who doesn’t even live in my neighborhood kicking a bottle onto the train tracks of the train station that I live by and when my uncle came from California and dumped his trash onto the tracks, my girlfriend and I gave him this look like “what the hell?” And I had to explain to him when we got home that you’re not supposed to dump trash onto the tracks because track fires, train delays (also, it’s just a disgusting and shitty thing to do). Use a trash can, people! It’s not that hard!

3) People always want the whole world to hear them and their music. There’s this guy who lives in my building who’s constantly blasting his music so loud out front on the street that objects vibrate around it. I have very sensitive hearing and this bothers me to no end. There are also the people who drive around on the street blasting rap and reggaeton. And for some reason, even though we have phones, people always insist on yelling at each other through apartment building windows instead of picking up the phone. That’s communication in the hood for you. 

4) If you live in a predominantly black or Latinx neighborhood and you see white people moving in, that’s never a good sign. That means that the landlords and housing associations in the city are trying to push people of color out and bring white and upper class people in. The housing association that my building is a part of raises the rent beyond affordability whenever my mom starts to make anymore money. And our housing is for low-income families so it’s supposedto be affordable. And it’s not like me and my family have minimum wage jobs. My mother is a book-keeper for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and I work for 2 non-profits as a teacher’s assistant and an activity specialist so it’s not like we’re poor, it’s that the cost of living is so high. The maintenance in my building is also sub-par. We have roaches and mice and no matter how many time we call the exterminator, they never seem to fix the problem. They plug up holes (whenever they happen to find one) and they spray around (only once did they do that) but that’s pretty much it so whenever we have pest problems, we are left to deal with it on our own. Thankfully, the building is clean, however, and I mentioned this in my last post, they still have yet to clean the blood off the walls and sidewalk from some incident where this guy punched a hole into the glass on the front inner door. I don’t think they want to take care of these problems because they want us to leave. I also noticed that in the wake of gentrification, they’ve been creating new buildings and parks and making the neighborhood look nicer. Where was all that when I was a kid? 

5) People walk too slowly. Especially in the city, the worst places to be are tourist traps and shopping areas like Herald Square, Union Square and Times Square. I don’t know if half the tourists in NYC know this but people need to get to school, work and other responsibilities and they don’t have time to walk as slowly as you. If you are reading this and you are planning to visit NYC someday, please, if you are lost and need to ask for directions or consult a map or GPS, pleasestep to the side. For native New Yorkers, it causes so much stress when tourists are meandering around in the city and blocking the way for other people. The reason why New Yorkers have a reputation for being rude is because we’re fed up with living in a tourist trap where we’re constantly having to make B-lines around people who don’t know where they’re going, who want to take selfies every 5 seconds and block pedestrian traffic and want to form crowds on sidewalks like they’re a mob and as if they’re the only people in the city. Non-New Yorkers, we’re not saying don’t come here, we’re merely saying that when you do, remember that you’re in someone else’s city. Respect the city, don’t litter, be polite, don’t block sidewalks and if you have to travel in groups, be mindful of how many people are in the space you are in (walk in single file if you have to and move for other people when they’re in a rush). That’s all we’re asking.