"This love won't let me go. So long, angel of Harlem. Angel of Harlem. She says it's heart, heart and soul..." ~u2

I'll be Bono's Angel of Harlem any day. I love living in Harlem. I love walking out of my apartment and being able to see the Hudson River. I love walking up and down Broadway or Amsterdam and just people-watching. There are some pretty interesting people up here.

Lately I've been thinking about my life. And I'm fairly happy with it right now. One of my best friends from New Zealand recently wrote on my facebook wall, "I was happy to see some photos, you're not the same!" That was especially interesting to me because it seems to imply more than a change in appearance. It made me think, because I'm not aware of being very different from who I was then. But maybe I am. I'm immersed in a culture that's completely foreign to me, and I think it's changing me. I'm a minority at work and in the neighborhood where I live. I'm learning about people who are so incredibly different from me, but whom I am starting to understand better. The kids I teach are worlds away from who I was when I was their age. They curse like nobody's business. They throw around the N word like stereotypical valley girls throw around the word 'like.' I seriously hear it about 50 times a day. They even call me the N word. Here's an exchange from Friday:
A student speaking to me: Yo, you gotta be playin', my n****r!
Me: Excuse me, what did you call me?
Student: Um....Ms. B.
Me: That's what I thought.
That's a common exchange. The language they use was astounding to me at first. Now I'm used to it. The art teacher, who's a young, very liberal, very artistic guy tried to talk to one girl about using the N word. Here's an excerpt of their conversation:
Mr. F.: D, have you heard the Civil Rights Movement?
D (looking at him like he's absolutely insane): Um...NO.
Mr. F: Well, it was here in America and a bunch of people of color stood up for their rights and tried to stop other people from discriminating against them and from calling them offensive names like that word that you use all the time.
It went in one ear and out the other. The kids are just following the example of the people around them, though. They really don't know any better. And they don't like school. They don't see it as important. They're just about the exact opposite of who I was at their age.
I'm getting 5 new kids next week. I'm afraid it will be difficult to integrate them into our class smoothly. We'll see how it goes.

This weekend two of my friends from high school, Kim and Betsy, came to stay with me. We had a good time. I'm not much of a partyer, but Kim is, so she dragged us out on Friday and Saturday nights. On Friday we went to The Joshua Tree, a fun bar where they play 80's videos all night, and XII. We didn't get back to my apartment until about 5:00am. Then on Saturday night we went to Prohibition, which I really liked (they had a great band) and 420, which wasn't so great (I wasn't crazy about the music and was exhausted by the time we got there). I was glad to gain an extra hour because of Daylight Savings. On Saturday afternoon we went to see a free screening of the movie Bella, which was very good. It won the Toronto Film Festival. Afterwards, the executive producer and Manny Perez, one of the stars, spoke and answered questions. It's about Latinos living in NYC, and the producer and actor talked about how there are hardly any Latino characters in movies and TV who can be looked up to as role models (they're usually the bad guys, the pimps, the gangsters, etc.). This movie was great because it showed them in a more realistic light; it's the kind of movie that my students and other Latino teens need to see.