City living

The children at St. Martin de Porres Academy are the most stereotypical city kids you will ever meet. The only time they ever see nature or wildlife is when we take them on school-sponsored trips outside of New Haven, when they are appropriately fascinated by said phenomena. Last week, I accompanied a group of kids on a trip to a retreat center on the Long Island Sound and spent most of the day convincing 6th graders that a) the crickets weren't harbingers of the apocalypse, b) the seagulls weren't going to swoop down and eat them, and c) the seaweed wasn't going to come creeping out of the water and attack them.

Intrigued though the children may be by fishing nasty seaweed out of the Sound, their chief source of fascination seems to revolve around cattle. To encourage a college-bound culture (one of my school's maddeningly catchy catch-phrases), I have mounted a UW pennant above my desk. Invariably, the students who come into my office to work on applications are far more interested in the minutiae of my personal life than in their application questions, so "Ms. Saylor - you're from Wisconsin??" is a frequent avenue of distraction. Naturally, they all want to know if I spent my childhood communing with my bovine companions in the middle of a field, drinking milk straight from the udder. The answer I give all depends on how much crap the interrogating child has given me on the day in question.

Two bovine conversational gems for you, my neglected readers:

1) While in the middle of a where-do-you-want-to-go-to-high-school interview, a particularly ADD 8th grader interrupts my interrogation to ask: "Wait, you're from Swiss-consin? That's where all the swiss cheese comes from, right?"

Ohhhhhh boy.

2) While driving an 8th grade girl to her shadow day at a Catholic high school a 45-minute drive into the CT boonies, we pass a field of cattle. I am busy trying not to get lost, not to get into an accident in CT traffic, and not to accidentally swear in frustration that I don't even notice. My student, however, nearly leaps out of her seat in fascination and concern. "What's wrong with the cows, Ms. Saylor? Are they dead???" Confused, I ask her what leads her to believe that the cows have moved on from their earthly life. "They're all lying down, Ms. Saylor! Are the cows gonna be all right??"

Apparently I have come to Connecticut from Wisconsin, via New York City, to be a specialist on marine plant life and bovine behavior. Who knew that's where a degree in religious studies would get me?

Ich bin...ein New Yorker?

I spent much of the last year trying to resist New York's charms. The City (as those of us who are unlucky enough to live tantalizingly close to New York, but not close enough to visit regularly, are doomed to call it) intrigues, fascinates, seduces, despite one's most valid and persistent reasons to hate it.

My decision to move to The City was made on such a whim that it took me a long time to realize that it takes a certain type to sign up to live in Manhattan. 90% of the Midwestern friends and family members who came to visit me in New York (and they were numerous) took one good look at the city and said, "It's nice to visit, but I could never live here." And so they don't try to. In my humble opinion, an attempt to live in New York can lead to one of only two outcomes: either you hate it so much that you leave soon after your arrival, or you're hooked. You may not know you're hooked, you may not really want to be hooked - but once New York has gotten under your skin, there is absolutely nothing you can do to change it.

For the last month, I feel like I have done very little besides pine for New York. Believe me, this mindset came as much to my surprise as it did to my housemates' annoyance - there are, after all, few things more insufferable than a sulky New Yorker.

...wait...did I just call myself a New Yorker? In many ways, I'm decidedly not - living in Manhattan for one year hardly qualifies as an ontological identity shift. Native New Yorkers would certainly never mistake me for one of their own. Besides, I'm a proud Sconnie, and will be til the day I die! But somehow, without my being aware of it, I made it to the point where my non-New Yorker friends tell me I've become a New Yorker. And that's more than a little disconcerting.

I think it took leaving the city to make me realize how badly I want to go back. The good news is that, after I finish this internship in New Haven, I can! And I probably will. If for no other reason that I'm nowhere close to done analyzing the microsociological dynamics of the subway system (you don't think I'm serious? I miss the subway so much that a compassionate New Yorker friend of mine took pity on me and mailed me a subway map to sustain me through this year-long public transportation fast.). I'm glad I'm here for the year. I'm glad I have this opportunity to experience a different kind of East Coast life (and I promise to blog about it one of these days - it's definitely not boring!). But I don't want to be a New Havenite. I don't want to be a Nutmegger. To my very great surprise, I want to be a New Yorker. At least enough to try living there again for another few years. By that time I should have the interpersonal subway dynamics figured out, right?

As I'm sure you all wanted to know...

There are many things that are readily available in New York, but difficult to locate in New Haven. Red lentils, for instance. Or taxi cabs. Or halal carts, should you fall prey to a sudden craving for a lamb kebab (it happens, you know). The list goes on and on. But there is one thing, I have been delighted to discover, that is plentiful here and virtually impossible to find on the isle of Manhattan: bathrooms.

Frankly I'm amazed I never got around to writing a post about the Manhattan bathroom scarcity problem while I was living there. It's honestly worse in New York than it was in France - because in Europe, at least, it's socially acceptable to pee outside in a state of bladder emergency. There are just NO public bathrooms! There are virtually no gas stations to rely on, and restaurants (even the McDonald's!) and coffee shops restrict their access by key. Even most libraries don't have them! There are few worse things than being downtown and having to go, especially if you're on a budget and can't afford a cup of coffee every time nature calls. All smart New Yorkers have their own, well-guarded lists of places they can depend on in a pinch (I won't share all of mine, but should you find yourself in need on the Upper West Side, may I refer you to the Cathedral), but still! So much unnecessary stress!

However: New Haven, while it hasn't yet realized that its denizens might occasionally want to hail a cab or crave an Ethiopian red lentil curry, has come to the enlightened discovery that its citizens have normal human body functions. Whether you find yourself on the Yale campus, with its blessedly unlocked buildings (take that, Columbia!), or simply near a restaurant that doesn't have dictatorial policies about restroom access, you don't have to plan a day in New Haven around your bathroom breaks. And it is absolutely glorious.