Singlehandedly Destroying My Neighborhood, Or Something Like That

Warning: I’ve replaced data with footsteps and theories with my eyes. 

Columbia Heights is one of those neighborhoods -- you know, the kind that were once mostly black and Hispanic, mostly low-income, mostly part of city council meetings when people said words like "lack of access" and "development" and "up and coming". 

The streets were packed with markets and bodegas where English was a second language, and little girls avoided certain spots after school. When this neighborhood made headlines, it wasn't a good thing.

And then stuff happened. Like a huge shopping mall with a Target, and bars with craft beers and high end barbecue. We moved in: the young professionals who talk about community and don't use plastic bags and put sculptures in our tiny yards. So the building facades changed and rents got higher and people built free clinics and started to volunteer for the people who we weren't.

Naturally, these things are on my mind as my waking body memorizes the bus schedule, and I figure out how to get more air in my new little room. Because I'm so happy here, it's almost unnerving.

I smile when I walk down the street and see multiple generations of boys and men playing soccer, cursing and falling and laughing in Spanish. I stop by the hidden bakery on 11th Street and breathe in so deeply my stomach is almost full. I want to kiss the buzzed head of the kid I tutor on Tuesdays when I see him waiting outside the market with his mother. And I love the little girls with their shiny black hair and uniforms, and the family that sits out on their stoop and barbecues for hours and hours on a Sunday.

But there's this feeling of guilt sometimes. As if my being here means quite literally taking the space of someone who was there before me and can't be anymore -- a family forced out to Maryland because their home became too expensive. A mother who commutes more than an hour each morning instead of walking to work. This kind of exodus, I hear, can create islands of poverty and crime, driving a working class to isolation from the resources they need.

And then the questions:

What do I do? Is this just the kind of capitalism that doesn't come so naturally to me -- an inevitable shift? Do I stick to  my designated spot near U Street and Dupont? Or do I try my hardest to be a loving, giving, sharing person so that I earn the right to stay?  And is this also just a construction of my mind and its imposing limits?

My friend and I talk to Monty one day -- an ancient black man sitting shirtless on the steps of his row house with some sort of liquor in a brown paper bag. He's been here for decades and the neighborhood has changed in front of him, I imagine, from the same spot where he is currently perched.

I ask him questions that secretly reveal what is nagging me, and wait for an answer that I never get.

Monty doesn't care about gentrification, really, and he's not the least bitter about the white kids moving in. He points at the liquor store across the street and says things have gotten safer around here. He likes what's going on -- there are new things replacing old things, and the kids are getting home in one piece. Things look different, and Monty is on board. 

I see him again on a few occasions, the shiny skin on his chest juxtaposed with the aging gruff of his face. He and his wife sit outside all the time, taking sips of the humid summer air. And every time I see them, it's a reminder. A reminder that I don't get to tell someone else's story for them -- let alone the narrative of a neighborhood that existed long before me and will continue long after.

For now the battle I have is not the one of how this city should grow, but how I can grow alongside my neighbors. At the very least, I'll have to start by finding out who they are.

Experiment 2: The Art of DC

Tabla/sax/beatbox concert at Atlas Theater

My parents took me to a good amount of concerts when I was growing up -- Jackson Brown, Don Henley, Sting, U2, Zakhir Hussain, Pandit Jasraj etc. It was a mix of classic rock and classical Indian music, kind of like Concert for George, which embodies both the raag and rock of my upbringing. I eventually peppered their taste with my own flings: the Backstreet Boys, Maroon5, and eventually Ani Difranco and one random night with Styx.

Partly because of this, I've always subscribed to the idea that art is one of the few things worth paying for -- concert tickets, books, paintings, instruments. These, along with travel, are worth my paycheck, and make for an easy sacrifice of things like fashion, makeup, cab rides and expensive drinks.

As my second experiment this year, I spent the last few weeks discovering DC's art, in all it's forms. I attended slam poetry events, visited the Hirschorn twice for an Ai Wei Wei exhibit, perused the National Art Gallery with a teleguide, listened to jazz, spoke to street artists from Nigeria and Northeast, saw a tabla-sax-violin-beatbox concer at Atlas Theatre, and went to a handful of photo exhibitions.

Nat'l Art Gallery

It isn't hard to find art in this city. You just have to stay off the Hill and say yes to every invitation you get, every flyer you see on a lamppost. And suddenly there's a 15-year-old kid standing in front of you reciting a poem about the emotional and physical abuse that daggered through his childhood,  making your entire body shake because you can't lift your fingers to snap when someone's soul has taken over the theater.

You learn that a man's curated pile of rusty rods and portraits of his middle finger were strong enough to have him detained by the Chinese government, and that the swiftness of a painter's brushstroke can speak volumes about his mental, physical and political state. There's ancient, and new, and accidental, and ruined. There is art from the poor and  rich, and  from men who decided to equate a smaller "package" with masculinity because they had control of the industry.

DC Youth Poetry Slam

The art immersion was a reminder about creating. About writing stories even when nobody will read them -- stories that are an extension of daydreams and reeling thoughts on long train rides. About making compositions on my tabla even if I'm a novice, because those beats are just as instructive as the ones penciled in my book.

I think it's cheesy to say I discovered art this month. I never lost art, whatever that word means, and I've always valued the delicate design and rhythm of the places I've lived. But I also think that an intentional focus on that graffiti in Shaw and the guy at the farmer's market with pen sketches has shed light on the District's relationships. It's a chronicle of the city's heartbreak and strength and violence -- and it's told through acrylic, wood, word and the absence thereof.

Waking Up The District

Early morning is the same in every city.

My current job comes with a 6:30 a.m. start time, so I've tossed my grad school schedule to the wind and reverted to a schedule that actually fits with my natural cadence.

As I navigate my bike down 14th street, the sky is usually just giving in to daylight. Horns don't honk this early, and bus drivers don't swerve across the bicycle lanes. Even cat calls are subdued.

In the early morning, only people with hard bodies are on the road. Construction workers, cracking jokes and eating egg mcmuffins, pretending to jump out of the road when I coast by their trucks. A laborer on a rusty cycle challenges me to a race, and we tear down the empty street, me in a white pencil skirt, him in faded Lee denim with a dusty hand print on the pocket.

There are runners, determined and unsmiling, their eyes glued to the uneven sidewalks. Women do lunges on the steps of the Masonic temple for their bootcamp session, with matching sports bras and workout pants.

When I get to Metro Center, there is  music. A full jazz band with an open case for money, or a single guy in a wheelchair with a saxophone, tapping out My Favorite Things, waking sleepy commuters.

And there's a woman who sleeps in a box that's woven together with bits of plastic bags. She always comes out when I'm locking up at the stand, the same time each day, and rolls a small red shopping cart out of her home before collapsing the cardboard to the ground.

Sometimes she wakes up another homeless guy stretched out a few feet away. "It's already six-thirty," she says, gently. They sit together, backs to the glass of a shut-down store, until the quarter-to-seven bell rings at  the white church with red windows across G street. 

I wonder as I wander

With six days left in DC I have to ask myself: did I make the most of it?

What does it mean to soak up a city, or place, to its maximum? Is it the number of nights you don't sleep? The weekends with so much packed in that you lie awake Sunday night, thinking of the memories you made? Is it the work you leave behind, the progress you've made? The people you've met?

Or maybe its the days you get lost, alone, discovering row houses you want to own someday, or brick alleys to stain glassed churches. Maybe it's knowing where to get the best organic cookie, or the strongest cocktail.

My months in DC were all of these things. I learned that a long commute can make your bright eyes dull. I learned that if you don't ask, you don't usually receive. And if you do ask -- persistently, patiently, politely -- you might have a chance to get your idea published in a city paper, or famous website. Or you might get turned down so many times you just shrug and go on.

I made friends on the elevator, enemies on a Metro ride, reunited with people who connect with me on levels that I didn't know possible. I felt awkward, I felt confident. I relied on my feet more than I ever have -- replacing buses, cars, trains with my own power.

Our country's capital is truly a place where passions collide. I've never heard so many arguments that evolved into dialogue and understanding. The lobbyists can be vultures, but they breathe their cause to the bone. Whether it is education, immigration, religion -- someone is DC has decided that their perspective should have a voice, an organization, and an audience.

But of course, as the inefficiency of politics pervades, so does the frustration of an economic chasm. From the homeless man in a red sports jersey who paces across Chinatown, to the pervert who followed me for three blocks talking about my assets, there is a poverty in DC that seems especially stark with the White House as a backdrop. It doesn't help that the public schools are the worst in the country, with stories of murdered teachers and teenagers too often in the headlines.

In the end, DC will always be a place of transition for me. I came here weeks after my graduation and learned to live out of one suitcase, on a shoestring budget, with a regular job.

I froze in the worst winter of 100 years, soaked up the spring that I never got in Florida, and melted through a summer so hot that I was stuck in a 110 degree train car for an hour and a half.

Next time, I'm staying for autumn.

District of Funk

So the title of this post has little to do with the following content, but sounds like a sweet band name, right? At least for DC street music.

I've been living in Washington, D.C. for three months now, but it took a few touristy friend visits for me to fully appreciate the city's offerings. The last few weekends have been a test of my Metro and hostess skills, and wonderful, sunny (except for last Friday -- ugh) expeditions. So I thought I would do a little pseudo-travelogue to point out some highlights:

SULU DC
Abstract poetry verses frustrate me, and if I don't get the gist of a poem on third try, I'm going to pick up some chick lit. I told my friend this as we settled into SULU DC, a showcase of underground Asian-American performance art held at the Ethiopian restaurant Almaz.
But then Michelle Myers from Yellow Rage came to stage and taught me how to get angry -- fists-clenched-teeth-gritted pissed off by listening to poem about a wronged immigrant or stereotyped women.
And after that, it was Sahra Nguyen, a woman whose heartfull, touching poetry delightfully pervades an cute, funny image. Example: describing her tiny, fierce Chinese mother in a poem "My Momma's So Gangsta".
Conclusion: My friend leaned over to me and said, "Now do you get poetry?"
I did.

Good Stuff Eatery
A crowded fast-food restaurant of Top Chef fame -- Imagine my surprise when one of my favorite vegetarian meals in DC took place at a burger joint. But when your "Vegetarians Are People Too" burger is actually a stuffed portabello mushroom with fresh cheese, flash-fried in Panko bread crumbs, well yeah, it's pretty freaking delicious.
Top that off with my first milkshake in about five years and an end to the grumbling tummy after a Capitol Hill tour, and we've got a winner.

A Loop Around the Mall
Even if you hate running, walking down the straight line from the Capitol, amid the Smithsonians, around the Washington Monument (WashMon, if you will -- I won't), through the World War II memorial and right up to Lincoln's lap will make you wish you were a DC jogger.
Springtime in DC is savory, and the Kite Flying Festival dotted our horizon like mass confetti. The famed Cherry Blossoms bow gracefully into the Potomac, and everyone's cutests dogs and children stroll around the mall. Tourist or not, it's a worthwhile walk.

Capitol Hill Books
Unlike what the name suggests, this rowhouse-turned-bookstore is an allergy-inducing mish-mash of stacked books, organized vaguely with post-it notes and rooms, and narrow enough for one person at a time on the stairwell (which is lined with World War II books).
So basically, it's perfect.
I read a couple of chapters of a novel, and looked up to find two of my UF creative writing teachers' names (Padgett Powell, David Leavitt) on the bindings in front of me.
If that doesn't call you name, browsing the surrounding Eastern Market's local crafts, hippie imports and fish counters, will.

This American Life

I know I've moved to D.C. because I had my first dream about Obama -- in this scene, going to a Roman Catholic church (?) with my family.

I know I'm a writer, because I woke up at 4:30 a.m. from said dream and knew I was going to blog that sentence.

My first working day in the city and I'm feeling equal parts recharged, excited and daunted. As a naive Floridian, the metro is still exciting, the diversity surprising, and the hills and snow welcome.

Vienna, Virginia, where I'm staying, is possibly the perfect American town. This might be an overstatement -- especially to anyone stuck in Tysons Corner traffic. But the libraries overflow and the rec center and bike trails are full, and after 18 years of flat, suburbs-of-suburbs Florida, I relish the dynamics of the community.

Also there is a vegan restaurant, Trader Joes and Whole Foods within a couple of miles.

Among my news years resolutions are to sustain my blog weekly,write more for SAJAForum, and read more while IPod-ing less. And with a new city at my fingertips, I know I'll have plenty to share.