2002-10-22 - 11:18 p.m.

Foreigner In My Own Country

Because I'd gotten in late the night before, I let myself sleep a little longer, until 7:40. It wasn�t much, but it was something.

After I woke I showered, packed together all my stuff and headed down to the lobby. Much to my relief my car hadn't been towed away, so I quickly moved it to a legal parking spot. I had a good breakfast at the hotel restaurant, which was a sports bar owned by a famous ex-baseball player whose name I can't recall. Hey, I don't follow the game. The room was ringed with big-screen TVs, and they were playing five separate channels, all sports channels. Damn, all that TV and nothing I gave a fart about.

Sad to say, this morning I had a repeat of last night as my poor sense of direction led me a merry chase.

I had remembered the directions that I had printed out from Mapquest, but it probably would have been better if I hadn't followed them. Sometimes the shortest distance between two points isn't a straight line. The directions I got had me driving across Queens on Roosevelt Boulevard, which was a total traffic jam. I also had a hard time getting there, due to various problems that weren't my fault. The streets of Brooklyn are not really designed for trucks or deliveries, but trucks are there anyway, and deliveries still have to be made. I kept running across streets blocked by double parked trucks, or eighteen wheelers trying to painfully back into narrow garages. Very frustrating.

I was stuck in the traffic on Roosevelt Boulevard, and I looked around me. All I could see were Hispanic people on the streets and Spanish signs on all the stores. For all I knew I could have been in downtown Mexico City. The street looked like a tunnel since it was under an elevated railway, adding to the gloom.

I felt very much like a foreigner in my own country. This is one of the things that people who have never been to the U.S. don't understand, how very ethnically diverse the country is. Because they've seen a bunch of U.S. TV shows, they think they understand what America is like, but TV is very, very lily-white compared to reality. The United States is a lot more than just Hollywood.

Once I left Roosevelt Boulevard my orientation problems started anew. I got on I-278 going west, and then said "No, I need to be going east." However, after I turned around, I discovered that west was indeed the right direction. Sigh. So I got myself turned around yet again, and then I made a really big bungle which somehow got me going over the Whitestone bridge into Manhattan. Dammit, I didn't want to go there! However, it was easy to figure out how to get to where I wanted to go - just go over the Manhattan bridge again. Easy, but time consuming.

It was about 10:30 when I got to the library, probably an hour later than I should have been. I settled in and got to work.

The media room of the Brooklyn Library was a lot less crowded than last week, in fact it was practically deserted. This suited me just fine.

This week, instead of all the friendly people who wanted to chat with me, there seemed to be all these people who wanted me to help them operate the microfilm readers. For the most part I was happy to show them what they needed to do, until this one lazy girl plopped herself down next to me and demanded that I help her. She didn't make any effort to try to work it herself, she just squawked for assistance.

I showed her how to feed the tape into the machine, but she kept pestering me with questions until I was practically doing everything for her. She was looking up an article in the Daily News about an off-duty policeman arrested on a DUI charge, I have no idea why.

After I printed out her article for her and she went away, I reflected about all the money and trouble I'd taken getting down here and that my time was limited. I was not down here to hold the hands of people too lazy to read the directions printed right on the machine. I figured out the machines myself, anybody should be able to operate them. Thereafter when people were asking me for help, I just told them that I didn't understand the machine that well myself and the library personnel could probably help them better than I could.

I seemed to be working quite quickly until I hit a brick wall. I had gone all the way through the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 1902, now I wanted to go through 1900. However sometime between January of 1900 and January of 1902 the Eagle had gone through a major facelift, so the papers of 1900 looked much cruder. There were no photographs only line drawings, and few logos or distinctive typefaces. The print also seemed to be even smaller, which didn't seem to be possible considering how small the print was in 1902. Everyone in 1900 must have been reading using a magnifying glass or something.

On top of that, I made the discovery that there was even MORE chess coverage in 1900 than the amazing coverage of 1902-1905. Not only were there many more news stories on chess that ran on random days of the week, but there were TWO weekly chess columns: one on Sunday and one on Thursday. It took me a while to pick up on this: I was most of the way through February before I started to wonder "how come these Sunday columns don't have the numbered chess problems with them?"

I was hoping to get to the end of 1900 before the end of the day, but I only got as far as the end of March. There is going to be a lot of stuff for me to go through when I get home.

After all the heartache, the trip home went 100% smoothly. I even stopped at the Boston Market and Krispy Kreme donut place on West 23rd street again, and AGAIN found an empty parking space with a meter. This is so unheard-of considering my experience with parking in New York. Maybe New Yorkers avoid these spaces because they are looking for free ones.

After I left Manhattan I headed straight home without incident. Because there was no meandering, I actually got home earlier than the week before, even though I was traveling a good deal slower.

I think if I go down next week, I'll try to do the whole thing in one day and avoid the hotel expense. Staying at a hotel just increases the amount of urban driving I have to do, and also increases my chances of getting lost. I can't see myself being too tired to negotiate Manhattan traffic since it's such an adrenaline-fueled experience for me. However, going down next week would be a big indulgence since I've found out nearly everything specific I wanted to know.