When we lived in the Alphabet City part of the East Village in New York City our apartment building was located one block away from a fire station and two blocks from a hospital. Having on-duty firemen and working doctors and nurses as your neighbors was a great comfort in a dangerous city, but one of the requirements of having such close proximity to first responders was dealing with the continuous caw of sirens 24 hours a day.
I was scheduled to serve my first day of Jury Duty today but since New Jersey is closed for business due to a budget crisis I am here with you instead.
Journal Square is a major transportation hub in Jersey City for bus connections and PATH train transfers. Much in the same way New York city’s “Times Square” was named after The New York Times newspaper, “Journal Square” is named after The Jersey Journal newspaper.
The Journal Square area is ripe with cultural monuments and ethnic identifications. India Square is one of my favorite places to visit and eat and drink! I also do my banking in the massive Journal Square complex.
Yesterday my young, attractive and obviously upwardly mobile neighbor — I don’t know her name and she’s lived in her apartment a year to my four years — was in the hallway with me when her Chinese food order was delivered. The delivery guy waved at me. We are good friends because he delivers a brown rice lunch special to me at least four times a week.
We don’t have a washing machine or dryer in our apartment building so every week I drop off our dirty laundry at the corner Laundromat for washing. In our Jersey City neighborhood paying someone else to wash and dry your clothes actually costs less than doing it all yourself in Manhattan.
Immigrants in America — both legal and illegal — are the new Whipping Boy masking a cascading facade of deeper fissures embedded in our nation.
Jersey City is a hardcore town with a tough reputation. There are pockets of high wealth in Jersey City and they are located downtown along the waterfront where views out the window frame the
Hudson River and the magnificent New York City skyline. Many say the best place to view the majesty of Manhattan is from the shores of New Jersey.
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Last Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos was the worst in recent memory because it was uncharacteristically static and boring.
There is nothing worse to watch in any sort of drama than a person talking on and on — especially talking to someone who does not respond — because that kind of monologue drains all the energy and tension from the show.
Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.
She apologized one was missing.
She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.
Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.
That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.
The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.
The deaths of 12 miners in Sago, West Virginia is no less a communication tragedy than the deaths of two Jersey City Police Officers who were killed in the line of duty after plunging off the edge of an open bridge last week.
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