Adventures In Sketch

I've been in the city for about six months now and everyone I know from "home" thinks it's awesome, wow, so cool, good for you. But I also get a lot of the "ooh, have you seen anybody get shot yet?" NO! I have not witnessed a homicide. ಠ_ಠ Don't jinx it. As a matter of fact, there has only been one occasion where I have felt distinctly unsafe in the city here, and I blame Queens. I also blame myself, because it was pure idiocy that popped me in to that situation.


For this story to make any sense, you need to know a little about my physical appearance. I'm blonde. There! It's been said. Judge away.


I never experienced that discrimination before I moved to Brooklyn. I grew up in Webster, NY, also known as SportsTown USA (declared so by ESPN magazine during my senior year of high school, thank you very much).


So, white suburbia plus, well, white suburbia, did a very sheltered blogger make. And there is the blonde. Which is not my fault. That is just what comes out of my head.

Back to Queens. Did you know that if you miss a UPS delivery in Brooklyn, you have to go to Maspeth to get it? I didn't. Trusty hopstop.com explained to me that it only (...) three trains to get to Queens, where I assumed I could then walk to the UPS place (hub? station? warehouse?) grab my box, and hoof it back to Brooklyn. Here is the idiocy: hopstop tried to tell me that the walk from the subway to UPS was over a half an hour long, I bet if it could, hopstop would have tried to tell me that it was about 23°F outside and I was not wearing pants (skirt and tights, woot).

Ah well. Apparently one is supposed to live and learn. Healthy steps. When I got off the train, it was dusk. Dusk in Queens. Sounds romantic, no? False. Queens is a clusterfuck of confusingly named infrastructure with no landmarks and very few street signs. There is no navigating against the Empire State Building in Queens. There is no trusty L line every few blocks in Queens. There are no helpful people in Queens. Naturally, I got lost. Thank god for smartphones.

After about twenty minutes of wandering, dusk fallen fully into evening, I ended up back where I started, now with a general understanding of in which direction I needed to walk. And walk. And walk. And walk. And, wait for it, walk. Did that last sentence read as redundant? It should. I want you to feel it, feel the walking, feel the annoyance...anger...despair...ultimate indifference toward life and death.

Here is where it got sketchy. The UPS (again, hub? What the hell is it called?) is located near some body of water or the other. I would try to figure out which one, but as I never again plan on venturing in to Queens and I have established something of a mental block toward the entire experience, I don't feel bad not caring. 

But the thing is that corpses always seem to be found near docks. Docks are near water, hopeless apparent ditz lost in the dark in Queens, not a soul around, again- not wearing pants. I was pretty sure I was going to be murdered for the seven dollars and iPod I was carrying and left under a UPS truck.

The story winds down from here. I did eventually make it to UPS; the small space heater located there reinstated my will to live and it wasn't until after I had waited over two hours for the nine people ahead of me to get their packages (that is math I could do, but won't for the sake of mental stability), when I was back out in the cold, did my idiocy kick in again. If the walk there had incited such imaginary violence in my head, why would the walk back, now lugging a box of books and shoes, be any more bearable? 

There are also no cabs in Queens.

My phone had long since died.

I made it about a quarter of the way back before I was ready to give up again. Trudging, literally, head bent into the wind, all feeling gone in my fingers and toes, getting honked at and hit on by every third passing car, I somehow saw a bus sign for Williamsburg. My feet stopped and it took perhaps three minutes for my brain to realize that that name was familiar because I lived near Williamsburg. If I could get there... I could get home... I could... bed... warm...

I waited fifteen minutes for that bus. Sitting on someone's stoop. Figuring that at least if I went in to a coma and wasn't found until morning, maybe the stoop would be enough shelter that a hospital could revive me. But the bus came, the glorious bus, and the people on it took pity on me and helped me figure out which stop was the Graham Ave L train stop. Earlier I think I said thank god for smartphones, well thank the FSM for the kindness of strangers on buses, because they may have actually saved my life. 

So never again will I go to Queens and never again will I be without a bus map in New York City. Also, UPS, I <3 FEDEX!