white teeth

i grew up in a very white town. you could probably count the number of black students who graduated in my high school class on two hands. maybe even one. (there were two high schools in town; somehow i ended up at the "rich" one. rich is a relative term there.) because everyone looked like me, and lived like me (it was also a middle-class college town), and thought like me (liberal, too), i never really thought about people who might look or live or think differently. not in an ignorant or xenophobic way, just in a "it never crossed my mind because it didn't need to" way. does this sound terrible? i don't mean for it to. i'm just trying to explain where i came from. the first time i was the only white person in a room, i later told people about it, because it was such a wholly new experience. i had never been in the minority; i wasn't scared or uncomfortable, just really interested in how it felt.

one of the reasons i love new york so much is because so many of the people here don't look or live or think like me. most of them don't even speak my language. i love riding the subway and seeing unique faces, listening to languages i can't identify (but whose rhythm and cadence i can still appreciate). i like knowing that i am different for other people, too, that i'm not like every other girl they see or know, that i speak my own language. (travelers to the land of s and i would really feel in need of a translation dictionary.) this is also one of my most favorite parts of my job. i work at a community arts school on the upper west side, and most of our faculty are foreign-born or bred, and many are multi-lingual. our director and another coordinator also speak multiple languages, and as i sit at my desk, entering data or answering the phone, i get to listen to conversations in hebrew and russian, and the unique english spoken by israelis, germans, russians, poles, koreans, and native new-yorkers. i feel like this makes my office particularly pleasant to be in. we may give piano lessons, but our languages have a music all their own.

oh, and a spasiba to my readers (and commenters.) that's russian for thank you. it makes me glad to know i am not the only one finding the magic. or reading this. how many times can you read your own blog, really?