I actually lived over by Flushing and Broadway for about two years so I know your neighborhood pretty well, plus got a couple friends in the area; was actually playing basketball over at Bushwick Houses this morning (I hate sports and hate watching them or even hearing about them but I consider shooting hoops to be a form of meditation, or something).
Yeah, Juarez is crazy. There are actually efforts ongoing to get the UN involved. I don't even think that would work unless the peacekeepers in question were all millionaires and thus difficult to bribe. Also, they would have to be immune to bullets and beheadings. My understanding is that the UN does not have many extraordinarily wealthy soldiers with magical powers. Seriously, though, only legalization will turn that city around in any reasonable amount of time.
I should have qualified my take on Russia as poorly-constructed in the sense of its accessibility to those who try to learn it as a second language, which seems to be your take as well; I remember hearing the same thing from a couple of other people who've studied it. Dostoevsky is my favorite writer and Russians certainly have a right to be proud of their literary and musical traditions.
Amusingly enough, the president of the atheist PAC I run with asked me this morning to "take control" of the Texas Department of Education by recruiting atheists to run in the next statewide school board election. I'm assuming she's never been to Texas or she would realize how fucking insane that is. I guess I can try to get some people to run as protest candidates to bring attention to the Jefferson thing.
Have you ever done any work or activism or some such thing with regards to social justice, housing? Saw on your profile that you're particularly interested in those sorts of things.
It's interesting that you mention Ciudad Juarez, because I'm in the middle of trying to read Roberto Bolano's 2666, the massive, almost 1,000 page novel that, I guess by the simplest way of explaining what the book is about (because I am still not sure almost 300 pages in!), deals with a bunch of people going about their (sometimes interconnected) business in a fictionalized version of the city called Santa Teresa in the shadow of "the crimes." Juarez sounds crazy, and I've been reading about the crimes on and off for a few years and no one has been able to give a convincing explanation as to what is exactly going on.
I haven't heard about Santa Muerte, though. She is female, too. Hmm.
I'm not sure if I would say that Russian isn't a "well constructed" language. If you said that to a Russian, they wouldn probably demand blood. From what I can gather, they are very proud of their strong literary tradition. I found Russian to be oddly mathematical. The grammar is ridiculous, but there is reason to it. It's just so much to remember, much less put it all together with correct vocabulary and actually SPEAK.
I live in East Williamsburg, which, depending on who you talk to, either doesn't exist, or is an area created solely by real estate agents. Regardless, I'm off the Montrose Avenue L stop, and I like it that way. We're actually not that far apart.
I wouldn't call East Texas "scary," really, so much as "boring" and "illiterate," although I suppose most of the creative male types one comes across in Williamsburg would get hassled at the very least. It's the cities that are universally dangerous. Certain parts of the Mexican border, where my mom's from, are among the most dangerous places in the world now - as in, more dangerous than Baghdad in terms of one's likelihood of being killed. I spent a day or two in Juarez about five years ago. It was fucking nuts then and it's about three times as bad now. Even the respectable folks are donning masks at night and engaging in revenge/warning beheadings of narotrafficos and corrupt police officers. An increasing number of residents worship this fucking neo-Azteca death goddess called Santa Muerte. I wouldn't go anywhere near there today, and I'm not usually adverse to going anywhere. Like, even large interior Mexican cities like Guadalajara and D.F. are okay to wonder around in. It's just that the border is currently a war zone while the cartels sort things out, and the resulting environment has made everyone nuts.
I've heard that Russian is not a particularly well-constructed language and very difficult to learn. I don't speak anything fluently myself; used to speak fairly good Swahili and a smattering of Arabic.
I just moved from Bushwick to Williamsburg, over off Union at 3rd street. Are you in Brooklyn, too? What part of NYC are you from originally?
That's quite a smattering of places. I vaguely recall East Texas being referred to as a scary place...is this true?
I took Russian for my whole freshman year. Apparently it comes out when I (try to) speak to Russian people when I'm drunk. But I don't think I really speak it. You need quite a few years of serious study before you are even proficient, because it's that ridiculous of a language to master. I hated it; I hated the classes. Things get weird when your professors point out that you're the only person of color in the entirety of First-Year Russian.
Anywho, I also like Jefferson's writing and personality; just was sort of let down at some point after having considered him my greatest hero for a long time when I was younger.
I'm from the downtown portion of Dallas, have also spent about seven years in Austin, a short amount of time exiled to East Texas with my dad (I was a bad kid), and have lived in a couple places in Mexico as well as in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.