Exotic Creature

I spent this week taking care of some of the preliminary activities I needed to do for the new adventure I'm beginning, and it revealed a few things that I thought I'd share.

Specifically I spent most of the week observing math classes at Gage Middle School in the city of Huntington Park, an old LA satellite city. It's in a section that twenty years ago would have been known as South Central LA, or at least that's my guess, since it's just north of Florence Ave, which became famous in 1992 when Reginald Denny was pulled from his semi and attacked during the riots, an act caught on a helicopter's camera, at the intersection of Florence and Normandy.

In any case, the things I noticed were partially concerning ethnicity. To say that Huntington Park is today majority Latino vastly underestimates what I saw. The truth is closer to overwhelmingly Latino (97.4%, from my 2012 LA Almanac). Of the many classes I sat in, one 7th grade girl was black, but every single other student I saw at the school, in classes I observed or walking around, was Latino.

Those demographics had the effect of turning a golden haired, pale skinned, blue-eyed, hairy 34-year old guy into a rather exotic creature. It was almost like Bed-Stuy again, getting stared at by just about everybody.

Another part of the adventure was getting there and back using my bicycle and the LA Metro. I found that riding the Blue Line from Long Beach to the Florence stop left me with a simple two mile ride to campus. The sun was in my eyes going there and coming home, and the wind was tough and in my face on the way back to the train. But that's not the thing I'm reporting on here.

Don't let anyone tell you that "Nobody Rides the LA Subway Metro" (my bad, old habits...). That sucker was crowded pretty furiously on each day, with Thursday morning being the worst. It was crowded like the 6 train in Manhattan this past Thursday, but people here don't know how to get out of the way; they're not trained well enough. That could take more than years.

There was one moment as I patrolled a class where a group of girls was giggling loudly when I walked by, giggled again when I asked them if they needed any help, and then one told me that I "look like that guy from Spider-Man." I thought, Tobey Maguire, but then I realized that these kids probably meant the new movie, and that kid from Social Network. I said, "Uh, thanks, I think. Doesn't sound so bad."

I was corrected, "No. It's a good thing."