Has Mr. Brooks ever spent a night in a homeless shelter? He can certainly try it, if he thinks that his social skills in environments infrequently inhabited by those of his socioeconomic background are superior to mine.
That's a picture of part of the first page of The New York Times today. It's the advertisement for an article by Mr. Brooks, who has often demonstrated his misogynist dislike of me.
The article says NOTHING about government responsibility to provide a good public school education to everyone. Also, it doesn't seem to me that Mr. Brooks has read any of the emails that I have sent over the past year to various people who work at Bunker Hill Community College, even though I have published many of them over the past couple of weeks. That's not even to mention that The New York Times hacked my school email account as soon as I started school last year, and that the Times did that to look for things that it could publicly and misleadingly construe as evidence of my sluttiness.
Some of what the school administrator who wrote the vicious report that could have had me expelled from school in 2016 objected to most strenuously were my emails to my then-writing professor, suggesting how he could try to counteract the failures of the urban public school system that had sent almost every student in his class to college without the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence. Although it wasn't heroic of that professor or anyone else who has lied about me at that school, shockingly low salaries are probably part of the apathy.
Those are the last couple of paragraphs of Mr. Brooks' article.
There's a Whole Foods on the other side of the expensive apartment buildings that are being built or which were built a couple of years ago, across the street from the Pine Street Inn. The Whole Foods was built to serve the needs of the people who live at those apartment buildings. Many homeless people spend hours there, sleeping or talking on the couches; nobody seems to ask them to leave, which is nice of the staff at Whole Foods.
That Whole Foods is .2 miles away from the Pine Street Inn, according to Google maps. Star Market, the only other supermarket within walking distance that I know of, is 1 mile away, which is significant when you have to carry your school books, your toiletries, clothes for a few days, and everything else that you might need on your back every day. Star Market also doesn't have tables where I can charge my phone while I'm doing my homework.
I don't always sit in the building at Whole Foods. Although I have lived in the Northeast all my life, I love summer. Since the curfew at the shelter is 7:00 p.m. every night, including the weekends, and 8:00 p.m. is the latest that guests can be outside after the curfew, I try to be outside as much as I can when the weather is good.
I try not to be at the shelter for dinner because it is a degrading and stressful process. There aren't enough tables and chairs for everyone to have dinner at the same time, so people are called in groups and have a few minutes to eat before they have to get up so other people can sit down. That process take an hour, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., and it's impossible to do homework during that time. Since the bed lottery starts at 3:45 p.m. every day, and the line for lottery tickets starts at 3:00 p.m., my day is almost over by 2:00 p.m., which is when I either have to stop anything else that I'm doing or finish it around the shelter's schedule so that I'm not late. I'd rather sleep in a bed than on a mat on the floor, between the tables.
At least I can choose where to have the mat. This is where I tend to sleep when I don't have a bed:
People who sleep in the lobby (that's what this room is called) have to get up at 4:15 a.m. instead of 6:00 a.m.
The majority of people at Bunker Hill Community College, both students and staff, haven't harassed me. However, when even one person does, it's disruptive. Also, NOBODY SHOULD BE HARASSING ANYONE.
Does Mr. Brooks even know that what the Dean of Students was telling me last year when I was hauled into her office and brought up on false charges was that she thought I wasn't good enough for the school? She didn't say that in so many words; what she was saying was that I was too old (for community college) and that my having been homeless meant that I was psychologically incapable of behaving normally in a classroom.
Copyright L. Kochman, July 11, 2017 @ 8:29 a.m.
