NY sucks.

Hello again! I am writing this while sitting on the lawn in front of Tyler/Plimpton back at Amherst. It is so good to be back. I actually don’t think I have ever felt happier to be back at Amherst, and there have been many times when I have been very happy to be back.

So why am I here? I left California and flew into New York JFK airport, not to Bradley….sooo shouldn’t I be in NY? Well yes, but the thing is….I hate my internship (well I hate what it’s been thus far) and ran away to be at a familiar place with familiar people, where I knew where I was and what I was doing, and where I liked myself….aka Amherst.

This internship so far has sucked. Really really seriously sucked. Why has it sucked? Two things, bad housing and NYC bureaucracy. Let’s start with the bad housing. The room they gave me is a nurse dorm room type thing in Building 1 which is attached to Building 6, which is where I am supposedly working. Okay, so it’s close. BUT, the room is ridiculously sparse and utterly sterile in a very hospital sort of way which is giving me the creeps. It has two beds , very dim lighting, an AC (the one good thing about it) and a sick which doesn’t work. The walls are ugly yellowing tiles and the floor is ugly yellowing linoleum and it’s at the end of a deserted hallway. Also, the lock doesn’t like me, and doesn’t let me open it so I have to stop random people and ask them to turn the key and then it opens and I look like a total idiot….whee.

The bathrooms I get to use are patient bathrooms by day and staff bathrooms by night, except the cleaning people don’t always come. So there’s always the chance that the toilets will have shit all over them or the entire bathroom will reek because someone’s catheter bag fell or something….Most of you probably know that I am super picky about bathrooms. I could stand the dingy room if the bathrooms weren’t so gross, but they are…so The housing is driving me crazy.

Oh yeah, also, no internet access or TV…. So seriously, the first night I got there, I called my mom who was leaving for India the next day and just cried for a while because I was all alone in a deserted hallway in the Bronx.

Now, reason 2 for why this sucks. I don’t have an ID card yet for the hospital. That means that I haven’t been able to do any work yet. This is the part where I hate NYC bureaucracy. The last time I worked at a city hospital was in SF where I went in for an hour and signed some forms, came back the next day and they had my ID and I could start work. Here, I have been told to go from office to office in attempts to get an ID which would let me into the research associate’s rooms so I could start reading CT scans and compiling data. They could have told me to bring my immunization records from home, it would have taken them a one sentence email, but they didn’t. So they had to run serologies and give me a PPD and all sorts of things. The day they did these, they could have given me the drug test. But they didn’t. I had to waste six hours on Thursday waiting around for them to tell me to pee in a stupid cup. Also, what hospital needs 4 days to turn over labs? Seriously?? I mean I’ve had dinky hospitals in India churn out blood test results in a matter of hours.

But I met the guys I’m doing work for, and they had all their stuff ready to show me so that’s fine. But nothing else is.

HOWEVER, the lovely Ms. Brooke Berman has been so wonderful and has let me spend a lot of time at her house, which has been so great. I also spent the 4^th of July with her family and saw Ratatouille, which was a delightful film.

So NY has sucked thus far, but being here at Amherst is great. I wandered around this morning and bought a lunch of raspberries and tea at the farmers market. Linda is a great person for letting me sleep in her room and Saber from rescuing me from my bus disaster yesterday.

So my lack of wireless in NY will mean infrequent updates, but when I get back on Tuesday I intend to take the subway to Manhattan and scope out cafes with free wireless where I can go to escape my dingy hallway and lack of ID.

I’m also considering telling them that it’s not worth it for me to just work for 2 weeks and just packing up and leaving and coming to Amherst to do anthro research. What do you guys think? Good plan? Bad plan? Is it bad for me to ditch an internship? But as long as I don’t get my ID I can’t do anything and who knows when I’ll get the damn card?

Help me decide, seriously.

I will post a less complainy entry later, but I had to get this out of me. And ask for help as to whether I should stay in NY or leave.