I'm A Real NY'er Now

I've been pondering why I haven't been blogging, and I don't have a good reason. I think it largely has to do with the fact that I'm not working from home anymore, so I'm not spending hours and hours at my own desk, desperately trying to procrastinate writing my thesis. Instead I'm sitting in an office and I've been feeling somewhat productive lately, so I don't worry so much about killing time, and I feel a little bit guilty about blogging from work.

BUT I've been having a lot going on recently, so I want to be better about reflecting.

One very interesting thing happened to me this weekend. I went up to my weekly residency in Harlem, which takes place Friday afternoons. The 1 Train on the way up there is terribly crowded and last week it was particularly so. I got to the school and, between classes, realized that my wallet was missing out of my bag. I checked the floor, I talked to the teacher, but it was gone, gone, gone.

I had Zach call the banks and cancel my cards and headed into the next class, and I have to say that I was pretty proud of the way that I handled things because I managed to maintain a pretty healthy perspective. Money is just money, it's not the end of the world to lose a little bit of it. Cards are irritating to reorder, but I have been blessed with joint accounts so I still have access to all my accounts until the new cards arrive. The three things which made me a little sad to lose were

1. my NYU id card, which is valid until '09 and gets me great discounts as well as access to clean bathrooms in the village and can't be replaced now that I'm no longer a student,
2. an H&M gift card for $30 which in itself is not such a big thing but represented my ability to go buy myself something guilt-free on a moment's notice, and
3. my Oregon drivers license which cannot be replace because of my lack of a Oregon address and the loss of which represents drastically increased difficulty in obtaining a NYS drivers licence.

But you know, it's kind of a rite of passage to get your pockets picked on a crowded train, and now I really feel like a New Yorker, so it's really not all that bad.

At the school the teacher I worked with asked me if I thought that there was any chance that the wallet had disappeared in the school rather than on the train, and upon reflection I decided that there was no reason to suspect that one of the kids took it and very good reasons not to imply that I did, so I made no report and didn't say anything to anyone other than the classroom teacher I was with when I found it missing and my director back at the theater.

BUT THEN YESTERDAY I got a call from my director who had gotten a call from the principal of this school saying that they had found my wallet inside a students' desk! I still don't know who's desk it was or what is left in it or anything beyond this, but it has been found and, presumably at least one of my IDs remains because they knew it was mine.

I am left with two emotions now. Firstly, I am relieved that there is a possibility that I won't have to take a NYS driving test and use public restrooms in the village. But, secondly, I am really sad to acknowledge that one of the students I've been working with all semester in my residency went through my purse and took my wallet. Do I say something to the class when I go back on Friday? What on earth would I say? But how can I not say something? At least one of them (and probably more than one because 7th graders can't keep their mouths shut) knows what happened and even though I don't care to find out who did what, I think it should be acknowledged.

One interesting but irrelevant detail to this story: When I went back to class on Friday after realizing that my wallet was gone, the students that I was working with, all of whom had been in the previous class, wrote a scene about a girl getting pressured into joining a gang and, to prove that she was a part of the group, she was told that she had to go steal a wallet from a woman nearby. And the "nearby" indicated by my rising thespians was the exact spot on the floor where my bag had been before I realized that my wallet had gone missing! Crazy world, huh?