QOTD: Walking Lessons and Shoes

Today’s article brought up two questions. A link on the Around Town section of NBC’s local Washington, DC news site about walking lessons led to an article in the New York Times about walking lessons... in New York City. While some local residents may be interested in taking or offering walking lessons after reading the article, it seemed a little odd to include an article about a class in New York City in a section about the DC area.

The linked article explored walking lessons in yoga classes offered by Jonathan FitzGordon at Yoga Center of Brooklyn. They sound similar to the classes by Amy Matthews at the Breathing Project referenced in an article seven months ago in New York Magazine about walking barefoot. Unlike this earlier article, the New York Times article does not mention one of the most obvious culprits for bad posture and walking-related health problems: shoes. More specifically, shoes that are known to destroy people’s bodies, such as high-heeled pumps.

I thought this was particularly interesting since the picture on NBC’s site for the article includes four women in what could be a dance studio, three of whom appear to be wearing three to four inch heels.

Would you take walking lessons to allow you to continue to wear uncomfortable shoes, or would you switch shoes first? Do you think FitzGordon didn’t mention shoes because he figured it would be easier to get New Yorkers to take lessons without having to convince them to give up their heels?

And, do you think “local” articles should always refer to things happening in and around DC, or is it okay to have one that’s actually for New York City?

QOTD: How to Respond to Teens Attacking Adults in SW DC

According to NBC (thanks DCist for the link), last week a woman was assaulted "for fun" a couple of blocks from what will be my new home. The article also mentions that teenagers jumped a police officer in front of the nearby CVS after he asked them why they were not in school. The teens stole his radio and tried to take his gun. A month ago an elderly man died after being beat up by teenagers in the same area.

While I know my current neighborhood is hardly the safest place in the world, the majority of the violence I have witnessed here involved black teenagers and young adults fighting with each other. As a white woman who is friendly but largely uninvolved in my neighbors' worlds, the worst I ever received was some benign drunken harrassment and a few young boys hitting on me. Almost all of my interactions with my neighbors here have been positive, even when I was digging into things some people would rather not talk about.

Seeing articles like this makes me wonder if the same thing will work in my new neighborhood.

I've already spent some time in Southwest. While the street I'm going to live on seems sleepy and quiet, plenty of people (including teenagers) hang out on the stoops just a few blocks over. There is also a very obvious income gap between my section of the neighborhood and theirs. On the one side, multi-story, expensive-looking rowhouses sheltered by tall, old trees and fronted by carefully maintained gardens line the streets. On the other, short, small, identical homes squat along treeless streets with waist-height chain-link fences and clothes lines in the back. My section of the neighborhood is mixed race; the other section seems to be almost all black.

The split in the neighborhood lies along 3rd Street SW, next to the commercial area that includes Safeway, the Metro, the CVS and Bank of America trailers, and the dirt pit that will become the new Waterside Mall. As the NBC article mentions, plenty of teenagers hang out in front of the stores there. I've said hello to them and laughed at their jokes, but I've never questioned them or challenged their right to be there as the police officer did.

When I move to Southwest I plan to start reporting on the area. This means, at a minimum, I will be walking around and talking to everyone I meet, getting to know who lives there, who works there, who hangs out, and what their stories are. Including the teenagers. Inevitably some people will disagree with the articles that come out of these conversations.

Years ago in Texas several of my guy friends realized that they could not stop me from going into places they saw as dangerous. Long before I took a Sociology class or wrote an article, I walked into places others labeled "The Barrio" or "that crack house" just to talk to the people who lived there. My friends' reaction, in typical Texas fashion, was to give me easily concealed weapons and teach me how to seriously injure or kill someone.

Inscription: "(Heart) for Chris with love"

I never had to use these weapons, and I stopped carrying them when I started needing to pass metal detectors to get into the libraries in DC. I also stopped carrying them because I don't want to wind up accidentally killing or crippling someone over a misunderstanding or pretty theft. To me, losing my wallet is not worth someone else's life.

On the other hand, I don't want to end up with my hands held behind my back by one teenager as another one beats me up just for walking down the street. Being able to throw the person holding me would be great in this instance, but would having a weapon like a knife, a night stick, pepper spray, or even a gun help? I don't know.

What do you think? Should I start bearing arms and really practicing martial arts again, or are my best defenses being aware, making friends, and talking my way through the situations I find myself in? Do I realistically need to worry about this more in Southwest than in Columbia Heights?

QOTD: Police Locker Homophobic Vandalism -- The Second Victim

UPDATE 11/12/08 12:00 p.m.:
Amanda Hess at The Sexist posted today about the questions raised in this blog post. She writes that she has contacted the MPD for more information about how they're handling the misogynistic aspect of this crime and promises to update "if and when I hear back from MPD."


Original post 11/11/08 2:45 p.m.:
In this article from Friday, the Washington Blade reports about an anti-gay slur scrawled across the locker of an openly gay DC police officer, Matt Mahl. One sentence of the article mentions a second person, although both the article and the police appear to be overlooking her:

Police sources familiar with the incident said the graffiti referred to Mahl as a “fag” and made lewd references to sexual acts by Mahl and a female police sergeant who is also assigned to the Third District substation.

This female sergeant was arguably also the victim of this hate crime.

A Google search turned up two other articles about the incident, one from the Washington City Paper's The Sexist blog and one from NBC. While it's somewhat understandable that the Blade focused on the gay male victim because it is a paper for the GLBT community, the two other articles covering this incident also neglected to note the second victim.

Why do you think Mahl received attention from the MPD and the media while the female sergeant was overlooked?