July 15, 1999
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There's an area in Brooklyn called DUMBO, which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. I'd read about a coffee shop that attracted riot girl types, and so I thought maybe I'd meet some new friends. Well, as it happened, I never did find that coffee shop. Instead, I saw an abundance of graffiti on abandoned factories and apartment buildings. Aside from a deli and a bar, there really wasn't much of anything.

A couple of painters were unloading their gear from a truck, and I watched them for a while. One looked to be about twenty-four, and he caught me spying on their activities. He smiled at me, and it was one of those awful, disarming Handsome Boy smiles that usually find their way to a Banana Republic advertisement. I blushed and fled the scene, feeling silly in a youthful way that I experience less and less these days.

Around the corner, some people were preparing to shoot a film of some sort. More accurately, they were slouching, trying to appear deep. I stood across the street looking like a third grader in my yellow Plumbrook Panthers t-shirt, skirt, and running sneakers. They disdainfully sized me up, and so I decided to respond obnoxiously by snapping pictures of them from obscure angles. But the artsy fartsies bored me almost as quickly as I'd seen them, and I walked to Jay Street. There, I found two girls and a woman of undiscernable age; all three were wearing bathing suits as a fire hydrant sprayed water into the street. The woman began to talk with a man, and the girls took this as a signal to romp wildly in the water. The older of the girls was probably ten years old: thankfully, too young to have learned to find fault with her body. And the younger, giggly girl looked about seven. I just stood there for a few minutes, watching them and smiling because I never had thought this scene existed outside of movies.