When walking the streets of this city you learn to wear a perpetual look of anger, not that is proactive to look at all your fellow New Yorkers like you wish they'd burn in hell. It's more for your own protection from having to give up money to a junkie, keep sketchy older men from hitting on you, getting you across the street even though 'someone' intended on running that red light...and a plethora of other things. It's just a common scare tactic that seemingly every person in this God awful place learned and now we're all just leering at each other like scum. Don't get me wrong, Albany is a very tight nit place when you make it that way. But this state seems to have a way with disassociation, and most of us were raised to feel as though we were not allowed to trust people. My Mother was a parent that taught her children caution in any situation, coincided with my Father's concept to give people a chance.
Born in 1993, I was a pretty pleasant 90's baby. I grew up to enjoy all the things my generation had to offer including Brittany Spears, Rugrats and Pokemon. Back yard birthdays, bountiful Christmases and big basket Easters. Mentioning all this I should also let you know, I was never well off. No, my family, in particular, lived in the Albany Downtown area that used to be the neighborhood of Italians and Pollocks, slowly turning into a black ghetto as the years progressed. My Nan was always bitching about that. The change in inhabitants over her lifespan living on the corner of Sloan and Second had not quite suited her taste, being born of the Depression, she was never a person of wealth although socially that did not change her rural distaste for black people. Mind you, my Nan was racist but she was not prejudice, a woman of the neighborhood she had made friends with everyone on her block, including it's black residents. She knew a good person when she saw one and the color of their skin nor the connotations of her childhood were going to prevent her from seeing that.
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