For a long time, I’ve been somewhat bitter about this. I was a Spanish major in college, and had opportunities to study in Spain, but was repeatedly talked out of it by my mom, who said I’m a lonely person who needs people; without my friends, what if I just retreated into myself and never came out? I thought that I was a strong enough person to speak back to my mother, but I wasn’t. It made me worried. What if I did just retreat into myself?

Well, having retreated into myself plenty in the intervening years, I’ve learned that I do get sick of being alone and go to pretty extreme measures not to be, if necessary. But by then I’d entered a lifestyle of cyclic poverty and constant work in my doctoral program. We’re not funded appropriately (or at least my entering class wasn’t—new students get benefits, and older students weren’t thought of), so I’ve been teaching between 6 and 10 classes a year to be able to afford my apartment and conference travel, all while trying to study and write a dissertation. A few thousand bucks and a month off of work were things out of my most insane fantasies.

Meanwhile, I developed a bad attitude about the sort of people who talk about traveling all the time. If you read personals ads, you quickly learn that men in NYC define themselves primarily through how often they have “traveled.” Going places is all the personality they have. Thinking art and food is better somewhere else is all the taste they have. Listening to people speak foreign language in the streets is all the intelligence they have. You can buy all this, if you have time and money.

It also gives you the right to think some lower-middle-class girl from Kansas must be ignorant and tasteless because she’s only studied the languages and cuisines you’ve encountered in their native habitat. I’m in the midst of some drama trying to get my passport, and let me tell you, if I hear the sentence, “You don’t have a passport?!” one more time, I’ll punch someone in the nuts. I live and teach in New York. I am not ignorant of the existence of the world.

So I’ve still got this chip on my shoulder, class-wise, about traveling.

Some of my friends, including some from Europe, have a romantic vision of how I’ll be changed by going there, how it will make me see things differently and recalibrate my life. I am not sure this will happen, exactly, in that I think they mean something about my political perspective, but if I get any more leftist I’ll come around the other side. If it happened that in my travels, I discovered a magical place where I am universally regarded as sexy and cool, I don’t think I’d come back at all. I’d just stay there and be worshiped as a god. Maybe there’s something I’m not getting.

I’m looking forward to my trip because I will be doing an interesting program of study with some people I think I will enjoy, and I get to see my friends abroad. I look forward to taking my German out for a spin, though everyone tells me I won’t get to use it much, and walking around some old streets I’ve read about. I don’t expect to come home and write a personals ad that starts: WELL-TRAVELED, WORLDLY ISO SAME.

The dinner table conversation consisted of three topics: 1) food, particularly the preparation of the meal we were presently consuming; 2) home design, notably whatever projects or plans were currently underway; and 3) um….maybe there were only two.

So these two topics offered a universe, an infinite cosmos, of conversation. My grandmother, a gifted cook, set standards that everyone else in the family worked hard to meet as they took turns hosting. If you toiled for hours on a homemade blueberry pie (and there was no other kind, believe me), you could count on at least fifteen minutes spent reviewing the crust⎯the ingredients, the prep, even the barometric pressure on the day it was baked. What’s the right amount of sugar to add to the berries? That depends⎯when were they picked? Where? What about the whipped cream? Did you chill the bowl long enough? Add a drop of vanilla, or no? Overall, how close is the pie to perfection? How does it compare to all previous pies? How could it be better?

It wasn’t mean-spirited, tear-you-down criticism; it was genuinely offered in the spirit of experimentation. Of science. Anyone in my family can cook anything. (It’s ridiculous.) Food is practical, I learned, but it’s also deeply creative and competitive and worth your attention.

The same thing goes for having a beautiful home. All my elders helped design and build their houses, and worked constantly to improve them. My grandfather, a WWII Navy radio operator and technical writer, was an Idaho farm boy transplanted to the east coast. He was raised to work with his hands. As a young vet he dug out the basement of his and his bride’s new home with a spade, and built it up from there. (My grandmother reminded us of this fact whenever we complained about housework.) My parents built the stone wall around their place with the rocks pulled up from digging out their own foundation. You want a deck? You want to lay down a new maple floor? You want rhododendrons in the front yard? Do it yourself, I learned.

Decorating was no different. I must have spent more time hearing about window treatments than I spent studying in any college course. Choose the fabrics, create the design, “run up” the draperies yourself. My aunt, an interior designer by trade, was the most passionate on the topic; it consumed her thoughts. One Sunday at dinner she confessed a long and elaborate recurring dream in which she was commissioned by Prince to sew swags and jabots. Everyone at the table laughed uproariously⎯not at the silliness of being Prince’s decorator, but at the thought that my aunt would ever deign to make jabots. Ha ha! It cracks me up even now.

If you don’t know what a jabot is, don’t worry. Most people don’t. But the specialized language of a skill is part of the fun: jacquard, finial, bias cut, Roman shade, valance. Insider-y shop talk: What’s the better original finish for that Heywood-Wakefield buffet: Champagne, Wheat, or Natural? Why? Are you sure? I took such matters as life-and-death decisions, subscribing to Met Home before Seventeen. Other kids admired singers and athletes; I idolized Andree Putman and Terence Conran.

I thought everyone’s family was like this. It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized dinner conversation could consist of anything other than…dinner. Travel, current events, the performing arts, technology, sports, business⎯to me, they were just sections of the newspaper. But guess what? Some people really care about that stuff! And they talk about it instead of whether to plant Japanese or Siberian irises!

All of this baggage has been weighing heavily on me recently as I seriously shop for my first home. My inner child, a little kid who begged for graph paper and a drafting pencil to draw floor plans of my “dream house,” has to shut the hell up. When entering the world of real estate, you have to be ruthless. You cannot fall in love with the first perfect house you see, because it will break your heart. You have to have a little bit of vision to see past what is, but be realistic about what can be. You have to know your limits and your budget. You have to search your soul to decide what’s a compromise and what’s a must-have. It’s a tricky calculus, weighing all the variables, questioning your values. We’re not what we own, true⎯but aren’t we, just a little bit, where we live? Don’t we deserve some beauty in our surroundings?

Even to have “taste” in such things is a matter of privilege, and nobody wants to be a snob, but DAMN, there is some ugly real estate out there. It’s almost as if everyone has chosen to live in the housing equivalent of Twinkies and Sno-Balls. I am looking for an artisanal brioche. And if I can’t find it, I might have to bake it myself.

As we drove up to the cafe, we both noticed — but didn’t mention to each other that we’d noticed — a group of guys hanging out in front of the smoke shop across the street. Some of them had tattoos crawling up the sides of their necks and their shaved heads. They didn’t quite look like the types that hung around that neighborhood, but I didn’t think much of it after we pulled into the parking lot.

Heliotrope is a short street in East Hollywood that borders one side of Los Angeles City College. The Hel-Mel area has become hip-ified of late, with two bicycle shops, a coffee house, a couple of galleries, a tattoo parlor, and Scoops, a hipster ice cream shop that makes its own odd flavors and shows work by local artists. On certain days the street teems with bicycle nazis working on their fixies at the Bicycle Kitchen, decked out in long dickies shorts, hoodies, bike shoes, and those dinky little cloth bike caps that don’t do anything but signify that the wearers want to be taken seriously as bicycle hipsters. My secret name for that area is “Little Berkeley”. Still, I like to hang out there on occasion.

We settled into our booth and ordered posole and craft beer. The food was incredibly delicious and warm, and we happily relaxed into our afternoon repast, Tim reading the Arts section and I the article in the Travel section about Iberian acorn-fed ham. The white hipsters scattered about the cafe were involved in their conversations, the girls in the corner talking around their lip-rings, the bike dudes carefully wiping their mustaches clean of the drippings from their jackfruit tacos and discussing the latest cranksets.

We lingered awhile after we’d finished eating, and eventually Tim mentioned that our meter was just about to run out, but rather than rushing home, we thought we’d go across the street to see what flavors Scoops had on offer. We took our time putting on our coats and settled up the bill.

As we rose to leave, we heard what I thought was loud firecrackers outside the cafe window. People in the cafe were looking in the direction of the noise, and thirty seconds into it Tim started yelling, “Get down! Get down!” About half of us hit the floor, but quite a few continued just staring out the window. We lay on the floor for a good few minutes until the popping subsided. It felt like a game. A guy at a table window yelled that someone should call the cops, and eventually a couple people took out their phones. Several people, including Tim, had seen a blue van drive down the street, and a guy step out and start shooting into the small crowd of guys in front of the smoke shop. One of the gangsters returned fire, and there were murmurings and rumors that he’d been hit in the leg.

The couple that had been sitting at the table in front of the window remained there for the entire incident. The man made a joke about the neighborhood being safe, and did his dining companion still want to be his roommate. He complained loudly that the cops probably wouldn’t even show up, and while they eventually did, it took them about 10 minutes to get there, far too long considering the fact that there was a police station blocks away, and the area was usually crawling with cops. The chef came out from the kitchen and had 911 on the phone, but it wasn’t until he mentioned that somebody had been hit that they considered sending out a squad car.

Some of the guys outside began picking up the spent shells from the ground. It looked like one of the guys was pocketing them, while one of the bystanders was apparently just curious (and stupid, as we pointed out to ourselves, since he was getting his fingerprints all over them).

As we waited for the cops to arrive, we talked about being surprised that even though we were in East Hollywood, there were gang shootings on this particular street. One guy said that he saw “MS13″ tattooed on the neck of one of the guys in the crowd, although we were dubious that he could see that from across the street.

Somehow we all feel shielded from this sort of violence – by what? Our economic class? Our color? The street that we live on is frequently being tagged by MS13, but I’ve never seen anything worse than that. While I’m aware that getting hit by a stray bullet is a possibility, it’s not one that I dwell on very often. Had we left the cafe a minute earlier, it’s quite possible that one of us would’ve been hit by a stray bullet, and this story would have taken a different turn, or perhaps not be told at all.

Eventually a couple of police cars showed up, and the rest of the gang members sauntered into the smoke shop, as if they suddenly had something else to do. The cops began questioning some of the bystanders, and after a few minutes more we deemed it safe enough to leave the cafe and go to our car, which was parked a few doors down from the incident. As we left the cafe, one of the other patrons admonished us that MS13 are bad news, and that it would be best not to talk to the cops. We hurried across the street and checked the side of our car. There were no bullet holes.

Somehow I’ve managed to get a summons only once or twice and have never actually served on a jury. This time was the closest I’ve come, and it was an interesting glimpse into the complicated workings of our overburdened judicial system. In this case I was called to serve in the Criminal Court, which processes three million jurors per year – that’s one-third of the entire population of Los Angeles county. To quote from the Los Angeles Superior quote jury website:

Los Angeles Superior Court has a “One Trial” term of service. This means that you are placed on call for no more than five days and can be asked to report for jury service on one of those days. If you are asked to report, and are not assigned to a courtroom for jury selection by the end of that day, your service is completed. However, if you are assigned to a courtroom for jury selection, you will be required to serve until you are excused by the Court or selected as a juror and the case you are selected on is completed.

Many people called for jury duty in L.A. end up spending most of their time at the courthouse waiting in the jury pool. From a potential juror’s point of view, the unspoken name of the game is to avoid actually getting on a jury.

I found the entire process quite stressful, actually, but as bad as it was for me, I’m sure it was much worse for the defendant. In this case, the charge was domestic violence. The defendant was a young African American man who allegedly had beaten up his girlfriend, the mother of his child. I found it interesting that the judge and the two attorneys were all women. The public defender was intelligent and well-spoken but young and probably inexperienced. The prosecuting attorney was older and obviously quite competetive. It struck me as strange that the defendant was present during the entirety of of jury selection. When we first filed into the courtroom, the defendant was sitting alongside his public defender with his back to us. At one point early on, the charges were read and the defendant stood up and faced us, giving us all an attempt at a friendly smile. My instant thought was “innocent”; the bleeding-heart liberal me saw him as a victim of racial profiling, and that he was going to be another statistic in the percentage of young black males in jail. (I realized later that if he was convicted, he probably would have to perform community service or attend anger management counseling, but that end of things was never discussed).

Since we hadn’t been called to this case until late in the afternoon, we were instructed to return the next morning by 10 a.m. The next morning we waited in the hall for an extra 45 minutes because one of the potential jurors was late. The people-watching was fascinating; all manner of public defenders, criminal prosecutors, families with children, and law enforcement milled about. At one point a young hispanic man was led out of an adjacent courtroom in handcuffs.

While we were sitting there, a cute young African American woman came in with two very small children in tow. It slowly dawned on me that she was the girlfriend of the defendant, the plaintiff. She seemed to be in a fine mood, easily chatting with the police officer who happened to sit down next to her on the bench. Apparently she was pregnant with twins (also by the defendant, I gathered) and she was hoping for boys, since her other three were girls (the third girl was old enough to be in school). They were extremely adoreable, and I was riveted, watching this young woman interact with her kids and observing her calm and loving demeanor. They were endearing, and a couple times the mother and I smiled at each other in reaction to her kids’ playing and being generally cute. At one point the defendant walked past her, and he smiled at the girls. Their mother called their attention to him, saying, “Who’s that? Is that your daddy?” She was smiling but not directly at him. A minute later she said to the officer nonchalantly, “He beat me up, and I’m tired of it.” Their conversation continued for the rest of the time that we sat there, although about other things.

Eventually we were called into the courtroom and the jury selection began. This trial was going to last five days, according to the judge, who, by the way, was no-nonesense and brooked no excuses in her courtroom about why people were unable to serve. There was constant discussion and emphasis on the importance of impartiality. We were reminded time and again by the judge that it was our job as jurors to consider only the facts in the case, and not insert our personal feelings. It was interesting, of course, that while she was saying that, there were several things going on inside and outside of the courtroom that challenged that idea.

Because of the nature of the charges, unsurprisingly, the judge wanted to know if any among us had experienced any form of violence during our lifetime, domestic or otherwise. Quite a few of us raised our hands, and we proceeded to tell our stories, one by one. Most approached the bench for privacy and explained how we had been wronged. One woman, juror #2 – the first to answer – spoke publicly about abuse at the hands of her parents. No detail, but you could hear in her voice that it was a very difficult subject for her. I gathered that similar stories were being told from the tone of voice and body language of the rest of the potential jurors who spoke to the judge in private. This cold, impersonal, anonymous courtroom was starting to feel oddly like group therapy.

From there a discussion ensued about whether or not we, as jurors, had the ability to put our personal experiences and feelings aside and listen purely to the facts. Some said yes; others couldn’t commit 100% (me included). Juror #2 answered quite honestly that she would try but couldn’t really see herself putting her feelings aside. The judge pressed her further, (to the point of bullying, I thought) and she ended up agreeing, hesitatingly, that she would do her best to put her feelings aside. Despite my really not wanting to be there, I found myself becoming quite interested in the discussions.

Granted, since many people put all their energy into figuring out how to avoid jury duty, it naturally follows that they will exploit any opportunity to do so. I began to wonder how many were embellishing their stories, and how many people were making them up competely. I didn’t get the feeling that anybody was lying. However it seemed that several people were dredging up things that they hadn’t really thought about in years, or that really didn’t affect them in the ways that they were saying to the judge. I mean, everyone has baggage. Mine isn’t something I think about very often, and while I’m sure it affects me in ways that I don’t realize, in all honesty I probably overemphasized its effect on me during this questioning.

I eventually was not chosen to be a juror in this case; nor was Juror #2. Two of the potential jurors did not understand English well enough to be chosen; I left the room as soon as I was dismissed, and so did not learn who the rest of the jury would be. As I walked out into the hall, the plaintiff was still there. “Are they letting you go now?” she asked me as I walked past. “Yes”, I replied, “good luck – I would’ve been on your side.”