Author Archives: Nicole Schneider

Posts by Nicole Schneider

Comments by Nicole Schneider

"My only exciting encounter with a police officer dates back to my junior year of high school. My parents were away for the weekend and left my two siblings and I at home with a fridge full of groceries and a list of phone numbers to dial in case of an emergency. Against my better judgment, I let my best friend convince me to throw a “small” party that Saturday night. The beginning of the night went pretty smoothly: there was no out of control drinking, no loud music, and no drugs of any sort. I was a strict host, and all my friends respected that. However, in a moment’s time, a mass of cars pulled up in front of my house at around 1 AM. The party went from quiet and small to absolute mayhem in an instant. A rush of senior boys piled into my cramped dining room, unloading knapsacks of vodka bottles, packs of beer, and Ziploc bags stuffed with marijuana. I turned around to find my best friend smoking with a few boys in my living room, and spilling red and orange drinks on my ivory sofa. As the music grew louder, my anger grew stronger. I started getting phone calls from my neighbors, which I of course ignored. I then noticed a commotion right outside my house. One boy had just crashed his car into my friend’s car, and a police officer was charging toward my front door. He demanded that I call my parents, and after a long ten minutes of speaking with them on the phone, he forced every last person out of my house. To my surprise he ignored the strong stench of pot that permeated the foyer. He didn’t even question the bottles of alcohol that lay open and almost finished atop every counter in my kitchen. All he demanded of me was to shut the music off and to respect the noise complaints from my neighbors. He gave me a stern “warning,” and then went on his way once all the cars pulled away from my house. In that moment I realized I was more afraid of getting into trouble with my parents than my neighborhood police."
--( posted on Feb 16, 2016, commenting on the post Assignment 2 )
 
"Being that I am from the small suburban town of Lawrence, on the south shore of Long Island, I was never really familiar with the City’s subway system until my first day of freshman year. The Sunday before school started I moved into a one bedroom apartment in downtown Manhattan, and was finally able to call myself a “city girl.” As exciting as this was, adjusting to the City life added a whole new level of stress that accompanied those first-day-of-college nerves. When my first day of school finally arrived later that week, I made sure to estimate how long the subway ride to school would take. I decided that it would take no longer than 20 minutes to get to Hunter College from Astor Place, and so just to be safe, I left to school 45 minutes before my first class was scheduled to begin. With my newly purchased metro card in one hand, I hopped on my very first subway ride to school on the 6 Train that day. While the subway ride that day took a few minutes less than I had estimated, the ride nevertheless felt endless. To say the subway that day was packed is an understatement. At each stop, more and more bodies flooded into the subway car, regardless of the lack of breathing space available to the rest of us. What I realized on that day may seem cynical and perhaps a bit dramatic, but I found that many people become their most aggressive versions of themselves when piling onto the subway each morning. Since there are no legal constraints on the number of people that may enter each subway car (and if so such would be difficult to enforce), more people push and squeeze their way onto the subway than can fit. This is especially frustrating when the subway is delayed, which happens constantly. While this may seem to be a trivial complaint, it is a struggle I have dealt with almost every day since that first subway ride – since I am always commuting to school during rush hour. Furthermore, being that I get extremely claustrophobic in crowded spaces, this makes my daily experience with the NYC transit system extremely frustrating and almost unbearable."
--( posted on Feb 9, 2016, commenting on the post Assignment 1 )