Zo- Congrats. Excellent work. Nice to see good people get rewarded.

Furthermore, I have an official announcement to make: I have morphed into Helen Martin, the older actress who sat and stared out of her first floor window on the hit television show 227. It's true. Within the past handful of days, I have witnessed a pair of six-year-olds talk shit to a pack of teenagers, a boy on a bike plan to rid himself of a supersized flourescent light (and the remnants of said light scattered across the sidewalk/grass/street), the police arrest a youth who was too stubborn to shut his mouth and walk away from a fight, and listened to my downstairs neighbor(s) get into fisticuffs.

I am amazed at how my neighborhood has changed with the seasons. In the dead of winter the streets were empty, the traffic was calm, and the noise was minimal. The more the atmosphere heats up, though, the more the riff-raff seem to gather, the more shit there is to talk, the more things there are to smash, and the more people there are to shoot. I am currently unemployed, until August 8th, so I have had plenty of time to keep a keen ear tuned to the street. At the slightest sound of trouble or excitement, I turn away from the fakeness of the television and turn towards the real entertainment- my street.