While looking for an apartment in Minneapolis, I visited an apartment in a neighborhood with a bad reputation for crime. The neighborhood itself had wide oaks and a lake with a walking path. The rooms were in a well-maintained Victorian with carved wood details. I asked the landlord multiple times about the crime. He kept changing the subject. Eventually, he said, “If you call the police, they respond like this,” snapping his fingers.
I moved into another neighborhood with a better reputation.
There, I was crossing a park to get to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, when a man lounging on a blanket waved me over. He asked, “Do you do sex for money?”
Confused about why he wanted to know my occupation, I said, “No, I’m an art student.”
I had on an over-sized t-shirt covered in paint stains that read, “Books Are Life. The rest is just details.”