Left turn: next right

If you ever drive in New Jersey, remember this: if you want to turn left off of a major road, you must make a right turn. It's driving me crazy. All left turns on these streets are like freeway exits, so you have to make a right turn and loop around to the street you want to turn onto. Also, you can't turn left when there's not an intersection, so if your destination is on the left side of the road, you have to drive past it, turn right, loop around, make a left turn back onto the street you were just on in the direction you just came from, and then proceed to your destination. What is wrong with New Jersey?

I guess they make it up by not making you pump your own gas.

So my first consortium this week. It's great. Fifteen schools in the Red Bank area (about an hour south of NYC) in New Jersey get together, work out a college fair schedule all on their own, and all you have to do is show up. You get to meet more kids than a regular presentation and also you get to socialize with the other counselors.

The problem with that, however, is if you end up being, due to the alphabet, next to a really annoying counselor, you're stuck with them all week. The two counselors to the left of me have been great, but to the right of me has been an older (looks like late 50s) counselor who talks a lot and really doesn't seem to understand that what he says could be offensive. Very offensive. He's well intentioned - knowing I'm a rookie he's been giving me road tips - but still, can get annoying and uncomfortable - and racist. A few examples:

Today, my talking about living in California led to talk about Schwarzenegger, then Reagan, then Bush. This guy is as rabid of a Democrat as I am, but didn't seem to think that talking about politics might not be appropriate when trying to recruit students.

Consistently referring to some schools as "black schools." For example, saying that a school used to be good but now it has gone downhill since it has become a "black school" in a "black area." What he's trying to say, I think, is that the areas have become poorer, and generally consisting of more minorities, and thus the schools have become poorer. But how he says it just comes out as ignorant and racist.

At one of the "black schools," saying after a, shall we say, "well-endowed" and curvaceous young woman: "she's got a body."

When talking about Boston, saying it is a great city because they've kept the blacks in certain parts of the city, thus making the other areas safe to walk around it.

So needless to say, the next three days of standing next to this guy are going to be not fun at all.

After the fairs today went down to the beach for a while before it got too cold. It was the first time I had really been to the Atlantic Ocean. So I guess it's kind of cool that I've been to both oceans now. It was very nice - to the north you could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and to the south the shore disappeared in the distance. It was good to get out and see it, if not just to get out of the hotel room.

After getting my beach fix, I turned right and headed left, back to my hotel.