Month: May 2016

See that small patch of evergreen trees in the distance? That’s my favorite spot to sit in Washington Square Park. Weirdly, I don’t have to fight for it. It’s not at all popular and there is always an entire bench free. I like to sit a little bit away from them so I look out at them.

Kantorei of Kansas City has started a Kickstarter campaign in order to record an album of Christmas music. They promise to include “previously unrecorded gems of the late Renaissance” (by Melchior Vulpius and Blasius Ammon)! There is never enough Christmas music in the world, and to have pieces we’ve never heard before is a great gift!

A view of the Municipal Building from the Hudson River. The Municipal Building is across the street from the beginning of Chambers Street, and I walk up to it whenever I visit the Municipal Archives. Is the west side higher than the east side? It can’t be, right? But this view seems elevated to me.

I passed by the group pictured below on Saturday, on my way to the America’s Cup race. I asked someone what they had gathered for, it was very Russian-centric and clearly had something to do with WWII, but I couldn’t understand her answer. I was also terrified that I would reveal some gross lack of knowledge. (I googled it when I got home and decided it must have had to do with VE Day and Germany’s surrender.)

Whenever someone posts a video on Facebook where they ask people something very obvious, like the one I just watched asking people about WWII coincidentally, I feel pity for the people who don’t know anything. One person had never heard of WWII, another had never heard of Hitler, another couldn’t name the countries we were fighting against.

First, I panic when I’m put on the spot about what I know. My mind goes blank. Second, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I once knew. Third, I can’t think of a third. Oh. Third, I’m not very educated to begin with, except in areas that coincide with my various obsessions.

My big fear is someone is going to shove a camera in my face and ask me to name a supreme court justice and the only names I will be able to come up with, if any, will be the conservative judges.

So I sympathize with the people being questioned in the video, and not the know-it-alls interviewing them. Except, I don’t like that the people being interviewed don’t seem to care. I think people should be educated and informed, and if I learned for the first time that there was something called World War II that was bigger and deadlier than any other war and involved nuclear bombs being dropped, genocide, and fucking so on, I’d be shocked to the core. I wouldn’t be standing there going, “Nope, never heard of it, hahaha.” Except maybe that was just a defensive response.

I’m not sure if I’m going to head back downtown today to see if they race today. I kinda want to curl up and read. More than kinda.

I took this yesterday. This guy wanted to get an even closer view of the race.

I don’t know why, but the race didn’t happen today. I heard something about there not being enough wind? There’s another race tomorrow though, so I’ll head back downtown tomorrow. Here are three of the teams in waiting mode. The sky looks bluer in this photograph than it actually was. It’s been gray and dismal all day. Except now!