Stacy Horn

Christ, these Canon G9s are delicate flowers. This is the third time this camera has broken. Buying a new camera costs more money so every time this happens I make the decision to repair it, and I should get a new camera already but the truth is I kinda love the damn thing. The techs don’t work weekends at my repair place, which means no one is going to even look at it until Monday.

I take pictures every day! How am I going to survive??

The statue of the Virgin Mary pictured below is a casualty from the Paring Down Process that is integral to my annual Spring Cleaning. Every year I have to get rid of a certain amount of stuff or my apartment starts to feel uncomfortably cluttered. We’ve been through a lot together though, Mary and me. Someone else had gotten rid of her roughly 36 years ago, when I found her and picked her up off the streets of Cambridge, MA, where I was going to school. Since then I’ve been carting her from place to place every time I’ve moved. She’s survived college, grad school, marriage, divorce, countless jobs, starting a business, five books, I could go on.

She was an interesting conversation piece too, because I’m not religious. “So, what are you doing with a statue of the Virgin Mary,” people would ask. I was raised catholic, I’d explain. I don’t believe but I still take comfort in and enjoy the beauty of religious iconography. But Mary has been falling apart for a while now, and leaves a pile of plaster dust wherever she sits.

Usually when I put something down on the street it’s gone within ten minutes. Mary was still around when I came back hours later. Thankfully, by the next day someone had decided they wanted her. I hope. Maybe the building super out her in the garbage. But I am going to chose to believe someone took her home.

This is great! Some of the events at the World Science Festival are going to be webcast, the schedule is here. I want to watch this one tonight at 8pm:

Quantum Biology and the Hidden Nature of Nature
John Hockenberry, Paul Davies, Seth Lloyd, and others

Can the spooky world of quantum physics explain bird navigation, photosynthesis and even our delicate sense of smell? Clues are mounting that the rules governing the subatomic realm may play an unexpectedly pivotal role in the visible world. Join leading thinkers in the emerging field of quantum biology as they explore the hidden hand of quantum physics on the scales of everyday life.

The battery on my camera died while I was out today so here is yet another picture from my trip out to Brooklyn on Monday. (You’d think I was on a safari or something.) A working gas lamp!

I passed by this building on my way to visiting my friend in Brooklyn the other day. Imagine being one of the old ladies who had to go home to that sign every day! “Yeah, yeah. I’m old. I live here in a home for old people. What of it?”

Built in 1851, to live there you had to be over 60, have your own bed and furniture, and be respectable. By the 1980’s it was a brothel. In 2001 it was converted to condos. Oh, the current sign is new. Originally, it was the Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females. That’s a little friendlier to come home to, although humbling (and a little condescending). Graham comes from John B. Graham, the 19th century lawyer who financed the project.

I watched this enormously sad documentary called Left By The Ship, about the children of US soldiers who were abandoned by their fathers when the father’s service in the Philippines was concluded. Actually, I only caught the second half while channel-surfing, but I started watching for a minute and then couldn’t stop.

These children are not covered by the Amerasian Homecoming Act. For some unknown reason they are excluded and most are in a bad way, living in poverty, and experiencing abuse both within their families and in their communities. You hear politicians and others go on and on about the importance of families, but so often it ends up being so much bullshit. Families go out the window when they become inconvenient. At one point one of the kids successfully reaches his American father, and if you could have seen the kid’s joy when he thought his hell had finally ended, and that he was going to rise. Oh God. I’m remembering it now. He never heard from his father again.

A friend of mine lives in Heaven (Brooklyn). This is the entrance to her enchanting apartment. Look at those roses. And the working gas lamp.

It’s no surprise I’m a pacifist (mostly, there are exceptions, sometimes one must fight) so I never know quite what to say to people in the military. It’s like any other group, some of you are great at what you do, most of you are decent people doing the best you can, and some of you should find another job. Wherever we have military we’re doing some things right, and we’re doing some things we shouldn’t.

Right now I’m thinking about the ones who lost their lives, and the ones who are struggling either while still on duty or back home. Thank you for your service. Thank you all for your service. You have really hard jobs (understatement of the year).

Buddy is hanging in there, seems to be mostly okay today. He’s eating, doesn’t seem uncomfortable.