![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There's one thing every woman's missed in Massachusetts Bay
Tonight: watched the fireworks from the Cambridge side of the Esplanade with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and rushthatspeaks, who had providently staked out a spot about ten feet from the water and directly opposite the fireworks barges. I brought potato salad, brownies, and homemade strawberry ice cream, they supplied the cherries, carrots, cupcakes, and nearly sufficient quantities of bottled water. There was a sky full of burning gold light and blown-rose clouds against argon blue; around eight-thirty, a rainbow became visible in the sunset over the Charles. I was hit on by some kind of postgraduate with an American flag bandanna and the recurring delusion that he could pick me up by inaccurately correcting my knowledge of Norse mythology and presumed inability to distinguish Germans and Nazis. The fireworks had evidently been scheduled for convenient television broadcast rather than actual in-city audience, because ten-thirty at night is way too late to start and playing the 1812 Overture forty-five minutes earlier did not help. The evening was nonetheless awesome. I didn't even sunburn. Tomorrow: write notes on E.T.A. Hoffmann; post my Readercon schedule; read my two books on Wittgenstein with even greater care than usual, as it appears that fifty-nine years of death have done nothing to improve his suicidal depression. Recover my hearing. I have the best cousins ever.
gaudior and rushthatspeaks, who had providently staked out a spot about ten feet from the water and directly opposite the fireworks barges. I brought potato salad, brownies, and homemade strawberry ice cream, they supplied the cherries, carrots, cupcakes, and nearly sufficient quantities of bottled water. There was a sky full of burning gold light and blown-rose clouds against argon blue; around eight-thirty, a rainbow became visible in the sunset over the Charles. I was hit on by some kind of postgraduate with an American flag bandanna and the recurring delusion that he could pick me up by inaccurately correcting my knowledge of Norse mythology and presumed inability to distinguish Germans and Nazis. The fireworks had evidently been scheduled for convenient television broadcast rather than actual in-city audience, because ten-thirty at night is way too late to start and playing the 1812 Overture forty-five minutes earlier did not help. The evening was nonetheless awesome. I didn't even sunburn. Tomorrow: write notes on E.T.A. Hoffmann; post my Readercon schedule; read my two books on Wittgenstein with even greater care than usual, as it appears that fifty-nine years of death have done nothing to improve his suicidal depression. Recover my hearing. I have the best cousins ever.
no subject
I am afraid it was not particularly exciting: he was mostly the pretentious kind of inaccurate as opposed to the batshit spectacular. I started to bring up Tacitus and the fact that while there is a lot of overlap between the cosmologies, the Norse gods were, in fact, Norse rather than really German, he cut me off—did I know, no, seriously, their names are different in German? Like, Odin is Wotan. Sigurd's real name was Siegfried. I contemplated whether I wanted to start reeling off names of the Æsir and the cast of the Nibelungenlied, but decided that might imply that I was interested in his conversation.
(I did ask at one point if he was German. I couldn't otherwise tell why he would be earnestly attempting to convince me, by way of chat-up, that the rest of the world hadn't yet forgiven Germany for World War II. No, he said, but he was very European.
. . . It did not seem to stop him from shouting, at frequent intervals, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!")