Ojives, Tour Guide Royalty and Respect for the Dead

I think each of these should be its own post, but, thanks to all of the beautiful weather, I didn't spend much time inside or focused this weekend, and if I try to recoup my losses, I'll be sitting here all day and fail to make it to the NYU bookstore in time to return my overpriced book (I have a replacement, cheaper version coming - slowly - since it will get to my parents' house first)

I started Stats class on Wednesday - in the first few minutes of "get to know your classmates" time, I ended up in a group one woman who is about my age and going to business school in the fall and a guy a bit older who was thinking about B-school. Neither of them had any quantitative background, so we bonded easily, though the guy was a huge name-dropper - he seemed nice, but he only spoke about friends' B-school experiences in proper nouns (Columbia, Chicago, Kellogg. . . ) and his own education was at "Cal" which I know means Berkeley but find irritating anyway since there are so many possible "Cals." As the rest of the room was introduced, he didn't seem so far out of the norm - though there were also a number of people in fields like "engineering" and "public health" who, like me and my "international development," (which is only kind of descrptive anyway) didn't use proper nouns at all. And then we had a lecture that turned into a totally different language of sigmas and denominators and n subohmygods, which I think I followed . . . sort of. I did take this stuff 8 years ago, and I swear there are at least some bad stats jokes in my memory bank. And the word version of the language is quite appealing: standard deviation? yes please.

Saturday, Sears delievered my box spring (5 minutes before the start of the 2 hour window they had given me to expect the delivery), and my roommate took me to a barbeque with a bunch of his nonprofit/government employee friends (and a city council candidate!) in South Slope. It had a southern theme, many kinds of devilled eggs (including bloody mary-flavored - which I tried and enjoyed and french toast-flavored, which I did not), and more food than I've seen in one place in a very long time. The boyfriend of the hostess was part of a family of tour guides - and pointed out to me as "tour guide royalty" - who, along with his brother, proceeded to regale many with their encyclopedic knowledge of Brooklyn bridge trivia (after discovering - and I have no idea how they saw this because it was on her head, behind her earlobe - the tattoo that the woman standing next to me had of the last name of the bridge builders- Roebling and the year it was named - 1867- which, it turns out, is well before when it was actually built). Very impressive.

Yesterday, I joined Jon, a family friend from way-back/very hip New York DJ and two of his friends for an organized bike ride (so us and 50 other people) from Canal Street and, we were led to believe, through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is normally closed to cars. The ride from Canal to the Cemetery took an hour and a half - it's MAYBE 5 miles. I think I turned my pedals thrice. But the route took us along the Brooklyn waterfront - which was, admittedly, pretty cool, and raised all sorts of hopes about the long-overdue future version of Brooklyn Bridge Park it has a sign saying "expected completion winter 2009" - but doesn't look like it's even been started), and that was nice, even if one of the other riders - an overzealous signaller - cut me off, perhaps after he heard Jon and my remarks on his overzealous signalling, but weird nonetheless. So we finally got to the cemetery and the ride leader told everyone to lock up their bikes and go walk into the cemetery. Except that the ride had been promoted under the pretense that just this once, we were going to be allowed to join the cars and the pedestrians. So Jon talked to the ride leader, who didn't so much as acknowledge that that had been part of the billing, while Elizabeth, another of our group members, asked to the security guard for the cemetery why bikes weren't allowed - he said a) because it's a conservative organization and b) bike-riding is disrespectful to the dead. I think b) proceeds from a), but this premise seems a little absurd - particularly for a cemetery that's billed as being all pretty and wildernessy in its own right. The ride's false pretenses were perhaps more irksome than the cemetery's definition of respect for the dead. So, we took off and did a little loop around Prospect Park - which was full of barbequers, friendly geese and at least one wedding party.

Later, I came home and bought the biggest window air conditioner I've ever seen from Craigslist (I failed to realize that it was 3 feet deep until the previous owner delivered it). I have a feeling this will be fodder for future posts.