Stacy Horn's Blog, page 13

My DNA Results

I did the Ancestry.com DNA test and disappeared for a couple of days after the results came back. I’m sure I’ll be disappearing many more days in the future, it’s just so much fun. I was able to clear up one mystery. My grandfather on my mother’s side was adopted, and I was pretty sure I’d found his birth parents but now I could confirm it based on the DNA matches that popped up! The weird thing is, I got the most matches on this line, the line I knew nothing about until now. I got the fewest matches on both my father’s parents line, none on his mother’s. Hmmm.

The one surprise was this. I thought I was going to be mostly Irish and mostly German, and I was half right.

45% Irish
24% Scottish
14% England & Northwestern Europe
8% Germanic Europe
7% Norway
2% Eastern Europe & Russia

A picture of my father from his Brooklyn Technical High School yearbook picture. Now I’m curious about Gerhard Hubbe. A quick search doesn’t turn up much. Is he the Gerhard Hubbe who went into forestry and moved to Oregon? And died in 2001?

Got My First Shot!

I agonized about which to get. I wanted to get the one-and-done Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but the general wisdom seemed to be get the one you can get the soonest, and that was the Moderna. My arm hurt, and that was it. I’m scared about the possible side effects from the second shot, but I’m thrilled to be halfway there! I’m going to go to the movies! (I know, a weird thing to celebrate given all the choices, but there it is.)

My favorite talking building. It’s hard to see but there are bandaids all over the wall. It’s wonderful.

Barber: Prayers of Kierkegaard

From John Maclay, the director of my choir, The Choral Society of GRace Church:

During a week of solemn observance and reflection, this musical essay by the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) seemed especially relevant. Written during World War II, Prayers of Kierkegaard is a beautifully crafted response to anxious times: an honest reckoning with adversity, emerging with a sense of hope and purpose.

We hope you enjoy (and feel free to share) the Choral Society’s concert performance of this striking piece, recorded live at Grace Church in May 2017, with Tami Petty singing the heartfelt solo originally composed for Leontyne Price.

Live From My Couch

Watching the Golden Globes Pre-Show. Look at my gorgeous, big, new tv!

2021 GANYC Apple Awards

My friend Laurie Gwen Shapiro won a Guide Association of New York City Award for Outstanding Achievement in Essay/Article/Series Writing for her New Yorker article, The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, AND a podcast I was a guest on, Gotham Center’s Lost NYC won the Outstanding Achievement in NYC Radio Program or Podcast (Audio/Spoken Word) award. Congratulations to them and to all the GANYC winners!

Trudging out to a meeting and hoping I don’t fall. (I didn’t. Not that day anyway.)

Listening to the Impeachment Trial

I hadn’t planned on listening, I get too upset, but I broke down yesterday later in the afternoon, and I’m listening now. Is anyone else listening? I came close to an anxiety attack yesterday. I honestly didn’t know that the riot was as bad as it was. The police officers screaming as they were bring crushed, attacked, the one who was tased, the one who was murdered. I felt terrible for the rioters too. Ashli Babbitt. I hadn’t seen the video of her being shot. I wondered about the two men who helped her up so she could crawl through the window, an action which led to her death. Of course that was not their intention, but how can they not feel terrible? I also didn’t know how many people had really come there to actually kill people, or, at the very least, tie them up and what? (If anyone doubts me, watch the trial, the evidence for this, and there was a lot of it, was presented.). I also didn’t know it had gone on as long as it did before help for the Capital Police arrived. I’m sure many thought they were going to stand outside the Capital and chant, but if they joined others and swarmed inside they must also be held accountable.

As readers of my blog know, there’s a building on 11th Street which regularly puts up signs on the front of their building. I pass it by on my way to work. This was the sign they had up in late January.

Oh my poor, poor couch!

Two of the evilest cats in the universe lounging on the couch they helped to destroy. This couch cost a fortune, and it’s going to cost a fortune to reupholster. Did you know that reupholstering costs thousands?? I didn’t when I first started looking into it. I could buy a new couch for less. Except, I had this specially made so it’s big enough to sleep on, and it comes apart into two pieces so it can fit through my very narrow doorway.

I guess I could buy a sectional someday, that comes in pieces that would probably fit through the door.

Pandemic Books

By a weird stroke of luck, every book I’ve bought to read during the pandemic has been absolutely perfect, and just what I needed except one. Gore Vidal’s 1876. I bought it because I’ve always loved his books, but this one felt … pointless. I think I got halfway through before I just couldn’t give it anymore time. It wasn’t adding up for me. I switched to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and gobbled that one up in every free moment I had.

Now I have to pick what I will read next. The contenders:

Kate Atkinson’s God in Ruins (the next in a series, Life After Life was the first).
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.
Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

For the curious, these are the books I’ve read since the pandemic began. I just realized I only skimmed the James Baldwin book. I specifically got it in hopes of reading about what life was like in NYC in the 1960s and 1970s for people of color, and there was only a relatively small amount about that.

– Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.
– 1876 by Gore Vidal (but not finished).
– No Name in the Street by James Baldwin.
– Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.
– The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa.
– Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro Kazuo.
– The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.
– Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano.
– The End of October by Lawrence Wright.
– Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
– The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
– The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel.
– The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn.

A doorway on Leroy Street, a favorite block of mine near where I live. I almost moved to Leroy Street. It would have been my first apartment in the City, but there was some problem with it that I’ve since forgotten. Leroy Street is such a beautiful and magical block. The only downside is there’s a ballpark, a playground, and a city pool (where I swim when it’s open) across the street. So, it’s noisy during the summer. Honestly, I like the sounds of playgrounds and ballparks and I don’t think that would bother me. (I also don’t mind traffic noise. The sounds of trucks, cars, and sirens never bother me.) But I love how they’ve just let the vines grow over this door. How do they clean the windows though?

Bali is giving Bleecker a hug!

I love it!! Cats getting along with each other is one of my favorite mood lifters. So today started out well. Uh-oh. Did I just jinx the day? Does anyone believe in the jinx? Everyone gets mad at me at work when I say things like, “Wow, today has been a nice slow day, hasn’t it?” That is always followed by a chorus of, “NO! You just jinxed it! Stacy!!”

Democrats vs Republicans — It’s the Hatfields vs the McCoys

I did a quick check of how my Trump supporting friends were doing yesterday and saw that one of them had posted about a letter from Ted Nugent to Biden, ranting about how dare he call for unity after … and I stopped reading quickly.

First, Ted Nugent cannot lecture anyone about unity and civility. And I thought, no one who supported Trump can lecture anyone about unity after the last four years. Trump did everything he possibly could to sow discord in our country. For eight years before that republicans said that all they cared about was making sure Obama never had a win, not whether or not what he was trying to do was good for the country (these were the republicans in congress, and I hope they weren’t speaking for everyone, but they were speaking for some).

When I start fuming like this on any issue, not necessarily political, what I try to do is imagine myself having this conversation with one of my oldest friends, but I imagine them on other side of whatever it is I’m fuming about. Then I ask myself, how would you discuss it with them? I wouldn’t attack, although I would probably still rant. But I’d expect to be listened to, and I would listen to their rant as well. The important thing is, in my imagination at least, I realize that I definitely do talk differently to them, and if I expect to get anywhere, I should talk to everyone as I would with my friend.

And so I did this with the whole argument about unity. Here’s what I realized. Why go on about who rejected unity first, or was the worst about it? Is that really useful? Like the Hatfields and McCoys, you’re never going to come to an agreement about who started it. Or whose side has the biggest assholes, or caused the most damage. I’m not both-siding it. I’m just saying we’re not going to agree. I do realize some people want to battle to the death and never give up. But not everyone. I hate all the hate. There’s got to be people who didn’t vote for Biden who feel the same. In my imaginary conversation my friend and I agreed we would never agree. Instead, I asked, “How can we fix this?” So if I ever work up to courage to try to start this conversation, I would skip what I said above about Trump and how Obama was treated.

Biden has a lot of experience working effectively with people on the other side of the aisle. I’m allowing myself a little bit of hope. I also think if he can do the things he wants to do, people who didn’t vote for him might be happy with the outcome.

A picture from a New York City snowstorm in 2016. We’ve only had one snowstorm this year, and it didn’t compare. (Another reason to be happy about Biden. Climate change.)