In which I visit the American Museum of Natural History

As a sidebar, I have little use for Manhattan. Fun to visit for a day or two, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to live there (or enough money to AFFORD living there.) As I was walking north to the Whitney, I forgot where Times Square was and so accidentally found myself in it. I generally try to be optimistic about the future of our country. However, I do sometimes have moments of panic in which I imagine our entire society collapsing, Rome-style. In the moment right before this happens though, my dystopian imagined-future looks something like Times Square smeared all over the country. Horrifying.

On the positive and lovely side however, I took a long detour through Central Park after I left the Whitney and before I stumbled into the Museum of Natural History. I’d been in the park before, but really only in the open parts with benches and meadows and things. There’s a whole chunk of it that’s foresty and natural-looking and that was really quite beautiful.
Chicago is still, hands-down, my favorite U.S. city, but NY has us beat in the giant-public-park category. Millennium Park doesn’t quite cut it. Particularly since aliens from the future landed there and set up a “band-stand.” I went into Central Park from the Whitney on the east side of the park (around 75th street) intending to walk south and wind up coming out the bottom of the park (59th). I got a little turned around though, and came out on the west side of the park near the Museum of Natural History (81st). So…I got a little turned around. But all for the best because I’d forgotten to look up where the Natural History museum was, so I wasn’t expecting to find it on purpose. And then voila! I only had about an hour to spend there before heading back down to meet up with Alyssa (near 39th) but I could have spent all day in there. I hung out in the African and Meso-American exhibits, with a little junket through the Native American tribes. So much beautiful art, and elaborately decorated artifacts, and fascinatingly weird magic/religious/fetish items. There was a wind-chime-looking thing made by a tribe from what is now the Congo, that was supposed to make it rain, because the dangly loops are supposed to look like falling rain drops. If you’re going to have magical superstitions, they might as well be poetic and creative.

There was also a bad-ass charm for made by another Congo-area tribe. The caption called it “Medicine for protection against forest spirits.” I thought it kind of looked like a necklace Free People might sell for a couple hundred bucks, but it sure is a lot more interesting-looking than any medicine I’ve ever seen.

Another accessory you probably wouldn’t see in Free People was a necklace (headband?) made out of dead birds, from someplace in a South American rainforest. Some of the birds are Honeycreepers, which I remember we had in the Nature Museum’s butterfly haven where I volunteered in Chicago. I liked them better alive, but they’re still pretty beautiful dead, I guess.