Martin Luther King Day Assignment

Monday was Martin Luther King Day and we were given an assignment to read five of his speeches, but then pick one and write about it in this blog. I read: I Have A Dream, Where Do We Go From Here, Beyond Vietnam, Loving Your Enemies, and lastly King’s acceptance when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964. I have decided to blog about his acceptance speech because I did not even know that he won the Nobel Prize. Martin Luther King was one of the most unselfish men in all of American history. Even when he was awarded one of the most sought after awards in the world he did not take any of it for himself. He accepted the Prize on behalf of his African American brothers and sisters struggling with the everyday problems of racism and segregation. King does not even forget for a moment that there are atrocities taking place even during his speech. He realizes just because he won The Nobel Prize does not mean it was going to change over night of what is going on in the street. King was smart to realize that he would get no other greater forum to speak of his movement than the place where the Nobel Peace Prize was held. There were world leaders and extremely important people that could help in the audience that night and Martin knew this would be the place to state the facts of the Civil Right Movement. Obviously Martin Luther King died before long before his time, but the impact he left on the Civil Rights Movement was immeasurable. Dr. King deserves his own day and deserved that award and he also deserves much more than he got credit for. The least we could do is recognize what he did for this country to forward thinking and just imagine what the world would have been like if he did step up and speak the truth.

Sunday, We ate at of my favorite places to eat in the city, it’s a place called simply The Hudson Diner. It was really nice to actually have some breakfast food for a change other than Poptarts in the morning. I had a delicious meal that consisted of sunny side up eggs, bacon, and hash browns. After our great meal we headed back to the apartment for a lazy day of watching the NFL playoffs, eating junk food, and frequent cat naps. When the night came around and it was time to go to bed I realized it was going to be tough to fall asleep. So I went uptown to small grocery story by our old apartment because I knew it was open 24 hours and everything around our new apartment was closed. When I got there I bought some Tylenol PM to help me fall asleep, but I had never taken it before. Long story short I had a reaction to it and it made me itch from head to toe literally. You know the felling for pins and needles when a limb wakes up from falling asleep? I had the feeling all over my body and it made it near impossible to fall asleep. So I called my mother and headed to her apartment to get so good sleeping pills. They did the trick and I sleep like a baby.

Saturday I did not really do any assigned thing because we had to move back to our apartment near Tribecca. Jon and I had to walk all of our food items to the other apartment so they wouldn’t spoil. When we go here there were still people living there and they were kind enough to let us put our things in the fridge. The rest of the day consisted of a lot of waiting for our apartment to get cleaned. So while we waited we stopped at many coffee shops and parks to burn time until we could go into our living space. Later in the afternoon we finally were able to get in. It’s weird to me that the days that consisted the least events are the days that tired me out the most. So I took a nap for most of the afternoon until our luggage arrived. I spent my night walking solo around the East Village and area of NYU and SoHo. When I was walking a few blocks away from Washington Square Park I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was Billy Crudup the actor from many movies such as: Almost Famous, The Watchmen, Big Fish, and many other blockbuster. He was a date with a very attractive women and did not want to bother him during his date. That was pretty much the highlight of my night and I began to walk back to the apartment. On my back I went into “Hercules Fancy Grocery” and man who owns it treats me like a grandson of his own. So I stopped in to just say hello, but I ended up story swapping and talking about penguins with Hercules for over and hour. Eventually I made my way home and had tough time falling asleep thanks to the very loud plumbing system and the arguing couple next door.

It's tough to find motivation every night to blog, but now I have to catch up on my documentation on my time this last weekend. Since I didn’t blog Friday or yesterday I’m a bit fuzzy on the small details, but I will do my best to remember all of what happened.

On Friday it was so nice out that we decided that it would be a good idea to walk the Brooklyn Bridge while it was nice out. So we took the 1 train to 42^nd street and then the shuttle over to Grand Central Station. Once we got to Grand Central we took the 6 train downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge. There we waited for my mom and Ann for about a half hour, but it was nice to just sit and enjoy Town Hall Park. At the park the there were pidgins and grey and black squirrels everywhere. All of these creatures were extremely tame especially the squirrels. On many different occasions at the park I could reach out a touch one of these squirrels and hand feed them. After awhile my mother and Ann showed up and we began to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. The scenery was amazing with the sun setting on Hudson River and shimmered off the skyscrapers. We the entire length of the bridge, touched Brooklyn soil and turned around and walked back across the historical bridge. When we reached the other side some of us ate at a small dinner in the business district and then we all kind of went our separate ways for the night.

I was woken up bright and early this morning…to just sit around and do nothing because we don’t have things that need to be done until after twelve so… I went back to bed until I actually had something to get up for. After my second awakening we waited around to move our things into a new apartment, but then found out that we would not be able to move in until later in the day so we made our way up to Time Square. We met up with my mom who was waiting for Michelle and I decided to join my mother and Michelle for lunch at BB Kings BBQ. It was very good and it was nice to see Michelle and spend time with my mom. Later in the day Mariah, Jon, and myself went to the Broadway Church of Christ to help and out sandwiches. Then we went back to the apartment and waited until Mariah and I had to leave to help usher and The Women’s Project’s play called “Smudge”. Ushering was pretty easy to do, but we sat and watched the play and it was interesting. Actually I’m going to be blunt it was very weird and frankly I thought it sucked. I’m not going to go into details, but just know I was not very good at all. Afterwards we grabbed a bite to eat and went back to the apartment we meet with my mom and just talked about things we were going to do for service work.

Once again I’m writing this in the past-tense form because I was too tired and just not feel like blogging last night.

When I woke up I remembered that it was a “museum day” or that’s what it said in our syllabus for this class. Most of the morning we brainstormed for ideas for what to do to accommodate our “museum day” and some of us decided to go to the Museum of Fashion. I didn’t really know what to expect when going to the museum, but I actually kind of enjoyed seeing how the styles have changed in the last couple hundred years. After the museum we went to Canal Street to do some shopping at the shops that line the busy street. I have to say I was kind of uncomfortable on Canal Street because their were a lot of sketchy people trying to sell me illegal drugs among other things I don’t need to mention in the middle of the day. Then we went to go eat in China Town and that did not go very smoothly either. It was a $4.50 Chinese buffet and I knew even from the outside that I didn’t want to eat there, but others in our group thought it was a good idea. Needless to say they changed their minds by the end. That pretty much rapped up the day and we made the sketchy walk back down Canal Street to get to the number 1 subway. We made it back to the apartment safe and sound and a story to tell.

Waking up to thought of a 5^th floor walk up is enough to just want to fall right back asleep. We had to move all of our things up five flights of stairs into a smaller apartment. After we moved our things in Mariah and I looked up some vintage shops and thrift stores in the village. Then we set of after our doing our homework on shops around the area and the first place we stopped I had been before. The last time I was here in New York I bought a original Grateful Dead concert shirt at this vintage shop, it was the expensive t-shirt I ever bought and it had holes in it, but that didn’t matter. These kind of stores are my favorite kind of place to shop because you know if you by a shirt or something there that it is very unlikely that anyone else will have that shirt. Actually my favorite store that we stopped at was urban outfitter because of their novelty items. Then we ate at a really good pizza shop and eventually made our way back to the apartment to chill out for a bit before we headed up town to Time Square and Columbus Circle to do some more shopping. When we got to the square we went into a couple shoe places, but we could not quite find what we are looking for. Then we went up to Columbus Square to the 5-story mall. Not far up the street from the mall there was a Best Buy where I bought some things for my computer that I needed. Eventually we made our way back to the apartment and I was a fairly uneventful night.