I’ve been making grand, middle-informed generalizations about Germany since the first day I set foot there in 1995, just out of my freshman year of college and full of serious, incontrovertible ideas about Thomas Mann, Nazis and gaining fluency through “immersion,” by which I definitely did not mean “studying.”

And for at least that long, Germans have also taken great enjoyment in my failure to portray their culture correctly (if only there were a word to convey such an emotion).

For if there’s one thing Germans love, it’s pointing out that other people are wrong. Of course, the fun thing about that particular massive generalization is that it’s the asshole bon-mot equivalent of a self-tightening knot: Any German who dares contradict it is just proving my point.

I will, however, begrudgingly admit that in the half of a year I have been in residence here at The Awl, I may, perhaps, have not been one hundred percent correct in every single thing I’ve said about Germany. And I’m not just talking about my grievous mistranslation of the word Unkraut, or my somewhat creative approach to German Rechtscreibung, which is more often than not Unrechtschreibung.

So, I bit the proverbial Gewehrkugel, and reached out to some Germans and asked them to engage in their national pastime of correcting me. Here goes. Their responses have been edited for length; my questions have been edited to make me look smarter and more articulate.

Whenever I see some sweet-faced kid walking down the street with a smile on his face for whoever passes by I wonder what he doesn’t know that I do. It’s easy enough to say “everything,” but some days I wonder if there isn’t just one lesson I could unlearn to make myself okay again, one memory I could forget so that I could smile at everyone without thinking about things too much. It should, theoretically, be possible. I mean, I was once a sweet-faced kid myself. None of us start out this way. We learn by living through it. You’d think we could undo it. Anyway, this new single by Yumi Zouma is terrific, and it will make you smile all the way through. Enjoy.

★★★★ The subway station had breathed in fresh atmosphere, but the train car was a rolling hotbox, and the effects of it would not wear off through an aboveground transfer and a second train, with unbroken air conditioning. The sun on the East Side was sharp. Even when the day reached its peak, though, the heat was never cruel. The baked pavement of Union Square was soothing for feet chilled by the office. The sky had lost the depth and purity of its blue in favor of something chalkier. In the still air of gathering evning, the buildings far downtown shimmered in soft colors. Near at hand, the bright parts of the big facades of Midtown buildings were reflected in the big facades of other Midtown buildings. The zigzagging up-and-crosstown path toward home accidentally went by Trump Tower; the brass canopy was dull and shabby behind the barricades, cut off from the exuberant light all around. The five-year-old made it to the southeast corner of the Park before giving himself fully over to whining that his legs would not carry him further. It was one against three, but his legs had in truth been through a long day, and hailing a cab was faster than winning the argument would have been. Somewhere around Columbus Circle, raindrops began peppering the windshield. The sky above was blue, and the west was lemony, and the five-year-old was wrong yet vindicated. The wipers came on. As the taxi pulled up to the building, a figure came into view in the corner of the forecourt, bent over, pointing its pale and completely bare behind out at the world, while the rain kept falling on the bricks.

I know we’re all a little out of sorts right now, a little fatigued by everything that’s happening all the time, worn on by worry and beaten down by uncertainty. It’s hard to be optimistic, and it’s even harder to appreciate the tiny blessings all around us. So let me just tell you this: Take time to celebrate everything about today, because what we know now is that whatever happens it won’t be as bad as tomorrow. Hope that helps! Anyway, here’s music, enjoy.

★★★★★ The light was unstoppable, thrusting everywhere into the shade. Bare limbs moved in dazzling curtains of sun. The people in exercise wear and the people dressed up for church looked equally, interchangeably content and composed. There was no line at the bakery. Pigeons crowded around food on the pavement while young dancers crowded the entrance to the adjoining dancewear store. Dappled spots flickered furiously on the sidewalk as the wind moved the leaves. It was stunning to be out in, genuinely stunning, so that walking back indoors brought on grief and confusion. A new errand, even a stupid one like running out to replace a block of undelivered sharp cheddar, was a blessing. The sun just after two o’clock shone straight to the bottoms of the drains and the spaces under sidewalk grates. Clothes were short or loose not in terror of the heat but because the conditions asked for nothing but skin, because there was nothing but pleasure in carrying a body around through perfect air in perfect light. The shabby lust of Zeus descending was too small a metaphor for what was falling everywhere. The people walking past advertisement signs were more attractive than the flat figures posing behind them. Wind blew in the cab windows over the knees like the ideal of air conditioning. Tree canopies and building tops were so overloaded with color and shadow they looked ready to topple. A low gold-and-glass storefront of banks on Third Ave was insane, a temple to madness, speared through with blinding beams. Across town a woman crouched in the street to point her camera at the arched Italian facade of the little Presbyterian church on 65th Street, its yellow bricks saturated with the indirect illumination from above. At home the sun was spilling under apartment doors out into the hallway. Even the bathmat, wrinkled on the floor of its windowless room, caught a glow in its folds.