What did I tell you about my powers of prediction?

Current forecasts have Ernesto making a sharp right and hitting Florida.

The Krewe of OAK parade...

just went by my house. Last year when it went by I was frantically trying to find a way to evacuate.

This year they have hardcore police escorts, which is different.

Ernesto & my amazing powers of prediction

I think chances are good that we will celebrate Katrina's anniversary with another hurricane evacuation. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to be a bad storm or a direct hit, but I think it will be big enough and close enough for an evacuation to be called.

However, since my powers of prediction are notoriously poor, perhaps I have just protected the city by saying so.

I'm kind of hoping for a semi-false-alarm evacuation, where we stay gone for about a week until the power comes back on. I had promised to spend the Labor Day weekend with my parents for my dad's retirement party. Then I learned that I would get my first set of sub and cites for the journal on Friday, and only ten days to finish them. Which means that at best I'll be able to rush up there, give my dad a hug, and rush back down. Unless we get a little hurrication that closes the school from Wednesday till Monday...

Addendum: in the just released forecast map, it looks like a direct hit. That does NOT make me happy. I want a few days off, not disaster upon disaster. It's not a hurricane yet, maybe it won't get very strong or maybe it will shift direction.

Setting a date

Mr. M's transplant has been scheduled for September 14. Finally! This should be a big relief, but he's a little worried and so am I, because he hasn't really recovered from the last surgery.

But we have to trust that his doctors and surgeons wouldn't go ahead with it if they didn't think he was ready for it. They wouldn't let a healthy young donor take on the risk if they didn't the the odds were in their favor.

From a longer perspective, it's more than time. It seems like his health is going to keep deteriorating without it; I'd hate to see it postponed again.

The semester's gotten off to a pretty good start. I like all my classes. All the journal work starts tomorrow.

The end of the blogging frenzy

Evidence that I'm still feeling a little fragile: seeing Soul Asylum, or half of Soul Asylum, on television promoting their new record made me cry.

I mean, I'm not even a fan. I suppose I'm a fan of them as human beings. Their new single is an anthemic pop-rock song called "Stand Up and Be Strong," and it's been criticized for being trite. But words of optimism and perserverance are only trite when expressed by people who haven't been through anything hard. They recorded this album while their bass player (and friend since back in the day) was dying of cancer. A couple of months after they buried him, Dave Pirner's adopted home was underwater. So if he wants to get up on national television and sing "Stand Up and Be Strong" looking like he's happy about it, I'm cheering for him. One of the things that made me cry was when he talked about how Karl Mueller's enthusiasm and perserverance balanced his own cynicism.

Another thing that touched me was the "Make Levees Not War" t-shirt he wore. During the time I've been in New Orleans, three rock stars without previous connections to the city have lived here. Trent Reznor lived in a big old house behind a big fence in the Garden District. It seemed like New Orleans was an Anne Rice vampire fantasy to him. Lenny Kravitz had a place in the French Quarter, and I think he might have owned the Wedding Cake house on St. Charles for awhile. New Orleans was a part-time gothic background to his glamourous life. But Pirner bought a regular house in the Bywater. I've seen him in bars, at second lines, at a Morning 40 show, on Frenchmen Street on Mardi Gras day, even at an ice cream shop. I think he even did some radio shows on WTUL. I've seen him twice since the storm. Sometimes I've wanted to introduce myself and talk to him about Mr. M, but I didn't want to seem like I was sucking up to him because he's a rock star. He was a regular guy here, a participant in the actual life of the city, and he clearly appreciated it for what it really was and not just what it looked like. And he didn't abandon the city after the storm.

The other thing that made me cry was knowing that these are Mr. M's peers, the same age, and they look like kids while he looks like an old man. Maybe that sounds shallow, but I don't mind Mr. M's white hair and the lines in his face. What kills me seeing him look like he was just liberated from the death camps, which is how he was in July. His donor is a mere 26 years old; I'd like to think the transplant will be an infusion of youthful vitality.

I hate that I'm not going to be there when he has the operation or while he recovers. In fact, I'm going to have to try not to think about it too much, which will be hard.

Classes start on Monday. I'm kind of looking forward to it, but I'm also nervous. This semester actually seems more make-or-break than the first year. I have to learn how to get at least one A; my grades have got to go up at least a little so I'm not teetering on the edge of losing my scholarship. And I've got to try to figure out what I'm doing next summer and what direction I want to go after I graduate. At the same time, I've got the journal and I've been informally nominated for some minor officer's position in the Environmental Law Society, which makes me nervous. I'm such an introverted non-joiner. Sometimes it seems like to succeed at law school or lawyering I would have to be a whole different kind of person, which I don't want to do. I think I do have to be willing to step outside my comfort zone, though. Anyway, how am I going to do better on my grades, work on the journal, and participate in a club, all while Mr. M is having and recovering from the transplant that we hope will give him his life back, how can I do it without having a nervous breakdown? Just by taking it as it comes, I suppose. And looking forward to December. I have this fantasy of spending Christmas in the Bahamas with Mr. M.

Tomorrow I have to go by school and see if I have any reading for my first classes. But I'm hoping to spend the day reading magazines and watching dumb movies on DVD.

I don't suppose I will be doing as much blogging in the coming months.

P.S. Hi Sharon!

Where Y'at, New Orleans?

We still have a sense of humor. This was shot in Lakeview, which still looks like this, except for maybe the ubiquity of dancing guys. Take a good look at his shorts...

Okay, it's really dumb, but I like it. Because I'd like to live in a movie musical world where people inexplicably break into song and dance while performing some mundane activity.

The non-recovery, and some thoughts on fashion

Donald Powell is the "Federal Coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding." I honestly don't know what he's done other than nix other people's plans.

In the new issue of the New Yorker (Aug. 21) there's a good account of the big game of pass-the-buck that has left New Orleans without a plan or direction a year after the storm. It doesn't get into the issues about the levees, flood protection, wetlands loss, and so forth. But it does convey the continued chaos and confusion and deepening sense of hopelessness.

I didn't get to see Spike Lee's documentary at the Arena and I don't have HBO, so I don't know when I'll get to watch it. I think it should be worth seeing. I was uneasy about it because I thought he'd bought into the whitey-blew-up-the-levee theory. But he doesn't endorse the conspiracy theories, he just lets people who believe it say so. Fair enough.

Julia Reed has a pretty good piece about New Orleans a year later in the September issue of Vogue. She's a wealthy and sheltered resident of the Garden District, but she shows that there's a limit to how much protection from post-Katrina despair that money can buy.

I don't read Vogue often. It's the grande dame of high fashion magazines, and it's got the arrogance to match. The editorial tone often conveys the idea that if you don't wear a size 2 and have $20,000 to spend on the right bag, you're not worthy of gazing upon its glossy pages. And there is something obscene about dresses that cost more than a third-world factory worker makes in a lifetime.

But when the thousand-page September issue arrives on the newstand, I usually buy it. Then I go home and sink into it for an hour or two, and I enjoy it. Some of the clothes are gorgeous. Some are odd-looking, even shockingly so. They might be great as a work of popular art, but horribly unflattering to any woman who might actually wear them. But some of what looks wrong now will look normal in a few years.

I'm more of an observer of fashion than a participant. It's silly and trivial, but then again maybe not so much. It reminds you of the pleasure of clothes and looks, and makes you think about what you look like and what you've got on. This is what I meant when I wrote about watching what I eat and getting a haircut and so forth. I haven't paid attention to my looks for the last year, at least. I look in the mirror, but I don't really see what I'm looking at. Then one day I do see, and I wonder why that girl doesn't bother to wear something attractive and put on some lipstick.

I don't always put much effort into how I look, but I feel better when I do. It seems like a demonstration of my ability to take care of myself and an act of self worth. Right now it seems like an act of recovery, like I can do more than just cope. I know it affects for the better how other people treat me. And there's a basic pleasure in wearing a cute dress, getting a good haircut or a pedicure, putting on new lipstick.

Not New Orleans

I'm interning with an organization that has a chance to present to the city council a set of policy recommendations on energy, sustainable rebuilding and related issues. So I spent the day at a meeting of bright, progressive people who have lots of good ideas about how to make New Orleans better than it was before. You can get really excited about the possibilities and enthusiastic about sticking around and being a part of it. Then you can walk out the door into reality--the state of the city, the state of local politics--and plunge back into despair.

It's so hard to make the decision to leave New Orleans. That must seem crazy to outsiders. This town is a wreck, it's barely liveable, it's probably doomed. But there's no substitute for it.

I'm not the only one going around and around with this question. Everyone's talking about where else you could go. There are other cool cities, places that are better than here by any objective standard. Portland, Seattle, Austin are the ones that come up most often. Chicago or Minneapolis if you can take the landlocked cold. Somewhere in North Carolina. Somewhere out west, maybe Tucson? If you can't pry yourself out of south Louisiana, maybe Lafayette could be a viable alternative?

Yet I've heard at least a dozen people come to the conclusion that there isn't a satisfactory alternative in the United States. It's not that those other towns aren't great, but they aren't this. So maybe somewhere in Mexico, or Europe. Maybe Castro will kick and Cuba will open up and we'll all go to Havana.

Mr. M is an advocate for the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico, warm and beachy places where my American legal training would be relevant. The idea of San Juan, Puerto Rico appeals to me. Mr. M doesn't necessarily need a real city, but I do. And Puerto Rico is a mixed civil/common law jurisdiction just like Louisiana, so my preparation for the Louisiana bar would serve me well there. For that reason Tulane graduates are pretty well represented in the Puerto Rico bar. (In fact, Louisiana's law schools are the only ones in the states that teach civil law in any depth whatsoever, and knowing about civil law makes it easier to get a legal job outside of the United States. Easier, but not easy.)

But if I were really serious about Puerto Rico, I'd have to be working on reclaiming my Spanish right now. I'd be visiting to see if it's really what I want. I'd be thinking about how to get a job there without any past connections to the place. I'd be investigating whether I could do the kind of work I want there.

Instead, I found an environmental public interest firm that does exactly what I'd like to do. They focus on the Southeast, which is the region I think I'd probably choose to stay in if I don't run off to Puerto Rico or a foreign country. This firm seems to be pretty well-funded for a public interest entity--they actually pay their summer interns a reasonable salary. They have offices in some pretty nice towns. But not the towns I would choose. Not New Orleans.

Not New Orleans. That should be a plus, right? New Orleans is a wreck, a shithole, a disaster in progress. But it gets a hold on some of us. It's like being in love with someone impossible, no good for you, and everyone can see it will never work out, but you're in love and you think she's the only one in the world.

Old dogs

Related to the long post below about nostalgia, I was just listening to a radio piece about when you lose your taste for novelty. According to the report, most people won't listen to new music after the age of 35, try new food after the age of 39, or get a body piercing after the age of 23.

I don't have any piercings or tattoos. Katrina has been the one thing in my life that seems like it might be appropriately memorialized with a tattoo, but otherwise I don't have any interest in body art and no regrets about that.

But I hope I will otherwise remain open to new things. I'm not 39 yet, but I didn't start eating raw oysters or sushi until I was in my 30s. Or kiwis. I think I was more uptight about unfamiliar food when I was younger.

I probably have the tendency to get a bit calcified in my musical taste. I listen to a lot of things by old bands that are new to me or that I didn't appreciate before. I have picked up a few new bands in the past few years, though they generally don't sound radically different from stuff I was already listening to. Off the top of my head: Harlan T. Bobo, My Morning Jacket, The Black Keys, etc. Plus some local bands. Every once in awhile some new hip hop will catch my ear, but I won't name names so they can avoid the shame of having people know some old white lady likes them.

From an interview with Mike Tidwell on Salon.com

Q: You write that the president telling people to return to New Orleans now is an act of "mass homicide," like sending civilians into the path of a tsunami. Why is that?

A: The president and all the offices of the federal government combined have done nothing at all to treat the disease that killed New Orleans. They've haphazardly tried to treat the symptoms, to improve the hurricane levees, to create better evacuation plans, to have more supplies pre-positioned for subsequent hurricanes. These are all symptoms. The disease in south Louisiana has been catastrophic land loss, and there's been a plan that's been on the table to reverse that land loss, since the '90s. And for reasons that are truly inexplicable, this government refuses to invest any real money into that plan.

Therefore, if you tell people to go back and you tell them to repair their homes and re-enroll their children in schools in New Orleans, and you've done nothing to treat the disease, then the cancer is going to return. New Orleans is still catastrophically vulnerable to another Katrina. Nothing substantive has been done to protect the city from another record surge tide. The only thing that can protect that city from mammoth surge tides from future hurricanes is to rebuild the land that has been lost. There's a plan on the table, and it's not expensive, certainly not compared to other ways that we spend money. Fourteen billion dollars to substantively rebuild barrier islands and begin rebuilding wetlands is about the cost of six weeks of fighting in Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston.

The nostalgia trap

Minnesota has the hippest state fair in the whole wide world. Sonic Youth is opening for The Flaming Lips on the first night.

There are some pretty good regional acts playing the fair in Baton Rouge this year, including my favorite zydeco sweetie, Geno Delafose. But if there are any national acts, they're third tier Nashville one-hit wonders or has-beens.

The other main difference is that the Minnesota fair takes place at the end of August through the beginning of September. Down here, the fair is late October into November, when the heat finally starts to fade a bit.

Mr. M wants to go see Sonic Youth because they remind him of his (um) youth. They remind me of that strange lost period of limbo when I left my husband. For a few months I worked as the night auditor at the hotel they were staying at when they first got to town to record Washing Machine in Memphis. Kim Deal was with them. I remember both Kim Gordon and Kim Deal seemed impossibly cool and also older than I expected. I know Kim Gordon is about 15 years older than me, so she would have been in her early 40s at that point. But that made her even cooler. Like someone who managed to retain her authentic rock chick coolness into her forties got a thousand extra coolness points.

I've been doing too much looking back and mooning over the old days. But back then I was always waiting for my life to start, waiting to bloom. I've been a late bloomer. But something in me seems programmed for nostalgia and regret. And here I am in the most past-obsessed city in the United States. Now the past seems like all we've got.

I think that, looks-wise, I peaked at around age 34. Now I've advanced all the way to almost 38, and I'm pining to be 34 again. It's dumb. My past wasn't all that great. I wasn't really ever happy until I got to New Orleans when I was 30. After that, my life started to get better, but it was still pretty fucked up for awhile. I was finally getting out of a long term rut when Katrina hit. I almost kind of needed that hurricane, as horrible as it has been. It created a definite before and after.

I think the second half of my life can and should be better than the first half, if I could just get myself to pay attention and stop looking back so much.

Instead, though, I've spent the last few days nursing a sudden obsession with Crispin Glover circa the mid-80s. I watched Back to the Future, which was tedious and obvious and heavy-handed in that Hollywood blockbuster way. Glover was the only thing that saved it, and he did look an awful lot like Mr. M in it. The "I am your density" momemt was really sweet. But he was more interesting in River's Edge. I've posted a video clip below in which I think he's really funny. He's a jittery teenage speed freak, but his mannerisms and inflections, especially in the first 30 seconds, remind me very much of Mr. M when he's in a certain teasing mood.

But however interesting an actor Crispin Glover may be, he can never be or give me what I really want from him, which is Mr. M when he was young and healthy, before things went wrong.

Before the hurricane, Mr. M and I hadn't had any contact for about three months or so, and longer than that since we had talked on the phone. Things had been tense between us. He got back in touch because he was worried about me after the hurricane. When he did, he had two things to tell me about. Karl Mueller, the bass player from Soul Asylum, had died of cancer a couple of months before at the age of 41. It's not like they were close friends, but Mr. M knew him and liked him from back in the day and he went to the funeral. I think it was a disconcerting thing for him. He might well have been the one from that scene who died way too early but not quite young.

Instead, Mr. M had just (finally!) found a donor who was a good match. All of a sudden it seemed like he had a future again. Without that spark of hope, I don't think he would have allowed us to get into this again.

At that time, he thought he would have the transplant in January. That's what has made this wait so hard. I have the paranoid fear that the donor is going to back out. I'm so incredibly grateful to him and yet so frustrated with him for postponing, no matter how good his reason. And if I feel this way, just think how Mr. M must feel.

He's lost some things he'll never get back. Nevertheless he finally has cause to hope that he has a future and that it will be much better than the last decade. There is reason to hope that we will have a future as a couple. There's lots of ways things could go wrong, lots of ways I could be wrong about us, but I think maybe we could be pretty happy.

In any case, unless I catch a stray bullet, I have a future and a present of my own to attend to.

Physically, aging scares me, but I could be healthy and attractive for a long time yet. But not if I don't start paying attention. I've been lucky to be relatively free of the weird body hatred-obsession that a lot of women seem to have. I've mostly stayed on the high range of a healthy weight. I wear a size 10, which is enormous by fashion standards, and maybe by some guys' standards, but for the most part guys have been happy with my figure and so have I. I get a decent amount of exercise without trying too hard. I walk the dog and bike to school and get in and out of periods of going to the gym and taking yoga classes.

But I can tell things are going to stop being so easy. I gained weight during the diaspora, and it didn't come off easily. It's not that I need to radically change everything. I just need to pay attention, make a few conscious changes. I don't want to deprive myself of anything I like, but I should start eating vegetables and cut back a little on the sugar and maybe the pepperoni pizza and the fried chicken. I just ate a whole box of Blue Bell fudge pops in in 24 hours. It's not a matter of dieting, just pacing myself better.

I've always taken good care of my skin, which is paying off, but my hair is another story. I need a real haircut. I need to start paying attention to what I wear. I need to pay attention.

It's not just my physical self. I need to pay attention to my mental and emotional habits, stop doing the things I do to sabotage myself. I started going to therapy, not with the therapist I mentioned before, but at a reduced fee clinic with a student therapist. So she's not that experienced, but I like her. Anyway I just mostly need someone outside my life to help me notice and pay attention to what goes on in my head.

The bottom line is that I need to pay attention to myself and my life right now, and I can't do that if I'm spending my energy pining to relive and re-do the entire period from about 1985 to 2000.

Like the hippies said: Be Here Now.

(This turned into an awfully long post. Never fear, my loyal and exhausted readers. In a week school will start again and I won't have time to write.)

It's warm, even

Airports and politics

Thank goodness I'm not trying to fly today.

Instead I'm at home listening to the 20-year-old deejay on WTUL play protest songs about Guantanamo and American foreign policy.

Of course there are liberals who have a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation in the Middle East. Thomas Friedman comes to mind. But for every dittohead and Coulter acolyte on the right, there's someone on the left like my former coworker who in the summer of 2001 was circulating a petition protesting the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statutes, but after 9/11 was appalled that we went to war in Afganistan.

Why is it so hard for people to tolerate even the tiniest bit of complexity or ambiguity? They've got to have white hats and black hats. And to my co-worker, America's black hat was apparently bigger and blacker than the Taliban's.

Yes, Bush is a disaster. We probably shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, we definitely had the wrong motives and we definitely made a mess of it. Yes, there's a lot of our foreign policy to be ashamed of that hasn't exactly helped us win the goodwill of the rest of the world.

But the Islamic fundamentalist world has declared war on us. We're not innocent, but we're not the villian, either. This has more to do with their pathologies than ours. They won't go away if we ignore them and leave them alone, as much as I might prefer that option.

There was an article in Salon.com recently in which the author expessed the opinion that Lebanon was the best hope for a viable democracy in the Middle East. And I wondered since when was Israel not a democracy? Again, I'm not a big Zionist. Israel has been a bully and has blood on its hands. It's not really a good thing to tell innocent Lebanese civilians to evacuate, then target missiles at the highway they're trying to evacuate on. Nevertheless, you have to consider that Israel is surrounded by people who are committed to wiping it the face of the map. It's no surprise it's a little trigger happy. It's complicated, see? The world is like that, my little college radio pontificators.

Oh my, maybe I've become a centrist. A moderate. How boring.

Or maybe it's just that the leftist party line has gone really, really wrong on a couple of issues, and this is one of them.

The uncanny resemblance

Mr. M says the resemblance is even stronger in Back to the Future (now at the top of my Netflix queue.) I think it has to do with the haircut.

His crankiness has dissipated and he doesn't seem to remember snapping at me or realize that it bothers me as much as it does.

I can't change him, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it. If this is really something I'd break up with him over, I should at least warn him. But it never seems to be the right time. I don't want to present him with my grievances when he has so much else to deal with. But then it's like I'm saving up a list of issues to cover when he feels better, which is not right or fair either.

Things are going to change very soon, even though it hasn't really sunk in yet. They haven't yet set a date for his transplant, but it is supposed to happen in early September. Finally. All those years of waiting and frustration and being sick and it comes to a point here. One way or another things will change.

Anyway, I'm all worked up about watching a movie with an actor who looks like him. I think it's fair to say I'm still crushed out on him in spite of it all.

Mr. M with a mullet

From time to time Mr. M or his friends have mentioned his resemblance to Crispin Glover. I could sort of see what they meant. But I don't think I've seen Crispin Glover in anything in the time I've known Mr. M, except for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and I can barely remember his role in that. I was distracted by Johnny Depp.

Somehow I never saw River's Edge until tonight. It's a creepy but really good movie from the mid-80's about a homicidal teenager and his screwed up friends. It's got a young Keanu Reeves in it and it's also got Crispin Glover in a big role. He's not the main character but he really owns this movie.

I didn't know Mr. M twenty years ago, but I've seen pictures, and obviously I know what he looks like now. And the resemblance here is so strong it's scary. Glover's voice is even like Mr. M's. His inflections and mannerisms in this film are a teenage speed freak's version of Mr. M's. It was REALLY WEIRD to watch this. And Mr. M and Glover are exactly the same age. I've often wished I knew Mr. M back when he was a young hot thing, and it's like I was getting a glimpse of it, and I found Glover attractive in his film, except he has a mullet and he's batshit crazy, so that made me feel kinda uncomfortable about being attracted to him. Plus the real Crispin Glover seems interesting and smart but... let's say... kind of nutty.

Mr. M never had a mullet. He had short, slighty punk rock hair. But he had the skinny black jeans and leather jacket. He still does, in fact.

I can remember seeing Back to the Future when I was in high school and thinking Glover was pretty cute in it. I was more into him than Michael J. Fox. So maybe I ought to put that in my Netflix queue. Maybe that would be a less disturbing evocation of the young Mr. M.

Anyway, I've never posted a picture of Mr. M, but if you watch this movie and imagine Glover's character twenty years later with a lot less hair and looking like he's had a rough decade, you'll get the idea. The resemblance between Glover today and Mr. M today is not as strong as it was.

Generic

Remember back in the late 70s or early 80s when generic products first hit the grocery stores? The packaging was basic black and white and the labels just said "corn" or "sugar" or whatever?

The template I'm using for this blog is one part old-school generic and one part New York Times austere authority.* It's not exciting, but I like it. It's easy to read. But I'm thinking I'd like to have a side column for a blogroll and whatnot. I've been looking at websites that help clueless bloggers like me design a template just by picking colors and basic layouts. But I want this one, only with a sidebar. I noticed Blogger provides some basic html instruction, but it doesn't address this problem.


*It's also a tiny bit Drudge Report, but nevermind that.

Head-butting

I might give the impression that Mr. M's illness is the only thing that makes our relationship less than perfect. I don't want to use this space to air out our relationship too much. He doesn't read this blog regularly, because I talk to him about most of the things I write about here. So I suppose I could use it to vent a bit, but I don't want to violate the relationship's privacy.

But there's something about his personality that sometimes makes me think about breaking up with him, that's come up again and that I'm turning over in my mind.

My love for him is not in doubt, but just because you love someone doesn't mean you should be dreaming about living happily ever after with him.

He's a bit crotchety in a way that I find charming. I tease him about being crunchy on the outside and sweet on the inside, a tasty treat.

But sometimes when he's in a bad mood he's more than crotchety, he's snippy and mean. I realize that this is sort of about how you expect someone to behave and how you interpret that behavior. When he's sick and cranky, I've seen him snap at his mother when she fusses at him. When it happens, I'll think she shouldn't let him talk to her that way. But it's like they both get it out and it blows over. No one would doubt that he loves her and is a devoted son. She always talks about how sweet he treats her, and most of the time he really does.

But with me, his barbs go deep and I brood over it, long after he's forgotten about it. His anger is sharp but short-lived.

I'm not used to that kind of thing. In my family, it's rare for anyone to say anything overtly mean to anyone else--at least since my sister and I got out of our teens. We make veiled barbs, perhaps, and piss each other off. Sometimes we fight, but mostly we keep our annoyance to ourselves, or vent to our friends. Occasionally we even talk things out in a relatively mature and healthy manner. Well, not all that often...

When he gets testy, I feel like I don't want to be talked to that way, but it's not like he curses at me or calls me names. I'm not sure how to describe it without transcribing a whole conversation. Actually, he has called me a bitch before. I've known him three years and he's said it twice. So.

Other guys have called me a bitch--in the heat of a major blowout. I guess what I find disturbing is that relatively minor irritations can provoke harsh words or general testiness with him.

It might be that I read too much into it because I feel uncertain of his affection for me, so if he's irritated I think it's about me, and if he is irritated with me I think he doesn't like me anymore. That's mostly about my own baggage. There's every evidence that I am very important to him and otherwise he treats me very well, much better than any boyfriend I've had before. He puts a lot of effort into doing things to please me, and he does the same for his mom and even for his friends.

He's aware of his harsher side, at least to some extent. Once he told me that he'd been in a bad mood and been short tempered with his mom and he felt ashamed of that. On a day during my last visit when he was particularly sick, he told me and his mom that he felt like shit and he was in a bad mood and he didn't want to take it out on us, but he might not be able to help it.

An awful lot has gone seriously wrong in his life, and I can hardly blame him for being ill-tempered sometimes. In general he handles things with much more grace than I think I could muster in his place.

That doesn't mean that his snippiness is okay. It's definitely the thing I would change about him if I could--other than his health, of course. But I also have figured out that you can't change anyone, ever. You just have to decide what you can tolerate and what you can't. But I don't know what to make of it, so I can't decide whether I'm willing to live with it. If I tell him I won't tolerate it, I need to make sure I really mean it and I'm willing to walk the walk.

It would help to have some third-party perspective. Adam in particular is good at seeing what's going on with things like this. But because of the situation, Mr. M can't travel and none of my friends or family have met him. I know his family and friends, though. He has a couple of good long-term friends, and they're genuinely nice guys, which is to his credit.

In love again

I've been feeling pissy and pessimistic about the state of New Orleans, with good reason. I've been thinking I need to graduate and get the hell out of here.

I haven't gone out at night for a couple of months. But tonight I went to a houseparty in an elegantly decaying old house. On the back patio, underneath a palm tree and with a view of the elevated freeway, a cute young girl with a Patsy Cline hairdo sang honkytonk songs, then Miss A (my dogsitter) sang Jobim while accompanying herself on the ukelele, then O.L.D. played a set of their scatological country & western songs. Everyone at the party was funny and charming. We drank beer and ate hotdogs. It was a hot steamy night with a bit of a breeze that made it almost pleasant.

It was White Linen Night, and lots of people were out. This was sort of a Soiled Linen party.

On the way out I ran into Adam and a couple of his friends, and we hung out on the street for a while and caught up with each other. They invited me to a salsa party in Mid City, but instead I went to see the Morning 40 at Le Bon Temps. A free show, everyone packed in shoulder to shoulder, drinking and sweating and smelling of b.o., and jumping up and down and singing along to every song.

The Morning 40 have become a great band. They tour and are getting some national attention, but in New Orleans we've been watching them for years, from when they were sloppy but fun and wild, to now when they are tight but still fun and wild. We know them, they know us, we know all their songs.

I only stayed for the first set--they are still playing right now.

Just as I got home, a nighttime summer rain began to fall.

It was exactly the kind of New Orleans night that I missed so much when I was in exile. How can I think of leaving? I love New Orleans, New Orleans needs me.

However, my sentiments are subject to change when I read the night's body count in tomorrow's newspaper.

Fun with morbidity & existential despair

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I hope you will indulge me in some Deep Thoughts--or skip this entry and come back later when I go back to ranting about my neighborhood.

I was reading a story about a woman who was with her friend when she died of cancer, who encouraged her friend to "let go," who helped her have a good death. Those last minutes were described in excruciating detail.

And I thought THERE IS NO WAY I CAN POSSIBLY DO THAT. I can't possibly face dying. Even a good death seems impossibly terrifying. But I don't have a choice, do I?

I found myself cursing at how horribly cruel this existence is. I didn't ask to be here, ask to be at all. None of us did. One day you open your eyes and here you are, you, this identity in this mysterious world, this mysterious existence. And you like it and you get attached to being, even though sometimes it is incredibly painful. And then you realize it's going to end, you're going to end, you're going to be nothing at all, and it's too terrifying to contemplate.

Hank doesn't worry about dying, and when he does die it will probably be harder for me than for him. This is the great curse of consciousness and self-awareneness. This is what it means to be human.

This is why we invent religions.

But as far as I understand it, Buddhism has a more sensible approach to the problem than those religions that cling to an idea of heaven or hell. The way to make peace with this is to learn to not be so attached to being this particular person, so when the time comes you can let go of it.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be the most important person in the world. I thought that would make me immortal. I think maturity has to do with realizing that your individual existence is short and probably not of any great importance. But it's meaningful because humanity as a whole is tremendously important, I think. I think of us as the universe's means of becoming aware of itself and knowing about itself. It's brain. Any individual neuron is not particularly important, but the system as a whole is crucial. Would anything be beautiful or terrible if we weren't here to see it? I believe in the human endeavor, in observing and learning and questioning and experiencing and making culture and evolving.

Often I think we're going to be not quite wise enough to pull it off. That our darker fears and urges will pull us down and destroy us. Thanatos will defeat eros.

Still, it means something to be here, awake and alive and observant and participating in this thing.

But I'm still afraid of the relentless process of aging and falling apart and suffering and dying and dissolving. I wish I could put time on pause until I'm ready to face it.

I think nature might have its mercies. I've read that when an animal is about to become another animal's prey, it's brain releases a chemical that causes it to be calm and not feel pain. Mr. M almost died, and he says when you get close to it, it seems very easy.

I hope nature will have mercy on Mr. M so that he has gets better and has a good chunk of time to be healthy and happy and enjoy life. I hope nature has mercy on me. I hope I will have a long and healthy life and not suffer too much and that when the end comes I will be ready and it will easy and simple and peaceful, like slipping into bathwater.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

So much for that...

It seems that T.S. Chris is not going to be much of anything, and that's good. I wouldn't mind a week or two of "hurri-cation" but I can't take another big disruption. I don't know what will be of New Orleans or whether I will be here to see it, but I need everything to remain stable enough to get me through the next two years of school.

Here comes Chris

It's coming in to the gulf, and then what? It could devolve into a big rainstorm. It could gather strength and turn a bit to the right. We watch and wait.

Yay for me!

I successfully wrote on to the environmental law journal. It means a whole buncha extra work, but it's good for my resume and it's also vengence for my poor grades in legal research and writing.