Benjamin Buttons

Benjamin Buttons doesn't offer much satisfaction in post-viewing rumination. In the end, there's just not that much too it. The character is only interesting because he's aging backward and he's very good looking. Otherwise he's kind of a dullard.

But watching it was an absorbing experience, largely because New Orleans looked so very beautiful in the film. But it was also visually compelling to see Brad Pitt emerge from old age in to youthful beauty. He isn't my fetish of male beauty--that would probably be Johnny Depp. But still, I couldn't look away.

Also, even if the film isn't really saying much of anything, it does make fresh some things we all know too well, about how change is constant and we are ephemeral, how we lose the ones we love and even ourselves. Every pair of lovers at the peaks of their existences are going to fall into decline, and they ought to know it; but the film brings special poignancy to that awareness by creating a pair who are declining in different directions.

Aging backwads would have its benefits. If you reached your peak of health and beauty late in life, you would probably appreciate it and make more of it than the average twenty year old. Benjamin's end is not appealing, but if you have to lose your mind and be totally dependent on others, it might be better to be in the body of a small child rather than an octogenarian, because you'd be more appealing to your caretakers.

And in other news, bar review class starts again tomorrow. I'm totally unemployed and would be in a panic if I had the energy for it. I've been studying and have slowed down on my writing. But being here, with my family and its ghosts, has given me some new threads to work with.

Lightning

I had a dream I was back in Richmond. It was a warm day but a little light rain had begun and the wind was picking up in anticipation of a storm. I stepped out of my house to look -- maybe I knew something was going to happen -- and out of almost nowhere I huge crack of lightning struck a neighbhor's house. This was no ordinary lightning strike. I watched in shock and fear as blocks of downtown Richmond went up in flames and skyscrapers collapsed. Both my house and my workplace were destroyed.

I've been missing New Orleans lately, but if I were in Richmond I don't think I would miss New Orleans. My life feels like it has been destroyed by lightning, but I can't put all the blame for the destruction on an uncontrollable natural disaster. It would be better if I could blame it on an unpredictable disaster that made the news and roused people's sympathy and desire to help. Instead: I flunked the bar exam and had the bad luck to graduate during a huge recession. Now I am living in my sister's dining room, looking for a job, getting behind on my bills, freezing my ass off, dealing with my family of self-absorbed moping depressives. Pot, kettle?

My *&^*% mother!

There's no solution to this problem and maybe no point in even writing about it, but once again I am annoyed and upset after a short and seemingly innocuous conversation with my mother, aka The Underminer. She doesn't mean any harm, she doesn't know she's doing it, or maybe I'm doing it to myself. Cognitive therapy has helped me a lot but it hasn't allowed me to conquer my mother's voice inside or outside my head. She managed to imply that going to law school was a mistake but too late but maybe someday I will find a job. I know that she gets to me only because she's amplifying my own depressed and self-undermining voice. The best solution I can manage is to avoid talking to her, but I'm afraid that after she's gone I'll regret avoiding her. I keep thinking that when I get a job and the crisis passes I will be more able to interact with her without going over the edge.

Things are bad.

I'm living with my sister and sleeping on an uncomfortable air mattress in her dining room. I'm working part-time for the holidays at Macy's. My sister is laid off, and her unemployed alcoholic ex-boyfriend is living and drinking in the basement. My sister is starting to realize that he's not going to leave until she definitively kicks him out.

I decided to stay here instead of with my parents in the midwest because it's closer the the area where I want to end up. I decided to take the Maryland bar instead, and have enrolled in a bar review course in Baltimore, which is 50 miles away.

It's cold.

I don't know how I can manage to concentrate on studying in this situation. I might go stay with my aunt after the holidays, when her kids go back home after their holiday visit, and my class starts.

I'm not making enough money at Macy's. I can't believe I graduated from law school and I'm more broke and my life is more fucked up than ever. I've been job hunting for more than a year, and while I still have hope of finding a temporary paralegal or document review job in Baltimore, I'm not holding my breath. Last month I interviewed for a job that I thought I was uniquely well-qualified for, and they never bothered to call my references or to communicate with me about the job -- not so much as a thanks but no thanks. I'm starting to fear that there's something fundamentally wrong with me as a job candidate that I can't see or understand.

I have no health insurance. I wish I could get back on Wellbutrin, which would help me get up and face every day with my chin up, but I can't afford it.

I like Baltimore, but when we visited on 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago, my sister's truck got broken into.

My aunt told us some things about my suicidal grandfather that we hadn't heard before. She was in the house with him when he shot himself. She said that he went on some kind of anti-depressant medication in the late 1950s - early 1960s, and that because of it he was a different kind of father for her than he was for my dad. He took the younger kids on trips and didn't seem depressed. But, she says that he lost his job and was reduced to unloading boxcars when he was somewhere in his mid/late forties, which triggered the depression that caused him to end his life. He felt like a failure.

Turning 40 is serious business!

What I need for a good life:

-To be financially self-sufficient and to take good care of myself

-To have a career that allows me to participate in human affairs in a meaningful way

-To have a writing and literary life

-To live well, with pleasure and health


Things to do before I turn 41:

-Launch my legal career

-Buy a car

-Get and keep my weight under 145 pounds

-Do something about my neck

-Do something about my teeth

-Write and send out six essays to The Sun

-Go somewhere new

-Go to Memphis and see the Bluff City Backsliders

-Have sex worth having


Things to do before I turn 42:

-Buy a house or condo


Places to go in my forties:

-Montreal

-Buenos Aires

-Lisbon

-American West

-Outer Banks

Polish Hill

Polish Hill is a Pittsburgh neighborhood that clings to a steep hill above the Allegheny River. An ornate Catholic church stands near the top of the hill, and a disorderly grid of streets zig-zags down, lined with old row houses and tenements. It is the kind of neighborhood found in northeastern industrial cities that contains echoes and shadows of left-behind Europe.

I knew Polish Hill only in passing. I lived there for a month or so, at the end of 1989, when I was just 21 years old. I'd already dropped out of college in New York, had a quietly brutal falling out with my parents, randomly chosen Nashville as the place to collect myself, broken up with my first boyfriend, and rented my first apartment of my very only own. And then I went back to Pittsburgh to go back to college, and to claim it as my home.

Back, even though I'd never lived in Pittsburgh proper. Pittsburgh seemed like the best compromise of the places I could legitimately consider home and the places I might want to call home. It seemed to me that my life had gotten off track when I was thirteen and my family moved from small-town Western Pennsylvania to the suburbs of St. Louis. I hadn't been particularly happy in Pennsylvania in the first place, but that was before I knew how miserable I could be in the cheaply thrown up suburbs of the burgeoning Midwest. Pittsburgh was, roughly, the place I was from, before I got lost. This was not my first or my last attempt to solve the puzzle of where I belonged.

I'd gotten accepted into Chatham College. I didn’t know out how I was going to pay for everything without my parents’ help, but the financial aid office assured me we could work things out. I picked Chatham and not the more obvious and more affordable University of Pittsburgh because Chatham had a film program. I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, because I really wanted to be a writer but had concluded that writing was no longer an important art form. There were so few readers compared to film watchers, or so my thinking went.

My mother told me explicitly that I was on my own, but I’m not sure I completely believed her. My parents were still angry that I left Fordham after a year to live in sin and misery with that hapless first boyfriend. They wanted me to move back into their house, where they could keep an eye on me, nag me into going to church, and send me to school at UMSL or someplace like that. But that was unthinkable, impossible
So up I went to Pittsburgh, driving the first car I had ever owned, a 1980 Chevy Citation with a stick shift and a distressed paint job. The first night or two I stayed at a Red Roof Inn by the airport. Then I found the apartment in Polish Hill. It was one boxy unit in an older building of four apartments. A cheap renovation had stripped out the period details from inside, but it was basically clean and decent. It had two bedrooms, and I thought I might find a roommate to help me pay the rent. I bought a new economy model refrigerator. Fifteen years of credit problems might have started right there.

I don't remember how I got the money for the move. I'd been working at Tower Books in Nashville and I couldn't have saved much. My first credit card had barely been used until the refrigerator purchase. Maybe Edd gave me some money, although he didn’t have much to give.

Edd and I slept together, finally, on my 21st birthday, on the futon on the floor of my apartment, just days before I left Nashville. Earlier that spring, I noticed how he looked at me and I got the feeling that he was attracted to me. I wanted him because he wanted me. He was ten years and ten days older than me. I talked myself into thinking he was good looking. We started to fool around on our first date, but he i panicked and ran before all the clothes came off. I didn’t understand why, and was left feeling like he’d taken my insides with him when he bolted. He told me that he liked me but he didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I still didn’t understand why. He was recovering from a divorce and a self-induced financial disaster, and he was hoping to be promoted to assistant manager at the store where we both worked. I spent all summer and fall tortured and heartbroken until he finally came around when I was planning my move.

I remember that he came with me when I drove up to Pittsburgh the second time, with my futon and my cat and all my worldly possessions. I remember having a hot dog with him at the "O," a hot dog institution near the University of Pittsburgh. The scene is a foggy and dim, but I can see him, stocky with his hair clipped short around his incipient bald patch. In his trench coat he looked like a bit-part detective in an old movie. A young trash-talking black guy insulted the trench coat while “Word Up” by Cameo was on the stereo. I remember that moment, but I don’t remember how Edd got back to Nashville, leaving me there in Pittsburgh alone.

I remember only one in-person conversation with another human being during this time in Pittsburgh, with a girl my age who worked in a restaurant where I had gone to ask for a job. We talked about how Pittsburgh, like Nashville, was really kind of a small town where everyone knew who had a cocaine problem. But I didn’t know anyone in Pittsburgh, drug addict or not. In my memory the town is nearly deserted and I am alone. I don't remember ever going to the grocery store when I was in Pittsburgh, although I remember eating, more than once, at a bagel place in Shadyside, one of my only memories distinctly populated by other people.

It was such a dreamy and disconnected time that I would doubt that any of it really happened, except that I have photographs. I took black and white photos devoid of human figures. There is a photograph of an empty swimming pool on the South Side. The painted crosses that mark the ends of the swimming lanes look like religious symbols in the hilly old empty neighborhood.

Fall deepened into winter soon after my arrival. The weather turned dark and grey. It snowed early, and then warmed up just enough for the snow to turn to grey slush. My cat ran away the night before the snow and I worried he would not survive the weather. I sold my electric guitar to a music store for money to pay the phone bill, ending my pretense of being a musician. I’d given my old acoustic as a parting gift to the old boyfriend.

I wanted Pittsburgh to feel like home, but it wasn’t quite the home I was from. It was a city, and I had grown up in the almost-rural suburbs of one of its smaller satellite towns. We visited the city when I was a kid, but when we drove near Polish Hill my mother would reach over and lock the door locks to protect us from the bad city people.

There were familiar elements that gave me some comfort. The once-familiar Pittsburgh accents and radio stations and supermarket products—Iron City Beer, TastyKakes and Lebanon bologna—marked a return to a place once known. The griminess, the dark of falling winter and the worsening weather were also things I’d once been used to, and I was willing to see them as badges of authenticity and toughness of spirit. While I might be uncertain if asked to distinguish between an oak or a maple or a poplar tree, I recognized the mix of flora and fauna, rocky hills and gloom that made up the landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t Polish like the first residents of the neighborhood, but I was Slovak on my mother’s side. My forerunners came over to work in nearby coal mines a little later than the Polish steel workers moved onto Polish Hill. These backgrounds seemed roughly similar, from the perspective of a descendent several generations removed from the immigrants’ realities.

The Poles and the Slovaks were Catholic, Pittsburgh was a heavily Catholic town, and I had once been Catholic, too. But I had already given Catholicism an inconclusive second try. In Nashville, I went to mass semi-regularly for a few months and I’d bought a new rosary in honor of the allegorically almost pagan religion that I wanted Catholicism to be. But the practice was unsatisfactorily pedestrian and the underlying creed preposterous. I wasn’t quite completely done with it, but in Pittsburgh I didn’t go to mass.

I read the newspaper want ads and filled out applications in stores and restaurants, but I couldn’t find a job. My parents were friends with a couple who had just moved back to Pittsburgh’s suburbs. I never saw them in person while I was there, but I talked to the husband on the phone and he told me how to apply for a job at UPS. I drove out to find the place, but I got helplessly lost and finally just went home.
The closest I came to employment was the one night I spent shadowing a waitress in a high-end restaurant. I didn’t go back because I found the work and the place terrifying. I was sure I would never be able to keep up with the constant criss-crossing orders and instructions. The kitchen staff was casually but ferociously rude to the waiters, who met the insult and demands with an equanimity that was beyond me. I was far too fragile for that world. I was already crying every night, on the futon on the floor of my apartment in an empty city.

If my choices had been retreating to in humiliation to mom and dad, or making things work in Pittsburgh, maybe I would have gone back to the restaurant the next day no matter how panicky it made me feel, or asked for better directions to UPS. But I gave up before I had to. Depression can make a surmountable obstacle into an insurmountable one. And I had no confidence in my choice of home. Pittsburgh had not embraced me, welcomed me and smoothed my way. It had rejected me instead. School couldn’t have but a few weeks away—surely I could have found something to do until the financial aid came in? Why didn’t I call the financial aid office? Because, I think, I didn’t want to do it any more. Because Edd was waiting for me.

I talked to him on the phone almost every day, but his letters were more satisfying because it was easier to read into them what I hoped to read. I thought men were important, and men who might love me were a precious rarity. We talked about him moving up to Pittsburgh but I didn’t really believe that future would materialize. Returning to Nashville began to seem the path of least resistance. Maybe I could even get my old job back. I just had the change the story I was telling myself. I’d been thinking of my time in the south as a little side trip to clear my head before I returned to the north to live my real life. But maybe I would find my home in the south instead. It certainly seemed an easier, and warmer, place to be. A man was there waiting for me.

I sold the refrigerator and a dresser that had my uncle painted for me when I was a child. I talked to my landlady on the phone, and she was reasonably understanding. She would let me out of my lease and would consider returning some of my deposit. But my cat, who had been gone for a week, came back on the night I sold my furnishings. I fed him and closed him in the extra room while the buyers moved everything out. During that time, the cat left runny diarrhea on the carpet.

The cat, Tony, had been a barn kitten on my uncle’s farm before we brought him home in the year before we moved west. He retained a little of a barn cat’s intractability, and it seemed that some of domesticated habits had worn off during his days away. He slept next to me that night and purred when I petted him. But when I put him in the car the next morning, he was loudly, violently unhappy.

It had snowed again, and the roads were icy. I drove carefully down the steep, winding street to the bottom of Polish Hill, the cat yowling all the way. I didn’t have a carrier for him. On the way up he sat on Edd’s lap or mine in relative content, but now he was angry and restless and wanted to get between my foot and the brake pedal. I decided I would stop at the vet’s office at the bottom of the hill to see if I could get some cat tranquilizers or a cat carrier or both, or something. But the vet wasn’t open.

When I opened the car door to get back in, the cat dashed out. I half-knew he was going to do it. I called after him, but I didn’t chase after him into the roadside weeds. I wept, but I left him there. I didn’t have the will to force him into a long ride he didn’t want to make, and I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that someone had fed him when he ran away, and he would find his way back up the hill to that person. I drove away.

I almost wrecked the car on the interstate through Cincinnati. It was warmer in Nashville and there was no snow on the ground. Edd took me out for Mexican food. We went back to the house he shared with three roommates. He played me Marvin Gaye’s divorce album, and we had sex within hearing of the roommates. Within days I had three part time jobs, an attic apartment to share with Edd, and a new identity to try out. I would be a Southerner.

Amazing

I remember four years ago when Kerry-supporters posted their post-election apologies on the web, asking the world's forgiveness for failing to stop Bush's reelection. This time, we have redeemed ourselves and then some. I personally am proud to have helped turn Virginia blue.

The damage of the last eight years is done, and can't be undone. I don't think that Obama walks on water and works miracles. But he is ridiculously smart, a refreshing change in a president. He is even-handed, charismatic, and from all evidence seems to be a truly good human being. He ran a campaign to be proud of, with no sleaze and a minimum of talking down to the voters.

In some ways, his race feels like a footnote, but nevertheless the affect of his election on race relations and on the psyches of black Americans is and will be profound.

Alas, he didn't call me up and offer me a job right after his speech last night. Still, I feel better about everything right now.

Freefall

I had to leave Richmond because I couldn't find a job and I wasn't able to pay my rent. Right now I am at my sister's house in Pennsylvania waiting in limbo.

Last week I had an interview in D.C. for a job as an environmental law reporter. I am waiting to hear whether they're going to make me an offer. If so, I will almost certainly take it.

If not, I will probably go back to my parent's house and lean on them while I study full time for the February bar. After the bar, I will probably go stay with my friend Nicols and help her work on her new book while I wait for the bar results.

The other possibility is that I would go back to Richmond to go to planning school at VCU.

None of these options are ideal.

The good thing about the job in D.C. is that it would be a job! It pays a salary and has benefits!!! It would probably be pretty interesting and it would involve environmental law. The down side is that it would be hard and stressful and would make it hard to study for and pass the bar. I'm not crazy about D.C., but at least I would be in the general region I want to be in, and I could still spend time in Richmond.

Going back to my parents would be the best way to ensure that I pass the bar on the next try. The bad thing is that it would be miserable, I would be broke and uninsured for even longer, and I would probably have a hard time getting back to VA, considering I wasn't able to find a job when I was physically present. It would be cool to work with Nicols after the bar, and I would have some time and a supportive atmosphere to work on my own writing, which made a comeback in the last few months. My goal first goal for my revived writing life is to publish an essay in The Sun.

Planning school would help me get more qualified for the work I most want to do, and would be in Richmond, but I would be living on a student loan, which seems like a bad idea. Plus, I'm not sure how I would fit in bar review, but it wouldn't be any more of a challenge than working and doing bar review.

I'm really sad to leave Richmond. The only upside is that I was able to put in my absentee ballot for Obama before I left town.

I think that when the election results come in tomorrow, I'm going to feel better about everything. Cross your fingers.

Goodbye beautiful Richmond

What I need to do to feel satisfied with my life

Be financially self-sufficient and take good care of myself

Participate in a meaningful way in the human endeavor (probably in the area of environmental law and policy)

Have a creative writing practice and a literary life

Live well, with pleasure

I'm Hillary Clinton and I (sorta) approve this haircut

Today for the first time ever I went back to a salon and asked them to re-do a haircut I was dissatisfied with. The ultimate result is a little too short and Hillary Clinton-esque:



But it's better than the bell-shaped bob that preceded it, which might be a classic but is extremely unkind to my somewhat weak chin and fat neck:



A year ago, my hair looked like this (and my skin looked like hell):

Failure

I failed the bar exam.

My friend Andy says it’s narcissistic and unhelpful to focus on the failure in the situation I’m now facing. I know what he means. He’s right, I am a narcissist as well as a failure!

As bad as things are, and they are bad, there is something to be said for finally, unambiguously failing at something. Until now, I have avoided overt failure but I have also not produced anything I can really be proud of. And I haven’t wanted to admit it.

I resist saying, thinking, writing that I am dissatisfied with myself. I want to be sane, happy and well adjusted, and that requires self-acceptance and a sense of compassion for oneself. I have compassion for myself, because I have a flaw I can point at but not quite name, and it is not my fault that I have that flaw any more than it is my fault that I have my father’s nose. The reason I did not quite shine in law school is the same reason I have never been able to make a coherent whole with my writing. I have tried to define the problem, but no explanation is quite satisfactory:

I am smart but not quite smart enough.
I am unfocused
I am a disorganized thinker
I am uninspired
I don’t know enough
I don’t understand enough
I’m missing something
My brain just doesn’t make the connections it should
I am a lazy thinker
I get distracted,
I allow myself to get distracted
I am terminally confused
I avoid hard thought
I can’t complete my thoughts
I don’t want to get messy
I don’t know what I want to do.
As a thinker, I “keep my head down.”
Because I am just not good enough.
Because I just am not what I want to be. I am not brilliant.

The thing is, though, that I don’t feel like I need to be the most brilliant, the best ever. I don’t mind if I’m flawed, just as long as I’m flawed with something to show for myself. Even if what I have to show for myself shows my flaws, its okay if it is good, if it has worth, even with its flaws. And I’m not saying that just to say it. I mean it. But I’m dissatisfied. I’m not convinced that I have simply run up against my personal limits. I want to test those limits, to see if I can do better.

It wasn’t hard for me to do well in school when I was a kid. Now, when I’m faced with something hard, I don’t quite want to admit how really hard it its. If it’s hard, I might not be able to do it. I want to think it’s just like all those things that other people thought were hard but I could do without too much trouble when I was a kid. I don’t get too stressed because I assume that’s how it’s going to be. Part of me might doubt that my performance was good enough, but the more dominant part assumes that I did just fine. I walked out of the bar exam thinking it wasn’t that bad and I probably passed, even though I knew I had messed up a couple of questions.

Something similar happens with my writing. When I get to the hard part, I deny it’s hard. I ignore the problem and muddle through.

The solution to my bar exam troubles is to admit I face something hard, take the damn bar/bri course, focus, do the work, and pass the test in February.

I’m not sure of the exact solution to my writing impasse, but I know that it starts with sitting down, writing, and focusing.

It is helpful to be clear about what I want to accomplish:

I want to be a land use and environmental attorney. A good one.
I want to be a personal essayist. A published one and a good one.
I want to live in Richmond.
I want to be financially stable, own my home, take good care of myself, live well and travel.

Then, it’s helpful to think of what the next step is to accomplish any of this:

The next step toward being an attorney is to pass the bar.
The next step toward being an essayist is to write a publishable essay.
The next step toward living in Richmond is to avoid leaving Richmond.
The next step toward financial stability is getting a job.

Unfortunately, some of these steps are in conflict with each other. Particularly, getting a job and staying in Richmond could handicap my ability to study for and pass the February bar.

Bookishness

Because I am broke, I can't afford to go to the ophthalmologist, and since I can't go to the ophthalmologist for my overdue yearly eye exam, I can't order new contacts, and so I am back to wearing my glasses everyday, for the first time in almost thirty years. And since I am broke and can't afford bookstores, movie theaters or my Netflix subscription, I have rediscovered the public library, which has become my main source of entertainment after the internet. New Orleans had such an awful public library, I forgot what an amazing thing a public library can be. Also, I am back in the east, and with the glasses and the library books and the chill of a real autumn and the return to a hilly landscape, I feel like the bookish, bespectacled, library-loving little girl of the Pennsylvania hills that I used to be has reemerged.

I like that Richmond reconnects the separated parts of my life, Eastern meets Southern. Let's forget all about that misguided Midwestern episode, shall we?

I could be perfectly at home here if I could just FIND A JOB, and then PAY MY RENT.

Everybody loves Richmond.

I must stay here. I must.

Paul Newman

I'm crying about Paul Newman's death at the age of 83. The death of an actor who lived a long and apparently happy life shouldn't strike me as a tragedy. But he was one of the gods of my personal pantheon.

Just to start out with, he was just about the most gorgeous, physically perfect men I have ever seen, and he stayed doable well into his 60s, at least. In a way, he was more doable in middle age, as age smudged his perfection in a way that made him seem more approachable.

There was the intelligence and good humor that shone through his acting. His charisma. His humbleness, the way he took on downtrodden characters and didn't depend on his looks. His famous loyalty to his wife. His family, the Newman's Own venture, his politics, the racecar driving, the way he seemed to be living well and fully for as long as possible. He seemed a man born with potential who did not squander it. I'm sorry to see his light flicker out.

Black dog, eating worms

It must be going around, because the outside news is almost all bad. Financial collapse and all its ramifications. The American fall from grace and prominence in this last administration. The ban on off-shore drilling lifted. The general dumbness of the electorate. Etc. Etc.

It was a bad time to go off the Wellbutrin. I am still unemployed and the contract work that was supposed to be my safety net is proving to be not so easy to get as was advertised. I just discovered my gas and water were cut off today. I have a pretty interesting internship at a nonprofit, but I'm getting paid about minimum wage. The Commonwealth of Virginia is facing its own budget crisis and I doubt it will be hiring me anytime soon. About three weeks till bar results come in. I don't know how I'm paying the October rent, and as of the end of this week I will be behind on several bills, thereby jeopardizing my credit and my ability to buy a house or a car even if I ever do get a job. If, a month from now, I find I didn't pass the bar and I still don't have work, I'll have to tuck tail and run back to my mom and dad. And I don't even want to think about what that will be like.

I will turn forty in less than two months. Also: nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.

Cape Charles, Virginia

The last summery day of the year, on the Chesapeake Bay with a certain someone...

Planning school

It's kind of pathetic, but I'm actually thinking about going back to school -- in the planning program at VCU. The point would be to be better qualified and to not lose focus on the work I really want to do, and to make some kind of tangible connection to Richmond. Anyway, my "statement of purpose":

I’ve been interested in what makes a good place to live since I was old enough to think about anything at all. I grew up on the outskirts of a steel town in western Pennsylvania, and I was always bothered by how hard it was to reconcile the natural beauty of the area with its industrial ugliness. In the years before the Clean Air Act started to show some effect, I can remember having to wash the soot off the outside of our house. I remember piles of slag on the side of the road. I am a coal-miner’s granddaughter, and my grade-school classmates were mostly the children of steelworkers, so I understood that industry, however ugly, was necessary to our well-being. This was especially apparent as the 1970s wore on and the steel industry went deeper into decline.
When I was 13, my family moved to the suburbs of St. Louis. Before the move, I looked forward to going somewhere clean and new. It didn’t take long for me to realize, though, that the very worst of Midwestern sprawl was a worse place to live than a small rust-belt town in decline.
My aversion to both of those types of places eventually led me to New Orleans, where I lived for almost a decade and used to think I would live for the rest of my life. New Orleans was a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand it was vibrant and unique, a place where everyone seemed devoted to living well, a place with its own culture centered on street life, and seemingly invulnerable to American mass consumer culture—where the Rue de la Course coffee house was crowded past midnight every night, and where all three Starbucks struggled for customers. On the other hand, as the world saw in the great post-Katrina airing of the city’s dirty laundry, New Orleans was a hopelessly dysfunctional disaster even before the disaster. It was (and is) crippled by corruption, ineptitude, racial hostility, crime, hopelessly ineffective public education, and a shortage of economic opportunity for everyone from high school dropouts to college-educated would-be young professionals. On top of that, it’s located right in the middle of an ongoing environmental disaster and depends for its existence on a complicated but perhaps not well-thought-out system of environmental engineering.
My friends and I spent a lot of time talking about how one might improve New Orleans and fix its most pressing problems without destroying its essence, and debating whether such a thing was even possible. After Katrina, these questions became more urgent. Since the hurricane, it’s been disheartening to see the city squander its chance at a new start. I hope I am mistaken in my pessimism, but to me it seems the city’s problems are rapidly compounding while its better qualities erode.
I began my first semester at Tulane Law School one week before Katrina. After the storm, I came back to New Orleans and Tulane. During law school, I focused on environmental law. I found that I was particularly interested in land use, where environmental issues intersected community and economic concerns. I became more focused on questions of what makes a city or town a good place to live.
If I were a better person, perhaps I would have stayed in New Orleans to fight to make it a better place. However, I’m sorry to say I have lost faith in New Orleans’ future. Instead, I spent a great deal of time thinking about the kind of city I wanted to live in. I looked around a bit, and last year I was delighted to discover Richmond. I moved here after graduation, took the Virginia bar exam this summer, and have a temporary job at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
I am applying to VCU’s MURP program for two reasons. The first is that the kind of work I want to do requires a strong background in planning, but my planning education has been a bit random and hit-or-miss. I think I would have a better chance of finding the work I want if I had formal education in planning. The second reason is that I recognize that I have no obvious connection or reason to be in Richmond, which in some ways is an insular small southern city, similar to New Orleans. I think some employers might be scratching their heads as they contemplate my application. An education at VCU would provide me with a more tangible connection to this city. I envision myself working in city government, probably as a city attorney, although there are other settings where I could find the kind of work I am interested in—a federal agency such as HUD, in state government, with a nonprofit or in specialized private practice.

The Hot 8 Brass Band

On the street, on a wet, humid night with a tropical storm moving in..... in Richmond, Virginia

Inventory

• Food—I eat too much, especially sugary food. I eat for emotional comfort and for distraction, to kill time, to avoid what I should deal with.
• Money—I don’t pay attention to money and am careless and irresponsible with it. I spend what I don’t have and avoid thinking of the reality of my situation. I don’t want to deal with the fact that I don’t make enough to really take care of myself. I spent all of my little bit of savings in law school. I’m in 6 figures of student loan debt and I owe about eight thousand dollars on my credit card. I’m as broke as I’ve every been. I’m almost 40, and I’ve never owned my home or bought a new car—or even a car that was less than 10 years old. I don’t want to do what I have to do to deal with my situation—find work that pays well and be careful and responsible with what I make. Pay attention to what I’m paying in interest, etc.
• I avoid work and lack focus. I don’t want to do anything hard or challenge my self. I’m physically and intellectually lazy. I don’t want to pay attention or concentrate on anything challenging and distract myself with things like surfing the internet and playing computer solitaire. Because of this I haven’t lived up to my potential, and this is related to my financial problems—which are also about now wanting to pay attention.
• I’m socially isolated. I push people away and then feel unloved and sorry for myself. I want to be loved without being burdened by other people. I’m not highly compassionate. I’m judgmental and self-absorbed
• I have a dishonest streak. I steal little things when I can get away with it. I have sometimes used men to get things. I sleep with married men and don’t feel guilty about it. If I was married, I would probably cheat if I could. I don’t want long term monogamy, which is legitimate, but I still have to behave with integrity

On the plus side
• I know myself pretty well, I’m basically true to myself and comfortable with myself
• I’m willing to take risks
• I’m level-headed and can deal with a crisis
• I admit my shortcomings and even though instinctively want to avoid a challenge, I also deliberately put myself in situations where I will have to face hard things (law school)

This is entrepreneurialism

The storm hasn't even hit yet, but these bumper stickers and t-shirts are available at cafepress

As Gustav approaches

The good news is that the evacuation appears to be proceeding much more efficiently than with Katrina. Its comforting to know that some lessons actually were learned. Everyone I know seems to be out. But that will be of minimal comfort if the city takes another hard hit.

Happy anniversary baby

Today is the third anniversary of Katrina. Tulane is closing at noon, public transportation is shutting down tonight, etc., all in anticipation of a probable mandatory evacuation tomorrow because of Gustav.

And I'm not there.

I feel relieved, of course. I never want to go on another hurricane evacuation, ever. I also fee slightly guilty and slightly left out of the excitement. Worried, but with hints of a kind of schaudenfreude (sp?)--if something really bad happens, it will prove I was right to leave, and I won't have to second guess myself. But that's not what I want of course. I want New Orleans to be there, be healthy, get better, survive and thrive.

It's been a a hell of a three years, and I can't believe I'm still broke and unsettled--wasn't law school supposed to fix all that?

Things that have run out because I‘ve run out of money

• Contact lenses
• Wellbutrin
• Lawcrossing membership
• Weightwatchers membership
• Netflix membership
• Dish detergent
• Eggs, groceries in general
• Health insurance
• Yoga card

The Karen Jones Phenomenon

In grade school and junior high I was friends with a girl named Karen Jones. She lived in my neighborhood and our mothers were friends. Karen was the only child and her mother was overprotective and overinvolved. Karen was kind of a big dork, but so was I. But Karen was also delicate, fragile and always seemed to be sick or injured. Some of her ailments might have been psychosomatic or mother-induced. She had thin blonde hair cut sensibly short and big bug eye glasses. I had the big glasses, too. I’m not sure if we were friends just because our mother were; or because as geeks we were friends by default, or if I liked her and we had fun. I seem to remember roller skating in her garage; and a Shaun Cassidy poster in her bedroom. We must have a good time now and then, at least.

Karen and I were in girl scouts together, but we didn’t go to school together until I transferred from my Catholic grade school to public junior high, just when the cruelty of children reaches its highest heights. The other kids called Karen “hypo” for hypochondriac, because she always seemed to be wearing a neck brace, carrying her arm in a sling, or hobbling around on crutches.

I know I publicly rejected her, although I don’t remember the details very well. It was probably the seventh or eighth grade. She was on crutches, I think we were in the band room at school. It might have been that she asked me to do something and I just said no. I never picked on her or made fun of her. I just refused to be associated with her gimpiness. It was instinctive, unpremeditated action. I surprised myself and her. I wasn’t quite sure at first what my words meant until I saw that I hurt her. Afterward I felt guilty but relieved. I thought I should call and apologize but then I would have to go back to being friends with her and I just couldn’t do it. She and I ignored each other from then on until we moved away not much later.

I know this strained my mother’s friendship with Mrs, Jones. My mother asked me about it, but she didn’t pry too much or give me a hard time about it.

Mrs. Jones is also part of a memory that should embarrass me but somehow doesn’t. I’ve never been the naturally spic and span type and during junior high I went through a spectacularly untidy phase. Also, despite my mother’s great uptightness about sexuality and womanly concerns, she never imprinted this on me. Instead, her shame caused her to pretty much leave me alone about all of it, ironically granting me freedom from shame. When I first started my period I was kind of fascinated by all of it, but the color and smell of my blood and its saturated patterns on the “sanitary napkin.” (It also makes me feel old to remember wearing pads without adhesive on them that needed a “belt” to hold them in place—but this is also instructive about my mother, since it was the early 80s when I hit puberty, and adhesive pads had been on the market for a decade by then.) Anyway, I remember Mrs. Jones coming into my room to talk to me (maybe about my betrayal of her daughter?) and I was embarrassed that my room was a wreck. Karen never would have been allowed to let things descend into such chaos. And, as we talked, I realized to my horror that a used, unwrapped, bloody sanitary napkin was sitting out on my record turntable. I think this cut the conversation short. I was sure my mother was going to have to have a talk with me about that, but either Mrs. Jones was too embarrassed to broach the subject with my mom, or she was too embarrassed to bring it up with me.

With both of these memories, I think maybe I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m not. If I were going to do a 12-steps style inventory and make amends to those I had wronged, would Karen Jones be someone I owed amends? Or was it a necessary act of self-preservation, which is what it felt like? Ditto my rejection of the Spicy Orange Guy, and a few other suitors who I instinctively and abruptly rejected as too needy, too clingy, too pathetic. Certainly, I’ve learned that once I develop that sort of contempt for a guy, there’s no point in trying to work it out and it’s less cruel to make the break quickly and definitely. And there’s no doubt that contempt is what I felt for Karen Jones, and for Spicy Orange Guy, and poor old Micro Dick, and even my attractive but clingy young Honduran suitor with the older woman fetish. They were all too needy, and the need felt too impersonal, as it always is when they’re head over heels right away.

But contempt is a cruel and unenlightened feeling; and the accompanying revulsion I feel makes me wonder just what about them scares me so much—or, actually, there’s nothing to wonder about, I fear being just that pathetic, as I know I have been on occasion.

Spicy Orange Part 1

He said I was a soft shell crab. He had me figured out. Was he talking about my personality, or how I tasted? My personality, he said. My pussy tasted like a spicy orange. My ego got a big kick out of that. After all, I was recovering from J, who had desired me intensely before we slept together and apparently less so afterwards. My ego got a big deflating kick in the balls out of that.

But I already knew that I was going to break up with the Spicy Orange guy, and nothing he did the rest of the night changed my mind. He groped my tits while I was parallel parking the car. Which also reminds me that he can’t parallel park or drive a stick. We went to see a really great young brass band (who knew Richmond had such a thing?) and he hung on me the whole time. He put his hands in my back pockets. He put his nose in my hair. He was even more clingy in public than in private, which made me suspect that this was as much about marking his territory than about affection and desire.

You could accuse me of being the kind of girl who doesn’t want what she says she wants, because here is a guy who clearly wanted me and appreciated my charms. He was smart and had a career and wanted to spend money on me. He wasn’t all that good-looking, but less attractive men have put my heart in a sling. You could accuse me of only wanting what I can’t have, but you could accuse everyone of that and you’d be little bit right. Cue Amy LaVere’s “Take’em or Leave’em.”

But he was just too fucking much. Clingy like saran wrap and needy like a baby kitten. He gave me flowers on our first date, our second date, and the date after he came in my mouth. That was our fifth and last date. I kept telling him to chill out and back off and he thought he was listening to me but I could still feel the walls closing in every time he touched me. He was an awful, slobbery, suffocating kisser. I sent him an explicit email in which I explained that “it’s the clitoris, stupid,” and he got all hot and bothered by it without actually absorbing anything in the message. Later that spicy orange night, after I took a sleeping pill, he informed me that he’d taken a Viagra (!) and in a groggy act of misguided charity I lubed him up and let him climb on top. After complaining (again) about having to wear a rubber, he pumped away for a bit and then asked if I was close! Jesus Tapdancing Christ!!!

Any man with any sense or experience would have sensed a certain chill the next morning at breakfast, but he just blathered on about whether my parents would like him and how he couldn’t be expected to refrain from groping me when my mother was around.

If the above seems cruel and snarky—I sympathize with him but I don’t feel morally obligated to put up with him. He hadn’t gotten laid for eight years, so you can understand why he might overreact to finally getting some. But at the same time, when an intelligent, employed, reasonably attractive man does not get laid for eight consecutive years in his prime, you can’t really write it off as a cruel accident of fate. He is responsible. Six of those years were the last, sexless years of his marriage. And again, who would stay in such a marriage? It wasn’t a long marriage—eight years in total, six sexless. They didn’t have kids; he wasn’t an old man—the sexless years were late thirties into early forties. Neither party was incapacitated; he had the chance to commit adultery but didn’t take it.

He wanted to have fun. He thought I was fun. It had been a decade or more since he’d been with someone fun! But he was the anti-fun. Any glimmering of real fun terrified him. He was anxious and neurotic and so unsure of himself. He had a cute arts and crafts bungalow filled with arts and crafts furnishings but everything was too careful and unimaginatively just-so, like a bad museum setting.

He was a red-headed WASP who liked to imagine he was the lost Kennedy. He was political true believer, naïve in a way that shouldn’t survive one’s mid-twenties. That naivete extended to sexual politics.

Now he send me pathetic emails about how he misses me and how I made him feel alive again, and how if I gave him another chance he wouldn’t blow it, not understanding that he’s blowing it just be sending such an email.

I sympathize. I’ve been there. I sent similar emails to Mr. M at one point; and while the message was different, I engaged in emotionally needy pestering of Adam and of JPJ after we broke up. I understand the pain and loneliness that motivates him. But when I look back at my behavior with Mr. M and Adam and JPJ, I am only ashamed of myself, not resentful of them for not giving into my emotional blackmail. I’m grateful and amazed that I still have a friendly relationship with Adam; and that Mr. M came back around. I am embarrassed that I was behaving like that in my early thirties, when I should have learned the relevant lessons much earlier. The Spicy Orange guy is now halfway through his forties. I will not feel guilty about telling him to get a grip and back the hell off.

Wellbutrin

I'm out of money, out of health in insurance and still don't have a job. Which means I'm going off Wellbutrin at the worst possible time. I've been off for two days and so far I feel tired, sluggish and hungry. I don't want to be on this medication forever, so I hope I'll do okay without it. But I can slip into depression in slow and subtle stages. It's important to pay attention to my state of mind and hopefully catch myself before I fall.

Richmond has a brass band...

and they're damn good. Who'da thunk? Check out the NOBS Brass Band link below. I've been in Richmond a month. The pangs of homesickness have subsided and I'm happy to be here. I took the bar exam, but I won't venture to guess what the results will be. The test was in Roanoke, and driving through the mountains made me happy, despite the circumstances.

Like I've been kicked out of the playground...

I need to stop looking at New Orleans listings online. Today's Lagniappe has both an interview the J (see previous post) and a review of the French 75 Bar with mention of Chris Hannah. I wish I could be in New Orleans tonight.

Johnny J's 60 Second Interview with Chris Rose

The 60-Second Interview: Johnny J
Posted by Chris Rose, Columnist, The Times-Picayune July 18, 2008 5:00AM
Categories: 60-Second Interview


Johnny J and the Hitmen

Johnny J's MySpace page says his music sounds like: "Flame shootin' maniacs lit up on twice-boiled barley soda, with a shot of Brylcreem on the side." Most folks would recognize it as rockabilly.

Johnny J. has been grinding out American music for several decades now, a stalwart on the local club scene and, in fact, very big in Europe.

He and his longtime sidekicks, the Hitmen, are having a CD release party tonight at Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n 'Bowl, to celebrate the debut of "Louisiana Rockabilly, " a collection of cover songs written by rockers from around the state. (Catch them July 26 at 2 p.m. at Borders bookstore in Metairie and 10 p.m. at Parlay's Dream Lounge, and on Aug. 1 at 10 p.m. at the Banks Street Bar.)

I talked with Johnny this week about the thrill of it all.

Rockabilly seems to be one of Louisiana's underappreciated musical genres. Do you think?

One of the reasons I made this record was because somebody was recently asking me about rockabilly music and I mentioned Jerry Lee Lewis and he said: Oh, is Jerry Lee from Louisiana? So then and there I decided I had to make a record like this.

I take it then that Jerry Lee is one of the artists you cover on the disc?

Actually, no. These are mostly artists who are lesser known but still made some great records and who a lot of people maybe haven't heard before.

Like who?

Al Ferrier, Joe Clay, Dale Hawkins -- and then some folks who weren't rockabilly at all -- Faron Young, Roy Brown, Sugarboy Crawford. The whole idea of rockabilly music is a realignment of another song. You take a bluesy kind of tune and you swing it a little more or you take a country song and you breeze it up. It's a treatment, you know what I mean?

Maybe. Then tell me, what is rockabilly?

Rockabilly is the font from which all great American rhythm music came from. It was the point where everything reached critical mass. You had all this stuff -- country music, rhythm and blues -- crash into each other and create a supernova and out of it came Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins and Elvis and all these other people. And it later became rock 'n' roll.


To what do you attribute the longevity of the genre?

It's just like country music and the blues; it's a pure form of American music. Even though people act like it comes in and out like a trend, it will always be there.

You didn't write any of the songs on your new record, but you have in the past. There was one I always liked called "Elevator Love, " about your fear of heights and only dating women who live on the first floor. How's that working out for you?


I've made it up to the second story.


Is that some kind of sexual innuendo?

No. Let's face it: Almost everybody around here is on the second story now.


Your MySpace biography lists your primary influences as Sinatra, Little Walter and Davy Crockett. The first two I get; explain the third.

That was the first record I ever owned -- Davy Crockett and the Wild Frontier. The other two guys are my favorite singers.


Let's talk about tonight: Describe the thrill of a CD release party.

Well, there is none, actually. It's not one of my favorite things to do, but it's necessary. You can have a good time if you put your mind to it.


You make it sound like a grind rather than a pivotal moment in your career.

To me, it seems like a motion that everybody goes through. It's the same motion every time and there's no E-motion involved sometimes. In fact, I was thinking about having a CD "relief" party instead and promising never to release any more CDs.


You're not making a real good case for people to come out and see the show.

Yeah, I know. I gotta fix that. But it's like this: I play music because I have to. It's just something I have to do. If I go over to someone's house and there's not a guitar around, I get nervous. It's something I must do and then I can only hope that people like it. And so far, they haven't run me out of town.


No, not yet. The party's at Rock 'n 'Bowl. That seems like the perfect place for your craft. Tell me about the allure of that venue.

I call it Johnny Blancher's Big Fat Po-Boy Lounge. We were the first band ever to play there, actually. And it has a certain familiarity to me. Which means, I guess: I feel real familiar in there.

Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at 504.352.2535 or 504.826.3309.
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Posted by RivrRoad on 07/18/08 at 7:17AM

I'll be at Johnny Blancher's Big Fat Po-Boy Lounge tonight listening to Johnny J and the Hitmen sing Red Car!

In New Orleans we tend to take our local music talent for granted. Johnny J, to me, is another one of our under-appreciated artists. His wit and sarcasm give you a glimpse of his intelligence. He is such a bright man with deep soul and so much talent.

If you've never heard Johnny J before then I hope you'll pop in to the rock n bowl tonight. His music is for all generations to enjoy.

Why is this still a surprise?

Wake up in the morning and find Aunt Flo has come to town, and smack your head---oh, that's why I've been feeling down the last few days.

I hate when men blame things on women being on the rag, and I hate when women use it as an excuse, but there's a glimmer of truth in the stereotype.

For me, the difference is subtle. Whatever is bothering me to begin with starts to seem overwhelming and perhaps just slightly tragic. I'm still capable of being happy or having a good time or noticing things that please me. It's just that the balance shifts a bit toward the negative. Also, I a hard time resisting the urge to eat ice cream.

It's not like I didn't know...

that there would be days like this. New Orleans on the news, a New Orleans themed MBE practice question. I would be totally fine with moving away if I knew for sure I would always be able to go back one or twice a year, if I wanted. But I'm still unemployed and broke. And if I don't pass the bar or make things work here, it's not like I will be able to run back to NOLA. Instead I will be living in my parent's guest room.

Well, that should be plenty of incentive to study like a fiend the next two weeks.

I'm sad that I had so few people to say goodbye to after all my years in NOLA. The post-storm diaspora didn't help, but let's look this in the face: I am bad at forging bonds with people. I need bonds with people. Richmond is an opportunity for me to start over and do better.

As for J, I don't care if I ever see him naked again as long as I get to see him play. I would feel better if he would send me the promised package. I would feel better if he was still uber hot for me. He made me feel like I'm bad in bed--although, actually, he wasn't the most, um, skilled and attentive lover. He was sort of bossy and selfish--but, perversely, that turns me on and brings out some need to please. Which then makes me feel inadequate and puts me in the head space I'm in now. I so much want to be a devastating femme fatale with a pack of devoted lovers. That's probably not going to happen in reality world, and it's definitely not going to ever come close to happening as long as I am so.. susceptible, vulnerable, easily knocked off center.

I miss

Chris Hannah, celebrity bartender, and his wonderful concoctions.

More romantic stupidity

This move has been much easier and less traumatic than I expected. I have a good feeling about my life in Richmond. Still, the last few days I've had a few episodes of gut-twisting sadness about New Orleans. There are certain sounds and experiences that can only be had in New Orleans, and I'm a long way away.

Plus I've been feeling a twinge of sadness and regret about J, which only highlights what a wreck I am about men and relationships. Because what I regret is not the experience itself, but that I am no longer the unattainable goddess of desire to him. It's sort of ice-princessy to prefer staying on a pedestal to coming down and having a tumble with a man and sustaining a few minor bruises in the process. Now my ego seems to need some kind of reassurance that he's still thinking about me. I was feeling this way right after the last time I saw him. Then he called me to check up while I was driving up here, and it made me feel better. But now I feel rejected again because he hasn't mailed me a particular item he promised. It's retarded and makes me seem way too delicate to have any dealings with actual male human beings.

I have a date this Saturday, with a guy who is at least fun to talk to. It shows that my transition is going well, that I already have a date. But even the most minor romantic interaction seems to make me miserable one way or another.

The bar exam is only a week and a half away. I need to stay focused on that and not be distracted by romance and its inevitably accompanying trauma.

It turns out Richmond has rock 'n' roll after all

Tonight, a WEDNESDAY NIGHT, I WALKED to a CORNER BAR in a RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD, where for NO COVER CHARGE I heard a pretty darn good band from Australia called the Red Hot Poker Dots. I'm not saying they were the best band ever, but the experience laid to rest my fear that I had left the rock n roll lifestyle behind me forever in New Orleans. Also, at no point in my 8-block walk home did I feel any apprehension about getting shot, nor did I become soaked with sweat.

Richmond is swell

Okay, after all the protracted drama and trauma of leaving New Orleans, I have to say---

Richmond is great. I don't know why people don't know what a great town it is. It's beautiful, lively, and just gritty enough to be interesting. Plus--even though it's hotter than NOLA right now, it's not humid at all. I just spent an hour walking around my new neighborhood and I'm not soaked in sweat. If it only had a real music scene, Richmond would be just about perfect by my standards.

Of course, there are trade-offs--the grocery stores don't have the cold-brew coffee concentrate to which I am addicted, but they do have the fabulous Pennsyltucky favorite, Martin's Potato Rolls, and lebanon bologna.

Some personally significant real estate of New Orleans

Goodbye

I am leaving New Orleans tomorrow morning. I want to say something about this, but I don't know what. I want to cry but I can't.

I finally did get it on with J a few times. It was a good experience, and he was very sweet to me. God knows I never had any illusions about him as relationship material. I made a very calculated decision to do it, and in a way I almost had to talk myself into it. We had a very warm goodbye. Really, this should have been the most enjoyable, pain-free affair anyone could have, and I still feel empty and alone after watching him walk away. Clearly I am not fit to ever be close to other people, because it takes so little to hurt me.

Anyway, it's not just J, of course. He's kind of a talisman for all my sadness about New Orleans. The rest is copied from an email I sent last night. I don't have the stomach to try to re-explain:

You know, it's my second-to-last night in New Orleans. I've lived here for eight and a half years, and I have only two people to say goodbye to, not counting a couple of friendly ex-coworkers. My friend D is close to me, but she's the kind of person who instinctively creates a lot of unnecessary drama. She's devastated that I'm leaving; I'm sad to say goodbye but I'm also a bit relieved because she's just too much for me right now. My other friend is a guy who I've know for almost as long as I've lived here. He always let it be known that he had a thing for me, and there was at least a spark of attraction on my part, but there were lots of good reasons not to act on it. However, I decided to have a little fling with him before I left, and so I did. It hurts my womanly ego a little bit that I am no longer the unattainable object of desire now that I have been obtained. But still, he was very sweet and kind to me and we were close for a moment and I'm glad I let myself be obtained. I just said goodbye to him. And now I am about to move myself to a new city where I know no one at all...

And the point is? I don't know. I'm not good at making friends or having relationships. I can't seem to sustain the kind of suffocating closeness that many people seem to need. D kind of wears me out. But I appreciate a kind of less clingy intimacy, with a lighter touch. However, by definition you can't cling to it, just let it go. I'm having a hard time with that right now. I'm having a hard time saying goodbye to a town I loved that never loved me back. I feel very alone and peripheral to everyone else on the planet, and I'm afraid I'm always going to be this way.

Life is a continual process of letting go, isn't it? I know that there are people who have profound spiritual experiences of oneness with everything, and I take some comfort in thinking that is true, even though I haven't experienced it.

Johnny J

If he was in a slump, it's done with. He just put out this great album, produced by Dale Hawkins. (Get it at CD Baby). He's a great, great guitar player. And there's nothing sexier than skills. I'm definitely going there.

The long goodbye

I have a month left in New Orleans, with nothing particular on the schedule. Everyday I study for the bar and do little tasks preliminary to moving. I go out to see bands. Why didn't I ever see Rotary Downs before? I carry around a camera so that I can take memento photographs, but so far I haven't snapped any.

In the last few months, my nightlife has gotten good again. I know I will not have such a nightlife in Richmond. The idea, though, is that the rest of my life will be better, and that the rest of my life is more important than my nightlife. It helps to think that I'm just trying out Richmond. I can come back if I want to. In the meantime at least I'll miss a hurricane season. It also helps to consider that I put my hat in the ring for the few appealing jobs in New Orleans that came available, and was completely ignored by those employers.

It's unsettling, though, that I have chosen this new place based on a good first impression and a judgment that it has many of the qualities I'm looking for. I know no one there. And yet it will be the stage for the next chapter of my life. I wonder if this will be a bad idea, yet I don't think it will.

I haven't (yet) been the weeping wreck that I thought I would be, but I am melancholy about the end of the New Orleans era of my life.

Today at the Rue I saw the underaged deejay who fled from my romantic advances a few years ago. Add that to the brief encounter with Torres the day before my graduation and my most recent romantic humiliation. My love/sex/romantic life in New Orleans has pretty much sucked from beginning to end, starting when David dumped me and took up with my nutty co-worker. Followed by painful and/or humiliating episodes with JT, Adam, Brent (tho in that case I inflicted the pain), James, Mr. M, Torres, The Psychopath, the Brit, the deejay, the bartender, and several other minor players. I'm thinking of breaking off a piece for J before I go, because I might as well give it to someone who really wants it for a change. And perhaps I strung him along in an unkind way.

Unkind. I wonder if my real or perceived unkindness is part of my problem. Darcy insists that guys are afraid of me. It would be one thing if they were afraid of me because I was so smart and lovely that I seemed unattainable; but I'm afraid their intimidation has at least as much to do with me seeming snarky, judgmental and mean. Darcy has made me aware of how often I sound sarcastic, even when I don't mean to be.

I've mentioned before how much I identify with Enid in Ghost World. To me she is hearbreaking and sympathetic, but I don't want to be a 40 year old Enid. But the snark has become automatic; I don't even notice I'm doing it, really.

I hope that I can get over that; and I hope that, even with my fears and misgivings about intimacy, monogamy, and the like, I can find a way to have better experience with sex and love and relationships in my next chapter.

RIP Bo Diddley

Not this shit again

I'm on the verge of depression. Actually, I'm up to maybe past my knees in depression. There are good reasons for me to be troubled and blue. Leaving New Orleans, unemployed, not doing so well studying for the bar.

Yet the thing that's dragging me down, even though I know how damn stupid it is, is a failed flirtation.

Because this scenario seems to play out endlessly--someone comes on to me enough to get my attention, I'm uncertain at first but warm up to the guy, my libido and skin-hunger emerges from hibernation. I flirt back and, as best I can, I try to respond in an appropriate way--issuing a clear invitation without chasing or coming on too strong. And then......

(the sounds of silence)

And then I'm pulled into despair to a degree that's completely unjustified by the (in)significance of the aborted affair. I can never tell whether I've been too subtle, too blatant, or if I misread the whole situation from the beginning. I could write it off as the guy's flakiness, but this scenario has repeated itself four or five times in the past few years.

In the meantime, the only sex I've had has been uninteresting, with someone I had no chemistry with, and which I ended without any personal trauma. Of course, there was the whole Mr. M affair, which kept me emotionally occupied, or at least half-occupied, during much of that time. Mr. M's presence in my life helps explain the paucity of sex and romance in my life, but it is equally true that I used him as a hiding place from the difficulties of actually dating or having a real sex life.

My friends say I'm "too much woman" for these guys. It's true that they were all younger and/or shy. But even if the "too much woman" explanation is true, it's only cold comfort. It allows me to hold on to some dignity and self-esteem, but it still rests on the proposition that there's something fundamental about me that prevents me from finding love or at least sex worth the bother.

I'm so abominably bad at relationships that I tend to think I should leave the whole business alone. Certainly I can be happy alone, and I'm much more stable and sane without it. But this is not a perfect solution because -- I have the same inborn desires as everyone else -- I want to get laid, but sex is only ever worth it in the context of a relationship with some chemistry -- I want to be seen and loved and to be close to another person in that way, even if it's not forever or in the context of a domestic relationship.

If I could turn off the brain chemistry that causes me to desire these things, would I do it? Maybe.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am now a Doctor of the Law

I am studying for the bar and getting ready to move out of New Orleans in five weeks. After all the tortured indecision, the emotions have died down and I’m ready to get on with it. I’m really sick of almost everything about New Orleans, I’m tired of the hassle and ineptitude, the filth and the crime and the weather, I’m grateful I’ll never have to go on another hurricane evacuation.

Graduation weekend I was in the French Quarter with my parents and Aunt Susie. We were gawking at St. Louis Cathedral when I heard someone call “Hey Heather!” It was Torres in a seersucker suit, smiling at me. He represents what was probably my quintessential New Orleans romantic experience: weeks of flirting; one insanely fun alcohol-fueled date on which an elderly retired gynecologist bought us drinks and asked us if we were going to get married because we made a great couple; underwhelming alcohol-impaired sex; an ambiguous goodbye with perhaps misread signals; nothing nothing nothing; a year and an hurricane goes by and I see him again and he’s all flirty but nothing comes of it; I send him an email that he doesn’t answer and I don’t know if he received; I see him again and he’s all flirty but even thinking about him seems a pointless exercise in frustration.

In the end, there’s only one thing I’m really, really going to miss about New Orleans, and I’ll miss it a lot: the music and the nightlife that goes with it. In the last month I’ve seen:

Pine Leaf Boys
New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
Happy Talk
Morning 40
Savoy Family Band
Valpairaso Men’s Chorus
Amy LaVere
The Bad Off
The Roots
CC Adcock
Tin Men
The Plowboys
Michael Hurtt and the Haunted Hearts
Johnny J

And that’s just an average month. Memphis was an above-par music town, but I never had a month like that when I lived there. And I don’t think Richmond is going to come close to even Memphis’ music scene. I kind of wish I could conduct my night life in New Orleans while I live the rest of it elsewhere. But as much as I love the music scene, for me it doesn’t quite make up for all the rest

Anyway, I know that Richmond has a weekly swing-dancing party and a couple of clubs that bring it good touring bands. I think that will be enough, and I expect the rest of my life will be much better there.

Almost nine years here and I have no one to go on a send-off spree with except Darcy, who is a newcomer to my life. I might have lunch with my old co-workers. Otherwise, the people I used to know are gone or estranged.

Memphis

I am a not-usually-very-proud graduate of the University of Memphis. With all the usual disclaimers about the futility of sports fandom, I would like to say "GO TIGERS!!!! WOOOOO!!!!!"

Southern gothic

A few days ago I wrote that I wished I could cry. Today I was a weepy wreck. It is a difficult, emotional time.

On the front page of the Times Picayune today was a picture of a crazy old woman who I used to see at the grouchy Norwegian guy’s laundromat. She would bring her clothes in a buggy she would push down the street, and even though she was washing her clothes she smelled like she hadn’t bathed in a month. She always seemed terribly sad. She was obviously not right in the head, but it was also obvious that she had once been beautiful. She scared me a bit, because she presented the scary specter of being old and not in your right mind and not being able to take care of yourself. But she was a character I wondered about.

She was on the front page of the paper because the city was tearing down the house that she shared with her three equally crazy brothers. The house was truly a hazard, falling down and stuffed with hoarded junk, and unfit for occupation, and it had been condemned for nine years. So the city tried to do the right thing, and you can’t really blame it if it didn’t quite pull it off. The woman was weeping the street and upset because they wouldn’t let her in the house and she couldn’t find her mother’s wedding picture. And again you couldn’t really blame anyone, because how could she possibly find anything in that mess. But still, she was so decimated and broken by this, and so helpless.


this is the house

I didn’t see the demolition, but I was in the neighborhood. Since my car is still in the shop, I rode the streetcar for the first time since the hurricane. The rumble and the woody smell of the cars, the windows that click up and down, the reversible seats, and the way that through the windows you can see New Orleans as it was the first time you saw it, these are the qualities of the streetcar that made me cry.

Also, twice today I saw this guy who I once met at the Rue who flirted with me and invited me to his birthday party. When I was foolish enough to show up, I was introduced to his fiancee. I remember that he was a few years older than me, which means that now he is past 40 and has blue hair and works in the kitchen at Nacho Mama’s. That was the second place I saw him today; the first was at the Rue on Carrollton where I was reading the paper. He did not make me cry, he made me feel like I did well in breaking out the the rut I was in and glad that I am leaving.

Crappy jobs I had in my 20s, part 1

I am still unemployed, stressed and crabby. I need another Swedish massage and a few thousand dollars to pay for my BAR/BRI course.

Sometimes I look at my younger classmates and think about the crappy jobs I was doing at their age. I could write a whole series about crappy jobs I had in my twenties.

For awhile I had a student worker job in the library’s media department. Mostly this job wasn’t so bad. I mostly remember sitting around and talking, and sometimes delivering TVs and VCRs to classrooms. But for some reason the department was also in charge of processing the teacher evaluations that everyone did at the end of the semester. As the forms came in, I would sometimes spend hours alone in the attic sorting through the forms. The up side to this job was reading what students wrote about teachers. It’s interesting that students seem to have a reflex sympathy toward teachers on such evaluations. Hardly anyone ever got a really bad evaluation. But I learned how to spot the signs of a bad teacher in a purportedly good evaluation.

The job was mind-numbingly dull because I was all alone in the stale attic air. It was always too hot or too cold. And there were no distractions other than a radio that only received a.m. stations. So I listened to WDIA--”the nation’s first black radio station.” They played some music, mostly soul oldies like Marvin Gaye, Al Green. Good but overplayed songs. But they also had lots of talk shows. I had already had a job where I spent the day listening to Rush Limbaugh with a ditto-head, so I knew of the the lunacy factor in talk radio. But the high paranoia expressed by so many callers was really striking. I’m not sure how representative the sample group really was, but I got the impression that most black people think that most white people are plotting complicated schemes to keep the black man down from the moment they get up in the morning till they put their scheming white heads on the pillow at night. The usual conspiracy plots got aired, for example that the CIA deliberately unleashed crack and/or AIDS on the black community. Since this was Memphis, there were still some theories were still being discussed about the King assassination. I think the CIA was in on that, too.

Their paranoia made me paranoid, that all the black people I saw thought I was out to get them so they were out to get me back.