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.