The Combobulatrix Explains It All For You

Okay, so it's not that bad anymore...

2009-05-19T16:12:00.001-05:00

and I haven't abandoned this blog. I'm going to revamp this pretty soon, but for the time being I just wanted to put up a new post that is less depressing than the last one...

I'm so sad and scared

2009-01-04T07:36:00.004-06:00

I'm studying to take the Maryland bar but I really want to be back in Virginia. I thought I liked Baltimore but now I think maybe I hate it. I've been looking for a job for more than a year. I'm late on my bills. I'm sleeping in my sister's dining room. Lately she's become such a psycho bitch that I'm afraid staying here is going to compromise my ability to pass the bar, and anyway it isn't helping my state of mind, either. I'm behind on my bills and I'm not confident that my car is going to make it to Baltimore everyday for the next two months. I don't know how my life got this bad so fast.

Benjamin Buttons

2008-12-28T22:07:00.003-06:00

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

2008-12-27T07:24:00.002-06:00

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!

2008-12-16T17:19:00.002-06:00

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.

2008-12-03T06:24:00.004-06:00

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!

2008-11-19T08:11:00.001-06:00

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

2008-11-08T14:29:00.002-06:00

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

2008-11-05T06:42:00.003-06:00

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

2008-11-03T18:43:00.003-06:00

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

2008-11-01T16:41:00.007-05:00

What I need to do to feel satisfied with my life

2008-10-29T18:00:00.000-05:00

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

2008-10-24T17:15:00.006-05:00

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

2008-10-19T15:00:00.003-05:00

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

2008-10-07T19:09:00.002-05:00

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.

2008-09-29T14:14:00.000-05:00

I must stay here. I must.

Paul Newman

2008-09-27T09:46:00.002-05:00

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

2008-09-24T18:07:00.004-05:00

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

2008-09-17T18:20:00.002-05:00

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

Planning school

2008-09-07T08:41:00.003-05:00

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

2008-09-07T08:09:00.003-05:00

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

Inventory

2008-09-01T09:35:00.001-05:00

• 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

2008-08-31T19:59:00.004-05:00

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

As Gustav approaches

2008-08-31T09:41:00.002-05:00

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

2008-08-29T08:09:00.003-05:00

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

2008-08-28T14:12:00.001-05:00

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

The Karen Jones Phenomenon

2008-08-27T21:37:00.004-05:00

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

2008-08-24T19:35:00.002-05:00

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

2008-08-10T07:51:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-08-02T20:17:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-07-18T08:35:00.003-05:00

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

2008-07-18T08:14:00.000-05:00

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?

2008-07-16T08:11:00.002-05:00

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...

2008-07-15T08:57:00.002-05:00

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

2008-07-13T20:57:00.002-05:00

Chris Hannah, celebrity bartender, and his wonderful concoctions.

More romantic stupidity

2008-07-11T08:13:00.003-05:00

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

2008-07-02T23:19:00.003-05:00

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

2008-07-02T20:27:00.003-05:00

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

2008-06-28T16:37:00.012-05:00

DI147r4/s320/100_0206.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217051733916676482" />

Goodbye

2008-06-28T11:50:00.003-05:00

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

2008-06-06T21:00:00.005-05:00

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

2008-06-03T23:02:00.005-05:00

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

2008-06-02T11:56:00.001-05:00

Not this shit again

2008-05-30T15:34:00.004-05:00

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

2008-05-23T22:20:00.002-05:00

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

2008-04-06T09:11:00.002-05:00

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

2008-04-04T23:13:00.002-05:00

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

2008-04-03T21:31:00.003-05:00

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.

Dancing

2008-04-02T22:48:00.002-05:00

I love dancing because it is the singular physical activity that I am naturally good at. I might immodestly say that I am naturally “good” at sex, but I don’t know if that’s a talent so much as a matter of being comfortable with myself and genuinely enjoying the experience (depending on who I'm having it with). Someone once told me I was unusually good at getting a massage because I have a great capacity to relax and let go! But that's the opposite of a physical activity.

I tend to feel physically gawky and awkward. Team sports make me feel clumsy and solitary sports seem tedious. I’ve done light weight training off and on for years, and it makes me feel good and gives me certain benefits, but I neither enjoy nor dislike the actual activity. To me, it's more as a matter of maintaining rather than progressing. I’ve also done Iyengar yoga for years, which is hugely important to my physical and mental health, but I’m not really good at it. Really, yoga is not something you can say you’re good at, because it’s more a matter of being where you are. I might be “better” at yoga than I used to be, because I’m more precisely aware of what I’m doing in some of the poses and the different actions seem more integrated. But I’m not the hyper-flexible yoga diva. I still can't touch my toes without bending my knees, and I don’t have yoga butt.

When I was in my early twenties, I was sort of surprised to go to clubs for the first time and realize that once I was coaxed onto the dance floor I was kind of good at it. It had a lot to do with the way that I feel or respond to music pretty intensely At that time, it seemed that most white kids were pretty stiff on the floor. I think it was because we were still affected by the disco backlash. Recently, though, it seems that white kids can really actually dance. When I went to see the Dap Kings, Sharon Jones pulled a couple of white boys out of the audience to dance with her, and they were good. They could keep up with her.

I always loved to watch more structured couples dancing, but I was intimidated because I didn’t know what I was doing. But I’ve found that if I try, I catch on pretty quickly. I’m still a beginning swing dancer, but I’m a talented beginner and I can do all kinds of cool things. I’m really excited about how much better I’ve gotten in such a short time, and I really want to make this a permanent regular part of my life, because it’s giving me a kind of physical satisfaction I’ve never had before.

Got nothing

2008-04-01T22:30:00.001-05:00

This is the fourth and last week of the writing contract, and tonight is the first time I’ve felt that I had to write something but didn’t know what. The book Writing Alone and With Others has been interesting and helpful but I don’t have the energy to look at it right now. I’m so tired and I have to get up early to take the car to the BMW dealer. I’m annoyed because I still don’t have a check or estimate from the insurance company. Probably I will use the money to fix the mechanical stuff instead of the body work, unless it all adds up to less than I expect. My yoga teacher’s daughter drives an old BMW, and when she took it in for repairs to the dealer, they gave her a new one as a loaner!!! That’s one reason to take it to the dealer, which is not something I would usually do except that I’ve taken it to so many different mechanics and they don’t seem to be consistent in what they tell me. Plus, it turns out the dealer’s labor rate is not that much higher than an independent garage. So we’ll see what they say. If they let me drive a new 1-series I’ll be the happiest girl in the world.

I will graduate in six-and-a-half weeks. Holy crap. I’m not ready, emotionally or practically. Last week I had an interview with a firm in Charleston. I liked the interviewer. I might like Charleston, but it’s kind of expensive and upscale, maybe too upscale to be interesting. On the other hand, it’s damn near as steamy as New Orleans and they get hurricanes, too. I think it might be too late to register for the summer bar exam in South Carolina, which is inconvenient. Anyway, I accepted the temporary job in Richmond so that’s still the default.

A writing exercise and some crying

2008-03-30T22:18:00.006-05:00

In the bathroom of my first New Orleans apartment, I’m sitting on the toilet, doubled over with my head resting on the rim of the claw-foot bathtub. I am crying because D.S. doesn’t love me. The floor is dirty putty-colored tile with a matted navy blue cotton rug.

That was my second claw-foot tub. The first was in the haunted house in Memphis, where I slept in the front room with the door closed and was afraid to get out of bed in the dark. I laid awake and listened to the ghosts dance in the attic.

I resented that the house didn’t belong to me. At night it belonged to the ghosts. By day it belonged to the glamourous wreck of a landlady, who had left all of her furniture and furnishings behind to go live with her boyfriend. Her gutter punk daughters still had keys and would sometimes stay there with their grungy boyfriends, or use the kitchen to cook for Food Not Bombs.

It was the last home of Miss Martha, my smoky moody tortoiseshell cat. She had cancer, and I could only afford so much chemo. But I felt unforgivably guilty when I gave up. At the end she spent most of her time curled up on the dining room chair. One day she wouldn’t come eat and that was the day I knew I had to take her to the vet, to put her “to sleep.” In the car, she livened up enough to cry and fuss, and I felt even more guilty and almost turned around. I held her when she died, and I never was so close to death before, or since. It was ten years ago and I’m still crying as I write this.

My ex-husband came over to help me bury her in the backyard because I couldn’t afford to have her cremated. He had to open the box and look at her stiff, fake-looking corpse.

Within six months, both Hank and Petunia were running around that same house all young and sassy in their puppy- and kittenhood. I don’t know why I did it. I just set myself up for twice the pain.

Accentuate the negative

2008-03-29T16:22:00.001-05:00

Some things I will not miss about New Orleans:

-the constantly recurring sinus infection I have only in New Orleans

-the general level of filth and all the trash in the streets

-the car-destroying potholes

-the endless public works projects that chiefly involve digging a big hole in the street in an inconvenient location, letting it sit open for several weeks, then filling it in only to dig another one the next block down.

-the street flooding that comes with only a medium rainstorm, and all the mud left behind

-the sensation of being chilly and sweaty at the same time on spring and fall nights

-feeling greasy and sweaty most of the time, despite showering two or three times a day

-the people who hang out at major intersections soliciting donations for their church and disrupting traffic

-the third-world postal service

-hurricane evacuations

-the lack of public curbside recycling (we pay a private company to pick up our recycling!)

The daily panic attack

2008-03-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

Since I discovered the wonderfulness of wellbutrin, I don’t get obsessed over men and I rarely cry. However, right now I wish I could cry because after you cry you feel better, at least a little bit, temporarily. I am so stressed out and worried about not having a job, and so dejected about the constant stream of rejection.

Okay, I didn’t get into Stanford and I didn’t get a scholarship from Georgetown, but I’m still at a top-tier law school. I’m not in the top ten percent of my class, but I am in the top third. I’m not on law review, but I’m on the board of a well-respected journal. But I feel like a loser because so many employers have rejected me out of hand based on the not-on-law-review, not-at-the-top-of-the-class thing. I know, rationally, that I will find a job and that I shouldn’t panic and that I should stay focused on what I want. I know that half of my class will still be unemployed at graduation but we all will be employed a year from now. But things are very tense at the moment.

I can’t bear to talk to my parents because they are in such a frenzy of worry about it. It seems they are worried even more than I am, which is unhelpful and insulting. I prefer my friends who seem to take it for granted that I will get a job, so what’s the big deal. That’s probably the right attitude, but no one knows what this is like, to be in a scary amount of debt, all my savings gone, 7 months from my 40th birthday, and no fucking job.

I can’t cry, so I eat or spend money instead. The former is especially unhelpful when I don’t know when my next infusion of cash will arrive.

Miss H, junior pervert

2008-03-27T19:06:00.000-05:00

My kindergarten teacher told us to draw a picture of our family, with crayon on manilla paper. I drew my family naked. My mother with her big boobs. My sister was a short little stick figure. My dad with beard, glasses, and an arc of pee from his penis. One of my classmates was egging me on, a blonde girl from a family that I would later think of as poor, white-trashy and frighteningly subversive. I thought I was daring and hilarious. I wondered if I would get in trouble when the teacher saw my drawing, but I wasn’t really scared.

We giggled maniacally while working on our drawings. I can’t remember whether my classmate’s family wore their clothes. I’m pretty sure that I alone was wearing clothes in my family portrait. It was the mid-seventies and I can remember something like a red turtleneck and stockings under a plaid jumper, mary jane shoes.

We turned the pictures in, and the next day the teacher gave them back with gold stars. Everyone had a gold star. She had written something like “nice job” on mine. She couldn’t tell that my family was naked. She apparently didn’t notice that my dad was peeing. Or maybe she did know and did notice and she laughed to herself or thought that I was a budding little perv. It’s quite possible she couldn’t tell because we were kindergartners drawing stick figures. But my kindergartner’s eye could clearly see the clothes in my classmates’ drawings and the lack of clothing in mine. I was disappointed that the teacher didn’t pick up on that.

When I got older, I was afraid of the blonde girl and didn’t talk to her anymore. When I got to grade school I never would have had the nerve to draw my family naked.

I don’t know what this says about my screwed-up psyche, but it isn’t a bad memory at all.

A letter

2008-03-25T22:17:00.002-05:00

I have a highly recommended book called Writing Alone and With Others, with exercises that I plan to start using to spur my daily writing. Darcy is writing actual stories, while I write lists about what annoyed me today. However, today I wrote a letter in response to Cary Tennis' column on Salon.com. I don't normally post letters on such websites, but this advice seeker reminded me of myself 15 years ago, and I thought Cary and the other commentators were too hard on her:

Dear LW,

I’m sorry Cary and everyone else is being so hard on you. I don’t think you deserve it.

When I was 20, I met a basically good guy. I married him when I was 23 and divorced him when I was 26. I was ambivalent about the whole thing to begin with, but I married him because he loved me and I thought I should love him back. I married him because I was young and inexperienced and the world seemed scary as hell, and he was a good guy who seemed to offer some comfort and security. He was a good guy but he was just not the right person for me. By the end I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I hated the hair on his back, he was too short and he sweated too much.

Several years later, I was hot as hell for a short guy with hair on his back. But with the ex-husband, these were symbols and symptoms for the ways he was not right for me. I came to realize it was cruel of me to marry him in the first place, and even crueler to stay with him when I couldn’t appreciate him in the way he deserved.

So I think you should strongly consider divorce, for the sake of both of you, but I have some caveats. For one thing, there is absolutely no correlation between how good a man looks, or how tall he is, and how good he will be in bed or in a relationship. In general, you have to accept the uncertainty that you will end up in a happy, permanent relationship with someone who suits you better. Maybe you will, and improving your own mental and emotional health will certainly better the odds. Or maybe you will be alone in 10 or 15 years. I’m an introverted loner, so to me being alone is far better than being in a bad relationship or even an okay relationship. If it’s important to you to be in a relationship a man, you will have to adjust your expectations. But I think you got married too soon. Date a variety of men, and make a wiser choice when and if you marry again. And then stick with him.

Why?

2008-03-23T15:42:00.003-05:00

Why do I talk to my parents about my job search when I know I'm only going to feel bad about it? And why should I feel bad about it anyway? I wish I could get a grip on this shit already. I think the problem is that I resent having to reassure them at such a stressful time for me. Shouldn't they be supporting me, not vice versa?

Actually, it's not that hard to understand the problem. My dad made such a huge deal about my interview in New York. He bragged about it to all of my relatives and his friends. I didn't get the job, which was truly for the best. I would be completely at peace about the whole experience, except that my dad has made it an embarrassment for me and himself.

People say, "he's just proud of you." But fuck that. Neither one of them have any clue about what law school is like or what I've gone through. They didn't do it, and they can't take the credit. They have no right to be proud OR disappointed in me. They can be in awe of me, or they can have quiet respect for me--those are the only acceptable options as far as I'm concerned.

And let's not even discuss the ruckus they're raising over graduation.

Once again, I sound like a bitch. Once again, I know I'm going to regret my standoffish ways when they're gone. I know very well that they mean no harm whatsoever. But even the smallest contact with them undermines my sanity.

I am a bad person

2008-03-22T21:02:00.001-05:00

Mr. M sends me one or two-line email messages a couple of times a week. I didn’t intend to blow him off, but I haven’t responded to a single one of them. The latest one just says “How’s tricks?” Now, if it doesn’t seem urgent and I don’t have anything particular to say in answer to the question, I’m probably not going to answer right away. I’m going to file it away in my head to email Mr. M. But before I get around to it, he sends another. And then it starts to get annoying. If we wanted to talk to me, he could call, but he doesn’t. We broke up and didn’t talk for awhile, then he called and we had one unpleasant phone conversation, when I told him exactly why I was mad and why I was through with him as a boyfriend. But, considering all we’ve been through and the unusual nature of our relationship, I said I hoped we could be friends and that I wouldn’t keep harping on my complaints. He called again a few days later and we had a perfectly friendly conversation. We exchanged a few emails. But he never called again, he just keeps bombarding me with these one-line emails that I don’t answer. Which I didn’t intend to not answer, but which have now become so annoying that I don’t want to answer.

My mother does the same thing, only she doesn’t email as much and I somewhat more deliberately avoid responding when she does. But she won’t call. She’ll just get her feelings hurt that I don’t call her or respond to her pointless email.

It’s wrong of me not to call her, I guess. I know I’m going to regret keeping her at arms length. And it makes me feel like I’m a bad person that two people who I know want to talk to me won’t call me. But it also makes them seem like passive annoying weenies that I don’t want to talk to. I’m not sure how I became such a bitch. But I know I get along better with people who are not afraid of me!

My sheddage, let me show you it

2008-03-22T09:37:00.002-05:00

The Secret History

2008-03-21T22:43:00.001-05:00

I’m re-reading the great Bennington novel, “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt.

There is a secret Donna Tartt-Miss H history: She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, where I worked as a newspaper reporter for one year. She went to Bennington for her undergraduate degree. I got an MFA from Bennington’s writing seminars. After “The Secret History” came out, I went to hear her read at the Brentano’s Bookstore in the Oak Court Mall in Memphis.

My friend Jerome swears and remembers to this day that I described her as a “short bitch in a black dress.” This cannot possibly be true, though, because I remember very clearly that she was wearing a soft pink double-breasted pantsuit with black-and-white men’s style spectator shoes. Her hair was black and cut in a short bob; and she was small and pretty. She was something like the characters in her book, with an affected elegant eccentricity. I envied her, so probably the vitriol in Jerome’s memory was accurate.

I’m still sort of envious, because she writes a novel a decade and maybe one magazine article per year, and she still gets to be a natty dresser. “The Secret History” has a cult following and I’ve heard she sold the movie rights, so I’m sure it still brings in income. But she must have a trust fund or a patron of some sort. The second novel “The Little Friend,” was pretty good (as far as I remember) but not as much of a popular success. It was set in a small town in North Mississippi much like Grenada (where she grew up, just down the road from Greenwood but out of the Delta a bit).

And of course, “The Secret History” is set in a small, expensive and exclusive college in Vermont which is called Hampden in the book but which is Bennington in every detail. I’ve stayed in those dorms and eaten in that cafeteria. The book is about a small group of students who accidentally kill a townie, purposefully kill their friend, and more or less get away with it. To my knowledge, no one I knew at Bennington killed anyone--except themselves. Liam Rector, a poet and the director of the program, killed himself last year. One of my teachers, Lucy Grealy, died of an overdose that might have been intentional. It’s that kind of place, filled with creative and overly sensitive people with little to distract themselves from their own melodrama.

I’m not really of Bennington, but I’m glad I had the chance to spend some time there. It left some subtle but lasting marks. And a big tuition bill. I’m not as brilliant or as elegant as Donna Tartt. Or as mysterious. But the truly brilliant are always unstable wrecks, in my experience. I envy what they can do. But I am stable and well adjusted, relatively speaking, and there’s something to be said for that.

I know you want to read about the constitution and environmental law

2008-03-20T21:43:00.002-05:00

I’m in the middle of writing a paper, and it’s been frustratingly slow going. At the moment it’s an even bigger source of stress than the job search or the car dilemma. I even had a sexual dream about the very sweet but fairly schlumpy professor who assigned it. In the dream we discussed the paper, among other things.

The paper is about the constitutional foundation of environmental law, or lack thereof. As you may remember from your junior high school civics class, the federal government is one of limited powers. The federal government is meant to regulate just a few things--including interstate commerce--and the rest is left to the states. From the New Deal until the mid-90s, all three branches of the federal government took an expansive view of interstate commerce. Federal statutes regulating such things as labor, guns, and the environment were enacted under the commerce clause. But in 1995, the Supreme Court started to put new limits on how far congress could go under the commerce clause. Under the now more limited interpretation of the commerce clause, it seems that many federal environmental laws could be vulnerable to constitutional challenge. The big pollution control laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are probably safe for the most part, if only because these statutes have caused pollutants to become items of interstate commerce. For example, cap and trade programs under the Clean Air Act allow industries to trade the right to emit a certain amount of pollutants.

On the other hand, the Endangered Species Act seems quite endangered itself, especially considering our even more conservative and less environmentally sympathetic new Supreme Court. Endangered species just don’t have the direct relationship to commerce that the court is now looking for. The Endangered Species Act is hugely important, not just for the sake of threatened creatures, but because it can be used as a tool to halt development that may be harmful in many other ways. The very first significant case involving the ESA was the famous or infamous snail darter affair, when a huge dam that was already close to completion was stopped because it threatened a homely and insignificant little fish (and other probably more important but less protected things).

The most simple and elegant solution to this problem would be a constitutional amendment saying that congress has the power to preserve and protect the environment. Unfortunately in this case, passing a constitutional amendment is a long and difficult process. Remember the ERA? But if someone asks you if you would support an environmental amendment to the constitution, you should say yes.

Vanity, they name is Miss H

2008-03-19T20:55:00.000-05:00

Someone make me stop spending money. I’ve got some cash on hand, but it has to last indefinitely. I’ve got a internship-ish thing lined up for after the bar exam and before the results come in, which will pay a little bit. I am confident that I will get a real job, but I don’t yet have one. It’s obvious that I will have to replace my car. This calls for conserving cash.

But I’ve been on a spree. No individual expenditure looks that bad, but they add up. The trip to Colorado was a good deal, because the journal will reimburse me for about 75 percent of the plane ticket, and the condo was free. And hell, I didn’t ski, which saved me lots of cash. But I paid too much for the rental car. I got a massage. I bought a purse at the Coach outlet--a great buy, and I love the purse, but it wasn’t exactly necessary. I wanted to take pictures and didn’t have a camera so I bought a digital on sale at Target for $140. I spent $70 dollars on jeans because I was hating all my old ones. I bought a garment bag because I didn’t have one and I needed to bring suits to the conference. I bought an emergency pair of dress boots because my pumps weren’t going to work in the ice and snow. I bought new sandals. I bought a few books at the Tattered Cover in Denver. I bought new bras (very necessary). I bought a new bottle of the very expensive skin treatment I’m addicted to. I bought expensive conditioner and hair pomade (my hair is looking much better). And I’m having laser hair removal. Vanity seems to be a theme here.

A few weeks ago, the author of sanquinaryblue posted about our collective growing obsession with looking young and flawless and most of all NOT OLD. I want to write about this at greater length, but for now I am going to admit that it seems important to me to look good and NOT OLD. This is about vanity, but it is also about being a beginner in a whole new career when I’m about to turn 40. Because I have to get a job so I can pay for all the clothes and beauty products, and a new car.

Maybe my love for BMW doesn't make me a bad person after all

2008-03-19T09:54:00.003-05:00

Toyota Prius proves a gas guzzler in a race with the BMW 520d

Moral rectitude

2008-03-19T00:15:00.001-05:00

I hate instant messaging because I like to think carefully about what I write. Unlike when I’m talking and any old thing comes out of my mouth.

Someone told me via instant message that she was talking to a potential sugar daddy. Little did she know the typing paralysis she was inducing by telling me this.

My mother is living in my head, and she is shocked and offended by the very idea a sugar daddy. She does not approve. My mother is very judgmental, disapproving and frightened by so many things. She is a woman of moral rectitude. She is good, honest, innocent, and easily shocked. Her best and worst qualities are intertwined. I hate her knee-jerk judgments and the way she disapproves of everything that is outside her limited sphere of experience. But there she is, living inside my head.

If we can muzzle my mother for a second, what do I really think, and what do I want to say to my friend? It seems like a questionable idea to make a deal with a sugar daddy. I wouldn’t feel right about it, personally. But I really don’t know anything about what’s going on. If maybe she likes him. If this might be a way for each to get what they need. People are complicated, they have all kinds of mysterious and deeply rooted needs and desires. Most importantly, other people are not all like me. A good friend would be concerned but not judgmental. She would say, so tell me about this. What’s this about? And she would listen.

The mother-in-my-head thing is related to the perpetual-older-sister thing. On Mardi Gras, drunk and high with my sister, I’m still the responsible one keeping her out of trouble. That’s not a bad thing. My sister considers me a good influence. My mother-in-my-head has kept me from bad situations and experiences. But she keeps me from experiences. If the path of excess is the only road to the tower of wisdom, I’m not going to get there.

Also somewhat related, after the first week of the writing contract, it is obvious that Darcy is truly a creative writer. She is an artist, but I am just thinking thinking thinking, always in paragraphs. I’m not saying that in the way of judging myself harshly. It is what it is.

Girls who wear glasses

2008-03-16T09:27:00.000-05:00

I’ve never skied. I was going to give it a try on this trip. However, I’ve had a contact lens emergency. My lenses were dried out after my very long trip in, and I tore off a piece of the left lens when I was taking them out. The next day I was determined to where them anyway, but the torn one was very irritating and ended up migrating behind my eyeball. Then I tore it even more while extricating it. So I am wearing my glasses, which are not quite the right prescription and offer no clear peripheral vision. I think this impaired vision makes skiing seem a bit too risky. Plus, it’s flipping expensive to get a lift ticket and rent all the equipment and get a beginner lesson. Instead, I spent my money on a massage, but more on that later.

Despite the limited vision, I’m kind of liking my glasses. I guess I’m less inclined to hide my wonky intellectual librarian side these days. Tina Fey is an inspiration--she’s smart, funny, fortyish, glasses-wearing and hot. And, even though I still prefer Obama, I appreciated her pro-bitch, pro-Hillary rant.

So I didn’t ski, I just rode the gondola to the top of the mountain. It was perfect--natural beauty without pain or injury. And today I got a Swedish massage from a young, adorable, strong-handed young man with a Northern European accent (perhaps actually Swedish?) I didn’t want him to ever stop. My favorite thing is when he pulled on my arms and fingers. I can’t explain why that feels so good. When it was over I could barely stand up. In short, it was better than 95 percent of the sex I’ve had. A regular good massage from a strong-handed man, coupled with weekly swing-dancing, could fulfill my need for physical contact and attention from men. I’m still hoping for good sex, but massage and dancing make it easy to resist unsatisfying, uninteresting regrettable sex.

Brrr

2008-03-14T23:23:00.004-05:00

Colorado

2008-03-14T15:31:00.004-05:00

I love arriving in Denver, especially coming from New Orleans. I love the way Colorado is flat, flat, flat and then Boom! MOUNTAINS. Everything looks clearer and you can see forever. I realize that in New Orleans I am living in a haze of pollen and mold spores. In Colorado, my sinuses clear up immediately. But then all the moisture is sucked out of my skin. Colorado is magnificent, but the cheap and ugly development looks even worse in such a setting.

I asked for a full-size rental car, and I got a Hyundai Sonata. It’s relatively big but the engine isn’t very powerful. Plus, at first I thought it only had one forward gear (drive) and thus I couldn’t downshift. So driving over the mountains was scary. And then it started to snow! I missed the BMW.

I’m staying in a condo with five other law students. It’s nice and big, though. More importantly, it’s free--one of my classmates is an ABA rep, and they’re picking up the tab. I think my journal is going to reimburse me for part of my plane ticket. And I get to attend the conference for free in exchange for a little bit of volunteer work. So it should have been a cheap trip, but it’s turning out more expensive than I thought. For one thing, I was groggy when I got in and somehow allowed the rental car rep to sign me up for insurance on the car, thereby doubling the price. (forehead slap). We won’t have the condo on Monday night, so I’ll have to get a hotel room or maybe stay with my cousin for the night. I’m not sure what I’m going to do on my free day. Attempt to ski for the first time ever? Go explore the Rocky Mountain National Park? Or go poke around Denver? (311)

Oh lord, stuck in O'Hare again

2008-03-13T09:55:00.000-05:00

Holy Christ, every time I fly I’m shocked all over again at what an ever-loving pain the the ass it has become. I’m waiting for a plane in Chicago. I’m going to Colorado, and I’m looking forward to it even though the main event is an environmental law conference. I was supposed to be on a 5;40 a.m. non-stop, but I missed the flight even though I was at the airport an hour early, at 4 fucking 40 a.m. So I got a seat on a flight to Chicago that left at 6:35, and I still almost didn’t make it because the security line was so long. I ran to the gate in my socks because I didn’t have time to put my shoes back on after TSA got done with me. I was the last to get on the plane and I barely made it.

I went to bed after midnight, got up at 4 a.m., and lightly dozed on the plane. I’m exhausted, but I am writing my words before I try to nap in the airport. Or go get a 10,000 calorie Cinnabon, one or the other.

Yesterday I skipped my constitutional theory seminar, but I went to my swing dance class even though I hadn’t yet packed for my trip. Af ew years ago I took a swing dance class with Al & Cathy at the Rock n Bowl. They were cute. Al was a slight man with a black pencil moustache, dyed black. Cathy was a chipper blonde have been on the Lawrence Welk show. They taught enough to allow you to function on a dance floor, and they also taught old-school gender relations etiquette, like how men should ask women to dance but not monopolize her dance card, and then offer to walk her to her car when she was leaving. It’s kind of ironic that I met the psychopathic misogynistic med student at the class.

Anyway, now I am taking a better, real-deal swing dance class. We have made it beyond triple-step, triple-step, rock-step and are learning to jitterbug. It is the greatest thing ever and a spectacular antidote to law school, which I will write more about later. But for now I am past 300 words and the Cinnabon is calling.

Crazy nutty freaky nature

2008-03-10T22:51:00.000-05:00

People are sometimes surprised that I’m trying to make a career in environmental law because I don’t seem like a tree-hugger. Because I’m not really a tree-hugger.

However, I’ve been watching and re-watching the BBC’s Planet Earth series, which has been a profound and even spiritual experience. But it’s more complicated than a wonder-of-nature feeling. The wonder-of-nature thing is the starting point. The series brings out like nothing before the jaw-dropping amazingness of our planet and its crazy assortment of life. Holy crap, nature is beautiful and cruel. So many kinds of creatures, such an infinite variety of expressions of the life force. And yet all this beauty and variety is all in service of two things: eating and procreating. Penguins standing around at the South Pole all winter freezing their asses off to protect their eggs and give the hatchlings a head start on whatever great resources there are to exploit at the South Pole. Snow leopardesses, pure gorgeousness in motion, in motion for the sake of killing something to feed their overgrown helpless cubs. Those poor, poor seals just trying to get some dinner for themselves, instead become dinner for an enormous and completely terrifying shark corkscrewing its whole huge body out of the water. All life wants is to keep itself going. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a point.

And yet probably the most touching thing is to see those animals who can easily get enough food and raise their young, who have time to play. Animals goofing off and enjoying themselves are so wonderful. When you get the eating and fucking out of the way, all this energy is freed up for new and better things

That raises the issue of humans, we with far too much left over after eating and fucking This series seems so profound because it represents humans exhaustively documenting and celebrating the planet we are simultaneously destroying. I can see why people get cynical and misanthropic and start thinking that things would be better if humans weren’t around.

But if we weren’t around, would nature know it was beautiful and amazing? Do you think the hippopotamuses would film the giant crocodile snatching the baby gazelle? Do you think dolphins wonder about what’s outside where the water ends, and contemplate the beauty and cruelty of nature? Do polar bears look at the stars and think, what the hell are those things? We are the only ones who do those things. If we disappeared maybe some other species of ape would eventually get to the point of looking around and trying to figure things out. If they evolve to that point, is it also inevitable that they will fuck things up like we have?

Beneath those questions are another level of freaky existential questions. Like: why does anything at all exist? Where did it come from? What is life and where did it come from and what’s the fucking point? But I can’t do anything with those questions other than ask them. And to posit that maybe the point of human life is to look around and try to figure it out. (530)

The contract

2008-03-10T00:23:00.004-05:00

Darcy left New Orleans before The Thing but has recently moved back. She is a friend and ex-roommate of my ex- underage quasi-paramour. Since she returned, we have hung out a few times and a friendship seems to be developing. She is a writer who is trying to figure out how to balance the writing with making a living. This is a dilemma I am familiar with. We have made a contract that we each will write at least 300 words a day for at least five days a week for a month. If either of us breaks the contract, we will have to apply for a job at Hooters. This is a particularly harrowing possibility for me, because I have no doubt that the Hooters recruiter would laugh my middle-aged ass out of the room.

Lucky for me, I am a writer of creative non-fiction. By definition, that makes me at least a little bit of a narcissist, and for a narcissist it is easy to write 300 words a day about yourself and your ever-so-interesting thoughts. By the end of this sentence I will be almost to 200 words.

Darcy and I made this contract at the Saturn Bar. I like Darcy an awful lot, and I like the Saturn Bar an awful lot, too. Lately I have been having more positive New Orleans experiences and have found myself second-guessing my decision to leave.

But every day I also find a reason to get the hell out of here. Today I was tired of my mopey-ass roommate and my too-familiar neighborhood, so I went to work on my paper at a coffee shop across town on Frenchman Street. It so happens that the ex-underaged-paramour used to work at this coffee shop. When I got hungry, I walked down to Decatur Street in the Quarter to have lunch at Coop’s Place, a bar that also serves very good food. I had red beans with fried chicken and a cup of gumbo, and it was scrumptious. Sitting next to me were two drunk middle aged construction workers who glommed on to me. They were both the type who used to be be good looking before they became middle-aged drunks. They were having an endlessly repetitive conversation that they’d obviously had on many previous drunken afternoons:

Drunk 1 (the smarter, more talkative drunk): I’m just saying, I love my daughters, man. Fuck everyone else. I got two daughters in Chicago, they’re both in the National Honor Society. They’re smart, you know? I guess I did something right.

Drunk 2 (the more belligerent, coon-ass drunk): Man, shut up. I’m tired of listening to you.

Drunk 1: Fuck you, man. I love my daughters.

Drunk 2: Shut up or I’m gonna hit you.

Drunk 1: Yeah, go head and hit me. Yeah right. See what I got to put up with. I gotta live with this motherfucker and work with him. He can’t do shit without me, I gotta watch him all the time. You’re laughing, yeah, fuck you. I’m sick of this town, man. People down here are stupid. I miss my daughters in Chicago. I’m gonna call my daughters. (He then gets out his cell phone but can’t seem to figure out how to dial it, leaving us all to wonder how his daughters would feel about getting a Sunday afternoon drunken phone call from dad.)

They were almost charming in their drunken fucked up doofus way, but they were also a New Orleans stereotype of Sunday afternoon drunks. I’m not picking on them for being drunk on this particular Sunday afternoon, but it seemed apparent that they were drunk on most Sunday afternoons and other afternoons as well The bar was full of regular Sunday afternoon drunks and the kind of New Orleans characters who essentially live in bars. It was a relief, it felt clean, to walk out of there and get away.

My beloved BMW

2008-03-04T20:46:00.002-06:00

was sideswiped, scraped and gouged by a utility truck while parked around the corner this afternoon. It's so sad. The thing is, it's perfectly drivable, it just looks like crap. The car is now 13 years old, has 185K miles on it, and has some kind of front end issue and a few other incipient problems. It doesn't seem like it makes financial sense to spend a lot of money on it. It also doesn't make sense to buy a new car while I'm unemployed and living in a place that's so hazardous to cars. I think the sensible thing to do would be to take the insurance money and put it in a new-car-someday fund, while I continue to drive my defaced car at least until I graduate and move away. But the sensible thing bums me out.

I kind of want to spend the money to fix everything because I'm fond of the car. Maybe it's not that silly to spend $5-7K to make it almost-like-new instead of spending two or three times that on a late model used car that isn't even a swell-o BMW. But there's that 185K miles. I know those engines regularly make it to 250K and beyond. I know you can replace an engine for far less than the cost of a new car. So how far does it make sense to go down that line? Till I can afford a super cool new 1-series?

Richmond! Richmond?! Richmond!!

2008-02-29T23:34:00.003-06:00

I really think I'm going to move to Richmond, Virginia, with only a temporary not-that-well-paying job lined up.

This is not the absolutely most sensible thing to do. The absolutely most sensible thing would be to aim for Baltimore--because my sister lives only 50 miles away and I could save money by staying with her while I study for the bar. And I kinda sorta like Baltimore, despite some of its less attractive qualities. And it's a bigger legal market, with the added option of working in D.C. if necessary. And I know a few people there. The Maryland bar is not as hard as the Virginia bar.

No one I know has been to Richmond, and they don't get the appeal. Well, here it is: For one thing, Richmond has lots of pretty old neighborhoods with pretty old houses. It's almost in the New Orleans/Savannah/Charleston league. Who knew? It feels like a Southern town. Parts of it remind me of Memphis, parts of it remind me of New Orleans. But it has a better economy than any of those places. And it's a hell of a lot closer to my family in PA. It's not a tropical climate, but it has fairly mild winters. It's a good size--big enough to have a city feel and stuff to do, but not huge and sprawling all out of control like the the Baltimore/DC metropolis. You can be in the Shenandoah mountains or at the shore in less than two hours either way.

The only thing is that it is maybe not the absolute best place to build my dream career. The best job markets for environmental lawyers are on the west coast, in Denver, in D.C. and in New York State and maybe New England. Richmond is a relatively small and conservative legal community. But the temporary job in Richmond would be at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which is a great organization. Also, I am told that the Virginia attorney general might be hiring a lawyer or two to handle conservation easements in the next few months, which would be right up my alley. The gamble is that if I move there and pass the bar I will be more marketable than I am from New Orleans. The challenge is that there are many good law schools in Virginia and they don't need to import from Tulane. I'm pretty sure I could at least do contract work and make a reasonable living, the question is whether I will find work that is engaging and fulfilling and makes a contribution to the world's well being.

I've applied for two jobs not in Richmond that I would probably accept if offered. One is in Chapel Hill and the other in Denver. But if neither of those work out, I'm pretty sure I'm heading to Richmond.

You know you're turning into a cranky old person when...

2008-02-23T00:24:00.006-06:00

you start saying things like "I remember back in [insert year more than a decade in the past] I saw [insert name of now-successful band] at [insert name of tiny obscure club], and now [insert cranky old person complaint]."

Well, back in the mid-90s in Memphis there was a sort of garage punk band named DDT, which stood for Dickinson Dickinson Taylor, which stood for Luther Dickinson, Cody Dickinson, and Paul Taylor. And then the father of the Dickinson boys, eccentric record producer Jim Dickinson, moved the family out to Hernando and the boys went to hear Junior Kimbrough or something like that, and they decided to start doing more of a blues thing. They changed their name to the North Mississippi All-Stars. And then somewhere in there Paul Taylor left to go on tour with Big Ass Truck, and the Dickinson's replaced him with gospel bass player Chris Chew.

They played my neighbors' wedding. In their back yard. They played at the Antenna Club with R.L. Burnside. One of my very first writing assignments involved interviewing the Dickinsons for the second-best free publication in Memphis. They invited me out to their place in Hernando. I asked them some stupid questions and then we watched wrestling with Jim Dickinson, who gave a fairly rehearsed soliloquy about the greatness of professional wrestling. It was very cool. I had a crushlet on Luther. I wrote that Luther was probably the best young guitarist in Memphis, which was probably true.

Now they are semi-big semi-stars. Or at least they can pack Tipitinas at $25 a head. They look the same. Same hair. Luther looks like maybe he could be in his 30s, but Cody still looks like he's 19. They have only gotten better, of course. Luther is the awesome. Cody's a great drummer plus he seems so preternaturally cheerful all the time that you can't help but like him.

But still, I can't listen to them for more than about a half hour. They're relentlessly set at one pounding setting. They're not really a band of many moods. They have some new songs, but they sound a lot like the old songs that they're still playing the same way they played them ten years ago. And none of them can really sing worth a shit. Back in the day they had a girl named Kelli-something who sang with them sometimes and really added a lot.

So I paid $25 and I stayed for about 45 minutes and I didn't really enjoy it. The crowd was mostly frat-boy douche-bags (to use their pejorative) and hippies (at least I got a free high from breathing the air). And Tipitina's might be world-famous, but it's not really such a great venue. And I knew ahead of time that I wasn't going to have a great time but I felt compelled to go anyway, for old times sake, despite the fact that it wasn't really in the budget. But if I thought I was going to have some cathartic experience or gain some insight into the past, it didn't happen. Or maybe the experience was realizing that I don't need that experience because I'm really over all that.

In a sort-of related development, I exchanged emails with my ex-husband this week. It was the first contact we've had in more than eight years, and it was a total non-event. Even with the potentially volatile reason I had for contacting him: on the bar exam application, you have to disclose everything you ever did in your life, particularly if it was bad. I don't have a copy of the divorce decree, and I can't even remember exactly when it went through. Some time in 1995, I think. He doesn't remember either and doesn't have the paperwork anymore.

Also, I recently heard Jim Dickinson on the radio, serving as the band leader for some Mississippi version of the Prairie Home Companion (sorta) called Thacker Mountain Radio. It was pretty good but nothing to swoon over.

Recent developments

2008-02-10T23:20:00.000-06:00

I'd like to think I looked elegant on New Year's Eve...

and cute on Mardi Gras (with my sister the Hot Blonde)

but in the last few months I've developed irritable bowel syndrome, bunions and sensitive teeth. I think I might be middle-aged.

Also, after a half-dozen interviews, at least two of which seemed to go really well, I am still unemployed.

But I'm not at all a gigantic ball of stress. Not me.

Niki

2007-11-09T23:45:00.000-06:00

My friend Niki (aka Nicols Fox, see link at bottom of page) is just about the coolest person I know.

I met her in grad school. She's roughly my mother's age and has been a role model and in some ways an alternative mother figure for me. She lives by herself in a cottage on the quiet side of Mount Desert Island in Maine. Some of my earliest on this blog were about a visit to her home in July of 2005, just a month and a half before The Thing.

She's a role model because she transformed herself in the second half of her life, and she makes being an old maid look damn appealing. When she was in her 40s she was the wife of a Republican politician in Virginia and the mother of two. Since then she has divorced, survived breast cancer, moved to Maine, finished an MFA, started a writing career and published four books, changed her lifestyle to reflect her semi-neo-luddite philosophy, and generally followed her own vision.

But I always wondered about whether she would stay up there in semi-isolation till the end. I worried about her a bit. Now I have learned that she put her house up for sale and is considering a move back to Virginia, because of a multitude of health problems.

She was so gung-ho into living on Mt. Desert. Just as I was about living in New Orleans, I suppose. We both had the feeling that we had found our place. But life is a series of storms and upsets, with interludes of semi-contentment if you're lucky. Now we are both in search of a new home and the next interlude. I'm going north and she's going south. It would be cool if we both ended up in VA. But I'm sad. I don't want her to be anything but healthy and in her element. I wish I could buy her house, too, as a way to hold on to that moment now gone.

I have a job interview at a state court in Norfolk on the day before my dreaded b'day. One of my fellow interns from this summer is interviewing in the slot after me, so we can get together and have a drink afterward. But the job is the opposite of the job in New York. It doesn't offer any of the things I want except a means to get established in VA.

I got back together with Mr. M about a month ago, but now I have second thoughts. Or I need to think about the relationship in a different way. I absolutely want him in my life. He is my closest confidante, but as a boyfriend he is hopeless. He does love me, despite what I wrote in an earlier post. But he chronically cannot get his shit together. On any given day I go to class, then to my externship, then run errands, then read for next day's classes, then work on my paper, then walk the dog, while he "managed" to get some laundry done and went to the drugstore. He still hasn't "managed" to do anything about work or school or making any plans to do anything. It drives me up a tree. I don't want to nag and for the most part I don't. At least he knows he's got some issues with this and he's in therapy to work on it. But still, I find myself losing respect for him. And I realize if we were just friends it wouldn't bother me very much. I sometimes get momentarily annoyed by my friends' flaws and foibles, but for the most part I don't notice them very much. But in a boyfriend I find this unacceptable. Instead of getting annoyed, though, I think I need to get detached. If he doesn't affirmatively do something, our romance will die a natural death because I am not going to move to Minneapolis. Hopefully the friendship will survive. And if he does actually do something, it will be a wonderful surprise.

Being romantically alone doesn't seem so bad as long as I have good friends and a social life. Right now I'm in a cycle where I'm madly horny for about two days each month, during which my dreams are just sex, sex, sex, and I have to masturbate in the middle of the night just so I can dream about something else--kind of like when you keep dreaming about peeing until you get up and go to the bathroom. But the rest of the month I don't think about sex at all, except maybe to think how annoying is that random, compulsive hormonal stupidity.

In other news, a murder in my neighborhood at 11 a.m. today, and a carjacking late thursday night/ friday morning.

Fall back

2007-11-04T09:23:00.000-06:00

I had a strange vivid dream about being in Milwaukee. I've never actually been there, and my dream Milwaukee obviously had no resemblance to the real thing, because it was steeply, mountainously hilly. More hilly than San Francisco. Only unlike S.F. it gets snowy and icy in the winter, and I was wondering about how people handled those steep slopes in the snow. But it turned out that Milwaukee's bigger problem was that there were huge tigers wandering the streets and attacking pedestrians. I hid from a tiger in a pile of big bags of dog food. I was wedged in between 50 pound bags of dog food and feeling crushed.

A totally nonsensical dream, but when I look at it for a minute I can see meaning in it. The dog food, for example, is about feeling overwhelmed by the cost of feeding and maintaining Hank (he just had a $500 vet bill), but he does keep me protected from dangerous things in the street.

Why specifically Milwaukee? I have no idea, other than it's geographically proximate to Minneapolis, and I know Mr. M visited there with a long-ago ex-girlfriend. But still, I dunno.

However, snow and hills are relevant because I have a second interview with a small law firm in New York State, in a town on the Hudson and near the Catskills. Supposed to be very, very pretty, and less than two hours to Manhattan by train. I hit it off with the partner who interviewed me at Tulane, and the firm itself seems nearly ideal in its clients and specialties. But it's in New York, which is not in the south and which has a serious winter. So now I have to figure out whether this is really a problem, or whether it's just about assumptions that should be questioned.

I lived in NYC when I was 18-20. I was lost, clueless and formless, and the city was threatening and overwhelming. The last winter there I found particularly hard. And so I ran off to the south, which seemed like an easier place to be. At the time I had the idea that I was going south to get myself together and gain some kind of wisdom, but I was foggy about what kind of wisdom this was and how I was going to get it. But once I got it I was going to come back and take over the world. Because I assumed that to take over the world you had to be in New York or at least in the Northeast.

But in the south I gradually came to the conclusion that maybe New York wasn't really the center of the universe. And even more gradually I came to the difficult conclusion that I wasn't going to take over the world and live forever. Nevertheless, I did get myself together and now I feel ready to participate and contribute to "the human endeavor." I don't think that requires going back to the NE.

But still, when I lived in Memphis I visited New England quite a few times--Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and I always felt bad about returning to Memphis, which seemed flat, junky and unlovely in comparison.

From the time I moved to New Orleans to the time of the Thing, I was always happy to come home to New Orleans, because I was in love with and happy in NOLA. But not so much anymore.

But winter. I've been working with the assumption that I have to avoid places with serious winters. There have been times when I've had very bad seasonal depression. Even in New Orleans. It's the dark more than the cold. But then I always liked going to Vermont in the winter, albeit for short, discreet periods of time. The hard thing about a Northeastern winter is that it gets so grey and stays that way for such a long time.

Still, the external factors that trigger my depressions only do so if there's a sort of nascent depression waiting underneath. The year that even a New Orleans winter seemed much too much to bear, and I could understand why someone might jump off a bridge, was the winter that Mr. M shut me out and disappeared.

Also, I can get horrifically depressed at that special time of the month, but only if I'm sort of depressed anyway. When I'm happy with my life, I barely notice my periods at all.

And now Katrina has introduced me to the wonders of Wellbutrin. So maybe a New York winter would be bearable. I would have engaging work. I wouldn't be broke anymore. I could buy a cute old house and hibernate inside. I'd be close to my sister and Miss S. I could go spend the holidays on a tropical island. When the weather got better, I could go hiking on the weekend, or to the shore, or to NYC.

Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize my worries away, because I just want to get something lined up so that I won't graduate with six figures of debt and no job.

The other immediate possibility is working for a particular federal agency. Depending on who wins the next presidential election, this agency might turn out to be a worthwhile place to work. For now, though, the appeal is mostly tactical. I could live in Arlington, take the VA bar, and be in a better position to get a job in Richmond. I developed a crush on Richmond just because it has lots of pretty old neighborhoods with pretty old houses, because it's just the right size, and because it's geographically well placed. But I don't really know anything about it as a community.

Post-K, all assumptions are subject to question. But that makes things harder to figure out. When can you trust your gut and when is your gut clinging to unhelpful fears and prejudices?

Sort of ironic, I had an earlier interview for a clerkship in Puerto Rico, which I didn't end up getting. When I got the interview I sort of dreaded the idea of living in San Juan for two years, but before long I enthusiastically thought of it as an amazing, exciting, un-turn-down-able opportunity. Which I was then bummed out to lose.

My NY interview will be in the winter, so at least my gut will be able to make a more informed choice.

cultivating my narcissism with mac photobooth

2007-10-22T22:59:00.001-05:00

My mother--argghhh!!!

2007-10-01T22:18:00.000-05:00

For awhile there, I was getting along better with my mother and finding her easier to take. Since law school, though, she drives me crazier than ever. Some topic best avoided when talking to my mother: school, my grades, my career, my love life, my sister, money, religion, sex, politics, writing, my aspirations or "personal growth," and any thought or opinion not sanctioned by "Focus on the Family."

The fertile crescent

2007-09-23T20:18:00.000-05:00

My ex-husband has a theory about how the arch created from connecting Nashville to Memphis to New Orleans is the fertile crescent of American music; that this area has a colorable claim as the birthplace of just about any form of American music. He's stil expounding on this in some of his newer pieces of music journalism. And it's a good theory. And of course in his view, American vernacular music was just about the only thing worthy of thinking about, except for Brazilian music.

So I lived in Nashville for a little bit, and I lived in Memphis for longer. I lived in the Mississippi Delta for a year, and now I've been in New Orleans for eight.

I was so young and unformed when I met him; I absorbed his theories and views and even after I left him I was following a map he gave me. I don't regret his geographical direction, but ithe imitated stance I received from him has stymied me for a long time--an attitude of arrogance, cyncism, a closure to a wide range of possibilities, the need to deem most of the world inferior, to explain and dismiss as a means of denying our own inadequacies. A contemptous "fuck it" to most everything.

This week I got an email about an article about Mississippi John Hurt that I wrote almost ten years ago, which still lives on the web. That article was the pinnacle of my living up to Edd's standards. I remember him telling me he was proud of me when that article came out. It might have been the last time I saw him.

Every once in awhile I look up his articles. Lately his articles have been appearing in the Minneapolis City Pages. Strange to think of one ex of mine reading an article by another ex and never knowing what they have in common. Except Mark only reads the NYT.

I suppose Virginia is on the fringes of Edd's map somewhere, as one of the sources of country music perhaps, but it's not at the center, not within the fertile crescent.

Second line

2007-08-25T21:48:00.000-05:00

Hank & I saw a second line parade on our evening walk tonight. When I first got back after the hurricane, every parade made me cry. I still find them moving, but more bitter than sweet. It's more like watching a willfully oblivious parade circle the decks of a rapidly sinking ship.

Addendum: but then there's this, which is sweet and not bitter, and is the New Orleans I love and I hope will survive: http://www.nola.com/rose/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-0/118767616844080.xml&coll=1

oh dear

2007-08-17T23:51:00.000-05:00

I think I just broke up with Mr. M.

Because it's pretty clear that I'm not exactly his top priority.

And there might be good reasons for that, all things considered.

But I think I deserve better. At least if you buy the theory that anyone deserves anything.

I want someone to really love me, and really be excited and passionate about me. I don't want to be in love with someone who isn't in love with me.

And then, more problematically, I feel scared and helpless--in New Orleans and in the face of death--and I want someone to take care of me. And I realize that no one can really, ultimately, take care of me. But I want someone to want to try. I want it to me Mr. M.

But one of the very few solid lessons I've learned is that you can't chase someone or guilt someone or argue someone into loving you.

Get me out of here

2007-08-17T09:12:00.000-05:00

Public Service Announcement

2007-08-11T06:31:00.000-05:00

This post is out of character for this blog, but it drives me insane that a certain basic misunderstanding continues to make people so unhappy in their sex lives. I had the misfortune to accidently hear an insipid nouveau hippy public radio show called The People's Pharmacy this morning. The guest was Dr. Irwin Goldstein, allegedly one of the worlds great experts on sexuality. Check the whole crew out:
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/archives/radio_shows/645_sexual_solutions.asp.

So a caller asks Dr. Goldstein about his girlfriend's "anorgasmia" problem. The girlfriend can have an orgasm by clitoral stimulation, but not from vaginal intercourse. Dr. Goldstein intones that this is a "common problem" and that the girlfriend should go to a doctor who specializes in sexual medicine, and also that she should try yohimbe.

ARGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Newsflash, Dr. Goldstein: if MOST women, maybe 80 percent or so, can't ever or often orgasm from vaginal intercourse, it's not a problem, IT'S NATURE. You numbnuts on the People's Pharmacy like nature, don't you? It's ANATOMY. Luckily for us all, NATURE has conveniently located the clit where it is easily accessible by one or both parties in pretty much any sexual position. So, to quote my hero Dan Savage: Rub on her clit! During intercourse! Or tell her to rub on her clit! Problem solved.

Don't thank me, thank Dan: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=267471

That's the way you spell chicken

2007-08-04T22:07:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of one of the charming Rhode Island Reds on the farm where I have been living. I'm not sure that an individual chicken can be charming, but a whole bunch of them running (and they really do run, it's hilarious) around the yard are adorable.

In the meantime, last week, in front of my new apartment on an allegedly safer block in New Orleans, a man was shot in the head, run over with his own car, and left to die in the street. This was at about 3 a.m.; he was coming home from his second-shift job.

My old boss lives on the same block. He thinks the neighborhood is stable and just fine. But he just got out of a really bad marriage, and I think the newfound sense of optimism and freedom has infected his rational capacity. I've also met a few younger, maybe more naive, people this summer who are in love with New Orleans. For example, a young teacher who lived and taught in New Orleans for a few years, his here in Virginia getting his masters in education, and plans to go back. Thank goodness there are bright, energetic people like him who have a passion for New Orleans. But I think I have finally lost mine. That enchantment with New Orleans seems to me a negative one, an underworld curse. I only have one more week here and I really don't want to go back. In fact, I'm a little bit scared.

Also this week, I had a bit of panic when I couldn't get Mr. M on the phone after the bridge collapse. He is fine, but I have that lingering sense of everything falling apart. Everything that seemed stable and permanent has been revealed to be fragile and unstable.

Things seem safe out here with the chickens, but then again a fox killed one last week. So chickenhood is fragile. Obviously. BTW, I still eat chicken, but I don't cook it or eat it at the farm.

It's been a good summer career-wise. I think I've decided I want to be a city attorney. For a city that's not in an unstoppable frenzy of destruction. Somewhere safe for Mr. M. The only bad thing I can say about my stay here is that I miss Mr. M, and the Hank & Petunia show. And that it has come to an end too soon.

Dear Diary

2007-07-22T16:02:00.000-05:00

I’ve had the most fun summer since I was ten or eleven or whenever when my parents dropped me and my sister off at the farm while they took a more mature set of cousins to colonial Williamsburg. That summer we played with the barn cats, saw bears eating out of a garbage dump, went to a Cheech & Chong movie with my cousin’s girlfriend in a metallic blue Firebird Trans Am just like the one in Smokey & the Bandit, went tubing, went to Hershey Park and watched another cousin make out with yet another cousin’s babysitter. It was an exhilarating, educational summer for a sheltered girl.

I did many of the same or similar activities this summer. I lived on a farm—with free range chickens instead of barn cats. I went to Hershey Park and rode rollercoasters for the first time in probably 20 years—they’ve gotten much more harrowing since the olden days. Yesterday I went canoeing on a slowish patch of the James River, which only took a little more exertion than tubing. Also—my sister and I visited Sharon in New York, and we all went to see the Morning 40 play the Mercury Lounge. Ryan Scully puked on stage. That’s rock n roll. Also, I went hiking four or five times in the gorgeous Shenandoah National Park. I’ve been working at a great place in Charlottesville, and have also explored Staunton and Richmond. All in Virginia, which is undoubtedly the most beautiful state on the eastern seaboard, and a contender for the national title.

It seems like law school was a great idea, just because it led me to this summer. And I have a clear idea of what and where I’m aiming for after graduation. But in three weeks it will be over and I dread going back, to New Orleans and the relentless work of the school year. I’ve missed New Orleans now and then. I still feel guilt and regret at the thought of leaving. But, to paraphrase Prince, all the things I’d lose don’t add up to all the things I’d gain.

Mr. Stinky Takes A Bath

2007-04-15T20:17:00.000-05:00

Tornados, parades, love

2007-02-17T17:13:00.000-06:00

Early Tuesday morning a tornado touched down about two blocks from my house. It blew roofs off of buildings and knocked over power lines and trees, which crushed the cars undeneath. I slept through it, more or less. I was expecting a bad thunderstorm and that's what it sounded like to me. I got up the next morning and the power was out, but there's nothing new about that. I took Hank for a walk and when I got outside I realized something bad had happened. But my house was untouched.

So what do you say about that? How lucky I am again. How unlucky this city is.

Yesterday I turned in a 50+ page paper with more than 140 footnotes. It's about the use of eminent domain to prevent development, as happened in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, where the township condemned a piece of land where a developer was about to start construction on a new subdivision. It was a really interesting and engaging thing to write and it was just about as satisfying as any writing I've done, except for all the all-of-control footnoting and nutty, uptight formatting that goes with academic legal writing.

But anyway, I was going to say that I turned it in and then I realized: it's Mardi Gras. I'm not ready for Mardi Gras at all. There's exactly 0% chance I'm going to appear in public in a costume. But I will probably go to the parades tomorrow or Monday or both, and maybe on Tuesday I'll go down to the Marigny to see what other people are wearing or not wearing. But mostly I'm going to spend the holiday catching up with everything I got behind on while I was writing my paper.

Mr. M was here two weeks ago, and we went to the Krewe du Vieux parade, which was a nice little discreet piece of Mardi Gras. It was great to have him here, but now I miss him more. He's doing well and looks much better. His hair is growing back, even. The city was lovely for him, as beaten down as it is, and though the weather was grey. We ate amazing food every day and I took him to the barber who serves cocktails with a shave and a haircut. On the way home one night I hit a monster pothole which destroyed one of my wheels, but it was good to have someone around to help me deal with a crisis, for once. It also made me realize how hard these roads are on my poor car, which makes me sad. Every mile in New Orleans has to equal at least three miles of normal driving. Alas.

Mr. M and I have a kind of relationship I recognize. It looks like a hybrid of my favorite aunt & uncle's relationship and that of a couple in a screwball comedy from the 30s. There's an ongoing banter where he teases me and I get agitated, but underneath there's a warm electrical buzz. It's hard for me to have someone around because I'm set in my ways and introverted and used to being alone. But when he goes I miss him awfully.

2007-02-09T22:04:00.001-06:00

the victims

2007-01-04T21:50:00.000-06:00

These two people were friends of a friend. I didn't know them well, but I saw them at parties and so forth.

This morning the wife was murdered by someone who broke into their home. The husband, a doctor who ran a community health clinic, was shot several times. Their two-year-old saw the whole thing.

They had evacuated to South Carolina and only came back in August. They had a long debate about whether to come back. The wife was the one who was really for it.

You can't do any good for New Orleans if you get killed just trying to live here.

In the photo, she looks a little bit like me. We have the same initials. Which makes it a little bit harder to maintain the illusion that this couldn't happen to me. That it only happens to other people who somehow do something foolish to provoke it. The foolish provocation was coming back to this city.

Stick a fork in it, it's done

2006-12-21T23:08:00.000-06:00

The plan was that I was going to drive to the great state of Pennsyltucky tomorrow to spend Christmas with my sister and other assorted relatives.

This afternoon I was vacuuming when Hank started barking and I realized someone was knocking at my door. It was the guy from the plumbing shop across the street. He told me that someone had just sideswiped my car and knocked off the driver's side mirror. What's more the car that did it was now parked 15 feet away in front of the corner store that ruined my life.

I should have been content to take down the license plate, but I was pissed and I hate the idea that I'm supposed to be afraid of people, and my pissed-off-ness overrides my fear. So I go to the car and tap on the driver's window. The glass is tinted dark but I can see a teenage kid sitting in there. But he won't roll down the window.

But right then another kid comes out of the store and comes over to the car. I ask him if this is his car? And did he know that he just sideswiped my car. Uh, er, I didn't do it. Well, who did it? I'm not going away, so he gets the driver to open the door. Do you know you just hit my car? I wasn't driving. (Even though it happened one and a half minutes ago and he's sitting in the driver's seat.) Who's car is this? My auntee's. Does she have insurance? Uh. The other kid gets on his phone and says he's calling his auntee. I can tell this is bullshit and turn away. The second my back is turned the car squeals away.

But I have the license plate number. I call in a complaint to the police. I give them the plate number and describe the car.

Now, I know that New Orleans police have more important things to worry about and I don't expect them to respond very quickly to an incident like this.

However, several hours later when a cop finally shows up, he tells me that the car that hit mine had been carjacked last night. The owner was returning to her car after walking her dog in Audubon park. Three teenagers on bicycles approached her, beat her with a pipe, took her car keys and drove off in her car.

So now, three hours after they drove away from the corner store, the cops are looking for the car in my neighborhood. I think they might have had better luck if they'd shown up a little sooner.

I'm afraid I've made myself (even more of) a target.

So many things about this disturb me and piss me off, but for some reason the thing that gets me the most is--how fucking stupid do you have to be to steal a car, don't bother to change the tags, and drive it around the same area you took it from? And then, when you hit another car in full view of a half a dozen people, you nevertheless park the stolen car and saunter into the corner store as if nothing happened?

Maybe they don't give a shit because the so-called criminal justice system is so useless that even if the cops actually catch them, it's extremely unlikely that they'll face any punishment worse than a night it jail.

In the meantime, it's been raining and raining all day and there is several feet of flooding in some areas. It seems the pumps have not been fixed since Katrina, so it just takes a long rainstorm to cripple the city.

It's official. I hate New Orleans. It seems to be a common feeling. This was posted on Craigslist tonight:

I'm not posting this for sympathy or anything like that. I just want my anger and frustration to be heard. I have always been a die hard N'Awlins boy. I never thought I would even think of leaving.

I had built a good life here. A home in Gentilly Terrace, a good job managing a great restaurant and two beautiful children that I maintained joint custody of after their mother and I split.

Katrina filled my Gentilly home with 7 feet of water and left me homeless for almost a year. My insurance settlement left me no chance of rebuilding. It also cost me the job I had worked so hard for for 20 years. Then it took my two kids away when their mother decided to relocate to Minnesota. I lost it all and I still stayed, hoping that I could rebuild some sort of life resembling what I had before.

Today I came home to my shitty little one bedroom apartment to find out that someone had broken in and stolen everything I owned, including all of the Xmas gifts I had saved months to buy for my kids, who are coming home for the holidays in two days.

So I'm done here. I'm giving up my new job, packing up what's left and leaving. And for all of you assholes that keep preaching about rebuilding, renewing and reviving New Orleans, give it up, IT'S ALREADY DEAD AND BEYOND OUR HELP. GOODBYE.

Unbe-fucking-lievable

2006-12-09T23:21:00.000-06:00

Bill Jefferson. The least effective member of Congress. Caught with $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer. Under investigation by the FBI. Kicked off the ways & means committee when we needed him most.

Was just reelected by the benighted citizenry of the New Orleans area, which deserves the hell it's going to.

It's the nail in the coffin, at least of my desire to stay here.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

2006-10-03T16:42:00.000-05:00

I grew up on rock n roll, country, pop, a little r&b. Opera seems at best inaccessible to me, at worst off-putting and unappealing.

I few years ago there was an Avedon photograph of opera singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in The New Yorker. She looked interesting; the picture compelled me to read the accompanying article. And she did seem like an interesting character, a bit of a late-bloomer who had worked as a freelance violist before she started singing. She was a mezzo soprano, not exactly a star or a diva, maybe a bit of a new age hippie, but she seemed smart and interesting and I got the impression she was someone I'd like to know. She had soulfullness.

In the lasted issue of The New Yorker, another article about her. A sad one. Her obituary. She died of breast cancer at the age of 53 on July 3.

Now I have iTunes and I can tell you that she has one of the most gorgeous voices I've ever heard. It almost doesn't matter that she's singing dreaded opera. Check out her singing "Angels bright and fair" from Handel's Theodora. Go ahead and spend the dollar to download it so you can hear the whole thing. Trust me. My heart is broken all over again.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040105fa_fact

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/articles/060925crmu_music

Football

2006-09-26T15:10:00.000-05:00

I grew up near Pittsburgh in the 1970s, when it seemed like the Steelers ruled the universe. I was a fan because it was part of the culture. We used to pray for the Steelers at my Catholic school. Then I figured out that God doesn't take sides in sporting events and that winning is not a sign of moral virtue, and I pretty much stopped caring about sports, especially professional team sports.

I'm offended that so much was spent to refurbish the Superdome when the rest of the city languishes.

But I've been teary-eyed all day about the Saints. Which goes to show that I will cry about anything these days. It also shows how much that game last night meant to this city.

If you're not here, you can't really understand. All year, the collective message we've gotten from the rest of America has been something like "You were stupid to build that city to begin with, you're stupid to go back, but why don't you welfare trash go home, get off your lazy asses and rebuild and stop whining and asking for a handout, and get out of our faces. And by the way, I hope another hurricane comes along soon and wipes you out for good." Or maybe that's just the message we've been getting from Texas.

This is not the p.c. way to look at it, but that game felt like a big Fuck You to everyone, and everything in us, that has made us feel like losers and fools and unwanted Americans.

The Saints could not have picked a better moment to stop sucking ass.

P.S. I'm not paranoid or making things up. This was posted on craigslist today:

People of New Orleans...........Suck!!!!!!!!!!
Reply to: pers-212636559@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-09-26, 4:40PM CDT

When in the hell will all you pathetic people stop feeling sorry for yourselves? It’s sickening! It’s your fault for living in a city below sea level, news flash hurricane happen every year in that part of the country and always have. It looks like the NFL is going to set the stage for a Super Bowl run, after that completely set up game by the NFL to let the Saints win their home opener. The rest of America hates the people of New Orleans! I hope an even bigger hurricane completely destroys your city in the next few weeks, or even better a huge meteor whips you all out!

My little survivor

2006-09-25T06:48:00.000-05:00

I got a new pair of sneakers and Miss P got an exciting new box. Last year she was finally being rescued after I cruelly left her behind in the evacuation. This year she's a little rounder but doing just fine. In fact, she's randomly running around the house after imaginary prey at this moment.

Most famous refrigerator in NOLA

2006-09-24T11:22:00.000-05:00

Red letter day

2006-09-21T21:48:00.000-05:00

Mr. had his transplant today and it went great! He already feels better than he has in years and he's enjoying drinking all the water he could possibly want!

Of course, fitting with the way things have been, there had to be drama and tension up to the last second. First, due to a scheduling mistake, the transplant got pushed back a week. Then on Tuesday when he went in for tests, the doctors discovered that his potassium was dangerously high and they were afraid they'd have to cancel the whole thing.

But it all worked out in the end. I wish I could be there with him. But the important thing is that something finally went right for the guy and it was the crucial thing that had to go right.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If I had time to read a book

2006-09-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

I would read This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin.

If I had time to write a book, I would call it Tropical Depression.

I do have time to keep an eye on the lastings postings from the Hurricane Center. I enjoyed the following post:

TROPICAL DEPRESSION SIX ADVISORY NUMBER 5
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
AL062006 500 PM EDT MON SEP 04 2006

...DEPRESSION A LITTLE DISORGANIZED...

What did I tell you about my powers of prediction?

2006-08-27T09:41:00.000-05:00

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

The Krewe of OAK parade...

2006-08-26T21:29:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-26T09:03:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-23T19:45:00.000-05:00

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.