traveling swallowing dramamine

fresh bruises.

on my heart?

on my knees. as promised. and also one, inexplicably, on the inside of my left ankle.

so right as i'm getting really frustrated--you know, the trials and tribulations of a single girl--i talk to breton and she tells me, tearfully, about how lately when she and jason lie in bed together, he sleeps with his back turned towards her. and my stomach kind of knotted up--because i remember that feeling so well--and i know breton and jason will be okay, but suddenly i was so grateful that i wasn't in a relationship and didn't have to deal with all the emotional bullshit that goes along with it. all of the work. i mean, i have to deal with emotional bullshit too, in my newly single state, but at least it's a different kind of bullshit. at least it's kind of novel.

i'm sure the novelty will wear off soon. but in the meantime, at least i'm not wasting time and energy on stupid fights, or feeling bad about myself.

a story:

when i was in seventh grade, i was crushing hard on that guy joel--the one who called me annietoes--the one who asked out my cousin. i remember the day he asked her out. actually, it all started the night before--the infamous Skate Night. when meghan--my cousin--made her grand entrance. her debut.

meghan had always been the sweet one, the popular one, wholesome, all-american, apple pie. she had even, white teeth and she drank a lot of milk. and up until The Infamous Skate Night, meghan was generally running around in a t-shirt and umbros. she was outdoorsy. she was athletic. she was...the exact opposite of me. so it's the beginning of seventh grade, and i won't be developing breasts until, oh, somewhere in the middle of my senior year in high school, but meghan's just busting out all over the place. and it's Skate Night for the 7th grade class. that means that Airline Skate Center (or maybe it was still Skate Country back then) rented out the rink for our grammar school's junior high. They had different nights for the different grades, and it was kind of a big social event. so my mom stops by meghan's house to pick her up for Skate Night, and meghan comes out in this tight white baby doll t-shirt and white shorts. short, short shorts. the rumor among the boys that night was that meghan didn't have to bend over for you to see her ass. so meghan comes bounding out of her house, and my mom and i exchange glances, because, as i said before, this was not meghan's usual attire.

so we go to Skate Night, and of course the boys are falling all over themselves. and when it's all over, i go home and go into my bedroom and i am freaking out a little bit, because i can sense that something big is happening, something is changing, things are never going to be the same again. meghan and i had been best friends since first grade. Skate Night was the turning point in our relationship. it all went pretty much downhill from there. it wasn't just me that saw the change--i've talked to other girls from my grammar school and they all point to that night--The Infamous Skate Night--when meghan wore that white shirt and those white shorts--that was where it all started. or ended.

(let me say right now that meghan is currently at LSU--i think she's pre-law--making excellent grades and enjoying the company of her long-term boyfriend. she didn't turn into a prostitute or anything. i know i'm making this all sound very ominous. from my 7th grade perspective, it was. she did go a little bit wild in high school. and it did all start in junior high. on that night. and we really never were that close again. which is sad, because she's a wonderful person. it's just that, ever since that night, it seemed like we didn't have much in common anymore.)

so i'm in my bedroom and i'm weirded out by my cousin's aggressive entrance into the world of hormones and boys and tight, white t-shirts, and i say to myself: this is not a big deal. this is not a big deal unless, like, joel asks her out. and joel won't ask her out, because he wasn't at Skate Night tonight, and he doesn't even know who she is. satisfied, i went to sleep.

the next day i couldn't go to recess because i had math counts practice. yes, i'm a huge nerd. anyway, the bell rang and everyone came inside, smelling like puppy dogs, and we’re supposed to be quiet in the halls but there’s usually chatter--but that day there wasn’t chatter—instead, there was a strange buzzing noise. the halls were buzzing and it was strange and i grabbed my friend amanda and i said “amanda, what’s going on?”

and of course joel had asked meghan out.

i went home that afternoon and i said to myself: if joel is so stupid that he’s going to ask out some girl he doesn’t even know, just because she has boobs--if he’s so stupid that he would pick her over me—well, then i guess i can’t really respect his taste in women, and i don’t need to waste my time worrying about him.

and from that point on, i was over him.

i mean, more or less.

i look back on my 7th grade self and i wonder where the hell that confidence went. i’ve been missing it these past few years. i want it back.

(the postscript to that story is that joel broke up with meghan a month later—he told me he dumped her because her last name was “poo.” he then proceeded to follow me around for the rest of my seventh grade year. when i campaigned for 8th grade student body president, he took a sheetful of my campaign stickers and plastered them all over his body. one girl told me that he wrote “i love ann” on some of them. funny how that stuff works out.)

i am a fork, and i will stick you!

thus spake the young Søren Kierkegaard at dinner one night, garnering him the nickname "Fork." 

i wish i had a nickname like that. i have had many nicknames, but none so clever.

there was "annietoes," of course. also in junior high i was called "dimples" by my other big crush, a boy named shelby--i got that name because i played a character named Mrs. Winthrop-Dimple in "Yardsale"--which was, incidentally, my first play ever. i was "alanis" for a long time because i played Alanis Morissette in the 1996 ADVANCE Creative Writing class film Unabomber: The Musical. my mom calls me "peanut" and sometimes "angelface." my aunts and uncles on her side of the family call me "anna-banana" and "anna-banana-fofanna." they also call me "ananita" and occasionally "ananita-pocaquita-lolalita"--that's because when i was little i spoke spanish.

my aunt meg belongs to the very exclusive group of people who successfully call me "annie." there are maybe five people in the world who can call me "annie" and get away with it. somehow when they say it, it isn't annoying, and instead it is very affectionate and makes me feel nice. corrie scully, who was a senior at mt. carmel when i was a freshman, called me "annie," and coming from her--she was one of the coolest people i met at mca--it was an honor. my uncle mike sometimes calls me "annie-wannie," and that's alright. jesse's dad called me "annie" and he didn't quite get away with it, but there wasn't much i could do about it.

matt tried for a long time to come up with a good name for me. he called me "annalicious" sometimes, which was okay, but my favorite was the one time he called me "sweet pea"--completely offhand, i don't think he even realized what he was saying until after he said it, and he was walking out the door when it happened--but it was really cute. jesse called me "little"--as a noun, not an adjective--as in, "hey, little." and i enjoyed that greatly.

stosh has come up with "free hands ann," referring to my, er, warm and charming and vivacious personality--or, more specifically, as a commentary on my physically affectionate tendencies towards all humankind.

at any rate, i am not amused. jim, my work study professor, calls me "peaches" when i've done something really good--ie., gotten the damn computer to work after everyone else on the project has failed several times over.

mr. allen, the director of the dance repertory company at lsmsa, called me "chelsea." we're not really sure why.

this summer in london we all had nicknames--patrick was "pissin' patrick," which is a longish but hilarious story, and my fabulous roommate quinn was "quinn the fin"--and i was, of course, stuck with "ann the man." sometimes, if the boys were feeling generous, they called me "ann the WOman." and you wonder why i hate my name.

if i had been a boy i would have been named little stevie--steve jr. or else i was supposed to be named mazie, after my mom's mom, mazie ann d____, née r__. the story goes--and my dad denies this, but anyway, supposedly--my mom wanted to name me mazie, and my dad hated the idea, and so did the original mazie, who said it would be cruel to name a child mazie, as all the kids in school had called her "crazy mazie"--but my mom stood her ground. so my parents fought and fought, and then my mom got really sick while she was pregnant with me, and they thought she was gonna die. and so my dad said if she lived, they'd name me mazie. so she gives birth to me, and is alive, and is like, "okay, so, mazie," and my dad's like, "uhhh....no." and my mom's like, "what???" and he's like "....well.....i didn't think you were gonna live."   

anyway. the grand prize for best nickname giver, of course, goes to ian, who is both effortless and prolific in his ability to create charming monikers for those fortunate enough to be counted among his friends. ian has granted me, among other, lesser names: annabelle (one of my favorites, though he's the only one who can successfully call me that), belle, bellerina (combining both a good nickname and one of my favorite pasttimes!), and more recently, shortcake. he also occasionally calls me "baby"--i think he calls every girl "baby"--and doesn't quite get away with it.

i guess you can't win 'em all.

=====================

de "Tu Risa," por Pablo Neruda:

Ríete de la noche,

del día, de la luna,

ríete de las calles

torcidas de la isla,

ríete de este torpe,

muchacho que te quiere,

pero cuando yo abro

los ojos y los cierro,

cuando mis pasos van,

cuando vuelven mis pasos,

niégame el pan, el aire,

la luz, la primavera,

pero tu risa nunca

porque me moriría.

if you peas.

from stosh's "online journal" post today:

I wanted to speak a little on what it means to have accidently stuck an eraser in your ear or a battery in your nose or a pen-cap in your throat. These are real problems, needing your love and sympathy, needing your understanding, and, most of all, needing your solutions.

so this is a story for stosh, full of love, sympathy, understanding, and most importantly, solutions.

one sunday when my brother was maybe three, which would have made me maybe eight and a half, we were in the backseat of my mom's car, going to my grandma's house. and michael was playing with a mardi gras bead. not a whole strand of beads, just one bead that had been twisted off. michael referred to a whole strand of beads as "beads," but just the one bead was referred to as a "ball with string in it."

so i'm reading in the car, and michael is playing with his ball-with-string-in-it. and he was generally a chattery little kid--so i had a bad feeling when i realized, in the midst of my reading, that michael had gone completely silent. i looked over at him, and he looked at me, panic-stricken, and said: "the ball-with-string-in-it is stuck in my nose!"

apparently he had put it up one of his nostrils and couldn't retrieve it.

anyway, my mom slams on the brakes and is like "you WHAT?" (this was before she started therapy--she had a rotten temper). so she's doing the whole "just STAY CALM. WHATEVER YOU DO. STAY CALM."--which is not making me calm at all--in fact, i am suddenly terrified that he's gonna inhale the bead and asphyxiate. so i'm trying not to cry--because although michael was annoying, he was my brother! i didn't want him to die! and of course michael is totally freaking out.

so we get to my grandma's house, the three of us nervous wrecks. and we go into my grandma's bedroom, and she very calmly tells michael to cover the unobstructed nostril and blow. the bead pops out, hits the hardwood floor, and rolls underneath the bed.

we went to my great-grandma's house later that day and told her our success story--and she was, by that point, a little bit senile--and when my mom told my great-grandma that i had been "hysterical," my great-grandma smiled at me and said that she understood why i had been "historical."

the strangest part of the whole thing was that, a few hours later on that same sunday, my aunt meg came into my grandma's house telling us that they had finally gotten the rock out of my cousin brady's ear. brady is a year older than michael. anyway, apparently brady had been on the school playground and found a little pebble and put it in his ear. and it had stayed there for a week, or something, and brady had kept rocking his head back and forth--presumably to feel the pebble rolling around in his ear canal. and my aunt and uncle were like, "why the hell does he keep doing that?" and finally they took him to the doctor, who flushed his ear out.

so after she tells us this story, someone retrieves brady from the backyard, where he had been putting bricks up against his ear--to see if they would fit.

then another cousin, kurt, who is also my brother's age, stuck some peas in his bellybutton while we were eating lunch.

it was a day of orifice infamy.

turn, turn, turn.

so i'm bored and experimenting. approve or disapprove?

also. the second essay. sort-of essay.

----------

Your dad has his home office in the large corner room. At night he sits at the big oak desk and you lie face-down on the brown shag carpet, breathing in. The carpet smells musty and sweet. The desk is the same color as the carpet but a little less gold and a little more red. On the desk are: a mail holder that commands, in fake-gold letters, DO IT NOW. Business cards that say Steven G_____ and Guste Barnett & Shushan and One Shell Square. A paperclip container made of dark smoky plastic. The top of the container is black plastic with a hole in the middle lined with magnets. You like to dump out all the paperclips, silvery and small, onto the gold-brown shag carpet, then try to slip the paperclips back into the container, one by one, without letting them get sucked onto the magnetic sides. Sometimes your dad sits you on his lap and lets you write stories on his electric typewriter. The typewriter is black and the keys feel solid underneath your fingertips. You write the stories and he reads them back to you:

Once upon a time I went to Grandmotherdear’s house. We played pick-up sticks and solitaire and concentration. Lulu and Nutmeg ran around outside and made gold dollars.

You stop him and request that he read what it really says. He reads: “akdjaklaj fijoa kjf f 9 8akldjfkladj jdfOIUW#Oru9u oshf adfiojaweoiur 3w.”

You laugh until you are breathless.

When your brother is born, the big oak desk moves to the living room. Every room in the house has either tile floors or that brown shag carpet, except for the living room, which has blue carpet and blue curtains and is therefore known as the blue room. The big oak desk sidles up against the floor-length curtains adorning the French door, which is not a door at all but a window that doesn’t even open. The desk is broad, with its desktop surface extending two feet beyond its sides, like wings. Underneath where the edge of the desktop meets the blue-curtained French door, you find a space enclosed on two sides, with a roof. The desk is high enough, and you are small enough, so that you can sit comfortably without bumping your head on the underside. You get nice light from the door-window. You can hide things behind the curtains. This is your fortress. This is your office. You move in.

Your Archie comic books are safe here, tucked away from the grubby grasp of your brother. You spend hours sketching in the gauzy filtered light: pointe shoes, ballgowns, a dancer poised in perfect arabesque. You write a novel detailing the misadventures of you and your friends, who have started a club of superhero ballerinas called the Nature Fairies. When your cousin spends the night, you sit together in your office, whispering secrets back and forth till midnight. She sleeps under one side of the desk, you sleep under the other. It is dark and the wood is silent.

When your parents divorce, the desk moves to Mississippi. So does the kitchen table. There’s an extra table in the blue room, but it’s too bulky for the kitchen. (You’d tried sitting under the blue room table once, just to see, but it wasn’t as good.) You get a new-old kitchen table from your aunt. It seats four, but it is round instead of rectangular, and it looks wrong in your kitchen. One day you come home from school to find that your mom has folded down one of the leaves of the table and pushed it up against the wall. Three chairs. You turn on her. “Do you have to rub it in?” you ask.

“You’ll get used to it,” she says mildly, as if it doesn’t hurt her as much as it hurts you. As if she did it for your own good. But you know she did it for herself. This is a reality and an absence unrecognizable in the abstract. One must rely on one’s furniture to provide the concrete terms.

the theme music to "Dragnet" used to scare me.

we played Taboo last night whilst drinking margaritas.

afterward, i was sitting on the uncomfortable sofa, listening to stosh play the piano, and reid came out of his room to ask me if i had checked my email recently. i said, "well, sorta," and he said, "come read this." so i sat down at his computer and read this broadcast LSU email:

PUBLIC SAFETY ALERT

The LSU Police Department is issuing an alert to the LSU community regarding some very specific suspicious activity that has been reported. Allegedly, a male subject has been seen loitering in various locations on campus and randomly approaching females identifying himself as a "photographer." It is alleged that the subject offers to put together a portfolio of photographs for the person he stops and offers to accompany them to any location to take the photographs. The police department has
established that no local studios or photographers have permission to conduct this type of business activity on the LSU campus. Therefore, any contact with this person or any other person not known to you should be avoided. In the event that you are approached by this person on campus you are encouraged to proceed to the nearest area of safety, such as a building or residence hall, and immediately notify the LSU Police Department at 578-3231.

and i finish reading and i'm like, oh, holy fuck. and he's like, "yeah, i know." because last wednesday i was walking back from class, and when i got to the corner of iowa and west chimes, this dude stopped me. and he said, "excuse me, i'm sorry, but i just have to say--you have such a great style. i saw you last week, you were wearing this skirt with these kneesocks that had a stripe around the top--and i wanted to talk to you but i was in my car and i didn't want to seem, you know, threatening."

at this point, of course, i'm feeling threatened. as a general rule, if i'm talking to someone who tells me that i don't need to be afraid of them, i assume that i probably do.

so he says, "see, i'm a photographer, and i'm looking for a model, and you would be perfect. have you done any modeling before?"

and i say no, and that i'm not really interested, because cameras make me self-conscious.

and he says, "really? you'd be perfect. you have such a great sense of style. you like to stand out, don't you. you don't like to fall in with the crowd. admit it. you dress this way because you like the attention."

i shrug. and i ask him for his name and number. trying to beat him to the punch. so he tells me his name is ben, and he gives me a number with a lafayette area code. he says, "we can keep walking, if you want" because i had been mid-stride when he stopped me. so we walk down iowa and he tells me that he works freelance, and he needs a portfolio, because he can't get work if he doesn't have a portfolio. that's why he needs models. it's a slick line that he delivers fast, so that it sounds a lot like the stories the people on state street tell you to get you to give them money. and he asks me if i know what a portfolio is. i tell him that my roommates are photography majors (which is sort of true, or used to be).

i ask him what kind of camera he uses--not that i know enough about photography to tell whether or not he's full of shit, but i'm trying. he tells me what kind, i can't remember the brand, but it was something familiar. and he said that actually he'd just gotten back from florida, where he'd been shooting in the hurricane, and all his equipment got wet, so it's all in the shop getting "dried." and i started laughing. and he's like, "why are you laughing? that's not funny. it's really expensive."

at this point we're approaching my house, which is on the corner of violet and iowa. and as soon as i see it, i realize that i don't want him to know where i live. so i say, "i'm gonna walk to the chevron, wanna come with me?" and he says okay. we continue down violet and he asks where i'm from. i tell him new orleans, and we start talking about live music, and he says that we're gonna go down to new orleans and shoot on location at a cool music venue. also that he's gonna make sure he gets my freckles in the shot. he's nicely dressed, in a blue button-down tucked into khaki pleated pants, with brown loafers. he looks about twenty-eight. i get the distinct impression that he's hitting on me. also that he's not for real. also that i'm a little scared of him.

we walk into the chevron and i pick up a candy bar, which i don't even want. he offers to buy it for me. i tell him i've got it. i have a brief conversation with the cashier about the price of candy bars these days. outside the chevron, i immediately stick out my hand for him to shake it, and i say firmly, "nice meeting you, ben, i'll give you a call." he shakes my hand without giving me any hassle, and when i turn to walk back down violet, he doesn't follow me. in fact, he sort of seems to disappear. i keep looking over my shoulder to see if he's following, or watching. at this point i'm straight-up scared. there are cars parked on the side of the road between the chevron and my house, so once i get about halfway down the street i know he can't get a clear sight line on me, but i unlock my front door in a hurry anyway, and lock it back behind me.

i didn't have any intention of taking him up on the modeling offer, but i considered calling him back anyway, just to tell him that i'd thought about it but wasn't interested. because i was afraid i'd run into him again on the street, and he'd get hostile with me for not calling him. but i never did call, because we don't have long distance on our house phone, and i didn't want to use my cell in case his lafayette number was a cell. because then he'd have my number in his phone.

when rikki got home, i told her the story; reid was listening from the other room.

so reid shows me the broadcast email--there's also a police alert on the PAWS homepage--and i'm like, "i guess i ought to call and file a report, i can give a pretty thorough description." i told jim about it today at work, and he said, "you can use my phone if you want to--you should call--because what if something happens to someone, and you could have helped--" and i'm like, "i know, i know, i'll call."

i call the number listed in the email and tell the guy who answers what i'm calling about. he directs me to a detective named lieutenant anderson, who asks me to come down to the campus police station. when i arrive, anderson takes me to his office, which he shares with detective martin. i'm having a hard time keeping a straight face at this point. it's all so gumshoe. i tell him my story, and when i get to the part about what he's wearing, they both start laughing. martin turns to anderson and says, "does he own any other shirts?" i ask anderson to tell me what's going on.

he tells me that he knows the guy, the guy is probably forty-six--although he looks like he's in his late twenties. he's got an extensive criminal history, including some sexual shit. in 1992, he was charged with sexual battery and found guilty. i asked anderson what "sexual battery" was; he told me it was when someone "touches the vagina or the anus--it can't just be breasts." he said it without cringing, so i tried not to look embarrassed, but jesus. anyway, back in '92, this guy pulled the same photographer story on a couple of girls on campus, had them "model" for him, got them posed, and then "copped a feel," as anderson said, under their clothes. now he's banned from campus.

last night, after they sent out the broadcast email, six girls showed up at the police station to file statements.

they opened up the case when a girl they were working with, who'd been a victim of some other crime on campus, told them, "oh, by the way, you might be interested in what happened to me last weekend." this guy had approached the girl, and she went back to his apartment with him. i interrupted anderson at this point to say, "are you kidding? she went with him?" he shrugged and said, "it's the law of averages, ask enough people and someone will say yes." so the girl goes back to his apartment, but manages to--"i think the word she used was 'escape,'" anderson said.

he tells me that he's gonna call me next week for a photo line-up. and that right now they don't have him for anything that's actually illegal--there's nothing illegal about approaching people to ask them to take pictures. but he says that the guy tends to go after the same girls--that part of his strategy is not to hassle them the first time he talks to them, so that the second time he talks to them, the girls think, "well, nothing bad happened the first time, maybe this guy is for real." but that i should be careful, and if i see this guy again, i shouldn't "chit-chat" with him, but call the police immediately. because, anderson says, "this guy gives me the willies."

so i'm shaking my head, because this is straight out of the movies. as i'm filling out my statement, i look up at the desk across and realize that there's an enormous hookah on display. i ask detective martin, "excuse me, is that a hookah on the desk?" and martin says, "huh? oh, yeah. anderson has one too, up there on his bookshelf." i look up, and sure enough. along with two blown-glass pipes. and on the bulletin board there's a bumper sticker from the american cannabis society that declares "THANK YOU FOR POT SMOKING." martin explains that they have sort of a competition going to see who can confiscate the biggest hookah. they display them like trophies.

so part of me is trying not to laugh.

the other part of me is afraid to open my blinds, day or night.

yes it could be worse

and that doesn't really make this any better.

friday catherine came in town. i met her after work at the mellow mushroom; the mixed nuts were playing 80s covers. it was a bunch of drunk mount carmel girls smoking cigarettes and i felt uncomfortable, like always, i guess. cat watched me tired, held my hand and bought me a jack and coke. then i took her to louie's and it was like taking another version of myself around baton rouge. the me who stayed. except i'm not catherine, and i was never on student council like the rest of them. i was a theatre kid.

she slept next to me and we had our real conversation in the morning, in bed. she's supposed to be going to england on the 1st. i don't know where she's flying out of.

then saturday ross's niece was born, and her name is katherine with a k i think.

then there was this hurricane.

i called my mom saturday afternoon to see what she was going to do. becca was already headed to lafayette. my mom is the first to evacuate, always. we always evacuate together. "i don't know yet" she told me. mimi and grandpa were already in baton rouge. i said what do you mean, you don't know. she said "they don't know which way the storm is going, and besides the traffic is so bad right now."

finally i said "well what is fran going to do" and she said carefully "oh he might go visit his family in boston. and if not, he'll be with me. and you have cats, don't you" (because he's allergic)

so when she woke me up sunday morning, shouting into the phone that it took her an hour to get from our house behind dorignac's to clearview and she's not going to make it to baton rouge, she'll have to go north-- i told her well no one is surprised.

then she called me three hours later, i was at work and she said "now you're the closest one to the storm, maybe you should leave baton rouge, maybe just get into your car and drive to natchitoches, stay in the girls' dorm" and i said no. i said "is fran with you" and she said oh well no he's up ahead a little ways. they were "tentatively" planning to meet up.

ie she waited to evacuate because she wanted to see what he was doing. which is why she didn't make it to baton rouge. and now i haven't heard from her in three days. the phones don't work. i think she's in mississippi somewhere. i was so mad at her that when i was calling my relatives frantically all day monday i didn't even try to call her. i called my dad and michael and aunt pattie but not my mom. not that it mattered, because i couldn't get through to anyone. but i felt like--she picked fran over me, and now she can't get in touch with any of her family, and i'm sure she's frantic and i feel like she deserves it. this, i know, is ridiculous.

except that yesterday i finally got in touch with my aunt pattie. they're staying at a hotel off siegen. she came to visit me at work, along with aunt ellen uncle tim cullen aunt shannon leigh kurt mimi and grandpa--and i kept watching the door for them--and kept waiting for my mom to walk in. i wanted her to. i wanted her but she never did. then my family was at the door and i ran across the restaurant and tackled my uncle. aunt shannon cried when she saw me. i don't know why.

they'd let me use the office phone to call the hotel. when i got my aunt pattie on the phone--this was at about 6pm tuesday night; the last relative i'd spoken to was my brother at around 10pm sunday--she signed off our phone conversation saying okay i'll see you, i'm so glad you called, mimi and grandpa are coming, i'll call the restaurant if something changes but i'll see you in a little bit--

then she paused and said, you know everything's gone, right?

i didn't see the news till monday night. i knew st. bernard (where my family lives) would be underwater. i was sitting with abby, barrett, jacob and his cousin and brother--we're from metairie, the west bank, destrehan. we're watching CNN at barrett's house (barrett said why is this crap still on and jacob's cousin said 'she hasn't seen it yet'--my house didn't have power, still doesn't) and we're identifying neighborhoods, or trying to, from the helicopter shots--but it all looks like houses and water, houses and water, and that same pan across the clearview mall parking lot, target and zia's with the roof torn off. i'm learning the geography of the city from this aerial view. i didn't realize the 17th street canal was the one right by my house, at the end of vets, separating jefferson and orleans parish. all i knew about the 17th street canal was that it was between "eight-by-yo-mama's" and "six-pack-a-dixie" in the Yat Days of Christmas song. we're watching CNN and they're talking about the breach in the 17th street canal and i sang, "17th street canal" and abby paused and sang, "dix pack of sixie" and i was glad to be with a bunch of motherfucking new orleans refugees right then.

all day yesterday i was so glib because none of it is real. i had a hair appointment on magazine street at 1pm today. it wasn't until i was reading the WWL tv forum and watching the live feed online--it wasn't until i saw blanco crying and landrieu saying, with great force, "you should get down on your knees"--that's when i lost it. i was alone at rikki's house doubled over. then i went to work.

i cried over cheese and onion enchiladas (the lady said she didn't want the onions) and people were tipping like crazy. like crazy. you could tell the new orleans tables, they were the families with little kids and the parents slamming back beer and margaritas. the husband at 53 said he wanted chicken quesadillas, 86 peppers and onions, and i asked the wife if she wanted the peppers and onions on her quesadillas. she looked at me blurrily and said "you know, at this point i really don't care" and i said "what part of new orleans are you from." they were from kenner. i told her i was from metairie and hadn't been able to get in touch with my mom, dad, or brother since sunday; she looked at me like a horrified sympathetic mother. the table behind them was from covington and then the shackletons sat down at 81 when my aunts and uncles left. i wouldn't have known it was them except the dad was wearing a white polo with St. Catherine of Siena Men's Club embroidered on it. i touched his shirt and said "i graduated from there" and as it turns out, sydney and adam are sitting right there, unrecognizable now to me, but i was on quiz bowl with adam when i was an 8th grade girl and he was a 7th grade boy, and sydney was in michael's class. this is what happens when new orleans comes to baton rouge.

i walked out of work with 120 dollars on a tuesday night and went to chelsea's, where shuchin bought me a lemon drop, and pj's friend serendipitously brought out a bourbon and coke that he didn't want, and then he bought me a tequila shot because i'd never done one and he's from new orleans and so is pj and everyone at chelsea's was a refugee and we toasted to that. i was too drunk to drive home so anson brought me to barrett's, where i showered and slept.

today i got voicemail messages for the first time since sunday. my phone hasn't rung in three days. my dad says: i am safe, please get in touch. my brother says: have you been able to get in touch with mom, because the first extended is this weekend and uh i don't know i'm doing.

i told barrett: i've got to figure out a way to get michael home.

he said: what home?

sweet or unsweet

and for every one person he rescued there were ten bodies he had to push aside
hacking their way out of the attic with a
the reason is because they issued a no fly-over with the helicopters and the news cameras
with an axe and a bat they
they said it was too gruesome
the second floor of chalmette high as a morgue
found an axe and a bat in the attic that's what they used
huey p long fieldhouse as a morgue
20,000 body bags
and the new orleans i was raised to fear gutted and splayed across the national news i am ashamed
this is what happens when new orleans comes to baton rouge
don't take terrace back to your house you'll get raped
R U SAFE?
twice
fucking animals
these are not bad people
busses and gas, not food, not supplies, busses and gas
looking like third-world refugees but this is not
where's the national guard? where's the national guard?
where is the national guard?
candace who cut hair what's your mama's maiden name that's right that's right can you believe that pattie can you believe i remembered no mama i can't
(in the middle of all of this, every conversation still beginning with where you from where you went to school what's your mama's maiden name and my aunt pattie actually making a flow chart, an actual chart, i asked her and she said 'he's my neighbor!' as in, he's got the next room at the marriott, evidently such connections merit graphs)
alliterative disaster rhetoric and unwater isn't a word it isn't a word they couldn't have made a dewatering committee it's
surreal it's so surreal it's surreal it's just surreal it's surreal and i'm not going to believe it until i see it for myself
(i'm not going back i'm never going back i don't want to see it just give me the money i'll get and you can raze the lot we're going to tennessee it'll be like a vacation just a week we'll go to dollywood)
and all these connections lost
you're born in new orleans, you live in new orleans, you die in new orleans. everyone knows this. a whole city can't disperse. neither can it be homeless. and the joke no one gets-- did you hear the one about the speaker of the house (rep. dennis hastert, R-illinois) and it's funny how touchy people get at the suggestion that new orleans could or should be bulldozed since it's below sea-level because in fact new orleanians have been saying it for years

thursday night we went to sogo it was supposed to be rebirth brass band but instead it was the refugee brass band two guys from rebirth and the rest from the mike foster project five dollar cover and two dollar everything me barrett bitoun wade josh breton clinton jacob ravi alanna shuchin and another scattered few dancing barefoot and the guy from tulane up by the stage with crazy eyes (i lost everything i had) shouting fuck you katrina to the beat we had a chorus then they played oh when the saints and i ran to the bar grabbed a fistful of napkins and passed them out we second lined around the dance floor then the band came down and led us out the door i told barrett i'm so happy right now is that corny and he said we lost our houses and that's kind of corny so

proud to crawl home

mallory

katie r. had a slumber party for her birthday when we were in second grade. and her mom told me, laughing, "your legs look like toothpicks!" and i cried.

in my head i'm still stick-limbed and small.

i didn't develop, in the judy blume sense of the word, until the end of my junior year of high school. i continued to make flat-chested jokes for a long time afterwards, out of habit, and people would look at me strange.

it's the same way that i'm startled when i'm around girls who are shorter than me. i was always the shortest. now i'm just slightly below average. the average american woman is five-foot-four. i'm five-foot-two. but there i go again. i'm not really five-foot-two, i'm actually more like five-foot-two-and-three-quarters. practically an inch taller than i claim. but i've been 5'2" in my head for so long that i can't reconcile the extra three-quarters of an inch.

similarly, it's hard for me to reconcile the shape of my body now--the curvy parts--with the skinny kid i used to be, and still am in my head. it's like the platonic idea of myself. not perfect, but habitual. it's like the way my aunt meg kept talking about her jet-black hair--she and her sisters all have jet-black hair--and finally one of them, aunt kay maybe, gently informed her that her hair was, and had always been, brown. not black. aunt meg alone of the five girls had brown hair. she was shocked to discover this.

i mean i don't think i'm fat or anything

(but)

and my mom, she has food issues. like i think she was anorexic for a while. she denies this still. she gained weight after michael, and then she got mugged when i was in fifth grade, and it was sometime around the mugging and before my parents got divorced, i don't remember, but she lost a lot of weight. she bought a scale like they have at the doctor's office, and she used to weigh herself every morning, and i remember going into her bedroom and the scale was on 115. my mom is about 5'8". and i guess we were in sixth grade, at gulf shores with all my aunts and uncles and cousins, and ben or meghan or someone told me your mom is anorexic and i went to her crying. she said, what are you talking about, you saw me eat dinner, i ate a big bowl of red beans and rice. and don't listen to them. they don't know what they're talking about.

she says that now, furiously, when i bring it up. which is very rarely. it's one of those things we don't talk about. remember when you were really skinny.

she eats cardboard food like protein bars, and she works out every day. but she's fifty now and it's not working like it used to. her body is spreading past the boundaries she's set.

they say that eating disorders are about control. i always thought of anorexics as people with an abnormal need for control. but i think people feel betrayed by their bodies on lots of different levels--weight gain, pregnancy scare, acne--how many different ways are there to get rid of body hair--we all fight to get our bodies under control. some semblance of it.

and what does it mean to resign yourself to the inevitable. because ultimately it's a fight we're going to lose. for the most part i think we're vain until we're pretty much dead. i tell myself every summer that even though i feel self-conscious in a two-piece bathing suit, i might as well wear one now. because eventually i'll be too old to pull it off. enjoy it while it lasts. i wish i could enjoy it. i think about how i'm going to look back in twenty years--i'll be wearing a matronly one-piece--and i'll see pictures of me from this summer and i'll think how great i looked. and if only i could have realized it when i was twenty-one and stupid.

i think my mom has given up on being a size four. she used to say that she couldn't afford to gain weight, literally, as in she couldn't afford to buy new clothes to fit her. but i think she bought some new jeans. they're cute. i can't help but notice that her ass is bigger. it upsets me that i notice. but it's also payback. for all those times my mom has told me "you look good, you look like you lost weight." beginning my junior year in high school, when i went away. why would you say that to a sixteen-year-old girl.

and the time i actually did gain about ten pounds, between eight and ten, which on me is a lot. my jeans were starting not to fit. and my mom set me up: a book with calorie counts for every food imaginable, a membership card to curitan's, and a lecture on how to do the math. it was the summer between my junior and senior year; i'd hurt my back dancing and had to take a break from ballet. i didn't have normal work-out clothes. i was the one on the treadmill wearing a thrift-store shirt, jazz pants, and blue converse. easy mac has 250 calories. but an apple only has 70. so. i was reading cookbooks for fun. i was hungry all the time. i've never been so obsessed with food in my life. i didn't even lose weight until i went back to school and started dancing again.

never again, never never.

but i can tell you that a double-stuf oreo has 70 calories. a regular oreo has 50.

you've lost weight.

this is a compliment.

janey saw me at the end of the summer and told me, you've lost a ton of weight.

even if she doesn't mean it as a compliment, i take it that way.

breton told me when she came back from france. you've lost weight. but when she says it, she means: what the fuck is wrong with you?

here: i've been waiting tables thirty-five hours a week since june. i haven't bought groceries in four months. i eat whatever i scavenge at work. a piece of quesadilla will keep me going for a few hours. maybe one full meal a day. and i'm on my feet, running my ass off, serving queso-covered fried stuffed jalapeños to a woman who orders a salad on the side, and a diet coke to drink. my idea of a joke.

and even though i look like shit. look at my facebook picture, i'm gray in it, and that was partially because of the hurricane but i don't think i looked all that healthy beforehand. even though i look like shit, and breton is saying "you're too skinny, eat this," i still take it as some fucked-up validation.

it's like when girls say oh i haven't eaten all day. oh god i'm getting so skinny. how unhealthy of me. when they're secretly proud. it's like when breton, even breton, says "i always get skinny waiting tables." and it's not skinny in a good way, but it's still skinny like a fuck-you merit badge.

i weighed myself a few weeks ago. my roommate has a digital scale in the bathroom. 100.5 pounds. that's the lowest my weight has been in a really long time. i can't manage to weigh myself again, though. i'm sure it will be higher, as it should be, but i'd rather not know.

my mom was taking ephedra back when it was trendy. she knows better. she's a registered nurse. i couldn't convince her to lay off. she finally did, i don't know what prompted it, but then she moved on to some other "supplement" that was supposed to kick up her metabolism. or suppress her appetite. she said it made her "pretty spunky." like aggressive.

i don't want to become this. i want to tell her to be a healthy example.

in ballet class i stare at the other girls' stomachs. mine isn't flat. some of the girls have flat stomachs but occasionally i catch them in an unguarded moment, relaxed instead of pulled-up, and their bellies curve out. these are fourteen-year-olds that i'm comparing myself to. these are prepubescent girls. i am almost twenty-two.

there's one girl, mallory, who's been gone about six months. she's the reason i wrote this post. mallory is about sixteen, i think. she was a strong dancer, muscular. you know how some people say muscular when they mean chunky. i don't mean like that. i mean she had great muscle tone. swimmer body. then early last spring, she started looking like she was about twelve years old. she dropped all this weight. she didn't have any excess weight to begin with. she got so small, bony arms, pink tights sagging at her ankles. she was obviously going through some shit, obviously had an eating disorder, but still coming to class. week after week. it kept getting worse. finally i asked another little girl if she knew what the story was. she told me mallory swore she wasn't anorexic but her mom was making her drink ensure.

finally mallory stopped coming to class.

i saw her back for the first time on thursday. she looks about the same as when she left. but she's out now, she's got an acknowledged eating disorder. she wants to be in nutcracker but she had to gain half a pound by auditions on saturday. i kept staring at her during class. the bones of her, childlike, the dark sunken cavities in her face and the lines carved around her eyes. childlike but scary old at the same time. fuck-you skinny. i went to get water between combinations and there's a picture of the 2004 senior company on the wall. there's mallory grinning up at the camera, full face, broad smile. i wanted, a little bit, to cry.

but at the same time, inexplicably, i was angry all class. i wondered how she looked at the rest of us, what she thought. did we disgust her. i looked at the other girls and for the first time i didn't see stomachs and thighs. instead it was all this flesh, muscle, it seemed so extravagant and beautiful. and we fight it every fucking day. hours in front of the mirror in a leotard and tights. no one likes it. so what the fuck is wrong with you. that you would do this to yourself. we're all in it but we cope. we're in it together, except for you, off in the corner, fighting your body for your life.

gutting houses

today i drove with michael to mimi's house. not the one in st. bernard. the new one, off oneal lane, way on the other side of baton rouge. i looked over at michael: this is weird. we're going to mimi's. this is how we get to mimi's house now.

when we got there, claire ran up to me and threw her arms around my waist and wrapped her legs around my leg and clung there, hanging, hello.

kaylen, kelsey, kevin, cullen: how is it? how are you?
great! we're great!
i fixed myself a plate of beans and rice and sat down and asked them again. how's school?
we hate it. it's horrible.

they're all ready to go home. except their parents bought houses in baton rouge, and they're enrolled in schools here, schools they hate, kids who don't want them. kelsey explained: at st. michael's, where the male/female ratio is like 1:3, the new orleans boys are welcomed and the new orleans girls are 'intruders.'

(aunt shannon and uncle tim went in together on a house and it's spacious, room enough for uncle tim, aunt elly, aunt shannon, leigh, kurt, cully, erin. there's a pond in the backyard, a fake one with a plug-in fountain. i told uncle tim, this is nice, weird but nice, and he said, you know, yeah, it's nicer than my old house--but it's in baton rouge.)

the party was at bethy's house, the whole extended family, mimi and her two sisters and the kids and grandkids. seeing everyone there was bizarre; it was my family but not our house.  still: bethy lives five houses down from uncle tim and aunt shannon. mimi lives two streets over, and aunt kay lives right behind mimi. it's not st. bernard but it's exactly like it was in st. bernard.

i was so happy to see everyone. mimi was so excited i thought she would bust. i hadn't even talked to her since the week after the hurricane. i miss them all, and i've been wanting to visit, but the traffic is so bad that i've stopped driving during the day unless it's within five minutes of my house and i can take a back way to get there.

aunt kay and i were talking while she snuck a cigarette and mimi came over, fussing. aunt kay was like, "mama, not in front of ann," and i thought mimi was trying to take her cigarette away. but then she took a drag and told me: kay's teaching me how to smoke. it took me a minute to realize she was kidding. she smoked in college. i said mim, what are you doing? and she said, completely serious, well, ann, you know, i didn't really want to take up drinking, so. she said the other day, grandpa confessed that when he saw aunt kay's virginia slims on the counter, it took everything he had in him not to sneak one.

that's when i realized how bad it is for them.

and still we are the lucky ones.

aunt kay has all the old pictures up in her new house, mimi as a little girl, granny and her sisters on the beach in 20s bathing suits. she’d put the old pictures on the second floor of her house in st. bernard before they left. but all the pictures of her own kids were downstairs. they’re ruined now. that’s all i had cared about, before i knew about my house. the home movies and the baby pictures. i can’t imagine them gone.

i played frisbee at bethy’s with a little redheaded girl, no relation, who looked like a ten-year-old katie p. she had her hair all curled up on top of her head and she was good at throwing the frisbee. uncle mike’s two-year-old, ryan, was running around in a batman costume. he looked at me and the little redhead and he put his hands on his hips and he said OOOOOOOOOH YEAH. then he ran around in circles and shouted it, again, OOOOOOH YEAH OOOH YEAH OOOH YEAHHHHH. ooooooh yeah.

kelsey told me to come sit in her bedroom. she and kaylen are sharing a room now, they bought new posters today: led zeppelin, jimmy hendrix, bob marley, pink floyd. they bought them, i think, at bed bath & beyond. which is probably the same place they got their matching reversible purple/teal bedspreads. kaylen asked me about waiting tables, she wants to get a job, she’s got too much free time because her new school is easy and she has no homework. i asked the girls what they do in baton rouge for fun, and they exchanged glances and said: we walk. sometimes, they said, we get chased by dogs. claire came into the bedroom and kelsey, irritated with the girl-talk interruption, told her to get out. kelsey is claire’s surrogate mother and it was weird seeing her fuss. 

--but kelsey—
i played barbies with you today.
--no you didn’t--
yes i did. on the internet, remember. (get out.)

sibling bargaining. michael was like that, he would chase me around the house wanting to play and i'd run into my room and slam the door, or try to, and if he caught it before it closed he’d stand on one side leaning and i on the other side leaning till the wood bowed or i could get it locked. and he would cry. and then if i would play with him, it was never enough. and he would cry. his adoration was thorough, endless, there was no satisfying him, and i felt horrible all the time. but he was almost six years younger than me. and it’s not like we could play barbies together. he dismembered my barbies. and besides, i played barbies better alone. if i sat on the sofa he had to sit next to me. and if i snuggled with him it only made him want to snuggle more. i told him, when we were both little, that he was a black hole of affection. my dad used to sit me on his knee and tell me how i was emotionally scarring michael for life. that made me cry. just like every time michael got hurt, scraped knee busted lip, that time when he was three and nearly impaled his right eye on the coaster holder at grandmotherdear’s, i drew him a band-aid.

hey, fix me a coke.
how many ice cubes?

this morning when i woke up, he was lying awake on the sofa in my apartment, it was 12:30 and we were supposed to be at mimi’s for 1. i told him get up. and do you want a shower. (yes.) so get up. (he lay there.) now. get up. hurry. (so he did.)

later, after the party, we’re driving down siegen to the bus stop so he can go back to natchitoches, and he’s being quiet and i’m worrying about him, and i think: there’s no one else in the world i can talk to like that. who else can i tell to wake up, now, and take a shower, and hurry up, and he'll actually do it. this is a weird point of sibling affection, but it’s true.

in kaylen and kelsey’s room, aunt kay and aunt ellen have joined us and they’re sitting on the carpet. beth comes in and says uncle mike’s on the phone. she puts it on walkie-talkie mode so we can all hear him. 

aunt kay says: well, mikney?
he says: your house, the downstairs, is gutted.

to me this sounds scary, but evidently for her it’s good news: and he took the kitchen cabinets down by himself: and next weekend, saturday and sunday, they’re doing more work, he wants kaylen and kelsey to come help him pull nails.

i think: i want to go, i'll pull nails.

and aunt kay will bring a radio with batteries: there’s power now in some st. bernard neighborhoods: there’s running water at her house.

aunt kay says: power and water, what more could you ask for?

kelsey sits up straight.

can we go back?
yes, my girl. but not yet.
--when--
not till may, kelse. at least.
--we could live upstairs--

kaylen stops her. (shut up. it’s not going to happen. stop asking.)

aunt ellen says: michael, listen to me. don’t touch my house. are you listening. don’t touch it. i want it bulldozed.

she looks around at us and nods. she says: i never want to see it again.

there’s a trampoline out back, i take off my shoes, i haven’t been on a trampoline since i was twelve. kelsey is jumping and talking to erin on her cellphone. claire climbs up with me, and sean patrick, and colin. then ryan, still in his batman costume. he sits on the trampoline instructing the other boys to stop jumping. maybe he’s scared, so i sit down with him and he climbs onto my lap. he’s got his arms around my neck, he’s saying something like “jump me,” and i bounce with him, sitting. then i stand on the trampoline and pick him up, he attaches himself to me, he’s heavy, i’ve got him. he whoops and we jump.

revisionist history

aim conversation with michael/highland coffee/8:45pm

deface the facts: it's actually pretty interesting stuff
deface the facts: unfortunately the author can't write
deface the facts: it's all the sneaky ways by which slaves attained literacy
grapity purple: ...was the author a runaway slave or something?
deface the facts: no, worse
deface the facts: a ph.d
grapity purple: nooooo
grapity purple: i puked this week!
deface the facts: ahh
deface the facts: why
grapity purple: meds
grapity purple: i think
deface the facts: for what
grapity purple: i think it was the combination of lortabs and penicillin
grapity purple: for my teeth
grapity purple: i told you about my teeth, didn't i
deface the facts: ah
deface the facts: yeah
deface the facts: ow
grapity purple: i haven't thrown up in almost three years
grapity purple: i'm not a big thrower-upper
grapity purple: when's the last time you threw up?
deface the facts: that time when i was like five and i had a stomach bug
deface the facts: and i kept eating chicken noodle soup
grapity purple: and then you kept eating the pizza
grapity purple: and throwing it up
grapity purple: no, it was fucking papa john's
deface the facts: ewww
deface the facts: i thought it was soup
grapity purple: miss norma was babysitting us
grapity purple: and we'd ordered pizza
deface the facts: hahaha, poor woman
grapity purple: you were like four
grapity purple: and you would eat a piece, we were watching a movie or something, and then you'd jump up and run to the bathroom
grapity purple: vomit, come back, grab another slice, sit down in front of the TV
deface the facts: hahahahahaha
grapity purple: i couldn't believe it. i still am terrified of throwing up
deface the facts: i was the coolest four year old on the planet

some reasons why

(for future reference)
(in no particular order, though i saved the one that startled me the most for last.)

lelia haller ballet school
compasses
mary, doves, lilies, other hardcore catholic imagery
the saints (haha)
my family is forever scattered across the goddamn country
harriette's b&b

yeah, i don't know. it's a more apt summary in a symbol than i had imagined.

story-tellers and shit-talkers

michael and i are sitting by the water, listening to kurt hassle kevin about getting into sports. kurt is michael’s age, going into his senior year at brother martin. he’s on the football team. also maybe the basketball team. kevin is in 7th grade and has never had anyone his own age in the family to play with. this is my aunt kay and uncle craig’s kid. it’s him and three sisters. i asked him how he doesn’t go insane.

anyway, kurt is telling kevin how he needs to get into sports now, because what's he going to do in high school if he doesn't play sports. or he should at least do something physically active, like, fine if you want to skateboard, but really do it.

michael goes, "alright, dad."

kurt continues: because i don’t want you to grow up to be one of those guys in college who’s like twenty-one and skinny and doesn’t have to work out and just smokes cigarettes all the time.

like my friends, i say.

kurt says, "i mean, what if you get into a fight, how are you going to defend yourself?"

i ask michael if he’s ever been in a fight. he rolls his eyes and says, "i run fast."

kurt says he got into a fight a couple weeks ago, he was with a bunch of brother martin boys and they came across a bunch of holy cross boys.

who won, michael wants to know.
kurt puts on his man voice: well you know, the holy cross boys, they roll deep.

i misheard him, though. i thought he said they were deep.
like, you know those holy cross boys, bunch of philosophers.

kurty says, "yeah, their thoughts defeated us."

.

i'm sitting on the balcony of the beach house, just showered, my stomach is a little sunburned. also on the balcony: kaylen, michael, cullen, kelsey, erin, kevin. we are talking about the babies. cullen tells this one about colin, a story i had forgotten:

uncle mike was teaching colin, his second kid, to ride a bike. (uncle mike taught most of the twenty cousins to ride a bike. he taught me at aunt meg's house on ocelot, it must have been thanksgiving, i was on brady's bike.) anyway, this was last year, colin was four. and he was scared, yelling his head off, uncle mike was letting go of the back of the seat, and colin called him every bad name he could think of. but he's four and his parents keep good track, apparently, of what he watches on TV.

so in his terror, as his dad lets go of the bike, colin's screaming: you THIEF....you ROBBER......you PIRATE!

cullen says: you heard about when we took sean to walmart?

this was a couple years ago, cullen and kurt with sean, who was maybe five. and there was this man with a prosthetic leg, and sean goes, "that man's got a wooden leg! he's a pirate! one leg, one leg..." as kurt steers sean away.

kelsey and kaylen tell one about how ryan, uncle mike's three-year-old, learned the word "intercourse" from a TV commercial, although he had seemed to be napping. and also recently they were babysitting uncle mike's kids, and they thought ian, who's two, was sleeping. but then in the middle of their sisterly argument, ian opened his eyes and repeated back: bitch.

i tell them about the saturday afternoon when michael was in first grade and he had this kid adam over to play. adam was a little hellion and he was getting into everything. my mom was somewhere else and my dad was in the backyard, so i was basically watching to make sure they didn't die. the mail came and adam ran to get it and threw it all down on the rug in the den. he ripped open a blue plastic bag (labeled Always, addressed to my mother) and dumped its contents onto the rug: four pink-wrapped maxipads.

adam says, disgusted, "it's just toilet paper."
michael blushes. "no it's not."

i'm in seventh grade and feeling wicked. "it's not, michael? what is it, then?"
michael reddens further. "it's....Always. you know.....like Always With Wings."

and what's that, michael?

in agony he says, "you know.....that stuff to make your butt more comfortable..."

we are sitting in white plastic lawn chairs laughing and erin asks, "what would we do without the little kids?"

she means: like die of boredom.

we are quiet a minute and kevin, feeling included for once in a big-kid conversation, says, "someone tell another story."

.

michael and i are on the balcony, intermittently reading and talking, and i start reminiscing about street fighter II, which we used to play on the super at maria's house. we didn't have a game system at our house until i was in high school and michael was in fourth or fifth grade. i always thought this was kind of sexist. the discrimination began when i was eight or nine and repeatedly asked my parents for a gameboy, which never materialized. i had to settle for playing on ben's or pat's. then michael got one for his fourth birthday. what the fuck is a four-year-old going to do with a gameboy? lose it, break it, or have it confiscated by his older sister.

anyway. i'd brought up street fighter on the balcony because i inexplicably had yoga fire! stuck in my head. i ask michael what that stretchy indian dude's name was and remember as he's saying it: dhalsim. we successfully name the other characters and bosses, though there is brief confusion over balrog and zangief. then i recreate our e. honda/chun li standoffs. also: sonic boom! and how we used to take 'pictures' of the characters in stupid poses by pausing mid-fight. and how we decided that what chun li said during her helicopter kick was: kiiing saaaardiiiine!

i say how i miss playing soul caliber. back when michael had the dreamcast and matt would stay over, they'd sit side-by-side on the rug in the den like they were both twelve. matt showed michael that siegfried move, which his friend from denham had named Face, Face, Crotch! and this is something we said from that day on, whenever one of us played as siegfried: Face, Face, Crotch! Face, Face, Crotch! three of these and you were either dead or out of the ring. fuck siegfried and his big-ass sword. i always played with sophitia, my chun li equivalent, with killer legs.

i tell michael, even after the dreamcast, jesse and i used to meet for lunch at the union and then go downstairs to play in the arcade. we saved all our quarters for soul caliber. i was always sophitia; jesse alternated characters. we cursed a whole lot and he won more than i did. but what really got me was how if it was getting to be time to leave and i'd won the last game, he'd say, "one more game," and i always capitulated, but if he won and i said one more game, he'd say no. so it always ended on him winning.

michael says, "wow, that must have been hard on your relationship."
i say, "no shit!"
he says, "man, that's a really terrible idea if you're dating a girl from the doody family."

.

i'd gone to the outlet mall, i was hungry, i knew it was dinnertime and i also knew it was red beans for dinner. walking up the stairs to the beach house, i hear my family: mass yelling, then a pause, then another roar. and i think, oh god, what am i missing? i can't stand knowing that crazy shit is going down without me. i used to cry if i overslept at gulf shores because it meant i'd missed whatever my family had done in the morning. not that they'd gone and actually done anything. but someone was always doing or saying something funny, which invariably turned into a long-running joke ("feeder bands..") or family legend ("don't be 'caed, it not real"); you didn't want to miss it.

so i get to the top of the steps and they're playing this DVD music trivia game. everyone is on or around the sofa. and i mean everyone, as in everyone who is staying at the house for the week: mimi, aunt pattie, mom, michael, aunt shannon, uncle tim, aunt ellen, cullen, erin, aunt kay, kaylen, kelsey, kevin, claire, uncle mike, sean, colin, and ryan. i walk in and they are apparently split into two teams and the sofa-half nearest me yells ANN'S ON OUR TEAM and then the other sofa-half goes NO SHE'S ON OUR TEAM and i'm standing there holding shopping bags. it escalates into chanting, like both teams are actually chanting ANN ANN ANN, trying to drown each other out, and i say, flustered, "um, i gotta pee."

after fixing myself a plate of red beans, i take a seat behind the sofa and tell the teams that i'm just going to watch for a while. secretly i'm pulling for the red team, because my mom and brother are on it. the game is split up into ten rounds and each round is different, like in one you guess which artist did which outlandish thing and in another you put albums in chronological order and in another you decide what's longer, this song or this historic event. you enter information with the DVD controller and sometimes you have to acknowledge that, say, someone from the blue team screamed out the answer before someone from the red team did.

we are a fiercely competitive people. there is a lot of screaming.

in one round, they give you a bunch of blanks on the screen, then they start to fill the blanks with song lyrics. one of the blanks is highlighted in yellow; this is the word you are trying to guess. and you're trying to figure it out before other team does. like the first one is:

___ broke  __  ____
__ ____ _ thrill
goodness ________
_____ ____ __ ____

so i realize it's the lyrics to "great balls of fire," and the highlighted word will be "balls." i yell, "balls!" and no one hears me because they're all yelling. so i have to keep yelling "balls! balls!" because, you know, i want to win. but it's also kind of awkward shouting "balls!" over and over again.

but the hands-down best moment of the game, and in my opinion, the highlight of the 2006 gulf shores trip--though i went home early, and i'm sure other ridiculous things happened after i left--which is exactly why i used to cry if i overslept--anyway, here's how it went.

it's another one of those guess-the-missing-lyric ones, and the screen looks like this:

mama ___
mama ___
____ ___ ___ __ go
________

and i say, aloud but softly, to myself, "mama mia?"

and aunt kay says slowly, "mama mia....mama mia...." and then, faster, "mama mia, let me go!"

which means the missing word is:

"BEELZEBUB!" aunt kay shouts. she jumps up from the sofa. "BEELZEBUB, BEELZEBUB!" 

she hops in front of the TV, waving her arms in the air, shouting "BEELZEBUB!" until the word appears in the highlighted box. having thus invoked satan, she marches towards the kitchen, arms flailing, possibly conducting an invisible Queen-esque orchestra. she throws her head back and sings: "be-eeelll-ze-bub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me...."

the rest of us, we're agape or aghast or laughing. and for the moment we're quiet, at least relatively, because she has by far outshouted us all. indisputably the point is hers.

tribute

i'm staring at this bowl, hoping to figure out a way to lick it clean without getting red gravy all over my face.

i've tried everything else already. drunk the dregs, licked around the edges, scooped up what i could with the fork and then my fingers.

if the bowl were flatter i could go at it with my tongue, but i don't think it's going to work out.

i suppose i have to let it go.

good red gravy is a terrible thing to waste.

it is something of an institution at my mom's house. we actually refer to it as Good Red Gravy. it comes in two forms: homemade from my mom's friend madeline's recipe; and in a jar from Sal and Judy's.

they are sweet sauces, on the thin side; sal and judy make a "hearty" version but i prefer the original. red gravy, by the way, is tomato-based italian-style sauce. if you're not from st. bernard you probably call it "tomato sauce" or "spaghetti sauce" or "marinara sauce" - in any case, i feel sorry for you.

(a long time ago i got in an argument with either matt or jesse about this; he pulled out a dictionary to inform me that "gravy" is inherently a meat-based sauce and therefore it makes zero sense to call a tomato-based sauce "red gravy." and i said: i don't care.)

there is a story about madeline's recipe v. sal and judy's. madeline's husband never liked her homemade version, complaining that it was too sweet. he loved sal and judy's version, though, and so he'd buy it from the grocery. madeline tasted it and said she thought it was pretty much identical to hers. no way, he said. so one day she poured out the storebought sauce and filled the jar back up with her sauce. he never noticed a difference.

my mom's rendition of madeline's red gravy is apt, but batches of the stuff are few and far between. i love sal and judy's just the same. it's a local brand, so not all groceries carry it, and it's almost five bucks for a jar. and it's worth it. my past roommates are aware of my red gravy thing; i didn't care what kind of red gravy they bought, they could get any kind they wanted, three-cheese-mushroom-whatever-whatever, but i had to have sal and judy's in the house. sometimes we ended up with, like, three jars of red gravy, and this is ridiculous, yes, and i am stingy and i know it's cheaper to share. my stinginess is surpassed only by my stubbornness. so i buy sal and judy's without compromise and i conserve it like water for a dying man in a desert. like there's a red gravy drought.

i could heat it up in a small pot and eat it with a spoon.

in breton's essay for her application to teach in france - back when we were living on jim taylor - she wrote about coming into my bedroom to tell me something - i think it was that she'd decided she had to be fluent in french within two years - anyway, she says in the essay that she walked into my room and i was sitting on the bed with a bowl of leftover red gravy up to my face and i was licking it clean.

these are things that never fail to make me happy - they require little effort or skill, risk no disappointment, and function independent of any mood: fresh cut flowers. thick paper and a nice pen. styrofoam go-boxes and a ballpoint pen. slanty afternoon light an hour before sunset. berries. large groups of people singing together.

good red gravy.

broken city

my friend tommy is in law school at berkeley but spent the summer working in new orleans, and he posted something the other day about the people in berkeley constantly asking him 'how it was' to be in the city.

i was going to write about the anniversary night but didn't.
i was going to tell you about the maple leaf, how it was packed and sweaty, and i waited at the bar for a cup of water, rebirth was playing and how impossible it is to keep still, sitting or standing, and i'm standing waiting for water, watching the people waiting at the bar and dancing to themselves, watching this girl at the corner dancing and i kept grinning at her, and something in the music changed and suddenly everyone is bouncing, even the bartender as he pours the drinks. and bliss rolling down my back. there aren't words for it. joy that makes your hair stand on end. revival-meeting ecstasy, the people are fanning themselves or holding their hands up. they're standing on the walls. i was telling barrett about it--the whole anniversary thing and whether or not to acknowledge it with some big-deal event--seeing as we're forced every day to acknowledge that it happened--it's not like you can live in this city and not notice it. and that night breton wanted to see rebirth, she thought it would be fitting and i agreed--though i was tired and not in the mood for partying. so i didn't drink except the water. and mostly i danced by myself and didn't say much. and i told barrett that it felt good, like church, like church would be if it were cool and led by a nola brass funk band. and what i meant was it felt restorative.

today i woke up and took my temperature and it was 101.8. so i went to the doctor. my doctor's office used to be on robert e. lee; the new office is on vets. i figured he moved because the old office got water. i asked him and he said twelve feet. then he said i probably had strep, but he couldn't test me for it because they'd run out of the tests. so he wrote me a prescription for amoxil. then i went to CVS and there were two pharmacists working and five people waiting, the pharmacists looked like they were about to tear their hair out. my mom said it's been like that ever since. i hadn't dealt with the medical sector of the city. i didn't know.

it's like this: you think you've got a handle on the situation--then you come into contact with a different part of the infrastructure--and it's a new perspective--and it's always worse.

and these are just the petty surface details.

i went to the blockbuster next to dorignac's at quarter to nine. there was a cop car in the front and about seven people standing by the doors. they said the door was locked because the store just got robbed. some dude had run out with a stack of movies and some other dudes chased him and then the robber's friend drove up and pulled a gun on them. eventually the blockbuster people let us in. the movie i wanted to rent was checked out, so they sent me to the store on clearview and w. napolean. the girls working the counter were really nice and i was like "ya'll know the vets store just got robbed?" and they said yeah, we got robbed at about 3 o'clock this afternoon.

at the vets store, waiting to be let in, the women standing with me were chatting about how stupid it was to rob a video store--and how busy the vets store was--and how not-busy the metairie road store was--and i said was that old metairie cc's open?--and they said yeah, it just started staying open after six--and one of the women said she drives out to the vets blockbuster even though she lives on st. claude--and the other woman was like oh my god, the parish--and the first woman said she used to get movies mailed to her house but she can't anymore--and the second woman said you could get them mailed to your work--and the first woman said you're right, i do that with all my other mail anyway--she said, we're living at this one house while the other one is getting fixed up, it's the first time we've lived alone since the hurricane--and this other woman was like, yeah, i love my FEMA trailer--

meanwhile i'm thinking:
-- you can't drive more than five blocks down a main road in the city proper without seeing a cop car.
-- and we've had three bikes stolen in two months from outside our oak street office.
-- but this is metairie.
-- even while they're waiting for a video store to be secured post-robbery, new orleanians will chit-chat about goddamn anything.

happy birthday and love to all the scorpios

at the rue on oak street, they rip out the daily horoscope from the times-picayune and tape it to the side of the tip jar. the horoscope is made out by a woman named jacqueline bigar. i'm partial to her because i've been following her syndicated predictions of my life since i was old enough to figure out that everything worth reading in the newspaper could be found in the Living section.

okay, i don't read my horoscope religiously. but i am superstitious in a new orleans voodoo-catholic sort of way. and if a horoscope is put in front of me, i'll check it out and even ponder it for a minute.

today:

Libra / September 23 - October 22

Take your time making a decision. You might be uncomfortable. Think positively about what you can do. Consider your options carefully. You might not hear the whole story; know when to ask questions. Tonight: Rest, and then put on your dancing shoes.

this is either the best or worst ann horoscope ever. 'take your time making a decision'? 'consider your options carefully'? let's not encourage my pathology, please.

on the other hand--
'you might be uncomfortable. think positively about what you can do.'

that's pretty good advice for someone who's overly self-critical and spends most of her time catastrophizing.

see, this is what astrology is good for. if you're too busy or broke for therapy, you can always count on your horoscope for a brief moment of daily reflection and self-evaluation.

anyway. back to work, so i can get out of here early--
so i can go home and rest and then put on my dancing shoes.

seriously!

squeezing blood from a turnip: it's never been done.

upon checking my email this morning, i discovered that a client of ours, to whom i had rendered a request for a full project budget, had once again submitted a budget detailing the expenses of their annual fundraiser, despite my explicit instructions to the contrary.

the grant application requests a "project budget, including income and expenses."

with the numbers the client has provided thus far, the project budget looks something like this:

INCOME: $300,000 (from donations)
EXPENSES: $15,000 (for a fundraising event)
GRANT REQUEST: $30,000

so basically, we're saying, "hey, we've got a surplus of $285,000 to run our program. can you give us $30,000 more? oh, and by the way, our stated program expenses are only half the amount of our grant request."

which obviously makes no sense whatsoever.

so i had to send off yet another email, in which i did not sound frustrated or totally patronizing at all.

honestly, i don't think the income/expense thing is a particularly difficult concept to wrap your mind around, and i didn't know how else i could explain it so that the client would give me what i needed to make up the budget. i vented this to steve as i was writing the email.

he responded true to form: "well...squeezing blood from a turnip...it's never been done."

this is typical of our office conversation: one of us airs a grievance, prompting steve to proffer clichés like a salve and then take an additional moment to explain the clichés to us. of course he means well. it's just that, as eric pointed out, the over-used expression serves to eliminate the effort of troubling oneself with explanations. we could further delve into such ponderous questions as why one would feel compelled to pepper one's conversation with haphazard clichés in the first place --

but i'd rather talk about this letter, which i found on a facebook group. i think it must have gone up on leno or some other latenight show.

...

Dear Mrs. _______,

You may already know this, but in case Alex has neglected to tell you, I am assigning him to detention for one hour this Friday, April 22nd. The reason is as follows:

Alex consistently defied me. During class he contradicted me numerous times when I insisted that the length of one kilometer was greater than that of one mile. Every other student in class accepted my lesson without argument, but your son refused to believe what I told him, offering such rebuttals as, "You're lying to the class," and commanding other students to challenge my curriculum.

Although he was correct, Alex's actions show a blatant disregard for authority, and a complete lack of respect for his school. In the future, Alex would be better off simply accepting my teachings without resistance.

Please see to it that your son understand this.

Regard,
___________

...

i hope that kid's parents bought him a steak dinner or something.

i would like you to tell me your favorite "I Told the Teacher She Was Wrong" story.

here's mine:

i was in sixth grade; we'd just come back from christmas break and our english teacher was returning the midterm exams. the grade at the top of my exam was a 99. i flipped through the test to see where i had missed a point. it was the last section: identifying nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter.

i remembered this section had been tricky: the teacher included "cow," which you might identify as "neuter" if you weren't careful. but i was careful and i caught on to her little trick and wrote "feminine," because cows are female and bulls are male.

but that's not what she had marked off.

according to her red pen, i had incorrectly identified "hunter" as a masculine noun.

obviously she was mistaken. it was probably just an oversight. i raised my hand.

"mrs. d___, you marked off for hunter because i said it was masculine."

she smirked at the class. "but it's not masculine. it's neuter."

"no, it's not."

she was still smirking. "yes, it is. what would be a female hunter?"

i looked at her. "a huntress."

her smile faded. "go get the dictionary."

i got up from my desk and walked over to the bookshelf. the class was gaping at me: the smart kid, yes, but not the challenge-the-teacher's-authority kid. i was a little shaky as i flipped through the dictionary. but there it was: huntress.

"okay, i found it."

she set her jaw. "what does it say?"

"huntress."

"what's the definition?"

"a female hunter."

the class snickered. she pursed her lips. "bring your exam to me."

i walked up to her desk and she took the exam from my hand. with her red pen, she changed my grade to 100. then she said, loud enough for the class to hear, "it's wrong. i'll give you the point, but you should know that you're wrong."

such snippy, belittling disapproval from a teacher ordinarily would have crushed me. on that day it made no difference. i knew full well that it was sour grapes from a petty woman. and i relished that moment -- not because i made the teacher look like a jackass, but because i was right and i stood up for myself. and for this kid, moments like that were few and far between.

someone buy this girl a drink

second grant funded:

From: Ann
To: BB
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 5:29 PM
Subject: a little bird told me...

...that ya'll got the community response initiative grant. which one(s) got funded? how much did you get?

yay for good proposals and fast teamwork...

congrats.
--ann

------

From: BB
To:  Ann
Date: December 12, 2006 8:41:02 PM CST
Subject: Re: a little bird told me...

We got Project RISE, of course - funded at 166,362...  I think it is pretty darn good.  It is about time people start to recognize the real deals.

.

this was a TANF grant i wrote for big buddy in late september. it was a week-and-a-half turnaround for a fifty-page proposal, the bulk of which i had to write and assemble in three days.

as it turned out, DSS decided after the grants were submitted that they needed to extend the deadline. this had been apparent to the applicants since the day the RFP was issued. we found out about the grant on september 18th. there was a proposers' conference to ask questions on the 22nd. the 22nd was also the deadline to submit any questions in writing. the answers to the questions were to be posted by DSS on the 26th. the grant was due on the 27th. at the conference, we were all like, "uhh.... that makes no sense." and this nice woman from shreveport asked the DSS lady, "but what if on the 26th you post a response to a question that changes my application and i have to rework it, how am i supposed to get it to DSS in time for the 27th?" and the DSS lady basically shrugged. then the shreveport lady said, "well, can you tell me what time you'll post the responses? i mean, will you post them first thing in the morning on the 26th?" and the DSS lady was like, "i really couldn't tell you, i mean, i can't say that, i can't say for sure." so we all kill ourselves over the application and then the day after the grant was due, they said that we didn't have adequate time to prepare our applications after the responses to questions had been posted, and therefore we had another two weeks to work on the application.

but big buddy was like, "whatever, our application is so tight we don't even care about your stupid deadline extension. and furthermore, we don't feel like reprinting eleven copies of a fifty-page document." so they didn't resubmit. so we got the award based on our first draft. this is a testament to our total badassness. we worked like fucking maniacs on that application. my one regret was that i didn't get to actually proofread the fucking thing.

so this is grant number two. it's technically grant number three, if you include the $49,000 grant steve and i put together in a week over spring break. i don't count that one because i set it up, went to boston for five days, and then came back to edit it. steve pulled together the bulk of the narrative.

so with two grants funded, my skillz are now worth over $266,000 dollars.

bitch what.

the local economy

a new gelato place just opened down the street from my office.

this makes me anxious.

it's called the pazzo gelato cafe. the tagline: "italian ice cream made daily; italian ice cream made crazy!"

they've been doing construction on the place (oak street between carrollton and dublin) for nine months and everyone in my office has been anticipating the grand opening, not only for the "crazy" gelato but also for the potential hot lunch offerings.

currently our lunch options include:
oak street cafe (mostly basic sandwiches and breakfast, with a delicious daily lunch special, cash only)
the rue de la course coffee shop (cold sandwiches, damn good potato salad, cash only)
mona's (lebanese food, around the corner on carrollton)

a longer walk or short drive will take you to:
cafe nino (pizza by the slice, a few blocks down carrollton, cash only)
ninja (sushi, a few blocks down oak towards the river)
fresco (mediterranean-style with a broad menu, maple at hillary)
refuel (fancy sandwiches, closed on mondays, dublin at hampson)

camellia grill is still not open and anyway the cash-only thing is sort of a pitfall, since i rarely have cash and never more than twenty bucks on me at once. i generally only get cash so that i can buy my daily iced tea at the rue.

so this means i usually eat at: fresco, oak street, rue, nino's, mona's. i eat out for lunch every day i'm in the office. i'm in new orleans three days a week. i've been commuting to new orleans regularly since march.

three days a week times four weeks times ten months is one hundred twenty days divided by five restaurants is twenty-five lunches per restaurant. except i've really only eaten at nino's five or six times, so you can distribute the other twenty lunches to the other restaurants. that's more than a month of lunches at each restaurant over a short time period (less than a year).

anyway, a month of eating lunch at one restaurant makes one pretty eager to have new dining options. and so now we have pazzo cafe, which is nicely painted with bright furniture accents and more than ten gelato flavors (including tiramisu, an old favorite) and, indeed, paninis for a hot lunch.

today i went to pazzo for the first time and a young-looking italian-looking guy with scruffy facial hair and an apron took my order. perusing the panini menu, i asked him what capicollo dolce was. he said, in either a ghetto new orleans or italian accent, that it was a kind of meat. i asked what it tasted like and he gave me a sort of helpless look and ran to the kitchen and came back holding a small piece of meat, resembling ham, between his fingers. he said it was good with the salami and provolone on the panini. i got it with sundried tomatoes too.

it cost ten bucks, which is a lot of money. it came with grilled squash and zucchini and some type of spicy pickled olive-looking thing, all of which was tasty. the whole plate looked beautiful. also they sell mineral water.

i mention all of this because i'm sitting there at the silver table with bright chairs and sunlight flooding the white walls and i'm hoping fervently that this place will not go under. there's three people eating and an old woman walks in to place an order and i hope this restaurant makes it. every time a small business opens an angel gets its wings. not really. but this is vital not only to the city's economy but to its heart. and these people are brave to open a restaurant on what at first glance looks to be a dead street. i want these people to stay and sell gelato in the dead of an undead winter, like the sweet ladies across the street who opened a snowball shop in november and painted the whole damn thing bright pink with polkadots, and i want more like them to open in the abandoned shuttered storefronts all along oak street or carrollton or canal and

(i don't even like the snowballs that much but i feel guilty every time i walk past that place and don't stop in.)

i want my city back.

here's what never left: a guy in an old-fashioned newsboy cap asked another guy in an old-fashioned newsboy cap what size hat he was wearing. the old lady with lipstick like a firetruck ordered gelato. on her way out she ogled my plate and declared, "what a beautiful sandwich!"

i said it was beautiful and also delicious (with the bit of meat the young cook had offered me with his ungloved fingers) and yes it was a panini, yes there's a menu up on the counter, and what kind of gelato did you get?

"pistachio," she said, and smiled broadly in bright red. she said, "i'll definitely be coming back."

découpage, décollage, décolletage [ or: how to break up with your coffeeshop boyfriend ]

i went to the rue at 5 for a tea. i had a headache. i called it a throbbing headache. when i have a headache i put my fingers to my temples and i can feel the veins swollen and pulsing. that's always where my headache is, except for the time i got a migraine, which was ben's fault. i used to say i had a whanging headache. i think i read that in an archie comic. i told ben once, when he visited me over the summer in natchitoches, that i had a whanging headache, and he said, "wow, what a word for a headache. i think now i have a headache." and i've felt bad saying "whanging headache" aloud ever since.

i walked to the rue hoping that my coffeeshop boyfriend was working. it was later than i usually go, so i thought he might have left already. i go to the rue every monday, tuesday, and wednesday, and he's almost always there, but it seems like he doesn't usually work very late. i would have gone to get tea whether or not he was there, but i'm always glad when he's working. i don't know why. he gives me stuff for free sometimes, but it doesn't happen so often that i expect it. maybe it's just nice to see him because at this point he's such a familiar face. no, because the other guys are familiar too, but i don't like them as much. i suppose it's just that he seems like a nice, laid-back guy, and he's a pleasant part of my work week in new orleans. i wink at him when i walk in and he's busy with stuff, and he waves at me when i leave, and sometimes we see each other out at night and we say hi, or else when i come in during the day he'll be like "were you in the quarter last night because i think i saw you."

anyway, one thing that makes me sad about not working in new orleans anymore is that i can't go to the rue on mondays, tuesdays, and wednesdays. i love the flavored black iced teas (apricot, mango, and blackberry are my favorite. i don't like the orange spice on principle, even though it doesn't taste like orange or spice, and also i cannot identify which principle it is that leads me to dislike orange spice-flavored iced tea). it's always exciting to walk in and see which flavor iced tea they're serving for the day. sometimes it's just english breakfast or some bullshit (e.g., orange spice) and i'm bummed, but today it was apricot. i look forward to seeing which tea they have the same way i look forward to reading my horoscope on the tip jar and making small talk with my coffeeshop boyfriend.

so today is the first day of my last week working in new orleans. when i get to the rue, my coffeeshop boyfriend is there, and he says what's up, and i say i've been to a funeral in lafayette. and he says oh, i'm sorry to hear that. and i say can i have a medium apricot iced tea and a side of potato salad. we discuss how the potato salad, which he doesn't charge me for, is like crack. and i say how i'm going to be working till like 8:30 tonight, and he says "i thought you had a nine-to-five kind of set-up," and i say well i do, but i didn't get in from lafayette till mid-afternoon. he gives me my tea and my potato salad and i take a deep breath.

i say, "so, this is my last week working in new orleans - i got a new job and i'm going to be in baton rouge all the time now - and i'll be sad because i can't come in and ask you to make me iced tea anymore." and he asks me about the job, and i explain how my apartment is in baton rouge since i graduated from LSU, but i stay at my mom's house in town for half the week while i'm working here, but i want to work for a while in baton rouge instead of going back and forth so i can get my shit together and then move to spain and go to grad school, and he says grad school in spain? and i say no, after spain - and he says cool, cool - i didn't know that -

which of course he didn't know any of it, because he doesn't know me at all. he might know my first name, just like i think his first name might be mark. i told him i'd still come in whenever i came into town. then i walked to the sugar-and-other-condiments table and put sugar in my tea and felt ridiculous. we don't actually know each other. he's just my coffeeshop boyfriend. but it still has been nice to see him for the first three days of every week, and i will miss him.