big-time catching up

Okay. Okay. So perhaps it wasn’t wise to start a blog right before going on vacation AND having a major work deadline. My apologies to anyone who probably isn’t even out there. There’s a newly enabled comments section below (thanks, fred baby) where you can bitch. And now here I am, back and ready for action, new deadlines looming but what the hell.

A rundown of recent (which is to say within the last month and a half) events:

—Went to New Orleans with fred baby for his birthday. This was fun. It was warm, it was green, public transit was running (see below for more info on this)…it was goddamned heaven. New Orleans is one of the best towns I’ve been to in which to do nothing. Also, in which to eat. Sometimes we got kinda crazy and tried to do nothing AND eat at the same time.

We walked, we ate, we sat, we ate some more, etc. One evening we went to the Acme Oyster House, and, while I had heretofore considered myself a pretty adventurous eater, I met my match in crawfish. Tasty, but…leggy. I couldn’t quite deal with the ripping off of the shells and legs and the sucking out of the brains or whatever else crawfish keep in their heads.

Beignets are more my speed, I guess.

We also saw some cockroaches. This is a newish experience for me, given that up here in the frozen north they don’t tend to be a big problem. In fact, they don’t tend to be big at all. Perhaps due to this, the possibility of roachy encounters in the Big Easy was something on which I totally fixated. Unhealthily, really. But the first one I did see was in the very cool Voodoo Spiritual Temple, and that seemed as good a place as any. If I were a roach, I’d probably go there, too. There was a great big white snake to hang out with, plus altars full of alcohol, money, and dried-out pizza.

—Got stabbed in the foot by the Salvation Army. I’m not kidding. This pin punctured my shoe as I innocently walked to the library one unseasonably warm March day. United We Stand, my ass. More like BLEEDING we stand.

—Explained the intricacies of the holy em-dash/en-dash/hyphen trinity to fred baby. In publishing these things matter deeply. Deeply and importantly. Apparently in computer programming they are not quite so central.

—Was regaled—and re-regaled—with stories of fred baby’s bizarre encounter with horny pinkeye girl. Um. Yuck.

—Attended my first baby shower. NOT FOR ME, I WAS NOT BEING SHOWERED. But many happy congratulations to Kt, who seems like someone who will be completely able to take care of a baby, completely unlike myself.

—Attended my first rally. There is a bus strike going on here, and has been for more than 5 weeks now. Oooh, we’re so cosmopolitan. We have labor strife and everything. We get national press. And I, meanwhile, am in hell. Due to my carpooling arrangement, I—a girl who once struggled and often failed to get her ass to work by 9:30—must now arise before 7. IN THE FUCKING MORNING. This is something of a problem. By Fridays I am inevitably a zombie—the real kind, not the flesh-hungry rotting-away kind. We’re talking authentic Haitian zombie, devoid of will or direction, stumbling glassy-eyed about and grunting in response to most verbal contact. I wish we’d asked the woman at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple more about how zombies work.

—Watched one of our neighbors get his ass hauled away in a cop car. Read all about it here. Watched that same neighbor (who was unfortunately back on the streets by the next night—and even more unfortunately, was back on OUR street) and some of his buddies videotape themselves ramming shopping carts together.

—Spent many hours simultaneously writing about Millard Fillmore and eying an angsty blond at Pandora’s coffee house. One night he spent a good 45 minutes polemicizing about the evils of Bush, American complacency, war, poverty, and the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, as his silent Coast-Guard-bound friend looked down into his latte mug and fiddled with his baseball cap. Gettin’ nothin’ from this, Angst-Boy then went on to drive himself into a proper 19-year-old depression when he started talking about his ex and exactly why women are so much cooler than men.

Later I had the chance to observe Angst-Boy with a girl. I was proud to see that the frequency of his use of “fuck” did not decline for the sake of her delicate little girl ears. And then I saw him again, alone with his notebook. He did a great deal of intense scribbling, writing long unbroken lines of tiny scrawly boy-script, pausing occasionally to throw down the notebook and sigh torturedly. I think I love him. I haven’t seen him for a while, and I know I miss him. Angst-Boy, where are you?

—Lastly, but never leastly, ate many, many bunny-shaped foods. My own way of observing the holiday.