Thursday, May 27, 2004
so this is it, I'm running last minute errands before I head to birmingham, and from there to the great smoky mountains nat'l park. I. am. so. excited. strange. though everyone's leaving nola these days, for the first time I feel like it's a really good thing - everyone I know who's leaving now is headed in a good direction, on to better phases of their lives - and i can't help but be happy about that. Saturday, May 22, 2004
i've got new glasses! 3 new pairs - well, 2 regular glasses and sunglasses. there was a really good sale. curious to begin getting people's reactions... my trial/tribulation for this weekend: broken air conditioning. got home last night to a nice warm 85 degree apartment, and they can't fix it until monday at earliest, so i had to buy a couple of big box fans to make the place tolerable to sleep in. argh. no fun. went out last night to visit miss molly on her last night bartending in nola, since i'll be out of town for her & ryan's goodbye party next weekend. it was, pleasantly, a very typical kind of night at la fee, not sad at all, though it's really kind of the end of an era for a lot of people, i think... i'll sure miss both of them. also ran into fellow blogger,jesuit boy, & tulane alum trey there, and got to really sit and talk to him for a while for the first time. good guy. once again, it's leaving time in new orleans - the streets uptown are packed with u-haul trucks and everybody's getting out of dodge for fairer climates and better job prospects. this time of year always makes me melancholy... i always feel like there's something wrong with me for still hanging around. maybe there is. Monday, May 17, 2004
aside from starting off on such a damp note, i had a pretty good weekend. spent most of saturday afternoon running errands in the always excellent company of athanata; then went to dinner saturday evening with melanie and darren at cafe degas, before going to the mermaid to see of montreal, which was fun. at cafe degas, i happened to run into my second grade teacher, who introduced me to her friend as "one of my all time favorite students" and told me that she still kept on her desk at home a drawing i had done of my second grade class balloon release - you know, where the kids write notes with a return address and tie them to balloons and let them go, and ask the people who find them to write back. well, apparently i drew the scene with an arrow pointing to myself letting my balloon go and a caption that read "dispatcher of possibilities". big words for a second grader. apparently that little piece of paper is still very important to this woman, over twenty years later. i, naturally, have almost no recollection of the event, and certainly none at all of the drawing - but it's kind of wonderful to think that i thought of myself in those terms when i was seven years old, with a whole life of possibilities ahead of me. i think i'll try to keep that in mind from now on. today was deliciously relaxing - only spent about an hour dealing with work related stuff, as opposed to my usual habit of spending sundays in the office. slept in, watched two of my newer dvds - "so i married an axe murderer" and "the long riders"; and then went to the 10pm showing of "troy". which was, for the most part, a very good (if not necessarily epic) visualization of that tale. it was beautifully filmed, intelligent, and hewed closely to the iliad in most respects. i particularly enjoyed aeneas' cameo appearance (my latin education left me a big fan of the aeneid), but was irked by priam's death, which didn't go down the way it was supposed to. my only other annoyance all weekend was having (repeatedly) to pay for breaking what may be the cardinal rule for professional graphic designers: no matter how badly you need it printed, if it matters, don't ever bring it to kinko's. aargh. visited three locations. had three separate, unbelievable fuckups. a true, true comedy of errors. they're lucky i can laugh at these things - but they still better damn well discount that bill... Saturday, May 15, 2004
flash flood. i cannot remember a time when i have been quite so thouroughly soaked to the bone as i am right now. nor can i remember a time when i have been quite so deeply frightened as i was for most of the horrible ride home i've just had. flash flood. it took me forty-five minutes to get home from the french quarter, most of it driving through nearly a foot of standing water. this was one time i was glad to have an suv - i saw several of the smaller cars that went before me flood and stall in their tracks. even so, i was only able to get home myself with lots of backtracking to avoid the deepest streets, going the wrong way down shallower one ways, running red lights to avoid stalling in the middle of their intersections, and in one case, close to home, driving on the neutral ground to avoid a particularly lake-like intersection that had engulfed three cars ahead of me. i'm still afraid of what damage some of my maneuvering may have done to my vehicle (now finally high and dry in my building's parking lot), but i suppose we'll see when the water drains off a bit later this morning (i hope.) flash flood: let me see if i can express this to you: three am. rain blatting down on the windshield in thick, heavy drops that seem to stick, viscous, to the glass, rendering the wipers laughably useless; attempting, carefully, to drive down tchoupitoulas street, kicking up a wake through an urban industrial neighborhood, surrounded on both sides by rusty aluminum warehouses and abandoned loading docks, through water so deep you can't see the white lines - only the waves and ridges in the water caused by the varying depths of the cracked and pot-holed streets beneath; flotsam - whole garbage cans - floating along the sidewalks; all the other cars that were with me have turned off down other streets, and suddenly i'm left alone with the warehouses, my high beams and the occasional dim sodium streetlamp - enough to illuminate the wet hell surrounding my vehicle with a weird orange glow, and nothing but dark water in front and pure, pitch darkness behind, and no sign of either the rain or the water around me subsiding. sheer, abject terror at the thought of stalling and having to spend the night alone in the car, in that neighborhood, unable to do anything but watch as the water slowly rose to flood it. but i got home, eventually, frazzled nerves and all. damn. and thank got i got that window fixed today... Friday, May 14, 2004
damn it. you'd think that people would have better things to do in the middle of the night than go around shooting out car windows, but apparently not. sometime between 10:30, when I got home from the gym, and 1:30, when I went back out to go to la fee verte, my driver's side rear window (and the windows of a couple other cars on my block) got totally shattered by some jerkoff with a bb gun. Fortunately, the safety glass had stayed together enough that I was able to grid it up with duct tape, so most of it's still in place - should hold until tomorrow. i'll get something to cover it in the morning... god help me if it decides to rain tonight - which doesn't look out of the question. grrr. I so did not need this. Wednesday, May 12, 2004
how fucked up is the world today? geez. i'm a believer in the theory that no, grandma, the world is not going to hell these days. it's BEEN in hell since the beginning - and is no more evil or morally bereft than it was 50 years ago, or 100, or 2000, or whatever. People have been fucking (literally and figuratively) and killing one another since they knew they could do either. the cruelty is no worse, i don't think - but its effects are more acute and widespread, because that cruelty is visible to people who aren't directly involved in it, due to the advent mass media in the last century. it's the ability of the public to be informed and actually experience the cruelties of war - first through reportage, then photography and newsreels, and then more immediately through television. but those media are all subject to regulations, censorship, and geographical boundaries that the internet isn't - so we're dealing with a whole new paradigm of fucked-up-edness today... i'm confronted with the unsettling conundrum of whether to watch the beheading video that IS the news right now, thanks to lizzie, who can always be counted upon to find such things and post and mirror them. can't decide if i want to see it. part of me wants to, for reasons both visceral and intellectual; part of me (the part that's seen other, similar web videos in the past) doesn't want to have that memory for the rest of my life. which will most definitely be the case. ryan's link is here. i won't even link to the movie myself - so you're still at least two clicks away. Monday, May 10, 2004
like i said, friends" and "frasier" ending are really the least of the changes this damn month seems to be bringing... "angel" is also ending; there's the tragic forced retirement of bob edwards' comforting bass rumble every morning on NPR; and even the friday five has gone away forever. and on top of it all, sadly, it's almost time to say goodbye to two good friends: ryan and molly move to denver at the end of the month. all that being said, life in general seems undeterred by these changes, and there are some very positive things happening in my life at the moment, strange and wonderful things. and very possibly a camping trip at the end of the month. :) i got my mom a really pretty, cloth slipcovered edition of shel silverstein's "the giving tree" for mother's day, because it's a book i have fond memories of her reading aloud to me all the time when i was a kid - so i thought it might have some sentimental value to her... to my total disbelief, she didn't even remember the book at all... oh, well. Thursday, May 06, 2004
"friends" is over... and "frazier" ends next week... as far as "friends" goes, i'm sure it's terribly cool to not care or think it's stupid, and yes, i admit the show jumped the shark a long time ago - but for some reason, even though I haven't really watched either series much in years, the fact that it's over still makes me very sad. just the fact that they'll be gone, after so long... I remember watching "friends" every week in the social room of my college dorm, when i was 18 or 19... so much has happened since then, nearly everything i think of as who I am has developed in the past ten years, that it really does seem like the end of an era, one less coffeecup by which to measure out my life, one less constant in a world that seems - especially this month - to be constantly changing around me.
i form attachments easily, i'm deeply emotional, i'm loyal to a fault - so pretty obviously, of the three guys on friends, i've always identified most with ross - the too nice guy - so it's good to see that he ended up with rachel in the end, though of course it couldn't have ended otherwise. as far as the final episode goes - and final episodes always choke me up - it was a well written ending to a well written show. now frazier just has to end up with roz next week, and all will be right with the world. *sigh* |