okay, so - for some odd, un-knowable reason, a very nice someone at an alternative weekly in southern california, the San Diego Reader, decided that unapologetic, in its capacity as a new orleans weblog, was somehow worthy of being published, for a month, in print - real live ink and pulp - to be read by actual people, not just the usual virtual ones - in bars and restaurants and offices and over coffee and... all kinds of other very, very analog places. which is all very strange for me, and required a bit of a more... coherent format, shall we say? one blog a week for four weeks, synopsis style; with a bit of an introduction on the first one. i'll post these as they're published this month; anyway, here you go - my first installment. and to all of you from the San Diego area, welcome, y'all...


why unapologetic? well, mostly because the name was available as a .com
domain back in march 2001 when I started keeping a weblog. that, and it just
sounded like a cool thing to say to a motherf@$%er before I ... oh, whatever
- it sounded cool. i figured it was even kind of ironic - i was always more the
kind of guy who apologizes for things that aren't even my fault. but over time
it's become kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, something I've come to aspire to
in my writing and maybe even in my day to day life - being unrepentantly true
to myself.

so let's get to the getting to know you: my name is allen boudreaux.
half colombian-american, half cajun. I'm twenty-nine - thirty in july,
which scares the hell out of me. single, which, taken together with
the turning 30 thing, is slowly becoming a frightening thing in itself. I live
alone in an apartment on the streetcar line on saint charles avenue
in new orleans. I'm a graphic designer at a small agency/film production
company in the suburbs - not what most people do after law school,
but I tried to make the law thing work for nearly three years, and
suffice it to say that after a really tough transition year,
I'm happier now than I was before, by whole orders of magnitude.
I love my work, something i've found that not too
many people can say, and fortunately,i'm damn good at it,
too. I still can't believe I actually get paid to be creative.
on that note, i've got a few of the standard issue young-creative-type
bugs - i'm a compulsive early-adopter and a pretty big indie music geek.
"geek" hopefully not being the operative word there, but what can you do?

unapologetic's pretty general as blogs go - its just my life and
thoughts. I write for myself, mostly, and for my friends to know what
was going on with me - and I'm continually surprised that there's an
audience out there that seems to enjoy reading what I've got to say. I
try not to get too sappy or confessional because whiny bloggers are a
dime a dozen, and who really cares?; I try not to wax poetic because
I don't want to sound pretentious; and I try not to get too much into
politics or religion because I've never felt the need for a bully pulpit
for my personal opinions. I fail at avoiding most of the above pretty regularly.

so it's spring now, which in new orleans means the few short weeks when
summer hasn't quite gotten its shit together yet and the heat and
humidity are still gathering steam. it won't last long, which I guess is
why we louisianians try and fit in as many festivals as humanly possible into April.
The french quarter festival was last weekend, the angola state
penitentiary prison rodeo is this weekend, and the new orleans jazz and
heritage festival is coming up next. no lack of food and music around
here, but then there really never is. did i mention it's the
peak of crawfish season? last thursday on my lunchbreak i bought three
lbs. of boiled crawfish and two blue crabs and had a picnic on the levee
near lake pontchartrain, all by myself. does it count as a picnic if you're alone?
*sigh*

i love new orleans, and I guess I spend a lot of time writing about that
here, too. it's a magic place with an economy so depressed I'm
surprised we leave knives lying around - and I feel a constant pressure
to get out of here, to escape to a city where graphic design and
advertising are more lucrative and challenging. most of my friends from
high school and college and law school have moved away, gone on to
bigger and better metropoli - but for some reason, whenever I resolve to
leave, the thick inertia that seeps up through the sidewalks here grabs
hold and doesn't let me go.

i was born and raised in NOLA, but I don't think I really
appreciated how unique a place it is until I went to college in memphis,
and realized that some cities are alive and some aren't. new orleans has
a palpable heartbeat that you can feel in the humid air, it heaves and
it sighs and it breathes and its breath smells like the mississippi as
it enters the gulf all silt and salt and sex - surprisingly human.

new orleans is an easy place to live - I don't like that moniker, "the
big easy" - but it is apt. besides being inexpensive, historic, and
on some nights just hauntingly beautiful, it's a nurturing place that makes you
want to create and share and find some way to express or channel
it so other people will understand and not think you're a loony for being so in love
with a place. I've painted it, photographed it, written about it... but never come close to really
expressing what I know this city to be. i guess the best i can do is to
make people curious if they've never been here, nostalgic if they have.

well, i suppose that's enough for now, and i haven't even gotten a chance
to really talk about what's going on lately with me, but i suppose there's
plenty of time for that later. One quick thing, though - if you're not listening to
andrew bird's new album, "the mysterious production of eggs", you really ought to be.
It's the best album i've heard this year, and i'm fairly obsessed at the moment. beautiful,
whilstly, violiny, quiet, catchy pop. just great.

anyway. nice to meet you.

   5/02/2005 07:36:00 PM