so if i come to your door
let me sleep on your floor
(I’ll give you all I have, and a little more.)
And today I woke up to Gym leaving, Gym who grew up in the ninth ward and who bartends in Kansas City and who better come back here in March to be communications director. Because he belongs in this city, and because he knows communications. For example the other night when I got angry at him, for reasons mostly having to do with us looking out for each other for one day and me remembering how nice that feeling is and being moody about its recent absence, Gym insisted we talk my miscellaneous moodiness out at four in the morning. Despite the fact that in terms of emotional days he was really All Booked Up without any of my shit at all.
And so today, first, he left. And fuck I wish he didn’t.
And I could have worked through that with a sledge hammer but today was a Day Off because we are all so exhausted. So Nathan took me and Heidi and Annika and Kristen to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park for a special exhibit of photographs from Katrina. Photographs of supermarkets with no food and people spray painting HELP on their roofs. I see new images every day, I stand in these places every day, and still I can’t wrap my head around it. Not even when a guy stands in the middle of the party and looks at me with his hand level at his chin and says right here, this high.
We had café au lait and beignets at Cafe du Monde on the Mississippi. The woman working register in the empty gift shop was here last year through the hurricane, not evacuated until three days later. She has a three year old and is 14 credits away from finishing a degree, and she doesn’t care about any of it anymore. She doesn’t like people any more. She doesn’t like anything any more. She started to cry. And I wonder how many people are leaning behind their cash registers here and in Texas and Wisconsin and Georgia and wondering what to hope for, now that they’ve lost everything they owned and their homes and their whole city, more or less, and they watched it happen with their feet in the water and thought they would probably die. And meanwhile one year ago today, the day after Katrina hit, as the water was still rising across 80% of an entire American city, President George W. Bush was golfing.
And do you get this yet? Because like I said I still don’t get it. Not even though Shannon and Chandra and I raced back to Nathan’s car after dinner and drove to the lower ninth ward in the fading light. The lower ninth ward that looks, today, like a scene in an apocalypse movie. Whole blocks of houses are gone. All the remaining houses are destroyed. Trees on houses. Houses on boats. Churches of jumbled, rotting pews and schools with scrambled lunchrooms, molding libraries. All of it broken and muddy and completely abandoned. This is street after street after street in every direction. This is one year later.
So we did what we could think of to do. We drank daiquiris and got tattoos and drove home through the night singing Tom Petty.
what happened next
First it was Friday, and Rebuilding Together had a press conference at the house on Spain Street. The Hands On volunteers sat around for two hours twitching to work while corporate sponsors thanked each other behind a podium. As we finally unloaded our tools at ten, a cameraman clomped from one room to another sniggering No one is doing anything. He asked us to lift tools, and posed VIPs with paintbrushes. Gag Gag Gag.
Then it was Friday night, and – freshman year style - twenty of us went to the French Quarter for jazz. We had three drivers. I caught a ride in a small four-door with six other passengers. The pack mercifully splintered upon arrival, and I spent the evening with a small group on a leopard print couch at the Black Cat club with a corner full of musicians and one Force of Nature who goes by the name Tambourine Lady.
Then it was Saturday morning, and I said goodbye to Tripp and Mick. Which sucks, because they were two of my favorite people around here. Tripp is a sports writer who is sharp and funny as hell. Mick is a marketer who is headed to Thailand between contracts. I hate when people leave.
Then it was Saturday daytime, and I went to the house on Spain Street for the last time, and I patched walls and cut baseboards and framed doors, and in the afternoon I joined the bathroom crew and learned how to hang drywall. There were other volunteers from Countrywide home financing, and the men from Texas and Louisiana called me ma’am and always let me go down the stairs first. One of them was pointing out a troublesome repair to me and I said Yeah, that wall’s all fucked up and I thought he might fall over backwards. But southern men? That could grow on me. And by three thirty the walls were all painted and the porch was screened and the back door opened all the way again.
And then it was Saturday early evening, and I went for a walk with Katie and MaryHelen and Stasha through the Garden District, past the grand houses with balconies and spiral stairs and Fleur de Lis ironwork.
And now it is Saturday night, and I’d like a mellow night in, but at the other end of the table they’re deciding between hip hop and dancing on Bourbon Street and a beer at Igor’s to start out in any case, and I don’t want to leave New Orleans but I might, so I better enjoy every humid dark furtive festive minute.
and sanity's brother in law
I keep finding second winds. I found big ones all summer and now I find small ones every day. I'm not convinced you can't ride out second winds indefinitely. Last night someone heading out into the New Orleans night yelled back, Sleep is Death's Cousin. Amen.And in the bigger picture, the frequent call to arms suits me fine. But I reluctantly admit that in the here and now small scale, I'm kind of sleepy. Physically sleepy, in a way that is making me mentally disconected. It comes and goes, and mostly I'm still on. But then there are other times like today in the dinner line, when Tripp asked some complicated question like How did the building go today? and I couldn't answer. I squinted and paused and exhaled, and that was it.And Tripp said, I miss Excited Jenn.And I do too. So I'm going to bed. It's 10 pm. I don't know when the last time I went to bed at 10 pm was, but not recently. But I know when the last time I got 8 hours of sleep was. And that wasn't quite recently enough either.
why my recent posting sucks
It’s frustrating to have so much to write about and so little time or energy to do it well. So this is the post of excuses, in the form of a schedule.
6 a.m. the music goes on and the lights go up. I wake up in my bottom bunk. The top bunk is unoccupied, so I’ve hung a blanket. It’s like a tent. I groan. If the song is bad I hide under my pillow.
I pull on disgustingly dirty jeans and a tank top. I go brush my teeth in the shared women’s bathroom. I get cereal or jam and bread from the front of the room. I eat it in the big common room. Other people talk but I sit at the table of non-morning people. We divide whatever paper has turned up, usually USA Today or the Times-Picayune.
I get my filthy socks and shoes on, pack a lunch, and gather my personal protection equipment, which the more annoying Americorps refer to as “PPE”: hard hat, goggles, bandana.
7 we get in vans and SUVs and drive through New Orleans to a site. We gut or de-mold or build or whatever. In five minutes we are all completely drenched in sweat. In fifteen minutes we are covered in soot or paint or plaster.
Noon we break for lunch. We pull off the more obnoxious pieces of gear and sit in the shade and eat sandwiches and apples and chips and ice water.
Noon thirty we go back to work. More filth and sweatiness.
Four p.m. we pack up. A truck comes to take our tools. We drive back to the church. We race inside to put our names on one of the two whiteboard shower signups. I always sign up for the outdoor shower. It’s a longer wait, but outdoor showers are on my Favorite Things Ever of All Time list.
I take a shower in the little plywood room with the green corrugated plastic roof. I use my bandana for a washcloth, and soap and shampoo sent down here for the relief effort. The smells seem impossibly sweet and fresh.
I go inside and put on clean clothes and no shoes and read my book. (More on my book some other time.) Sometimes I read in the hammock in our very urban yard. I get through about five pages.
Five thirty someone yells Dinner! Dinner is fabulous, without exception. Dinner could be crackers and butter and it would still be fabulous, in that way that overcooked spaghetti is fabulous after a long hike. But it’s really delicious, by regular every-day standards.
Five forty five we have a community meeting, with announcements and recognition and introductions and goodbyes.
Six I decide to stay in, to do some work, to answer emails and read and write letters and go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Six thirty someone mentions that it is someone else’s last night. Plans are made to go to Igor’s, the neighborhood bar/laundry, or to Bourbon Street, or to Magazine Street, or to some sports bar to watch a Saints game. Last night we went to the Maple Leaf to see a funk/brass band. We drink Abita beer and margaritas and hurricanes.
Two in the morning we stumble home. I brush my teeth again. I lie in my little tent bed in a dark silent room full of sleeping people, too excited to sleep. I listen to a song on my mp3 player or send a text message. The song ends. No one texts back. I sleep for four hours.
gypsum and pliers and stairs, oh my
Today instead of destroying things I got to build things. And this was good.
Most of the work that Hands On does is either (a) gutting or (b) molding. “Molding” is maybe a misleading name because we are really de-molding, but this word is perhaps too long for the sign-up board.
But this week, One Time Only, we have donated ourselves to another nonprofit called Rebuild Together. Under ordinary circumstances, Rebuild Together is a national organization that does minor repair work for elderly residents. After Katrina they expanded their mission in New Orleans to complete housing renovation. Their goal is to fix up 1000 houses in the region. They are right around 100.
And, if I may make a rash and biased appraisal of this effort based on my one-house experience, the new mission really needs some work.
Monday morning twenty of us went to the Davis House. Mr. Davis is the step-father of the trumpeter for the Dirty Dozen, if that means anything to you. The Davis’s two-storey house was trashed in the hurricane. Rebuild Together has chosen it as a model house, to be renovated this week and unveiled in a press conference on Friday.
This is not going to happen.
Once again, I’m hesitant to talk shit about anyone related to the relief effort. People down here are working under rough conditions, often for little or no money, with less recognition. They are making life possible for many New Orleans residents.
But on our site, there are between two and four coordinators at any time. They have no working hierarchy. They don’t even seem to get along that well. And they are all either inexperienced with construction or inexperienced with teaching. Or both.
So the day goes like this: We all stand around. Steve and Yvonne, smoking, argue about who will do what and how many people it will take. James tries to get a crew together for painting. Yvonne, smoking, steals his crew. He gets four new people and they start scraping paint. Steve tells them they’re doing it wrong. Yvonne smokes. And so on.
The normal Hands On style is to descend and conquer, preferably while playing Very Loud Music. We work independently, we work hard, and we work fast. The Rebuild Together style is to talk a lot about all the things they'd really rather do themselves, then reluctantly watch us do them while criticizing. And No Music. Music means you're goofing off. Ditto for laughter.
The real highlights are when Yvonne sees two women carrying timber and says loudly, “Let’s get a gentleman on here!” or when Steve says, “Here’s a hammer, lovely lady.” Because we all really love to be called weak (but don’t worry, still cute!) when we’ve been lifting and hammering and sweating in the heat all day.
So mostly the whole thing is an exercise in frustration. With good management, our crew would kick ass on a site like this. We would tear through it. But no one is there being a leader, so we waste tons of time. And once you have learned how to organize things well, being part of something that is poorly organized is agonizing.
The wasted time was abundant enough yesterday for a very sweet boy named Ian, who used to work in construction, to explain all the different parts of a house to me: floors, ceilings, walls, roofs. Materials and insulation. And then we had a fight with spackle, because – if you will think back 10 years or so – that’s the sort of thing 20 year old boys do when they don’t know what to say next. Which is ridiculous and kind of fun.
But in the too-rare moments of productivity, it’s great to be building, and to know the people you are building for. And today I got to make and install a doorframe, which involved a circular saw and a table saw and a sawsall. AND I now know how to patch drywall.
proud to call it home
Saturday is not a day off around here, but we didn’t have to gut. Instead our whole volunteer group was put to work for the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans to distribute surveys in neighborhoods hard-hit by Katrina.
I set out at nine a.m. with Mike from Minneapolis. The majority of the volunteers here are either Americorps or young college kids on summer break, and I don’t want to say anything bad about them because, hell, they’re volunteering their time just the same, and I’m sure they’re all very nice, and blah blah blah. But I don’t feel particularly invested in getting to know them. Because I am old and bitter and my humor doesn’t go over well with them at all. So I have been gravitating towards anyone over 24, towards new lost people and anyone who doesn’t get along well with others.
Mike is an introverted insurance agent. Hahahahahahaha. Really. Isn’t that great? But in this crowd, that basically makes him a rebel outcast. It’s beautiful. I asked him to be my survey partner.
And he is so cool.
Turns out he is starting grad school next week for public health, because he wants to work for an NGO abroad. And he just got back from Siberia. And he’s training for his first marathon. And we talked about these things for four hours as we walked around the battered blocks of half-fallen neighborhoods, taping blue packets to door frames of houses that were as likely abandoned as not. On the front the packets said, How safe do you feel in your neighborhood?
The neighborhoods look like this: The streets are fine, and the mess starts at the sidewalk. Broken concrete, piles of rubble from gutted or demolished buildings. Concrete or mattresses or wood in front of at least one and sometimes half the houses. Usually messy patches of yard, overgrown and scattered with debris. Occasional white trailers where residents live while fixing their homes. And the houses themselves, sometimes falling over, empty, missing doors. Sometimes half-repaired, re-painted but broken. And sometimes new. On a good block the breakdown was maybe 30%/40%/30%; on a bad block 60%/30%/10%. In all cases the clean new houses were sitting on the same desolate streetscape.
At first I was very unhappy about this task. I don’t like intruding. I don’t like being turned away. I don’t like tromping around people’s homes when I’m so clearly an outsider. But after about ten minutes I loved the work. It’s New Orleans, and neighbors sit out on their porches, and people are friendly. Crazy friendly. And a handful of people would scowl at us, and I would look at them and smile and say good morning, and every time they would smile and greet us back. And you could tell that we were just one in a long line of volunteers who’d walked down these streets, because occasionally people would call from their stoops, Are you here with WIC information? or What are you giving out?
And though all we were giving out was surveys, and an occasional New Orleans: Proud To Call It Home bumper sticker, no one turned us away.
And is there a way for me to say this without sounding like an ignorant ass? No. So here goes. If I had landed in a neighborhood that looked like this in New York or Philadelphia, I would have been scared out of my mind. I would have turned around and gripped my cell and walked the other way as fast as possible, imagining all sorts of ridiculous victim scenarios. I guess the neighborhood where I taught in Brooklyn was quite similar, and I was warned about walking there by my vice principal, so I rarely did. But of course as soon as I was on the street it turns out it’s just another neighborhood, a place where people live and work and make their lives. And most of them aren’t thrilled about the crime either. And insult to injury, they constantly get treated like criminals themselves.
This hurricane? It happened a year ago this week. A year ago. So if you don’t mind a third-grade type exercise, will you do something for me? It’s what I was doing yesterday.
Picture the street where you grew up, and all the houses on it, and the people who lived there. And then imagine that your street, and your whole neighborhood, filled with water so high that it filled up whole rooms. And all of your things, photos and letters and pieces of jewelry, washed away.
And then the water went away, but you couldn’t move back in. The mold would make you sick, and the ceiling could come crashing down. And most of your neighbors don’t live there anymore, so your street is full of empty houses. And you still might rebuild, except the business or the school or the office where your mom or dad used to work is closed. So it’s hardly a good time to start writing checks to roofers. And the wait for a roofer is six months long. And basically? No one gives a shit.
And that’s New Orleans.
And I was going to walk down the street thinking I should be scared.
one day, one hundred degrees
I’ve been here less than two days and already I don’t know where to start.
Because first of all, I am in New Orleans. And it’s crazy here. And maybe you already know that, because, well, no shit. But this disaster to me was too big to understand, and too wrong to really believe. I saw the same pictures everyone saw on TV last year, of people waiting to be rescued from rooftops and cars floating down the street. But honestly there are so many pictures like that on TV, month after month, and they’re just pictures. When I visit places I’ve seen in pictures, they’re almost never like I imagined. Which is maybe part of the reason I feel compelled to go places like Bosnia and New Orleans. I feel like these are places I should understand, and the news washes over me as hard as I try to make it sink in.
And second of all, I’m here in a story-laden set of circumstances, in a church full of volunteers who are mostly much younger than I am, having the kind of fun that is both inappropriate and necessary in a disaster area.
And third, our work is intense and uncomfortable and sad and physical, and I want to talk about that too.
But I guess there will be time.
Let me just start where I started, at 6 am in a former church sanctuary now full of bunk beds. Having hardly slept, I got on jeans and ate a bowl of cereal out of obligation. I got my gear. I got in a van. Ten of us drove to a house for a gut.
Houses are not designed to sit in water. When they do, as thousands and thousands of New Orleans houses died, everything in them spoils. The furniture and the carpets and the plaster and the insulation. The walls and the ceiling. It is all ruined beyond repair. The only thing salvageable is the wooden frame and the roof. All the other things have to go.
But all the other things don’t just wash away – they spoil in place. They cling, broken, to the wooden frame. And then mold grows. So gutting a house involves breaking apart all these useless but still-strong pieces and carting them out, leaving only an exterior shell of a house with the frame revealed inside.
It is disgusting, exhausting, and dizzyingly hot work. We wear boots and jeans under Tyvek coveralls, which are bright white paper lined with plastic. And on our heads we wear respirators, goggles, and hard hats. We swing sledge hammers and crow bars and smash everything away, and then with just as much work we empty all the rubble into a big pile by the street. In Louisiana heat. Wearing hats and protective clothing. Inside plastic suits.
And at the end of my first day I was so exhausted that I nearly fell asleep at 8 pm. But also here I am, with forty people I don’t know, and that needs to change. So with faith in second winds I walked out to the front room and glommed on to a going-out group, and six of us went dancing on Bourbon Street, which is still full of bachelor parties and Big Ass Beer stands and barely-dressed couples drinking big frosty drinks in the street.
So that's my first day. Not even. There’s so much. But I have to get back to it.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I’m in New Orleans
And I was nervous this afternoon, mostly because I hate landing in cities I don’t know after dark when no one is meeting me and I don’t know where I’m going. But I got off the plane, and I got my bag, and I called Hands On to tell them I was On My Way.
And the taxi driver drove 75 mph through the New Orleans night with hip hop blaring, which made me feel happy and relieved and excited. And we got to the First Street United Methodist Church and I didn’t know how to get in, and he waited while I tried a few doors and finally called.
And I got the tour from a Wisconsin Americorps, and there are big barrels of gloves and wireless internet and outdoor showers, and a big room full of bunks full of sleeping volunteers who knocked shit down all day. And at six in the morning the lights will go on and the music will go on and we’ll all get up, so I should go to sleep. But first I wanted to say hi. Because I don’t know anyone here yet. And I’m feeling like it’s the night before the first day of school. Except as an adult, I really like that feeling.
Gone Again
Last night I was talking to Matt on the phone and he pointed out that this summer I have made use of an alarming variety of transportation. I’ve flown four different airlines. I’ve taken Greyhound and Amtrak and an Alaska Marine Highway Ferry. I’ve driven my truck and Marc’s truck and La’s SUV and Frenchie’s mom’s car and a rental car, and taken a taxi, and hitched rides on Craigslist. I ran. I rode Jones’ bike. I was in an ambulance.
I have been doing a lot of Moving Around.
And the crazy thing is that when I first got to Quebec City over a month ago, I was completely exhausted by this. I was coming off of five weeks of rootlessness and I was eager for it to end. I was exceedingly unexcited to have to figure out Plan B.
But somewhere I got a second wind. I like traveling, after all, and I have a relatively vast capacity for not having an address and rotating through three tanktops. And though I wasn’t thrilled about the circumstances and timing, it was fun to have so much Possibility. One of the first things I did was write to Habitat for Humanity.
Habitat organizes groups of volunteers to build low-cost houses. After Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast last August, I wanted to head down and work on a project there. But they didn’t have many builds up and running by my winter vacation, and spring vacation I spent in Quebec. So finally here I was, on the east coast, with time to spare.
Long story short: I signed up for a build in rural Louisiana scheduled to start last Sunday. And at the last minute, it was cancelled. A story that, in other summers, might have merited a whole post of its own. But at the moment I’m sort of in the habit of sudden changes of circumstance.
So I spent another afternoon Dealing With Fucking Logistics and farmed myself out to a group called Hands On New Orleans. I think I’ll be gutting houses instead of building them, which isn’t as fun, but what counts is that I’ll be doing something, and I think that something will be rather useful, and also they feed me.
But because I once again had unanticipated schedule flexibility, and because I’m bad at geography, I booked in four days in Santa Fe first to visit my parents, who are out here for a classical music festival. So this week I have been living in an unbearably lovely little hotel room, and taking pictures of adobe buildings, and hanging out in churches.
And tomorrow I’m taking a rental car to a plane to a taxi to a Methodist church near the French Quarter of New Orleans. Because sometimes you travel a whole lot and pretty much end up where you started.
Homer Simpson, Nicole Kidman, Lance Armstrong (with Sheryl)
Lauren and Marc play a game called Who Got the Deal. It is one of those games that can be played during car trips or while waiting in line. It can be played with total strangers to incite laughter and spirited debate, but it is a different game entirely when played with a significant other, because it can be weirdly revealing and filled with the sort of Wrong that people are sometimes hesitant to show the world. My equivalent of this game is Sleep With / Live With / Cliff. But Who Got the Deal is a whole new realm of judgmental fun.
It works like this. (1) You think of a couple. A couple you know, a couple of stars, a couple you were part of. (2) You decide who got the deal.
That’s the whole game. It’s simple and brilliant and awful.
There are those couples where both people think the other person got the deal, and that’s hard to be around, and awful to be part of. And then there are the couples where both people think they got the deal, which is sometimes annoying to be around, but kind of great. And various other permutations. And there are people who want to be the one who got the deal, and people who want to be the one who’s responsible for the other person getting the deal. And so on.
And the nice thing about being around Lauren and Marc is that they pretty much consider themselves exempt from the game. They’re just a great match, and that’s it. And Lauren is training for another hundred-mile bike ride and Marc is building a car and at night they grill fish and drink Topo Chico and watch Entourage, or they meet their friends for Micheladas and chile relleno. And they have made this awesome life for themselves in Austin, and it’s really neat to see that about someone you knew in junior high.
As an adult, it’s rare to be able to spend so much time with a friend – particularly a friend who’s married. Now I’ve met the people whom La talks about, and I even know what she does for her job. Because honestly: do you actually know what most of your friends do all day? Like, the actual tasks they perform? (I’ve also learned that running your own company means you get to perform some of those tasks in a bathrobe.)
So that has been yet another super perk of this weird improvised summer. That and all the fun of Austin, where I got a little tan and had my first (and second) workouts ever with a personal trainer and saw a turtle while eating fried okra and figured out that I want to learn to swing dance. And then Lauren cut off my hair, cause that’s what happens when I’m starting to feel kickass again, and I got on a plane for Santa Fe.
let me go and i. will. want. you. more.
Texas hill country is hot and dry and surprisingly green, green with little-leaved big trees that I don’t recognize from my northwest lessons. The rivers and creeks are rare, and radiate the quality of sacredness and sustenance unique to water in the desert. We were driving seventy in La’s Cadillac SUV. But at the water crossings we would stop, right in the middle of the empty highway, roll down the windows so the chilled air rushed out with the music. Lean into the sun and drink up the view.
At a shabby BBQ shack we ate coleslaw and sandwiches while Ella devoured a still-hot pork bone. We drove through Johnson City, home of LBJ, and at the roadside stand next to Cattleman’s Bank an older woman stuck a knife out from the shade with a sliver of Fredericksburg peach on it. And we could have driven all day, with Cake and the Jayhawks and Kelly Willis, but it’s my last day in Austin. There were Things To Do.
We stopped at Amy’s ice cream, and I got bittersweet chocolate with bananas and almonds mashed in. And we went to the Story of Texas Museum. It’s not called that anymore, but it once was, and I like that name best. They showed a movie about Texas, and when cattle stampeded across the screen our seats shook, and when a hurricane hit Galveston, mist filled the room. And did you know Texas really was its own nation for several years? It declared independence from Mexico long before it voted to join the United States. And when it finally became a state, the civil war erupted. And Texas realized it had made a mistake. Which really, explains a lot.
And back at home I packed a big box – a box that once contained hot rod parts – with my tent and my raincoat and my watercolors and all the other irrelevant Canada-appropriate things I’ve been hauling around. And when I have an address, which I’m working on, Lauren will send me this box. I will open it and pull these items out and probably feel sad again the way I did when I packed it, but in the mean time I feel ecstatically light, just me and my little bag and my laptop. And it seems that strangely, the more you plan, the more stuff you need. But being ready for anything takes almost nothing at all.
putting the pieces back together
It’s Saturday night and I am listening to Dutch folk-rock and drinking alone. But, you know, in a good way. Lauren and Marc had plans and I was psyched for a little recovery time from our busy day. So I cooked up a three-ingredient pseudoAsian dish and watched the last twenty minutes of Top Secret - a very funny movie that also embraces one of my new favorite and hopefully temporary hobbies, making fun of French people.
Today was fabulous and exhausting. Once I got my onward ticket two days ago, Austin time seemed suddenly precious and fleeting. So we began working through my Austin ToDo List with renewed vigor.
Last night the three of us met up with Andy and Megan, whom La and Marc are couple-dating, which is apparently a thing married couples do to meet other married couples to be friends with. Margaritas at Polvo’s loosened us up for the Alamo Drafthouse - the coolest moviehouse in the world. They host events like movie-okie, where you get up onstage and recite lines with your favorite movie clips. We were just there for Little Miss Sunshine. But even that involved beer and molten chocolate cake a la mode and a pre-movie screening of a 1950s instructional video on How to Treat a Lady. Which seriously? They should continue distributing.
Despite the late night we woke up early today to hit the farmers market for berry tarts and spaghetti squash and hibiscus lemonade. To combat all the lingering local freshness we then hit Fiesta, the giant discount Mexican supermarket that smells unpleasantly of meat but stocks essential items like Cock Soup and Powerful Indian House Blessing Fast Luck Bath and Floor Wash. Which is bright opaque yellow. And which is not a wash for both your bath and your floor, but which is rather a wash for your floor, and a bath soap.
And THEN, we went to Shepler’s western ware. And took pictures in cowboy hats.
And FINALLY, the moment I’ve been looking forward to for at least five years, I got my first welding lesson. Because Marc is a hot rodder, which means he rebuilds classic cars in new-and-improved ways, and he has a garage half-full of a half-built kickass car and half-full of the tools used in its assembly and alteration. Tools like a MIG welder, which is one of the four kinds of welding, which I learned about right after Marc walked me through How A Car Works. And there are really very few things as cool as understanding something like How A Car Works, when you are surrounded by cars every day of your life but have never understood how they work at all. And now? Now I know what a transmission does, and what V-6 means, and that most cars don’t even have carburetors anymore. Because of fuel injection technology. Can you believe it?
And then Marc cut a piece of steel in half, and I welded it back together. It was Awesome.
middle of the country,
middle of the night
So it’s one in the morning Central Standard Time. One in the morning for me and Pensacola Florida and Chicago Illinois and most of Nebraska. And I suppose most of the people in most of these places are sleeping, but I am not. I am Wide Awake.
Left to its own devices my body wants to sleep from two thirty till ten. And the world is just not set up for that. Because right now I feel social and sharp, but there is nowhere to walk to and nothing open and no one up.
The one thing I’ve missed terribly ever since college is the reliable nighttime company. I could wander into my suite at any time and find Kapil watching the Simpsons or Kira pulling all the bits out of rocky road Breyers. And my college boyfriends didn’t mind being woken at three in the morning, because twenty year old college boys are still awed and thankful at every opportunity for conversation and/or sex with a girl. Two big attractions of nighttime.
But since college it’s been hit and miss. I’ve lived with early birds and dated mostly don’t-wake-me types. Talley was the only other night owl in all of Eugene. We would close out bars and then go watch DVDs and drink wine on her couch.
Tonight I’m listening to the mix Adrienne made me for the marathon. It’s a thing of genius, a seamless montage of Sly & the Family Stone and Blondie and Billy Bragg. And I’m looking at a four-color map of the United States, wondering if anyone is awake in Billings or Cheyenne or Santa Fe, where it’s only 12:30.
general mayhem
So once again, I started the day with a very different plan than the one I am finishing the day with.
It began innocently enough with the monthly mass email from my friends who run the fabulous travel site bootsnall.com. They started the site in Eugene, and I wrote for them from New York, and when I was checking out grad schools they gave me a crazy welcome and showed me all around.
Now the monthly mass email usually contains a list of new travel blogs, and ads for travel deals. But this month it started with a solicitation for travel writers for a new project: a series of Logues for popular destinations, like the wildly successful one they already have going at baliblog.com. They are looking for people to write about London and China and Hawaii and lots of other places I don’t live.
But it was a dangerous email for me to get just now, with the considerations of big irresponsible adventure fresh off my tongue. Because suddenly there I was thinking, how little could I live on in Costa Rica? And if I went there, or to Hawaii, for a month or for a year, could I possibly think of anything productive and even vaguely tangentially career-related to do there?
Not because I feel obligated to, although that might be appropriate. But because I actually really truly love the shit I’ve just spent four years preparing to do. I mean, I love it. I am a big shameless urban planning geek. I visit cities and document their public plazas. I draw little maps in my journal. I like to talk about Jane Jacobs. And I am beyond anxious for a chance to start working, given that I find some sort of work that involves making socially successful, aesthetically kickass, ecologically functioning urban space.
And in fact just yesterday I found an advertisement for one such job, and have been giddily assembling an application for it.
Yet. For some reason that I can not exactly put my finger on I am nearly, but JUST NOT QUITE ready to start such a job this very moment. Perhaps because I know that when I get off that plane in Portland, a grittily beautiful city with bridges and brunches and Powell’s, I will not want to quit this awesome job, and I will live in some small central house with lots of bookshelves, and I will bike around and take swing dancing lessons and barbeque with my long lost friends, and date some dorky hipster boy who makes satirical music or selfmocking art and agrees to learn sign language with me so we can make fun of people in crowds. And all of this will be Good and I will want it to Last. For which reason I am clinging to this current little bit of reliable uncertainty.
And furthermore, I got all geared up for a Big Summer Adventure. And though the improvised substitute summer has been fun and altogether wonderful, I need something before heading west again: a dose of stunning, breathless excitement. But, you know. Not from anaphylaxis.
So the current plan, the plan as of right now half past midnight, is that I’m going to New Orleans.
toxic alkaloid venomtastic
I am supposed to be working and planning but instead I am reading about fire ants, the little fuckers that sent me to the emergency room. This is what I have learned from Wikipedia:
Solenopsis often attacks small animals and can kill them. Unlike many other ants, which bite and then spray formic acid on the wound, fire ants only bite to get a grip and then sting (from the abdomen) and inject a toxic alkaloid venom. For humans, this is a painful sting — hence the name fire ant — and the aftereffects of the sting can be deadly to sensitive individuals. The venom is both insecticidal and antibiotic.
Fun! Also:
Some people are sensitive to the venom and experience anaphylaxis, which requires emergency treatment. Signs of anaphylaxis can include dizziness, nausea, sweating, low blood pressure, headache, and shortness of breath.
So I guess there are now two things on my list of allergies.
no man, no plan, no canal
I am sitting in an Austin coffee shop called Flightpath. It’s a great coffee shop with warm yellow walls and retro furniture and paintings hanging on the ceiling. There are the appropriate number of slightly preppy hipsters sitting one to a table with their laptops, occasionally leaving to take phone calls.
I am trying to write a cover letter for a job that doesn’t exist. My friend Jon gave me the name of a former colleague of his who works at a company that does cool urban planning consultant work. They have an office in Portland. An office that is not hiring. Which makes this whole thing seem to me like a giant exercise in asking for rejection, but apparently that is Not How I Should Look At It. So I’m working on this cover letter. But it has taken me all day. And it still sucks.
Dave has been offering me helpful advice.
tortuga says:
how about, instead of applying for this job, i move to a commune in northern idaho and make big metal sculptures?
David says:
I don't think that will have the same kind of satisfaction for you
David says:
though it might
David says:
I don't know
David says:
how do you feel about big, metal, Idahoian sculpture?
tortuga says:
i don't know either. i mean, i like making big sculptures.
tortuga says:
i've always wanted to learn to weld.
tortuga says:
maybe this is my chance
David says:
could be
tortuga says:
maybe this awful, awful cover letter is god's way of telling me it's time to learn to weld.
David says:
maybe, and this is less subtle, it's god's way of telling you it's time to learn how to write a cover letter.
And I’ve been sending out random emails to folks about room rentals in Portland, though frankly I’m having some reservations about flying back out west and paying for a place and then maybe not finding a job there. But Plan A at the moment is that if someone writes back and offers me something, I’m just going to take it. And if no one writes back and offers me something, I’m going to have to think of Plan B, quickly. Because I’m running out of couches, and this is the first job I’m actually applying for. And it’s not actually a job.
So now would be a good time for something random to fall on me. (Let me specify, for the universe, that I would prefer this not to be a large heavy object, or anything else that would send me back to the ER.)
But I'm feeling surprisingly ready to make another big bold stupid decision.
Panama?
lessons
The moral of today’s story is: be careful what you wish for.
For example, the universe might hear your request for high adventure and send you on a seemingly fun and innocent date that ends in South Austin Hospital’s Emergency Room. Because you’ve never been in an ambulance before, thinks the universe. That would count as Adventure.
This is going to be long, and graphic, and gross, and maybe you just want to skip this post. But I feel sort of vaguely in shock at the moment, and I think writing about it will help me. But I’ll make an exception to the I-Hate-Spoilers rule and tell you it all turned out alright. So.
Lauren and Marc, due to a weird twist of events this weekend, are in Portland. It’s just me and Ella the Giant Yellow Lab around here. So last night I made plans with J, whom I met for coffee last weekend and went swing dancing with on Wednesday. He picked me up at 7. Our plan was to have a picnic in the riverside park next to the Congress Avenue Bridge. This bridge is home to over a million bats – the largest urban bat colony in the world – and each night around dusk they all fly out to find food. It’s one of those Austin must-sees.
We parked in the city center and walked a mile or so to the park. There were scattered drops of rain and a breeze, but the sun felt strangely hot. J had packed us a whole picnic dinner: sandwiches, carrot sticks, plumbs, pears, cole slaw, bottles of water. All in a little cooler with ice. We got to the park early, found a nice flat spot, spread out his big blanket, and ate.
We talked about Kansas and religious fundamentalism and fruits we don’t like. And oddly, we talked about how many poisonous things there are in Texas.
And then the bats started flying out, big black clouds of them. Bats are beautiful. These bats are Mexican free-tail bats, which are small and fly quickly and erratically. They streamed over our heads and disappeared off into the trees. It was really cool.
I had taken off my shoes to sit on the picnic blanket, and when the bats started flying we walked across the lawn to a more crowded spot that was better for viewing. While I was looking up at the bats I felt a little sting on my foot. I thought it was a mosquito. And then I felt another. I looked down and there were a couple ants on my feet. Small but ordinary looking black ants. I brushed them off. I went back to the bats.
There were more stings. One of them was quite painful. I laughed and brushed it off. J asked what was going on and I said I’d probably stood on an ant hole. I felt silly even complaining about a little ant bite when there were these thousands and thousands of bats overhead that clearly deserved full attention.
And then the bats finished flying, more or less, and we went back to the picnic blanket to talk about it. There were six or seven bites on my feet. My little toe felt hot and itchy. And then I started to feel hot all over. I was trying to talk about the bats but suddenly I felt flushed and feverish and sick. I took some ice from the cooler and held it on my neck. I felt terribly dizzy. I also felt weird and embarrassed. And then suddenly I was lying on my stomach on the blanket, concentrating very hard on my breathing. I couldn’t think at all.
I told J I might need some Benadryl, that maybe I was having an allergic reaction. I told him this while lying there with my head buried and spinning. He went to find a first aid kit. And then I puked. Twice. Which was hard, because I could barely lift my head. I felt sweaty and fragile and totally unable to move.
All of this happened within maybe five minutes.
And then it got hard to breathe. I’m allergic to cats, and about three times ever I’ve had such a bad reaction that I couldn’t breathe. It’s really scary. Pain sucks but you just sort of wait it out. But not being able to breathe induces panic. Because, you know, you can’t breathe. You can’t wait it out.
J came back and there was no first aid kit. The breathing was getting harder. When this happened before with cats, I was always able to go outside into the fresh air and clear it right up. But this air was stifling and heavy. I asked J to call an ambulance.
And this is the part where I thought maybe I was going to die. Which now sounds ridiculous and melodramatic. But I couldn’t move, could barely talk or turn my head, and my lungs felt swelled up and constricted, and my brain wasn’t working at all except for this weird detached little narrative that was like, Shit. I think I’m going to die in this park in Texas, all because of this random decision to come watch bats tonight. One of those crazy totally avoidable deaths that just happens during a regular day.
Then someone held a cell phone to my ear, and this woman, who I guess was the 911 woman, started asking me questions. I don’t remember what she asked. I remember that I had to keep repeating myself, because she couldn’t understand my answers. She told me not to eat or drink anything, which somewhere in all the blur I found funny. And she kept telling me the ambulance would be there really soon. Except it kept not being there. I think she asked me what I was wearing, so they could find me. She kept talking and talking, and I tried to focus on her voice.
And then there was this guy’s voice above me, and he was asking me things, but I don’t remember that part clearly either. And then I got these terrible, terrible cramps, and I had to go to the bathroom. Except I was in the middle of the park, and couldn’t move. And I said to the EMT, whose name was Matt, I really have to go to the bathroom. And he said, Well, I don’t have a bathroom here. Which let me tell you, was a really unhelpful thing to say. Because I was lying immobilized two inches from my own vomit hardly able to breathe and what I didn’t want to have to do, just then, was problem solve. My mind actually cleared enough at that moment for me to really dislike this guy.
But the cramps were so awful that I somehow got up and stumbled over to a few trees and just went to the bathroom. Luckily I was wearing a skirt and I had this big blanket wrapped around me. It was horrible, but I guess it could have been marginally worse. And then I passed out.
Woohoo, Adventure!
Matt’s voice came back. I still hadn’t seen him because my eyes were closed, but I heard him asking me to walk over to a stretcher. Which was a total physical impossibility. He asked again and now I really hated him. Finally he and the other EMT, Chris, carried me onto it. And then they wheeled me into the ambulance and shut the door.
And then suddenly, I felt like my brain was attached to my body again.
It was cool and bright in the ambulance. It also felt clean and safe. The air conditioning was blowing right on me, and I could breathe again. As fast as it had come, it disappeared.
Matt started asking me lots of questions about what happened, and now I could answer them clearly. I told him about the ants. He looked at my feet and said that if it was an allergic reaction, my feet would be swollen. He was convinced I had heat stroke. I had taken Ella on a long walk just before J picked me up, and then we walked a long way to the park, but I didn’t feel like that was it. But he was convinced. I guess they get a lot of that.
He recommended that I go to the hospital, but he couldn’t take me unless I consented. I wasn’t sure. Suddenly I felt so much better, like that feeling when a fever breaks. It felt stupid and unnecessary and expensive to go to the hospital. But I was also terribly thirsty, and still having awful cramps, and shaking. He kept saying, “If you let us take you, we can start an i.v., and that will make you feel better.” And after about five minutes I realized that I still couldn’t even sit up if I wanted to. And I really, really wanted that i.v. to make the thirst and the cramps go away. So I agreed.
They gave me an i.v., which I’ve never had before. Matt said that he had been on worse dates, one where a girl had a seizure and another where a girl peed in his closet. I took a shit in a public park, I said. Yes, he said, but you’re from Oregon. Don’t y’all shit in the woods all the time? It was the only redeeming thing he said all night.
Chris got in the front and we left. It was kind of fun to ride in an ambulance. I felt shitty but so much less shitty than before, and the whole series of events seemed so unreal and insane, and I was kind of laughing. In the ambulance. Matt filled out paperwork the whole time.
We got to the hospital and they wheeled me out. People out front were staring at me. They wheeled me into the emergency entrance and into a little curtained exam room. They lifted me onto a bed. This whole time they were talking to each other about where to go get dinner. They were talking about which nearby Mexican restaurant had good grilled chicken. I really, really hated them.
And then I was just in this bright room alone. A nurse tech named Marciella came in and hooked me up to a heart monitor that beeped and showed my heartbeat like on TV. And she left.
Eventually a nice nurse named Brooke came in, and she said, “I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” It was what I wished someone had said in the ambulance.
And then J arrived, and sat next to me on a folding chair. This poor guy. So not what he signed up for. And I wanted to be able to tell him that I was fine and he should go, but I wouldn’t even have been able to sit up at this point, much less figure out how to get home.
In a while this doctor came in named Andrew Jones. He was young and really good looking in this very comforting way, soft blue eyes and gray hair. He was extremely kind. He asked me what happened and I told him, and he said I had probably had a severe allergic reaction to all those ant bites. He asked the nurse to give me Benadryl and some other drug that sounded like, but was not, Xanax. And these things put me to sleep.
And some time after midnight, after two bags of saline and antihistamines had been emptied into my left arm, I signed a lot of papers and walked very slowly to the car. And J stopped at the 24-hour HEB supermarket and got me Benadryl, which I have to take today to avoid having a relapse reaction.
And this morning I feel tired and weak and achy but fine, which makes the whole thing seem even more surreal. And I avoid that word at all costs. But it’s just crazy, that last night I was lying face down in the grass in Texas thinking maybe I was going to just be dead, and fourteen hours later I’m blogging about it. It feels so weird that when La called this morning from Portland to see if I was going to the farmer’s market, I didn’t mention it. I kind of feel like maybe I blew the whole thing out of proportion, or just made it up entirely.
So that’s my latest adventure.
time for new business cards
DutchBoy messaged me again today. He priced tickets for a visit out here. Honestly, I am not encouraging this in any way. I have stayed neutral. But I haven’t discouraged it either. Which makes me wonder… Why do I have to keep learning this lesson about what a bad idea it is to like unreliable people?
And I started worrying, Is there some masochistic side of me that is attracted to unreliable people?
But the thing is, no. I am not, not in any way at all, attracted to unreliable people. So WTF? Why don’t I just tell him that I’m not going to aid and abet his little November-road-trip plan when chances are he’ll get bored in the middle of New Mexico and hop a flight home?
And maybe you could have told me this a long time ago, but I’m finally ready to admit it.
I am an Adventure Whore.
Impromptu adventure is my own personal crack. I can’t get enough. It’s up there with sex and rollercoasters and loud music and Will Shortz on Wednesdays. It is a thing of beauty and an unmatched pleasure and probably the whole point of life.
But so far – and I’m trying with all my might to believe this is not conclusive evidence – so far the other adventure whores I’ve dated and the other reliable people I’ve dated are two distinct and non-overlapping groups. Because fundamentally the addict is always going to drop your ass for his next hit. And fundamentally the reliable guy is not going to abandon his commitments because Aeroflot is having a sale.
Which leaves me in a bit of a pickle. Because I tried dating reliable people, who drank while I danced and drove me to the airport and found my spontaneity tolerable. And I tried dating other adventure whores, who made big art and stayed up all night and went into the ocean with me in March. But the former never joined in the miscellany, and the latter never stuck around.
(And a few times I’ve dated people who were either reliable OR adventure whores, but who for whatever reason insisted they were the other. And that, I can say decisively, is the very worst of all.)
Now at some point I may meet a reliable adventure whore like me. We will buy the tickets to Moscow – because Moscow, shit! – but if they are only good for the week of our friends’ wedding then we will buy the tickets to Larnaca the next week instead. And neither of us will run off with an attractive Cypriot, even if (s)he woos us with brandy and yemista, because we will have learned that lesson Long Ago. So we will woo each other with brandy and yemista, and when that gets old we’ll woo each other with something new.
But in the Mean Time, since this reliable adventure whore has not turned up yet, I hardly feel compelled to turn down a perfectly unreliable road trip invitation. Sure, he’ll probably bail. But we might end up drinking tequila in West Texas, and I’ve got a great pair of boots.
milestones
Today, to celebrate the new month, I flipped out.
I got a call from my temporary editing job reminding me that I have one paycheck left. Not that these paychecks are paying for much. Some of my friends earn my hourly wage every four minutes. (No, really.) But the job has been covering my summer, as long as I fly at six in the morning and don’t eat too much. Luckily I lose my appetite in the heat.
Alas. Now the happy days of mobile work I love are coming to an abrupt and wholly predictable end. Why don’t more people want to pay me to make cool publications for them?
So I need to find a job. And I hate finding jobs. I am terrible at networking, and I am terrible at talking to people I don’t know on the phone, and somehow even the idea of a resume is freaking me out at the moment. And all of these things I’m terrible at are driving me crazy, because I’m not really at all terrible at actually doing a job.
But today I woke up feeling panicky and unqualified for anything I would possibly want to do, and I also need to find a place to live, and it all felt rather overwhelming. And then my friend from DC, whom I missed when I was in DC, called to tell me he was in Austin, but would miss me in Austin, and we ended the conversation in an unsatisfying let’s-both-be-victims humph.
And I went back to work and suddenly four people i.m.ed me at once, and I am bad at i.m. multitasking, and one of them was the totally unreliable Dutch guy I had a small crush on in Amsterdam, who now wants to come visit me in November. Which I’d love to look forward to except I already know he is TOTALLY UNRELIABLE and if I make any sort of plan with him I will look forward to it and then he will flake out and how many times do I have to learn THAT particular lesson.
Except then! DC friend surprised me at the door, and we had glass bottles of mineral water on the back deck for fifteen minutes until he had to go to his work function. And then swing dance guy called and he’s picking me up tomorrow at seven. And then La came home and she and Marc and I made salads with all the veggies from the farmer’s market, and we marinated eggplant, and we put a big fat organic free-range grass-fed Texas steak on the grill.
Which I ate a big piece of, in honor of the end of my one-day pity party and the first of August in Austin.
