State of my mind

I don't know what's going on with the economy

or the presidential debates



but I really wish that H&H would make cinnamon wheat bagels. mmmmmmmmmm.

Record-keeping

All throughout middle school and high school, my brother would joke that my AIM away messages was my only way to confirm my own actions, nay--existence. Wait, we're going to dinner? I HAVE TO PUT UP AN AWAY MESSAGE THAT I'M GOING TO DINNER. GOD FORBID ANYONE NOT BE PRIVY TO MY DAILY ROUTINE.

and it was capslocked because i was in middle school. inexplicably (maybe explicably but i don't have time to wonder about it), my away messages died with the rise of facebook.

but now i'm so f-ing busy all the damn time that i do need some mode (preferably electronic and self-indulgent [geek!]) to confirm my existence. if i dont, i'll be 75 and in denial. That means I'd be a wrinkly cougar wearing American Apparel. EW WHAT.
So here it is guys (MB in the future). I existed today.

Not only did I exist, I had an existential crisis regarding furniture and yoga. I spent a good two hours trying to rearrange all 3 pieces of furniture in my room so that I have enough room to spread out a yoga mat and do shit for class. But I live in a broom closet, right? So I had to actually sit down and draw a variety of possible layouts so that my bed, a coffee table, a suitcase doubling as a desk, and my yoga mat could all co-exist in the same room. Once I picked the winner, I dragged everything around, cleaned, reorganized, and saw that it was good. On the seventh day, I did yoga.


I felt better after the yoga, but not as good as I felt before I reorganized my whole room in order to do the yoga. And then I realized, This is what my life has come to? Reorganizing in hopes of doing better, driving myself into the ground with effort, and raising myself up only to break even? Like, why did I ever bother crawling out of the womb then? I guess there was a reason I was 2 weeks overdue--because I knew that 22.666666 years later I would stress myself out in order to give myself space in order to get as close as possible to how I breathed the day I was born.

GOD! If I wanted to be this ironic, I'd live in Williamsburg.

And that is what I did today.

Why didn't you respond to the Evite for my pity party?

Today was like that day many years ago when I was learning to ride a bike, and I swerved onto City Park Avenue, fell off, and got run over by a Suburban.

Twice.


Except today wasn't bike-riding but something else. And now I want to go climb into my cavernous mountain mole-hill that I dug for myself and sleep for an extremely long time.



But I'll have to do with eating 3/4 a pint of Ben & Jerry's for dinner.


The only good thing out of this week is that my trust funds are relatively unscathed.*

*take that with a salt mine

I Can't Take That Job Because My Ancestors Will Haunt Me (and other self-indulgent arguments for poverty)

I'm okay with not getting a paycheck this week. I'm okay with not..no paycheck. No..check? Peanut butter for dinner..again? Why haven't the 30 Craiglist jobs gotten back to me? Don't they check their emails every 2 minutes, too?

Eff you, 21st Century, for making it impossible to be a starving artist without being a dead one. Shakespeare had it so easy. If I didn't have cell phone bills or felt compelled to buy shampoo and maintain proper hygiene, I'd be coupleting and pentametering all over the place. Just keep my nose clean and out of the plague, and I'm fine, right? No upcharge on my alcohol because of rising gas prices. Any animal on the street is fair game for the pit and skewer. People dying all the time--constant flow of jobs and open sleeping spots under London Bridge. Simple.

Good times in the Renaissance, right?

I need a job but no one needs meeeeeee. Except that guy at the West 4th stop who liked my feet. That's not even desperate enough. I need to hit rock bottom and...like oh GOD. I'm going to end up working at some place like Bubba Gump, right?

Which is a fine, fine establishment to work in, I'm sure. But if I work there, it's like having a Sicilian working at Sbarro.

Can I really denigrate the generations upon generations of ancestors who passed down the gastronomic grail of perfect rouxs and cooking trinitys so that I can go work in some yankee corporate restaurant next to MTV studios and serve Mid-Western tourists jambalaya with TOMATO SAUCE??
Call me hyper-sensitive, but I can't shake the moment when my naive world became a lot darker the first time I had to bring two tourists packets of Sweet-n-Low to put in their grits. It's not fucking oatmeal! For Loup Garou's sake, put some cheese, garlic, and tabasco in that shit and eat it.

I may as well just hand a customer a musket rifle and ask them to shoot my dead ancestors all over again. This is a late-blooming conspiracy theory, but the Civil War was really about differences in cooking. So I do not need an Evangelinian ghost haunting me in my Ikea bed telling me tales of my betrayal.

I hope I get that dog-walking job. I'm obviously a little too volatile to work around people right now*.

*which is remedied by bourbon and chocolate. i'm accepting early halloween presents.

New Orleans--A Sandals Vacation!

At some point while lying on the blue porch spring and looking through the spanish-revival archway and further into our yard to the terra-cotta tiles and olive tree, I wondered why we can't just secede and declare ourselves the capitol of the Caribbean.

Apparently, James O'Byrne is a kindred spirit: "Once you stop thinking of New Orleans as one of the worst-run cities in America, and start thinking of it as the best-run city in the Caribbean, it all makes sense."

Maybe not the best thing said about nola, but I'll admit it rings true.

taking responsibility for gustav

if you don't know why i feel that i was solely responsible for katrina hitting new orleans, then that is a story for another time with many, many drinks (no, i didn't blow up the levees).

but i feel that i did it again with gustav. something about how i said i didn't know how i'd survive without the olympics and my life would be "soooo boring" blah, blah.

and then i sat around on my porch on wednesday, cursing whatever i could about how my week of vacation was messed up and wondering why on earth hurricanes never hit new york, a place that i would LOVE a reason to evacuate out of. and then hanna came and is currently "hitting" as we speak/type/read.

i don't remember what i did to send josephine hurtling towards nola, but i'm sure it'll become clear to me while i reflect on my sins in church tomorrow.


Gustav was a non-event. The hype rattled every damn sane person in the city. "Mother of all storms." Shuttup, Nagin. If you're going to start lying again, give us another chocolate city comment and make our time worthwhile.

I spent a lot of time sleeping on the porch swing, drinking wine and champagne with my family and neighbors, playing poker, watching my dad clean his gun--all those things that people do without electricity and who have government-instated curfews to adhere to.

maybe more hurricane reflections (and videos!) for a later time.



PS- GO SAINTS