Swiffer nation celebration

Our apartment is in the final stages of being repaired, according to Ramon and crew. Which is the one thing I'm holding onto - the awesome imminence of moving back into our place. Everything is covered in that fine sheetrock silt - I mean everything - but I have never looked forward to Swiffering more. Hell yeah.

And I read great things about reopenings in Mid-City, and OMG, I am already fantasizing about burying my face in a roast beef po-boy at Parkway Bakery. But then I read that my favorite 'hot' sauce - Crystal - is leaving New Orleans. Aagh. For every bright spot, it seems there is a dark spot counterpart.

Grrr.

It's getting really hard to hang on...just in the sense that daily life isn't life so much as it is a collection of distractions, none of them terribly real, or gratifying, or sustainable.

It's hard for me not to resent the hell out of this city, this whole situation right now. Yeah, I love New Orleans. Yeah, I love its quirks, its human gumbo, its flava. But this is getting fucking insane. I am annoyed. Sometimes post-K life is like this little mosquito in my ear, an incessantly buzzing mosquito in my ear that I want to kill but I know that trying to kill it would mean hitting myself in the head in the process.

And then other times I think, well, at least life is interesting.

I find comfort in the company of friends though, usually. Which is very very good. We get together and laugh about the way our memories are shot through...I find myself increasingly ineloquent. The other night I couldn't think of the word "excess." I kept trying to say "excellent." And I wasn't even drunk.

Promises out of DC today to build the levees "better, stronger" but not necessarily Cat-5 strength mean jack shit. Fucking lip service, but who cares? Did Nagin or Blanco call bullshit? No, there was a lovely photo-op and I'm sure Shrub made up a cute nickname for Nagin, like Sugar Ray or Ray-Ray or Nagles, and there were back pats and everyone stood on the appropriate marks in the carpet for the nice camera lady. And Nagin says, the nice man in the big white house said it'll all be okay, so everybody come on back now.

Tripping the mood tarptastic

Chris Rose's column today summed up my own experience with mood swings and the whiplash of my emotional peaks and valleys. I have becomed more familiar with the benefits of mood-altering drugs. I think if there was ever a time to turn to Eli Lilly & friends, it's now. I'm not ashamed to say I'm currently conducting a fond love affair with my new beau, Xanax.

I had a recent evening with friends (a couple who I'd seen only once or twice since the storm) at our local hangout. Pre-K, we'd discussed topics ranging from 80's clothing fads to the sinus conditions of our co-workers. Drinks, laughs, the usual bar interpersonal theater. After-K, I found myself sitting across the iron patio furniture from them, literally staring into my drink and at the tops of my shoes. I was not lively company. In fact, I was downright melancholy. This is not a mood that I frequently exhibit, and certainly not one that I bring to a friendly get-together. Our usual lively bar talk was replaced by monologues of almost haiku-ish brevity.

And yet, the next day, I was back to "normal," and wondering what the hell was my problem last night? I have been in awe of the amplitude of my own uncontrollable mood swings - hell, I didn't know my moods could do this - and I'm left reeling in the wake of these hot, quick punches of emotions. Pfizer should take me in as a lab rat. This is nuts.

Tarptastic!

We're back in Uptown New Orleans. Not staying at our house though - "Ramone" is supposedly showing up with his crew Monday (and he's been scheduled to show up for the last 2 Mondays) - so maybe things will move forward soon. Who knows. We do strongly suspect, however, that our rent will increase considerably soon. Which sucks, and which will probably mean us leaving New Orleans...especially if I am laid off.

My job situation is tenuous, to put it mildly. Layoffs are imminent, and have been going on in small waves since September, and I just feel like my number will be up soon.

I want to be one of those people who digs in their heels and says "I'M STAYING IN NOLA NO MATTER WHAT! YEAHHH!!" but with *both* my job *and* my housing up in the air, and the stress of the last few months, I am just tired. And I want some normalcy. I'm not saying I have it bad - I mean, we are doing much better than our neighbors to the East and in Lakeview - I'm just saying how things look for me. I could swing with the stress of either my job, or my housing up in the air...but to have both so uncertain is a double-whammy. Ugh.

I don't know how much longer I'll be here.

Our Lady of Blessed Wall Mold

I predicted a few weeks ago that people would soon start to see images of Mother Teresa, Elvis, Ernie K-Doe, et al. in their post-Katrina household wall mold.

So far, no reports. No MSM reports, anyway. Anyone?

The prosecution rests

The T-P paints a grim picture, via the Rebuild New Orleans Commission, of the current state of the city. Depressing. Even if crime is indeed "a blip on the radar", there is no criminal court to prosecute anyone. That, to me, is more frightening than the crime that existed before in the city.

I'm trying to keep a stable head about all of this, and I am largely optimistic about the future of New Orleans, but holy crap.

The questions on everyone's mind

Stephanie Grace at the Times-Picayune elegantly summarized the questions running through my head and the accompanying emotions in her "We're up, and we're down" article:

The questions are at once global and intensely personal:
Will businesses, even the ones that want to stay in New Orleans, be able to function if there's no place for their workers to live? Can we count on the cavalry, as Nagin put it, to stick around? Or has donor fatigue already set in up in Washington? Has President Bush finally stopped dropping in for those staged, numbingly routine photo ops?
Which favorite corner haunts will reopen, and which old friends will be around to share a toast when they do?
How can we resume our lives, as Nagin has urged us to do, if we can't put our kids in school?
How is a city full of night owls supposed to function under a curfew, anyway?
And is it really, truly OK to drink the water?

Read it here.

Go the hell away, Ty Pennington

I find that home improvement magazines, and especially HGTV, make me want to shriek obscenities and throw silverware, or whatever's close by. These symptoms popped up after the storm. Maybe it's just me.

Elsewhere: Not New Orleans

I try to stay positive about the future of New Orleans, for the most part...mostly for friends and family, and because that's where my home and job is (for now, anyway). But the truth is - I don't know. I don't know if I can stay past, say, Mardi Gras. The environmental stuff worries me. My job situation worries me. The mold in our house and my horrible mold allergies worry me. It's all a wait and see game.

I hate not being in control of my job situation, and I feel like I'm not in control of much of anything right now. So I'm kind of "shopping" for other cities. In a half-assed (half-hearted) way. I like Austin. I like NYC. I like them both a lot. But I'm not sure I like them enough to live there. And my husband insists we live somewhere where we have friends, so that narrows down the list. I insist we live somewhere with a soul, with a unique personality. That narrows down the list. Both of us want to live close to our parents, who live here in south Louisiana, so that narrows down the list.

New Orleans: job in doubt, environmental hazards, friends gone, debris and infrastructure problems, below-average salaries, close to family, has a soul (this is in doubt if the city becomes the Vegas of the South - thanks Nagin), has the best food in the country.

Elsewhere: Not New Orleans.

Every time I go through this pro and con list in my head, I get nowhere. It was gently suggested to me that I write this stuff down (thank you Blogger) to get it out of my head and so I would shut the fuck up about it. Heh.

I wish, I really really really wish I wanted to move somewhere else. But I really liked New Orleans - the New Orleans before the storm. It's not going to be the same now. It might be similar, and I hope it is, but New Orleans won't ever be the same.

Seeing the New New Orleans

I saw the city for the first time the other day (see the other post about our apartment). I had not been back to New Orleans for a month, despite the fact that my husband had already been in (thank you, press pass), and a friend of ours bribed his way into the city the week after the storm with beer and Rice Krispy treats.

Uptown, I knew, had survived the storm relatively well. I guess I should say, exceptionally well, relative to the destruction suffered by the Lower Ninth. I had voraciously sought photos of the city online after the storm, and I thought I had a good handle on what different parts of the city looked like. My stomach, however, always tells the real story, and it was doing Olympic-sized somersaults as we drove in through Kenner on I-10. As I looked around, I thought, it doesn't seem too bad out here in Kenner/Metairie. Some building damage. Some sign damage. It wasn't until we were on Carrollton, when I saw that block that burned down...the blank traffic lights...the ghost-town that was now Uptown...that's when I started to cry a little. Damn that was hard to see. Seeing this beautiful part of town that just a few weeks ago thrived with people and smells and life and sound, and it was now so...dead, quiet, and slow...it was awful. It felt like the separation of New Orleans from its people was just as bloody as the suffering each had felt on its own.

Driving into the CBD with my friend Joyce revealed a different scene. Canal Street's neutral ground was a parking lot of emergency vehicles and utility trucks. Guys in aprons, gas masks, and hazmat suits flitted in and out of businesses, carrying out bags of god knows what. Gigantic trailers of mobile generators took up almost all the available parking space, and an enormous vat of something took up the width of the sidewalk outside the Hibernia bank head offices. The sidewalks on Canal Street were filled with Latino laborers lining up for their Salvation Army truck lunches, eating on the steps of the Sheraton. Big stinky piles of sheetrock and ceiling tile lined the street, on top of dusty sidewalks and curbs. Some media had setups on street corners, absent of reporters. Despite the bustle outside, the lobby bar at the Sheraton was totally empty. A big industrial fan whirred in the corner, pointed at the center of the room.

We were rubbernecking like bugeyed tourists at all the activity. There was also the occasional scene of destruction, like the famously photographed cars crushed under a crumbled brick wall. As we drove into the Bywater, things seemed a little less...predictable. Even though the CBD was not predictable by any stretch, at least you felt like things were kind of under someone's control (more specifically, under someone's contract). In the Bywater, the charred remains of a warehouse filled with petroleum tanks had collapsed toward the street. Streets and houses and business were all empty. Tree trimmers were few and far between. So few people were outside, and the ones that were outside were either military or contractors. Abandoned RTA buses straddled the neutral ground on some streets. On one boarded up house, someone had spray painted, "FUCK YOU GREEN GHOST." Joyce took photos, and we both started to feel increasingly "out of it." I don't know how to explain it...we had a hard time finishing sentences, and we both felt dizzy and lightheaded. I got so dizzy at point I actually passed out for just a second or two - something I have never done - and I started to be a little concerned about the air environment around us.

First visit to the apartment

I finally got to see our place. My husband and I have an apartment in Uptown on Camp Street, between Robert and Upperline. Right after Katrina hit I started seeing posts in the nola.com forums about a fire that swept through the Camp/Upperline area, and burned 5 houses down to the cinders. I knew - I just knew our house was one of them. I just knew something more awful had to happen to us. When it rains, it pours, right? Surviving the hurricane with no flooding, only to have our wonderful apartment be burned to ash.

But our place didn't burn down. It was intact, with roof and window damage that's fixable. Went we went inside, the power was back on so the fridge didn't smell like hell (though we have to get rid of it) and the only overwhelming smell was that of the mold and mildew that was cloaking several walls. The minor damage our apartment suffered almost made me feel guilty.

Our neighbors' houses-turned-ashes is a sickening thing to see. It looks like a bomb exploded. Just the chimneys, the porch steps and the porch pillars remain. The cars on the street near those houses were burned down to the unpainted metal. The paint on the license plates was burned off, and the plates themselves warped under the heat. After a few hours of getting sweaty, headachey from the mold and crabby from the heat while loading our possessions into boxes, I looked out to see that awful devastation and I just felt numb.

Working hard is hardly working

The future of my job is tenuous at best. I can't return to my office because of building damage - they have shut everything down until January. They are graciously paying us full-timers our salaries, but are laying off administrative and part-time staff in the meantime...and I can only wonder when my time is up.

I hate this. This waiting. But I love my job - it was a big part of why I love New Orleans. The people I work with are fun, goofy, diverse, and real. We were all friends at work and after work, and we shared birthday parties and drinks. And now everything's in question. We're all trying to be patient, and be helpful - we're desperately doing things to be visible to upper management. Things to make us look indispensable, so they won't lay us off.

In the meantime, until the office re-opens, I am hoping to go to Atlanta and help out with Red Cross efforts there. I hear they need people to help with logistics in food supply/delivery/distribution. I have been offered a great volunteer gig, and I really want to do it. I can't stand feeling helpless and the restless cabin fever has really done a number on my sanity.

But I've been told by my boss - who I love - that if I go, I'll probably lose my job. But even if I don't go, there's no guarantee that I'll keep my job, he says.

I've been at my job for over 7 years, and it kind of pisses me off that I'm being evaluated on whether or not I can sit around and wait for a work assignment when the office is closed ANYway. I would much rather go and volunteer in Atlanta...I can stay with friends there, and I am willing to not draw a salary from my company when I'm gone. Why, then, when they know this, are they still threatening to lay me off if I go and volunteer? Why lay off one of the few people who has been busting her ass in the post-Katrina aftermath, who is willing to not be paid until the office re-opens? How does my situation create greater burdens for my employer, so that I should be laid off?

The climate of fear among my co-workers is thick. We feel so in the dark and hate knowing that the future of our jobs is being discussed by the clueless bigwigs up in New Jersey (corporate headquarters). We're pissed off, scared, and just want things to be normal. Please.

Losing what mattered most

Losing a whole community of friends has been the most devastating effect of Katrina. No question about it. Watching all your friends get scattered to the wind - pardon the phrase - and knowing that some, if not all, of them won't return is just...hard. People you had drinks with, cried with, shared red beans & rice with, people who helped you move, brought you gifts when your dad died, people who made you feel good. All gone now. Some have said they're returning...but a lot of them aren't. They have jobs in other cities now, far from New Orleans. Some have kids and simply can't return for a while now, if at all. Our community of friends as we knew it simply doesn't exist anymore. *Poof.*

When I realized that my most valuable possession was this community, I just lost my shit. One evening, while talking/bawling with my friend Joyce, we both sobbed on each other's shoulders when this realization hit home. Possessions, as they say, can be bought and replaced. But as I wailed to Joyce, "Y-youu caaan't buy friends at the store!!" And then I cried, a result of both my deep grief and the fact that my abilities to describe my feelings of utter loss were crumbling into really lame metaphors.

Retail therapy

Shopping in the weeks after Katrina took on a whole new dimension. Before Katrina, a trip to the mall was a mundane experience, blandly punctuated by a soft pretzel or some people watching, culminating in the purchase of something from a sale rack somewhere. After Katrina, a trip to the mall was a pageant of disoriented, displaced, glassy-eyed wanderers. You could tell who they were. In the mall at Lafayette, Louisiana, close to where we had evacuated after the storm, the Katrina evacuees paced up and down the restroom and customer service hallways in the mall; they pooled together in the food court to trade accounts of what they'd heard about this neighborhood or that neighborhood; they squatted against the marble planter and talked anxiously about what to do next. We all seemed to share the same state of mind: addled, hot with cabin fever, and discombobulated. While standing in line for a sandwich at Quizno's, I met someone who worked at the same company I do (I had never met her before), and lived down the street from me. We immediately shared the latest information we knew: Was the street flooded? Any trees down? Have you seen photos?

Little encounters like the one in the Quizno line repeated themselves across southern Louisiana - in restaurants, Wal-Marts, and gas stations. Everyone was so starved for information, and the media was playing the same video loops of rescues off of rooftops. But I kept hearing gratitude - lots of gratitude. After stumbling upon yet another pocket of evacuees in the local Wal-Mart, one woman from Slidell told me that friends of friends had taken her family in. She shook her head and said, "And they didn't even know us."

Reading the email of the living

In the days after Katrina, I was asked to help a local New Orleans site review and route reader email. It was, and is, a popular site, and many people desperate for news - especially news coming from local media - were sending email to the site. Emails like, please rescue my father. He needs insulin and is in a wheelchair. Or emails like, I can't find my mother. She is 88 years old and refused to come with me. Here is her address. I love her so much. Please, please help me. Or: I want to adopt that dog I saw on CNN. Can you send me information? Or emails like - and these were always fun to read - why do you people live where you live? Don't you know you're below sea level? The people of New Orleans deserve what they get. And you're all crooks.

Etc.

Reading these messages was soul-crushing. I was exhausted. Day after day, during that first 5 or 7 days after the storm, that's all I did. I sat furrowed and slackjawed at a computer screen, reading people's pleas for help - any help - and tried to get them relevant information. I posted address information to the site for search and rescue teams, with the hope that someone with a helicopter or a boat could reach them. Sometimes I felt like I was really doing something good. Other times I wondered if we were giving people a false sense of hope - we could not guarantee that rescue organizations were reading our site. We tried to direct them to FEMA, Red Cross, etc. but so many wrote us saying, I can't reach those emergency people - so please, please help me.

After the first week or so, the emails started to change. And as I type right now, I have big fat hot tears coming up, as I remember that first different message I got. To paraphrase, it went something like this:

My brother [name and address] was on oxygen before the storm. He did not evacuate with us and his body is in the house. Please how do we get his body? Can you help?

Search and rescue emails gave way to death emails. My optimism for the search and rescue cases - there were so many posts asking for help on the site - gave way to a new feeling: rattled, jittery helplessness. With a lot of quiet despair. I didn't know how to handle it. How do you handle something like this? How do you handle your emotions when your days are spent reading email after email of loss, death, and dying? People reaching out to you for help, and you're not equipped to help them? Lots of people were around me, living with us or visiting us, and I didn't feel like I could let it all hang out. Even if I could have done that, I'm not sure what it would look like, or how I could control all my emotions.

I'm sure that what I expressed came nowhere close to the trauma I was feeling. I felt like I had enormous responsibility to these strangers who wrote these things to me, very personal things about losing their "matriarch of the family who keeps us all together." Message after message about losing grandmothers, brothers, sisters, neighbors, and friends.

I thought, how did I get here, to this point? Where I'm reading a woman's email, who is upset about losing her Mawmaw, who likely lost everything that Mawmaw ever gave her for her birthday, crocheted for her wedding, or loaned her until she came over for her usual Sunday dinner?

Say hello to the twitching half-wit

This post-Katrina thing that has affected every corner of my life - my home, my friends, my job, my relationships with friends and family - escapes description. I mean, it escapes that kind of wry, subtly euphemistic yet gratifyingly accurate kind of commentary. Think Vonnegut or the Daily Show. Yet this event has (further) reduced me to a blathering nabob. Words fail me.

Yet, here I am, employing them in such an awkward way, compelled forward like some kind of anxiety-ridden twitching half-wit.

Even now, in these salad days of Reconstruction, my head is still spinning. If you're riding out the post-Katrina ebb, then I'm guessing you can probably relate.