Buried on page 3 of the Times-Pic's Metro section today are more details on the meeting I mentioned yesterday concerning the RSD's Facilities Master Plan. Glad they are slightly more prominent on nola.com's Latest Metro News page, but those headlines change over time... like, in the blink of an eye. Aren't'cha glad you've got my blog? Don't answer that...

Rejected by the Vieux Carre Commission are two public art works that hint at the sides of New Orleans life that the Commission apparently feels are best left out of the French Quarter:

DeDeaux's sculpture would be a freestanding set of three steps recalling the concrete stoops, or entrance stairs, left behind when homes in some of the city's most devastated neighborhoods were washed away by floodwaters after the levees broke. The acrylic steps, 29 inches high and 48 inches wide, would be illuminated at night.

DeDeaux said she hopes to install more than two dozen similar sets of steps at sites citywide, such as in City Park and the Lower 9th Ward, and eventually to assemble them all in one place. But she said the Jackson Square location, in front of St. Louis Cathedral and near the Chartres Street entrance to the square, would be the first and most important installation because of the site's historical importance.

She said she was seeking permission to install "Steps Home" at the site for only a few months, though she hoped the piece would be accepted well enough that people would want it to remain longer.

Campbell, who is from London, and Vis, a New Orleanian, wanted to install 10 13-inch-wide, 3/4-inch-thick metal medallions reading "You got them shoes on Bourbon Street" in the sidewalk of the heavily commercial section of Bourbon between Canal and St. Ann streets.
Besides the reference to the well-known local hustle in which panhandlers tell tourists, "I betcha I can tell you where you got them shoes," the discs would have another local resonance: They would resemble the Sewerage & Water Board water meter covers that have become popular collectibles.

You know, if the Quarter won't take 'em, I'm sure Ground Zero will. Just for kicks, perhaps this shocker of a sculpture ought to be trotted before the commission to see if they'd put it in Jackson Square. I'm such a stinker.

Leaving in eighteen months: RSD superintendent Paul Vallas, according to the board member of my son's charter school who spoke about Vallas' latest idea for the local "system of schools" at the meeting I attended last night: an International Business/International Baccalaureate high school, with the idea that it will be open next fall. Great. When I see a bunch of pecan pies in the skies, I'll let you all know then, too.

Demolished by the city...yet another home that should not have been. The Walking Id, Blakely, and all the other City Hall complacents and go-alongs-to-get-alongs need to get. The. Hell. Out of this city.

I'm already in an awful mood 'cause I'm having to type all this out at a library computer instead of in my humble fraction of a hectare.

Really, how much worse can this day get?

Ohhhhh...

...please...

...do NOT answer that.

Important Meetings Concerning Public Input into the Recovery School District's Facilities Master Plan:

Meeting with the Orleans Parish School Board on the FMP is tomorrow night at 5:30 PM, McDonogh 35 H.S., 1331 Kerlerec St

The deadline for public input on the FMP as it currently stands has been extended to October 1st, at which time there will be a 10 AM meeting at City Hall on it.

Email any and all suggestions, comments, complaints, etc., to masterplan@rsdla.net. Thanks to Neighborhoods For Priestley School for the email.

Citizens for One Greater New Orleans informs us of an Orleans Parish School Board Candidate Public Forum:

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 from 6:30-8:00 pm at the Urban League of Greater New Orleans offices at 2322 Canal Street, New Orleans. Street parking is available. The doors will open at 6:00PM and you will have an opportunity at that time to meet your candidates.

And yes, I know some of the usual local education "reform" suspects are involved in this one...but it's a darned good chance to see if all of these folks running for school board positions know what they're getting into or if they are gonna have those deer-in-the-headlights faces.

Just 'cause I'm in the mood...and because Sheckrastos has inaugurated a "Be Nice To Texas Project" to help aid the Texas Gulf Coast, I give you...a little something from some dude seeking the basement of the Alamo:



I hope he finds his bike there very soon.

Oh, and apparently, any teardowns that were being rushed though by Hizzoner the Walking Id must now have the consent of their city council district representative to go through. Ummm...hello?...what about the committee that was supposed to be doing this job? Anyone? This process is still waaaay off the rails.

Just for that, here's Rice University's Marching Owl Band:



For another view (and some funny comments) of the same performance, check it here.

So there.

My days are strange.

Life seems to be one big ol' conspiratorial plot designed to get my sorry rear outta bed and exiting my home. And it doesn't help that my husband is away on a business/family trip until Thursday or thereabouts.

I miss him. So much.

It isn't easy to focus on what I have to do without him, I know that now. I crave his presence, his listening ear, his sometimes sardonic, mostly considerate comments on the things I'm doing, as well as the crazy things that happen to him at work, or on his monster commute.

(When he went back to work after the storm, his trip on I-10 over to Baton Rouge was fine - until he got to his exit. The traffic light there was out, and it turned what was normally an excruciatingly long nearly four-minute wait for a traffic light under "normal" conditions into a forty minute crawl from the beginning of the off-ramp to just past the dead traffic light. If it were me in the middle of that mess, I would have gone seriously postal when I got to work that day just from the insanity. Hell, I'm glad he came home in one piece that night, and that he still had his sense of humor with him.)

When there was a possibility, early on last week, that we would have to evacuate again to make way for Hurricane Ike, he reminded me of his upcoming trip to the northwest, and I was suddenly forced to face the idea that Oh, NO, I would have to do the evacuation thing all by myself.

It was bad enough to try to regain some sort of balance and routine on our return from the Gustav evacuation (and, once Greg Peters' latest Suspect Device comic on the Gustav evac is available online, you can bet I'll be linking to it. I wanna blow that sucker up and frame it to hang up in a prominent place in my household. Too, too funny, and too true regarding the paranoiac tactics of Hizzoner the Walking Id during this latest mass exodus from New Orleans...) without being confronted by the variable my husband's absence presented. Wondering if I really ought to go shopping for more perishables that we'd tossed out into our huge city-sponsored garbage cans, stuff that was contributing to the serious stink in the city streets. Thinking I really ought to take the clothes I was washing straight out of the dryer and back into the suitcase. Wanting to quit straddling the fence once again - should I be watching those damned spaghetti models again with every few passing hours, or should I see/hear/speak no tropical evils and take my son back and forth to school like this storm season ain't no thang?

I am here, without Dan at the moment, to say that equilibrium for me is so, so hard to find - almost like my good man was so hard for me to find for twenty-six years or so. I am nearly - nearly - too far gone to care again about the things that got me going, and I am doing everything in my power to get those juices flowing again. This isn't easy.

What helps here?

-Getting the little guy up and out of bed in the early mornings for school
-Walking the dog mornings and afternoons
-Reading, reading, and more reading, though I am finding I must lay off the Tweeter Tube a bit, as it is seriously killing my attention span - waaay more than Google could ever make me stupid. In that sub-category of reading are the usual suspects:

1. The NOLA blogpocheh
2. Twitter
3. Other blogs around and about the interwebs
   
4. library books
5. books I vowed not to buy, but couldn't help myself
6. Da Times-Pick-Yer-Nose
7. My subscription to The Oxford American. Yeah, this latest issue of theirs is dedicated to New Orleans, and it mostly gets it. When it is good, it is damned good. There is an essay by Lolis Eric Elie in there that ends with a few paragraphs that will now have to stand alongside Lafcadio Hearn's now-famous and much-bandied-about 1879 quotation on the state of New Orleans, it is that good. There are many other standouts within its pages as well - but they are dancing 'round some land mines with an essay entitled "Quartered: Has New Orleans Produced Great Literature?" by William Caverlee. Yes, there is a disclaimer at the very beginning: Mention the phrase "New Orleans writer" to a native of the city, and the names offered in nomination will come back at you fast. But who has been left out? One of the olden greats, like George Washington Cable or Lafcadio Hearn? Or a contemporary from the list of fine writers that seems to grow by the season: Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Ford, John Biguenet, Tom Piazza, Nancy Lemann, Moira Crone...Put six names on a list and ten have been left off. But hey, people, it all goes downhill from there. No mention of Patty Friedmann? Poppy Z. Brite? Michael Tisserand's Sugarcane Academy? Year Zero and Life In The Wake by NOLAFugees? Dedra Johnson's Sandrine's Letter To Tomorrow???? Calling Marc Smirnoff...which leads me to...

-Emailing. The City Council, for starters. About the resumption of the process for approval or rejection of housing demolitions that the Walking Id had suspended for Gustav's arrival and aftermath in these parts.
-Attending a meeting tonight at my son's school concerning the Recovery School District's Facilities Mash-Up Plan and how it will affect our school. One of the two school buildings is slated to be "phased out" of use in a few years' time, cutting our facilities exactly in half. And they call that reducing maintenance. I call it the destruction of a good school.
-Must not forget any help I can give to these folks in great need at this time.
-Worrying about the recovery of this great fried catfish eatery, which was written up in the latest OA as well.
-Going to get the little guy from school
-Invariably watching Apollo 13 for the bazillionth time. I started looking on Netflix for other space documentaries/movies just to mix things up a bit. It's kinda tough to dress up outer space after a while. Everything becomes black, white, and shades of gray and institutional/government-sponsored colors within the command and lunar modules, with the exception of the big blue marble on which we live. I now find myself craving those parts of the movie that are showing Mission Control and the Lovell household, because the variety of colors there is much more pleasing to my eye. You can take this girl outta art training, but you can't take the art training outta the girl.
-Cooking meals or heading out of the house for 'em.
-Getting us all ready for bed. Trying to get my son to actually sleep in his. Dodging all of his new excuses for why he needs to sleep in mine. My personal fave recently was his fear of a plastic stingray toy that was designed and molded to have all of its teeth wide open in a menacing yaw, and it just happened to be positioned in such a way for the little guy to see it and get freaked out. The ray from hell is now up on my dresser and out of his line of vision.
-Sleeping like an airplane until the next day's alarm goes off at least four times.

Dan, honey, please come home.

x-posted at Humid City, and beaucoup mercis to founder, webmaestro, and birthday boy Loki on allowing this crazy Jewish broad to keep posting over there...

Required Readings for the Day

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler

Oh, and when the Gambit Weekly site gets its latest words from its editor up, read it in full. Update, 3:51 pm: Here it is!

An excerpt from "Hard-Learned Lessons":

Soon after Gustav cut a destructive swath up the middle of Louisiana, the national media packed up and left New Orleans in a huff, declaring that the storm had spared the Crescent City. It was a classic example of the media deciding in advance what "the story" was, and then missing the real story as it unfolded. If only they had looked a few miles west of the city, they would have seen a huge story that directly affects all Americans. The story is one of how two small Louisiana parishes continue to satisfy America's thirst for fossil fuels while the rest of the country - particularly the federal government - continues to ignore them in their time of need.

...Lafourche and Terrebone also are home to two of Louisiana's richest cultures: the Acadians and the Native American tribes that comprise the United Houma Nation(http://unitedhoumanation.org). Brenda Dardar Robichaux, the nation's principal chief, says Gustav affected 13,000 Houmas. The storm wiped out Isle de Jean Charles in lower Terrebone, home to 100 people from the Biloxi-Chitimacha Band. Some homes floated off foundations while others became piles of rubble. The Houma tribes have lived in Louisiana for more than 400 years, far longer than any European cultures, and have been good stewards of the land - unlike oil and gas companies that chopped up the wetlands and hastened their destruction.. Robichaux doesn't know what will happen to her people. "It's really hard to recover when you lose your house and your boat," she says.

Don't forget my previous post and all its links

It isn't just Louisiana that knows how important coastal restoration is. Not anymore. Whether or not greater numbers of us United States citizens will choose to act on this knowledge, however, is, once again, the big question.

From Mark Folse concerning relief for the Texas regions affected by Hurricane Ike:

We need everything from Tampons to Shoes to Toothpaste.

SEND to:

If sending Check..be sure to Memo it "Texas Hurricane Relief".

Patrick Pearson

5252 Constance St. New Orleans ,La. 70115

Will return Receipt with the Truck Manifest.

Check or Money Orders only. Thanks for responding.

God Bless you and yours.

More Twitter tracking from the Austin American-Statesman here.

More pictures of Ike's aftermath here.

And PLEASE do not forget the United Houma Nation and south central Louisiana, which was hit very, very badly a second time - this time, by water.

I suggest we begin by siphoning all the fuel out of the bulldozers hell-bent on demolishing everything without going through the proper channels and sending it to those who need it most.

Maitri mentioned that she was following these tweets from the Austin American-Statesman.

I took one look and this one about floored me:

As a kid I watched the eye of Alicia pass over my house. Last night Ike did the same. Life is way too short. Hug somebody, Now.

more pictures and information here

video of immediate aftermath in Galveston here

Live feed from Houma is here

(thanks to NO News Ladder)

With Gustav, it was the winds that damaged the most

With Ike, it's shaping up to be the water.

They're watching those levees in the southern central parishes pretty closely.

Everybody, get ready to help in the aftermath. Because ALL of those folks to the southwest of us are gonna need it.

All four Houston area live feeds are here.

Hunker down and hang on, east Texans.

And Galveston: just EVACUATE. All of you.

For 9-11:

Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Maintenance Art Manifesto

I. IDEAS
A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.

B. Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again
keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy
keep the home fires burning

Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change.
Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.

C. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.

The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.
clean you desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.

D. Art: Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying).

Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials.
Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.

E. The exhibition of Maintenance Art, “CARE,” would zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.

II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION: “CARE”

Three parts: Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance.

A. Part One: Personal I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also,
(up to now separately) I “do” Art.

Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap-sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse.

The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

B. Part Two: General

Everyone does a hell of a lot of noodling maintenance work. The general part of the exhibition would consist of interviews of two kinds.

1. Previous individual interviews, typed and exhibited. Interviewees come from, say, 50 different classes and kinds of occupations that run a gamut from maintenance “man,” maid, sanitation “man,” mail “man,” union “man,” construction worker, librarian, grocerystore “man,” nurse, doctor, teacher, museum director, baseball player, sales”man,” child, criminal,
bank president, mayor, moviestar, artist, etc., about:”

-what you think maintenance is;
-how you feel about spending whatever parts of your life you spend on maintenance activities;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and life’s dreams.

2. Interview Room—for spectators at the Exhibition:

A room of desks and chairs where professional (?) interviewers will interview the spectators at the exhibition along same questions as typed interviews. The responses should be personal.
These interviews are taped and replayed throughout the exhibition area.

C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;
-a container of polluted air;
-a container of polluted Hudson River;
-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced: purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists. These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the
exhibition.

Why do I have this up for 9-11? Because of this article I saw in The Village Voice shortly after we moved to Queens in 2002:

Two days after 9-11, the Fresh Kills landfill reopened to take in the wreckage from the World Trade Center. "That was very, very shocking to me," says artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose six-channel video piece about the former dump—Penetration and Transparency: Morphed—is currently running at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island.

She remembers thinking she'd been misinformed: "The city would never do that. They would never mingle human remains in a place where they put garbage; that would collapse a taboo in our whole culture. That crosses a line." But no other site was big enough; no other so secure. Ultimately, about 175 of the landfill's 2200 acres were given over to sifting through the hundreds of thousands of tons from Ground Zero, no doubt some of it human ash. This added a layer of tragedy to a site that was already contested, fragile, enormous, resented, and political.

Ukeles has been the sanitation department's unpaid artist-in-residence since 1977. She's devoted her entire career to thinking about garbage, recycling, ecology, and the endless invisible labor involved in keeping things clean. In 1989, the Department of Cultural Affairs gave Ukeles a commission, making her the official artist of Fresh Kills. She'll now participate in its transformation, working with whatever design team wins the international competition.

More by Ukeles here. Recent interview can be read here.

A great commentary on her Touch Sanitation, in which she made it a point to personally shake hands with everybody working for NYC Sanitation and thank them for "keeping New York alive" can be found here.

Two years after Katrina there was, at last, time for reflection. What had become of the can-do nation that had built the Panama Canal and put men on the moon and now could not see its way to heaping dirt high enough to defend a major coastal asset like New Orleans?*

My son is currently addicted to Apollo 13. I must admit, we've been feeding his obsession with space travel quite a bit, in case you haven't noticed. It is one hell of a lot better for him to be watching a reenactment of all sorts of scientists trying to keep three guys alive in a tin can up on space than for him to be watching other flicks I could mention...but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

In watching these various films about space travel, and in reading books about it, my son told me once, in all seriousness, that when he grew up, he was going to design a metal that could take the intense heat of reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, so that tragedies like the one that befell Columbia in 2003 could never happen again.

I cannot tell you how happy that made me, hearing him say that.

Unfortunately, in considering Clay's latest post, I cannot help but wonder about all the obstacles being put in the way of good scientific learning and research in this country, and I also have to wonder about the people who would pour more money and resources into other things.

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. And it's not a miracle. We just decided to go there.**

What in God's name did happen to us? Why in hell can't we simply decide to go ahead and get the levees up to snuff, learning something from the Dutch in the process? I had a chat with some folks today who discussed some architectural possibilities for new homes in south Central Louisiana to replace the ones decimated by Gustav. Is that sort of engineering really out of our reach?

As good as our governor was in our latest time of insanity, he is indeed no meteorologist. And despite his flurry of facts, figures, and rapid-fire on-top-of-it-allness exhibited in his press conferences, he approved of legislation allowing creationism to be taught in public schools across the state.

Do moderate-to-conservative politicians and folks who think they can pray away any sort of ills and attitudes look at their kids when they express any sort of curiosity about science, any inventing initiative, and/or any thoughts of their own concerning how the world works and see some sort of devilment that must be exorcised? Nonconformity that must be quashed? A certain - dare I say it - foreignness about their children's views?

Well, the fact that this machine is at the French-Swiss border working merrily away and this one is simply a hole in Texas*** indicates that we handed a great deal of our scientific know-how and our curiosity to other countries a loooong time ago.

What will it take for us to keep up? Another Sputnik-type breakthrough? A cure for cancer coming from a research facility somewhere in Iran? Somebody in North Korea finding a cheap, clean alternative energy source that can power our lives?

When will we decide to go there?

____________________

*from Jed Horne's "Whatever It Takes: Why I Stayed" in the latest issue of the Oxford American

**Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell in Apollo 13

***Herman Wouk already had some fun with this one.
___________________________

And speaking of going there...here's a tres kewl site about the lunar landings.

Everybody is biting their nails with such worry over this new storm that is heading towards the Gulf with such menace, this Lingonberry La-La Land, this Swedish Smasher, this Behemoth of Big Boxes. Yeah, y'all know what I'm talkin' about...

It's gonna be fast, by God. It will be flinging so many unassembled sets of shelves at such high speeds, you won't know what hit you. Everybody will have to board up their windows because friends don't let friends have particle board furniture in their homes. And the tornadoes of framed prints that will reduce one's abode to a picture in a catalog!

Dear Lord, it's everyone's worst nightmare come to life.

Save yourselves from this scourge! Protect your fine art works and your great good taste! Beware of this Hurricane Ikea!!!!!

Oh, wait....

Hurricane Ike?

*shuffles off, embarrassed*

...never mind...

I look at all the pictures that have been uploaded, pictures that show us in small doses how much the Houma Nation will have to shoulder with regards to their recovery, and I can't think of better places to put my confused energies at this time.

Bagging up the leaves and branches still needs to be done here. I finally managed to do some dishes and some laundry. Took my son to the aquarium earlier today. Had dinner at Jamila's last night with family and friends, and brunch yesterday morn at Slim Goodies', and I didn't mind their truncated menu one bit. There were even a lot of people at our first Shabbat services after the storm, though our executive director had to sleep in the synagogue due to the lack of electricity at his home.

Things are so...normal. And yet not.

Our decision to evacuate came a day before a mandatory order to do so came down from city officials (and left a message on our voice mail, by which time we were already making our way towards Oklahoma from Texas). We zigzagged our way through Louisiana and Mississippi, then Louisiana again before settling in a hotel east of Dallas late Saturday night. Along the way, my son was biting into an apple while we were tooling along on I-12 and informed me he'd lost a tooth - his first. I called up my mother, in part because I was freaking out at what I thought was a bit too early of a milestone for the little guy to have. When I told her we'd told him he needed to take better care of his teeth, she chided us half-jokingly;"You are some mean parents!" The tooth fairy left him a Sacajawea dollar for his bottom front tooth under my mom's pillow at their house in Oklahoma City.

We pulled into Natchitoches, Louisiana, for a short break after a beautiful drive down highway 84 and found ourselves at the banks of the Cane River taking in the last night of the Zydeco Festival, which was going on until midnight. The little guy ran around with a girl he'd just met as our dog sniffed the grass and we listened to Leroy Chavis and his band rocking the downtown. We ate at a restaurant that had two different programs on each of its televisions: one was the Illinois-Missouri football game, and the other was nonstop coverage of around-the-state prep for Hurricane Gustav. Back into the car, where we tried to get a room in a La Quinta in Longview, Texas, only to be turned away after the guy standing just in front of my husband in line and chatting amiably with the desk clerk for twenty-damn-minutes took the last room. We found another room in a hotel further down the road, where we spied an Entergy truck from New Orleans in the parking lot.

Oklahoma always weirds me out, but I seemed to search for even more faults with the state and with my parents' new city of residence this trip. Oh, the novelty of passing the Oklahoma Horseshoeing School (South Campus!). The strangeness of a) having the Boy Scouts of America sponsor a Kid's Meal at the Braun's chain of restaurants and dairy stores and b) having my son find a small emergency flashlight in his kids' meal. The sheer hilarity of having boosterist billboards along the highway proclaiming messages such as OKLAHOMA: The parking meter was invented in our Great State. The fault-finding was largely unwarranted: my family and the state were good to us.

I was searching for something off, however, because things were already off and I couldn't take the time to really settle and see that. Between having to shuttle around with family, be mom and wife, keep tabs on our dog, who came with us and had to be eased into life with my parent's yellow Labrador, and doing some checking on storm progress but not too much, I didn't have too many moments to process that, yes, we were fine, but our home might not be. People we knew, good friends who were scattered about the southeast or who stayed to weather the winds and rain, good people who were also doing their thing - we were all in limbo, hurrying up to wait on a force of nature that, depending on circumstances beyond our control, could pass us by or wreak some serious havoc.

Uneasy times, punctuated by moments that were akin to pretty much any other family vacation we've ever had.

Tackiness was encountered at establishments such as Oklahoma City's Science Museum, where we gave the girl at the desk our zip code and she informed us that, of the six families from New Orleans that had come through the museum, we were the only ones that had not asked for an evacuee discount. There were moments when my toothless wonder of a son would run up to people and instantly lay out a five-year-old's version of the events of the past few days and we'd cringe a little. Overall, we were having a good time, but there was also the feeling that it was somewhat stolen from somewhere, some way.

Right now, though, I want to give back some of that good feeling to these parishes, people and places that were hit hardest by this. Because life will always make us feel off-balance at some times more than others. And because we need to grab hold of these times when we can do something to get those who have fallen waaaay off balance back on again.

It is why I take great joy in encountering the incongruous in unexpected times and places:

Oh, these little vignettes, these windows of possibility that show us, all at the same time, how sacred and profane we can be. How much we can soar while both feet are firmly planted on the ground.

How much we can truly help others when we want to, and we have it in our power to do so.