I can't believe it's been five days since I've had time to be on my computer. Training for my job is killing me... 9 hour nights, not getting home till 1:00 AM, and no tips. Plus it's Mardi Gras. We were at the parades all day yesterday. Hopefully next week things will settle down. I feel like my feet will thank me when they do. Anyway, Happy Mardi Gras!
I'm employed again! I start orientation tomorrow at _____ on St. Charles. (Hey, I'm not about to be one of those bloggers who gets fired for talking about work.) Once I finish training, I'll be waitressing 4-10 Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. When I add this to my current schedule of grad school 4-6 Monday, Tuesday, and every other Friday, this means I'm pretty much free all day! The manager at _____ promised me lots of $$$ for few shifts. I hope I don't make as much as I did at my "real" job. Then I'll be really depressed.
This really takes me back to when I was working at Anthony's Lobster House, over two years ago. It was this restaurant near the convention center downtown, where one wall was made entirely of windows overlooking the Mississippi. During the day it was just barges and tankers. But at night the bridge would light up, and you could see the colors in the water, and you could stand there refilling the guests' water glasses and imagine... somewhere else. One night after waitressing, I came home and scribbled in my notebook a few paragraphs about a redheaded waitgirl who has a secret, a waitgirl who works in a place with a view. Only her view wasn't of the lights reflecting on the Mississippi: her view was of the skyway, the flare-lit road I imagined winding above a huge city on another planet, and the stars. And one night this waitgirl took off her apron, let down her hair from its ponytail, said, "Keep the change," and walked out.
Her name was Ari Kloss. And that scene was the beginning of my novel. Well, damn, it's funny where inspiration comes from. I'm going to go write.
Just warning you. Until this fall, I had never played a computer game. Then I got sucked into Knights of the Old Republic, or as we call it, The Game. I played for, like, 30 hours straight. SO MUCH FUN. Really. SO FUN! Like being in Star Wars! I guess I never did the role-playing thing because it made me think of guys in basements. But the writerly part of me loves naming my characters, figuring out who they are, etc. Then I discovered mods, and that opened up a whole new aspect of geekdom. For some reason, I really really like being a Twi'lek in a skanky outfit. I haven't been a guy yet, and I haven't managed to be evil because it makes me feel so awful. But I have been:
Malta Amakiir is my character in Neverwinter Nights, which I'm several hours into. She is a half-elf ranger. She is a chaotic neutral character, which I interpret as a reluctant hero who helps the good guys but isn't above taking on some shady quests for fun and profit. Malta has a direwolf called Nymeria (just like Arya Stark!). Though it lacks the Star Wars factor, this game is pretty cool. 
Palyn Nu is my current character in Knights of the Old Republic II. She's a hottie who somehow manages to fight without her boobs falling out of that shirt. Really I just run around in the game watching myself and going, "EEEE I look so cool!" Thanks, pcgamemods. 
My current character in KOTOR I, Mariorav Fortuna was supposed to be evil, but I couldn't do it. Sigh. So yeah, she's a Scout/Jedi Guardian. And she's purple. And her midriff-baring robe is pretty cute. I really need to get going on that Dark Side thing, but my party gets so upset with me when I beat up random people and take their credits, I just get depressed.
Arkady Darell (tribute to Asimov) was my first KOTOR II character. She was a paragon of the light. But the game wouldn't let her hook up with Bao-Dur, which was a huge letdown, because he is pretty sexy for an alien guy with horns. Arkady rocked the double-bladed silver lightsaber (which really just looks white.)
Duru Antilles holds a special place in my short gaming experience, because she was the first. No relation to Wedge (I figure Antilles is the Smith of Star Wars), she was a sarcastic Scoundrel who became a Jedi. Duru favored two lightsabers, one blue and one purple. She was such a bad ass. And she saved the galaxy. And it was awesome. I miss you, Duru!
... But this morning, I think I'll be purple for a while.
I don't think there should be any controversy over whether Mardi Gras should have rolled. It had to. The argument is that if Mardi Gras goes on as usual, people will think everything is OK here. Which it is not, but I got news for the detractors: most of America already thinks that anyway. I know better when I drive down Gentilly on the way to class. And did you know that the cable company here devotes an entire channel to playing music and showing photographs of the 9th Ward and Lakeview 24/7?
But today's floats showed a sense of humor about things, and it's a healthy idea. It makes you forget for a while that you have to dodge giant piles of debris and derelict cars everywhere you drive. I now have a lovely Krewe of Carrollton "Blue Roof Blues 2006" cup. The parades are much shorter than usual, but my usual spot at St. Charles and Milan was crowded enough. Let the parades roll!
I have been doing a lot of market research lately for my writing. I'm in one of those "ugh" phases where I keep re-structuring my 3/4 finished novel, changing my mind, and moving the scenes back where they were. I am worried that it starts weakly, and as an unpublished writer who will be sending out queries sometime this year, it can't afford to. But I am ready to settle down and do some serious work on it this month. I need to read about writing on the internet less, and actually write more. I have three short stories very close to completion, which just need that final push to get done.
For Valentine's Day dinner Mike and I went to Arnaud's in the quarter. Illustrating the difference between New Orleans and Boston (and in fact most other cities), when there was a mixup and we sat for 15 minutes before being given menus or drinks, the maitre d' came out personally, apologized, and gave us complimentary appetizers. I love just walking around in the quarter, looking at the flower-filled balconies and mysterious courtyards and old shuttered houses. It's nice to know that the oldest part of the city survived mostly unscathed.
I found out UNO will finally be sending my refund check for living expenses this week. However, I'll only get $1,000 and the rest will come in a month. Argh. I am also applying for jobs so hopefully it won't kill me to wait. After all, I need to pay for the car I don't have. (Have been driving a rented Sunfire for two weeks, which is longer than I had the Accent. No word on when repairs will be done, but at least I have not had to pay for any of this.)
I have been in this whirlwind of obsession over the cat in the last four days. I am so glad I took a chance on him, even though he was bitey and unfriendly at the shelter. That is not his personality at all. He was just traumatized. He is very vocal (a nice way of saying loud... YOW YOW YOW) and purry. And I really am trying to refrain from posting cat pictures, but...
We are Siamese if you don't please. Well, part Siamese. Himalayan. I feel like I have a child. Lie down. Wake up. Comfort yowling cat. Back to sleep. Wake up to cat on pillow. YOW. YOW. Pet cat. Back to sleep. YOW YOW. But it was a lot better than Sunday night. I think he needs reassurance. The newest cute (or not) cat behavior: he has taken to following me around the apartment. If I go to the bathroom, he gets off the couch and sits outside the bathroom door. YOW YOW.
But... Progress! He only went under the bed three times today. Once was when I took out the trash (gone for two minutes, instant loss of trust, cat shoots under the bed). Once was when I went to school for two hours (even more egregious betrayal of trust: drive to Metairie and not take the cat!). And also, when the mailman came onto the porch, he growled at him and ran under the bed (guard cat, very useful except for the running under the bed part).
Kitty has informed us he would like to be called Jolee Bindo. 
Yesterday I went to the adoption festival at Celebration Station, where the Hurricane Katrina pet rescue operations are wrapping up, and brought home this handsome fellow. He was found outside in January. They trapped him and had to cut off all his pretty fur because it had huge knots. He bit the person who shaved him. They were warning everyone about that, so a lot of people didn't want him. But if someone held me down and shaved me, I'd bite them too! Poor kitty seems pretty traumatized. He kept me up all night. Every 45 minutes he would sit up on the bed and cry until I woke up and petted him (he does purr though). I think he just wanted to check that we were still there.
Now he's under the bed. We've regressed a little bit this morning. Note that this picture is his "good side." From the back he kind of looks like a cross between Mr. Bigglesworth and a poodle.
Doing some outlining/structural work on my book, while watching the Katrina hearings on C-SPAN for entertainment. Oh, we have blamings, and finger pointings, and convenient "I forgot who I talked to"s. Of course, now it's come out that the White House knew about the levee breach on the first day. "Brownie" was pretty quick to turn on Homeland Security now that he's no longer on their payroll, accusing them of shunting disaster planning to the side to focus on terrorism. Federal officials are stuttering. "Well, we weren't sure of our information," whines one. "We had reports of a broken levee, but on TV I saw people partying in the French Quarter!" Susan Collins (R-Maine) is displaying some appropriately non-partisan snark as head of the committee. (Rightly so, she's a St. Lawrence alumna.) Now they're disagreeing over their chain of command.
You know what I think? I think it's a two hour flight to Baton Rouge, and a one hour drive to New Orleans from there. Shouldn't someone higher up have GOTTEN ON A *@%#ing plane and gone to see for themselves?
I think the funniest part of being in grad school for education is the randomness of the coursework. To wit: my final projects in this semester's classes range from a poster, to a binder (pretty clip art required), to a 20-page paper.
I have been spending this week writing and vaguely scanning Craigslist for a part time job. I hope there's something out there that requires pretty clip art, 'cause I am so putting that on my resume.
I just wrote a practice query letter & synopsis for my novel (inspired by enormously helpful fellow gin drinker Miss Snark) which I'm pretty sure are better than the novel itself. It was nice to get the plot summarized in a way that makes it easy to pick out its flaws. I saw several connections that needed to be strengthened, for instance. Now to tighten up the plot till it resembles what I just wrote...
Also, I want to give a shout out to NOLAFugees.com, the voice of satire in P.K. New Orleans. Their take on the Mayor Nagin "Chocolate City" controversy has to be my favorite.
You know, before this fall I thought, "I'm a good writer. Lots of people are good writers, much better than the crap that's in print. Yet they aren't published. Why the hell not?" I mean, I have read some horrifically crappy novels. We're talking major publishing house and the sentence structure is embarrassing.
I will tell you why many good writers are not published. It's HARD. My main problem, sifting through my so-far-unfinished novel today, is there's so MUCH of it. And I only have 60,000 words so far, which is very short. I shudder to think what the authors of my favorite 800-page fantasy tomes go through. It's not like a short story. I forget what I've written. I lose track of the timeline. Are we in today, or tomorrow? Hell, maybe this happened last week, I have no idea. Recurring themes? Forget about it. I don't even remember where my characters are. I still have at least five major scenes to write, many more to flesh out, and then comes the editing. And from the research I've done on the submission process, no wonder there aren't many people who do this. It's sort of like hazing.
I wonder if I will get weeded out.
How did this come up? While doing some brain-killing work on my outline, I ran across the following sentence of dialogue: "'And as soon as they pull the records,' added Jesov, 'they'll find out we’ve been using them to get into the shuttleport. They’ll seize the ship, if they haven’t already.'"
Which is a fine sentence were it not for the fact that Jesov was killed in the previous chapter. Oyy.
How big was Hurricane Katrina where you lived? I mean, am I biased in thinking it was one of the major national events of 2005? OK, just because I was kept out of my residence for six weeks because of mandatory evacuation, lost my car, job, health insurance, and stuff, wallowed in limbo and tears for weeks, and was forced to spend all my savings doesn't mean it was that huge for people who didn't live in New Orleans. I accept that. But come on, I am pretty sure lots of people donated money, and Katrina certainly is being covered by the media in pretty much every other American city even five months later.
Why, then, did we get skipped? I mean, and pardon my language, I think a huge WTF is due. For those keeping historical track at home, I am pretty sure the destruction of a major American city has not occurred since 1906. I admit to not having watched Bushie give his shoddy address on the state of his shoddy union, but I read the transcript. And personally, I was baffled. Perhaps shocked would be a better word. The Gulf Coast got 156 words out of 5,300.
But you know why Bush ignored us? I'll tell you what I think. I think we got shafted for two reasons. The first is that the Bush administration knows they dropped the ball on the FEMA/Katrina debacle. "Hey, Brownie ol' buddy, yer doin' a great job!" Feeling embarrassed yet, Bush? Right. So they'd rather pretend the destruction of an American city in a natural disaster didn't happen, because it makes them look bad.
The second reason is that Bush loves simplified, them vs. us, "morally" appealing figures of speech. (Doesn't matter if it's factually inaccurate, it appeals to our good old compassionate hearts, right?) This is the shit he thrives on. Man, is he stumped on Katrina. Because he got away with the War in Iraq garbage for far longer than he should have, by throwing out keywords like "evil" and "barbaric," and junk about "protecting" the country from "terror." But Katrina isn't politically expedient for him for precisely that reason: it was a natural disaster that probably caused "terror" in a lot more American lives than any possible terrorist attack, yet you can't blame Katrina on evil. You can't nail it down into a little constructed package and tell us who to blame.
All apologies to those affected by 9/11, which technically did have a higher death toll. But did it cause the largest American diaspora since the Civil War, the future social effects of which won't be measured for years? It did not. The thing I don't get is that NYC was something like 90% blue during the 2004 election. What I want to know is how on earth Bush managed to garner votes by convincing people in Bumfuck, Kansas that they needed to be protected from "terror" and "evil." Like anyone is ever going to bomb you idiots. Like anyone even visits your town. NYC actually got hit! And even they didn't fall for Bush's rhetoric! And somehow he turns this rhetoric, this 9/11 induced fear, into another term. To get back on point, though, Bush simply can't use what happened to New Orleans to further his own goals. So he leaves it out.
So yeah, where I live is apparently not part of the Union, but Iraq is. Hadn't you heard it's our new colony? Or at least important enough to waste nearly an entire address entitled the "State of the UNION" on. We really care about bringing "freedom" from "evil" to the Middle East. $400 billion to the "war." Less than a quarter of that to the Gulf Coast.
Oh boy. I'm going to wear my MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR shirt every day this week. But I might have to buy two or three more of them, so I can alternate them and not get smelly. Because, oh, did I mention I HAVE NOT HAD A SHOWER IN A MONTH? Because I still have no hot water.
This is America, Mr. Bush. Right here. Excuse me while I go stick my head under a freezing cold faucet.
