Why India? (For God's Sake)

I am preparing. In two months, I will be in India for the first time in my life. (Or, considering my destination, I should say, for the first time in this life.)

I will be spending six months alone in a country I've dreamed about much, but in fact, know very little. I'm mostly going on suspicions and hearsay. As a child, my first impression of India was a place where people poop in the streets among wandering cows. This image has stayed with me as I consider my upcoming voyage. The cows are fine - I grew up on a farm and am used to being around bovines - but I don't want to see anyone poop in the street. Or poop anywhere, really. I also don't want to get sick. No. Not even a little "traveller's diarrhea" so I can trade shit stories with other backpackers. Nor do I want to be pestered by begging, starving children, trailing me for blocks for a rupee or two. And I really don't want to fend off curious Indian men who think that all American women are sexually available and attracted to them.

Clearly sometimes my fears get the upper hand, and I have to remind myself of why in fact I am going. Because I suspect that yes, there will be street poop. And sickness. And beggars. And there are likely to be men. Really hard to avoid those things in life, and especially so in India.

So why am I going? I have to tread carefully here, as it's easy to get sucked into the quicksand of cliche. But, friends, I am not going to India to "find myself." Nor am I going to "lose myself," tempting as those options - especially the latter - are.

The seed was planted during my first backpacking trip through Mexico fourteen years ago. A gutsy, gorgeous Australian blonde, Kerry was one of the backpackers I'd traveled with for a time, part of the makeshift family I'd found to reconvene on a little island near Cancun to spend Christmas together. I was 22 and shy, on my first trip out of the U.S.; she was in her 30s, had been all over the world, and always got the best deals bartering, despite her complete ignorance of the Spanish language. She'd been to India and said that everyone should go. Yes, it was challenging, but it was an important experience. Like going away to college - difficult but necessary if you wanted to truly understand the world. And truly understanding the world was something I really wanted, more than money, almost more than love.

A few years later, I was deep into a quintessential New Orleans experience: working in the service industry, drinking too much, and sleeping with my boss. Owner of an Indian-fusion restaurant uptown, he was from northern India and returned there frequently. He offered to bring me to India with him, and despite the facts - he was married, thirty years older than me, and repulsive on many levels - I really wanted to go. I'd had tiny tastes of India when we'd visit his siblings living in New Orleans, who ate entire meals using a single piece of naan as a utensil, and I thought it would do me good to visit a place where people didn't need forks. It goes without saying that everything they cooked - my boss included - tasted incredible. No one had told me that lentils, or eggplant, or okra, could be so good. I was also smoking a lot of weed in those days, and my boss often reminded me that there was plenty of that to be had in his homeland. Of course, he would spring for everything.

Blessedly, I didn't go. I wasn't smoking that much weed.

I didn't go, but I began to feel a sense of entitlement towards going, as if the universe owed me a trip to India. I had just performed the daunting moral feat of not exploiting a married man whom I found repulsive just to indulge my escapist nature: surely there was to be some sort of reward. In the meantime, I cheered myself up by telling myself that I would go "someday." But the "someday" list was long, and as I was no longer surrounded by Indian food, my motivation lessened.

One doesn't need to be a Hindu or a Buddhist to have many distinct lives in New Orleans. In a later reincarnation, but in the same neighborhood, I moved into a community of slightly-Buddhist libertines, the property owned by a Buddhist with a nonprofit located in India. He spent half the year living in Dharamsala, working at his community center for Tibetan refugees. He took groups of college students every summer, which sounded insane. Why escape the second-hottest place in the world for the hottest? This is when I learned that Dharamsala was high up in the Himalaya mountains, and was quite pleasant in the summertime. I became instantly jealous.

Suddenly everyone in my acquaintance had been to India at least once. Some of them studied with lamas or had heard the Dalai Lama speak. Perhaps not coincidentally, these were some of the nicest people I'd met during my many New Orleans lives, and I wanted to be more like them. I had an India trip coming - right? - and all the other kids had been there. Why not me?

The fact that I had been studying yoga for several years at that point was not as much of a factor as one might expect. My yoga practice had been so integral to my life for so long, that it didn't inspire me to leave. It would be like travelling to Italy to look for the Italian-made pair of glasses lying on my bedside table. Sure, it would be neat to see where they came from, but utterly unnecessary.

That said, when I was training to be a yoga teacher, I began to learn that yoga was more than doing tree pose safely. It was what you ate and how you thought. It was cultivating the awareness to observe your thoughts. It was being honest and it was being content with what's present. It was paying respect to the lineage that came before, which is why we took the trouble to make flash cards to learn the Sanskrit names for yoga poses.

We watched Naked in the Ashes, a documentary about the Indian sadhus, the holy men who dedicate their lives to seemingly-strange practices in order to purify themselves and become closer to God. I learned that in India, it's normal for some people to stand on one leg for several years, or to hike barefoot through snow to get to the base of the holy Ganges. You pull that stuff in America - even in New Orleans - and you get locked up. But in India, what seems insane may actually be enlightened.

My curiosity about India reached a fever pitch. I was in Europe for my teacher training, and so the idea of travelling further seemed out of the question. But when I returned home to New Orleans, I wanted nothing to do with America. Immediately I got embroiled in a romance with a French man who decided I was "the one" for him. Several months later, when I refused to marry him, he went to India to lick his wounds. During our regular skype sessions, he repeatedly invited me to join him there. Again, India. This time being implored to go in a charming French accent.

Again, I didn't go. My Frenchman wanted me to go as his girlfriend, and that is not how I am to see India. I want to go as myself, like Kerry from my Mexican travels, tall and wild and free.

But this time, the bait dangled too close. I'd been in an extended transitional period - read: on unemployment - and had to Do Something. I'd considered getting a Real Job, or going Back To School, but then realized that it could be the perfect time to finally go to India, and go in a way that I can take my time. Driving myself crazy with indecision - the threat of making the Wrong Decision just gets worse as I get older - I consulted a psychic for the first time. She agreed: just go. Make 2010 the year to see this thing through. On later reflection, I realized that I can't even see myself in a Real Job or in a Graduate Program - India keeps blocking that view of myself.

So why am I going? Because I can't not go. I can find myself at home, I can lose myself at home, but I can only find India by going there.

Still Singing

My most tortured relationship is with the written word. This says a lot, as I have lots of tortured relationships. Ask around - you'll see. But writing - ungh. It's what I do, it's what I have been trained to do, it's what I do best. And yet I start a creative project - a novel about Socialist Socialites, or an essay about working for state government, or a poem about my last day visiting the state-run mental health clinic - write some solid material, and then abandon the endeavor in order for something less fulfilling. Like scrubbing the sink. Or picking fleas off the dog.

On the up side, I've done a lot of interesting things to avoid writing. I learned how to paint signs by hand (with the logic that people don't read manuscripts, but they can't avoid a sign.) I started a business designing costumes and hats. It didn't last six months, but it did result in my completing an essay about homegrown Jazzfest commerce titled "The Shilling Fields." (Published on a website that was later hacked, another gem lost into the gaping maw of the internet.) Most recently I foolishly left unemployment - and all that time for writing - to work for the U.S. Census, an endeavor rich in writing material if it weren't all supposed to be confidential. They made us take an anti-blabbing oath, which I interpreted to mean that it's fine to tell amusing anecdotes to friends over drinks, but not so prudent to write down and publish what I learned from knocking on my neighbors' doors. Which is too bad - Census Day 2010 would be a blockbuster!

So even when I'm not writing, I'm writing. Hence the torture. If I could just chuck it, fuck it, I'm off to law school, I could move on and join all of my fellow Americans who choose to make a bunch of money being an asshole. Case closed. But no. I keep returning to the page, choosing instead to make no money being an asshole.

The good news is that I found something I can commit to, through rain and through shine, through drama and through daydreams: my yoga practice. When this world ends, you will find me on my yoga mat lifting my arms to the nuclear-cloud sky. Of that I am sure. The person I am with a yoga practice bears little resemblance to the person I was before. I no longer I eat meat - not even delicious crispy bacon, juicy, deep red steaks, or my first love, greasy fried chicken. Nor do I ever sleep until noon - sleeping-in for me now means arising at 7:30. And strangest of all, I find myself being nice to people - even bad-driving, rude-mouthed, ugly-faced assholes - despite all the clever, cutting responses pressing hard against my mouth.

Have I lost my mind? More relevantly, have I lost my edge?

A solution seems obvious. "Jeez, Miss Amanda, why not write about yoga?" I tried that. I signed on to be the New Orleans Yoga Examiner for examiner.com (see for yourself at this link) and could have used this as a way to integrate myself into the yoga community - even local yoga celebrity Sean Johnson thanked me for writing about his band's new yoga CD. Yet, I couldn't get over my resistance to the bizarre logic of content-providing, where blog titles need to be as bland as possible so to be found by search engines. Clever titles were good for selling newspapers, but search engines need titles with the most obvious words that people are searching for. I also couldn't get over my resistance to examiner.com pretending we were getting paid for our work when we weren't. (I never received a dime.) Now I could do yoga every day for the rest of my lives and it wouldn't matter: being lied to about pay will still bug the shit out of me.

So why not do my own thing? Why not, indeed? It's only taken me several months to sit down and get started. Today I resume the blogging project, as I prepare for an extended trip to India where I plan to write as much as I can. Though I hear that India has a way of changing one's plans...making me wonder if I'll be able to keep up the blog. Can I do it this time? Stay tuned, my friends. Stay tuned....

connect the dots

chicago, london, roma.
roma, bari, santa maria del sole.
santa maria del sole, alberobello, martina franca.
martina franca, napoli.
napoli, pompeii, positano.
positano, ravello, amalfi.
positano, napoli, firenze.
firenze, siena.
firenze, la spezia, riomaggiore.
riomaggiore, manarola, corniglia, vernazza.
riomaggiore, genoa, nice, marseilles.
marseilles, madrid.
madrid, barcelona, montmelo.
barcelona, sant cougat.
barcelona, valencia.
valencia, milano.
milano, firenze, siena, monteroni d' arbia.
monteroni, siena, firenze, venezia.
monteroni, siena, colle di val d'elsa.
siena, milano, madrid.
madrid, miami, chicago.

Back in the Fishbowl

How long can jetlag serve as an excuse for malaise? I've been back at home for over a week now and I'm still tired and wishing I were anywhere else. It's shitty to be at home for the holidays – Mom's making cookies, lights blink on the tree – and wanting to be in a foreign country, alone in the drenching rain, understanding nothing. It's ungrateful and foolish and it's how I feel. I've even been nostalgic for my backpack with its leaden contents, so heavy that every time I wore it, I was inspired to stab someone – anyone! Of course, my nostalgia didn't start upon my arrival home to the US. During one of my hundreds of bus rides through Italy, I found myself wishing myself off the bus, away from the man with his head in my lap, and back at home. But in that same moment, I knew that when I got home, I would want to be right back on that bus, stiff from sitting, nauseated from the winding roads. How sad to be human, to desperately want something with the knowledge that its attainment will only bring more wanting.

Meditation helps. It helps by allowing me to let go of my thoughts, which I do because all of my thoughts are bullshit. So what if I miss Italy and the man I met there? If I moved across the sea to be with him, I would miss the US and the men I could have met here. If I lived in Italy, the delicious food would grow tiresome, the beauty of the land would fade, the charming, passionate people would make me crazy. And so what if I miss traveling? Near the end of my trip, I was ready to be at home with people I could converse with; now that I'm here, I want to run away again, back to the place where I can't understand every excruciating detail of every overheard conversation.

It doesn't matter who I am or where I go – the mind wants to generate displeasure. That's its job. For the mind, displeasure means problems to solve and judgments to cast – stuff for it to do. It's job security. When I can relax into the moment and feel just as content shopping at the McHenry WalMart as I am admiring the art at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the mind is out of work: nothing to complain about, nothing to compare against. Just boring old happiness. Not that I experience this phenomenon very often: my mind still thrashes about as I shop at the McHenry WalMart, a store which still drives me fucknuts.

Although the mind works this way for all people, all over the world, I more often notice the busily-

complaining mind among Americans. For example, at Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia, Antonin Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece of a cathedral, tourists commonly take an elevator up to the top of one of the towers, shoot a few photos of the Barcelona skyline, and exit by walking down one of the narrow, winding staircases. I went at sunset, which is a marvellous time to see Barcelona from above, its sky magic with pink light. However, going at sunset meant that it's too dark to see the steps on the exit down, and of course there's no handrail. Started in 1882, La Sagrada Familia is the quintessential work in progress – from spires to floor, it's still not finished after 126 years – and so installing a handrail for the tourists hasn't been a priority. As I inched my way down the tower, enjoying the novelty of having a mildly dangerous experience inside a church, I was treated to loud complaining noises from the Americans in front of me, who planned to “write a letter” to somebody in response to this grave violation against American safety codes. “They really need to put lights in here,” one of them observed, and I politely kept my response to myself: “No, they really need to finish the facade before the world comes to an end. You just need to walk slower.”

But we've done it to ourselves, in our overly-alerted paranoid paradise. I know that it's a cliché to talk about styrofoam coffee cups with “hot liquids can burn” warnings, but I had to pause at the olive bar at the Oak Park Whole Foods. Nostalgic for Spain, I wanted to purchase some fresh olives, but I got this very American warning on a sign posted on the sneeze shield: “Careful: some of our olives may contain pits.” You would think that the sort of person who can drop $10, $20 on fancy olives would be willing to take that risk, and may even be educated enough to expect a pit within an olive, but I suppose a grocery store's lawyers can never be too careful. I bought the olives anyway.

As I waited for my connecting flight from Miami to Chicago, I overheard an American who had given up complaining for something better. It seemed she had been waiting for planes numerous times over the past day or so and had come to a resolution: “I'm just going to eat my way through this airport.” Pizzas in hand, she and her three companions clinched it for me: I saw more seriously overweight people in my first hour back on American soil than I did over two months travelling in Mediterranean Europe. (I use the term “overweight,” but I wonder – does it still fall within the parameters of political correctness to call someone obese, even without a medical opinion?) Not that Europeans are rail-thin: I saw plenty of round bellies and thick thighs, but nothing particularly grotesque. OK, I saw one obese man at an internet place in Madrid. He had a mustache, which I remember because it was so odd to see someone outside of the realm of normal human proportion.

As a blogger, I suppose it's my duty to theorize on Why Americans Are So Fat, though the topic has been done to death. So I will make this quick. It's hard to get So Fat – Fat, yes, but So Fat, difficult – when one eats Real Food, that is to say, food without a label. Meat from the side of an animal, cheese made by hand, freshly-baked bread, fruits and vegetables with the dirt still on them. In Europe, one can find all of these things daily, not just at the weekly farmers' market or on a special trip to the apple orchard. At a fast-food stand in the Madrid airport, I could choose from sandwiches on homemade bread, tapas of olives or anchovies, and freshly- squeezed orange juice. In the Miami airport, I searched hard for Real Food and had to settle for nuts in a bag.

Let it be known that I do appreciate the irony in my complaining about American complainers, especially as I go on to complain about American caution, American obesity, and American food. I haven't even gotten to my anti-TV tirade, inspired by the constant CNN blaring from the Miami airport television screens. Did you know that in European airports, they don't even have televisions? My mind is working overtime, bitching about all the differences. Home sweet home, let the complaining begin!

Seriously, though, I treasure this moment of returning to a familiar place with new eyes. When I got on the plane to Miami and heard the flight staff speaking English, and watched American television on the tiny screen in front of my seat, and flipped through a New Yorker – which one can get in the Madrid airport, if one wants to spend 8 euro – I remembered many things about American living. Even if Americans can be excessively polite, we are not so excessively nice. Those jokers on The Office are funny because their pranks and put-downs remind us of our fellow coworkers. The boss burns his foot and obsesses on his injury while ignoring his worker's concussion-fueled delirium. And is anyone in the world more self-referential than a writer in the New Yorker ? I started circling all the winking asides and self-deprecating humor and blackened up my costly magazine. I did this because I know that very soon, my foreign perspective will be covered up by my old habits of thought, as surely as the December snow has blanketed my parents' lawn.

When I first stepped back onto American soil, I had to go through Passport Control, where several Passport Controllers sat in their glass boxes, waiting. Even without anyone in line, a security guard chided me to “hurry up!” I stood there for a moment, confused. Hurry up? Where had I heard that before? And why? Hurry? Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?

Roma, non basta una vita...

Rome, a lifetime is not enough...

I have been writing this blog in my head and in my journal for three weeks, from the moment I awoke on the plane above Ireland and looked down to see the green patchwork of pasture, stitched together with stone fences.  From above, the patches looked like scales of a multihued green fish.  

That was all I saw of Ireland, and my impression of England was limited to Heathrow Airport - large and clean and modern - where the snackshop sells roasted-chicken flavored crisps.  Perfectly edible for vegetarians, as there's not a speck of chicken involved.  I was flying straight into the grubby arms of Roma, with its graffitoed train cars and flapping laundry.  Tiny cars zoomed over cobblestone streets; fleets of Vespas snake through traffic.  A pedestrian could stand all day on a Roman sidewalk, politely waiting for her chance to cross - the only way to do it is to forge ahead in tall clackety boots.  

I ate gelato and pizza for a week, snapped shots of the world's most famous icons and fell in love with a place that I may never see again.  If it were simply a museum, I could have left Rome easily, but it is a moving target.  Under the ruins where Julius Caesar was stabbed on the Ides of March, soft-hearted Romans have started a stray-cat sanctuary, so the visitor will find the spayed and vaccinated critters wandering about the ruined buildings, sunning themselves on ancient stones.  

On my first day, I visited one of the hundreds of cathedrals, the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, on a Saturday evening at dusk.  I entered to hear a choir of voices filling the giant cathedral; a man sat playing an organ taller than most buildings in my hometown.  Excited that I'd walked in on a concert, I gasped when I saw a bride and groom at the altar.  The pews were filled with their stylish guests.  In Italy, they let tourists watch private weddings - the Church is open to everyone - so I joined the other tourists in the back.  Perched in the corners of Michelangelo's vaulted ceiling, angels looked down on me with smooth, beatific faces.  Curls of gold bloomed up the walls and over the altar, glistening in the candlelight.  So much beauty inspired by love for the Divine; it was too much to absorb, alone.  I cried and made an offering, lighting a small candle for Love.  

A few hours later, the reception guy at my hostel invited me out to see the city; it wasn't Love, but not a bad warm-up.  The next day, we drank cocktails in Trastevere, the "hip" part of Rome.  I was most impressed by the bar food: in the US, when bars put out free food for patrons, it's usually chips from a bag and dip from a jar.  If it's cooked, it's invariably greasy or cheesy or meaty, most likely all three.  In Rome, bar food is slices of quiche and hummus and fresh vegetables and risotto and panini; if it's not homemade, then they have much to teach us on the art of processing food.  

While I'm on the subject of food, I was able to participate in a Home Food  event the night before I went to my all-vegetarian yoga teaching retreat.  Created to preserve the food culture of Italy, Home Food "Cesarinas" open their home to people interested in sampling the traditional food of that region.  I had a Roman specialty, veal saltimbocca, and although I generally frown on veal, I wanted to do as the Romans do.  Panfried with sage leaves, the veal was somehow tender and crispy at once.  Sandwiched between courses of gently pickled vegetables, fresh mozzarella, gnocchi made of polenta, and delicate peach/plum tarts, the veal was a perfect send-off to my meat-eating life.  If I remain a vegetarian, I will do so happily knowing that I left on the perfect meaty note. 

Rome is more than its food, of course.  It's big, for one, and big in a way that makes Texas look like the cow pasture that it is.  On one of my first days, I literally stumbled onto St. Peter's Basilica - home of Michelangelo's Pieta and St. Peter's grave, as well as the Pope's main stomping ground - and for all the beauty of that building, the colonnades were what awed me.  Each pillar is no wider than God's own thigh, and several times as tall.  There are about a thousand of these pillars, neatly lined up in four curving rows, sheltering the hundreds of devotees in line to see the Basilica.  

But again, Rome is a moving target.  After being bowled over by the colonnades, I wandered a few blocks away and was just as impressed by the wine vendors at the open-air market.  They pour the vino out of spouts from giant vats and sell it for 1.5 euro a liter.  My friends, that's $3 for a big bottle of wine!  It tasted fine to me, but the young French university students at my hostel shook their heads at my selection and left their glasses untouched.  History majors, these boys talked politics with me - it seems the whole of Europe wants Obama to win - as they smoked mint-flavored tobacco from a portable hookah.  I had some; it was like brushing your teeth with smoke. 

We were on the hostel terrace, where I chatted in Spanish with two women from Cancun.  We talked about - what else?- men, and they too went to the Trevi Fountain and tossed their coins to wish for a husband.  That same terrace, I met a group of Turks, who shared their morning Nutella with me, and I also shared coffee with the cleaning lady who related the long, dramatic production of her love life, completely in Italian.  I'm not sure what I did to deserve her friendship - earlier in the day, she slapped me on the ass - hard! - but I always enjoy a good love story, even if I can't understand a word of it.  

Sofia, one of the women from Cancun, gave me good advice for visiting St. Peter's Basilica, which has infamously long lines.  People wait for two, three hours to get in to the cathedral, and I, not being Catholic or patient, was loath to wait for so long.  Sofia told me how she'd gone up near the front of the line and merged with one of the large tour groups.  I used her strategy and was inside in ten minutes: Mexican-style.  

Inside the Basilica, I soon became exhausted with beauty, for the Pieta is only the appetizer for the sculpture that lies within the building.  Yes, Michaelangelo's representation of the marbled arms of the Lord do shine with a holy light, but the holy light flashes at every turn.  Angels dart across the ceiling, and when they caught my eye, their faces mirrored mine.  Every time!  How can stone carved hundreds of years ago know what I am thinking, in this modern second?  Is it an optical illusion, psychological projection, or just plain magic?  

As I roamed about the statues of saints and papal bones, I often paused the British man giving me an audio tour so that I could absorb the dozens of languages flying past my ears.  German.  French.  Italian.  Korean.  Japanese.  Spanish.  English.  All of us come together in ugly, smelly hordes just to glimpse the beauty inspired by Divine Love.  

And what to do with this beauty?  Frame it in a camera and hope it lasts.  Try to explain it to your friends, even if words seem weak, a limping pantomime of what is Real.        

Greetings from Signal Mountain

New Orleans living - hard to know where it will take you. This time, it got me up on Signal Mountain with clean air and gaspbreaking views and fallen leaves. The trendy green grocery store in town may have spaces reserved for LEVs - low emission vehicles - but it don't fool me. The newspaper tallies how many public schools can teach Bible, and even the independently-owned used bookstore has rows and rows of Bible Studies and Christian fiction. No doubt it's God's country here, entirely opposite of the way New Orleans holds its spirits. Up on this mountain here, it's as pretty as God Himself. Folks here talk God and walk straight. New Orleans, on the other hand, is a swamped-up mess of trash smells where God wrings out his hand rags. At home, we keep our gods to ourselves but stumble in the streets full of the Holy Spirit.

My neighbor Lauren's boyfriend Trey grew up on the mountain, just outside Chattanooga, and they were headed there for Gustav, with their two trucks and numerous pets. At the last minute, I joined them. We barged out of New Orleans around 2 am last Sunday morning and driving all night through the Louisiana and Mississippi backroads. Trey brought his walkie-talkies to share between the two cars, and practiced his trucker lingo over the crackily lines. 10-10, Momma. Clearin on out. Not long before its batteries died, and we were back to cell phones. Then there was the lost-cat scare, when Trey's ex-wife's left-behind cat Babs had retreated so far into Trey's pile of stuff that he was convinced old Babs decided to try out the wilds of Poplarville. She was found, curled up under the snake's cage. Later that long morning of night, Hwy 11 vanished into the woods and we were forced to join our fellow evacuees on 59 north. I fell asleep for sunrise.

I woke up around 7, ready to drive, fueled by a chocolate moon pie and a cup of gas station coffee. As the drive wore on, I consumed two Clif energy bars, a cookie-dough Frosty with Wendy's nuggets, half a bag of jalapeno potato chips, and one of Lauren's havarti pesto sandwiches in order to stay awake. Just before the Signal Mountain exit, Trey's car ran out of gas and we had to roll downhill and wheel ourselves around to sputter to the closest gas station. That was right around when Lauren got to seeing things, but somehow, around 3 that afternoon, we made it up Signal Mountain.

It's almost a week after our departure, and we know now that New Orleans made it just fine, and even our raggedy-ass neighborhood finally got its power back. This is my second draft of my first blog entry, which I really wanted to write from this mountain. I say this because those bayou spirits know where to send us. We go to the mountain to suck on sassafras roots and wander in the wild magnolia underbrush. Bayou knows that we need the mountain's strength, that we need to remember the nature that shelters and protects, if we are to go back and defend her.

Why I Left New Orleans and Started This Blog Instead

During Hurricane Season, even New Orleanians can lose grip on our famous good life. We drink and eat our way through several months of holidays, then hunker down in the air conditioning to ride out a long, lazy summer of napping and stiff drinks with lime. Like a cat in sunlight, it would seem that nothing could rouse us.

But the daily news loves a good storm, and some years there are plenty. Cue the young, gutsy storm to sweep on stage just in time for Tragedy Anniversary. Past storms flash across the screen, which floods and floods with three-year-old-Katrina water, and next thing you know, the whole city is deserted. Only the essential personnel and the artists - your storytellers and snapshotters - remain: the former grim with duty, the latter near-giddy in the front seat.

I'd toyed with the idea of staying for the show, but it would have involved staying with a man I had dated earlier in the summer. We weren't together anymore, which was fine, but my potential host went from wild-west bravado to panicked weight-shifting within less than twenty-four hours. Before long, his plan to weather it out in the Ninth Ward got revised to getting some rest in a corporate hotel. Clearly unnecessary ballast like myself wouldn't fare well on his rocky ship.

Since the sum total of my provisions consisted of one bottle of cheap chianti and half a container of peanut butter, I considered teaming up with someone else ready for the onslaught. Sure, I could have scraped together some bandages, candles and a few joints to make it through the worst of the storm, but I'd just spent that entire day with a hangover, boarding up windows and moving all of my earthly belongings to waist-level. The nicer items got moved to the neighbor's house. For I don't need the media to tell me that when your house is nicknamed "The Dungeon" and located on a street that floods out during an average rain, you move anything you want to keep. After several hours of hauling furniture and climbing ladders, the enthusiasm it takes to buy enough canned goods and batteries for a killer storm tends to wane. Plus, I didn't have a car, nor did I know anyone I wanted to be trapped with for five days. I was stuck with the one person I did not want to be alone with - myself - so when Mr. Mayor came on decrying the "Mother of All Storms," with the business about Gustav spreading 900 miles wide, I packed my bag.

Don't get me wrong. I wanted to stay and take the opportunity to describe the sound of hurricane-force winds, to walk through streets of sewage, to interview French Quarter drunks. I lived with the Katrina regret that I wasted away the most newsworthy event in my life in front of a television 90 miles away. And this time, I didn't have to think about protecting a car, or a dog, or catering to a worried boyfriend. Gustav would be my storm.

But here's the thing, and listen close: something odd is afoot. True, I was jealous to hear of another writer friend staying to blog through the storm, but when it was suggested to me that I should evacuate because people were tired of hurricane writing anyway, I felt the tingle of relief. I could relax, stay centered, and leave the drama for someone else. After 11 years of living the slow life, practicing yoga asanas, and reading self-help books, I finally let go of the drama. Who would have thought.

Like all cravings, my drama-lust will come again. Don't think I didn't chuckle to myself at the irony: I finally decide I can let the drama alone, and what happens? Nothing. From what I hear, Gustav only took out a few branches and a window or two, at least in New Orleans. People lined up to see a show that cancelled itself.

And so it seems that the most natural thing for a New Orleanian to do is savor the vacation, suck down some cocktails and get caught up on sleep. Live the good life, get some thoughts together, make a statement on the beauty of doing nothing.