So, I did try to pack this weekend with magical New Orleans-ness. Saturday Adam and I went down to the Quarter and ate at Angeli's, and then puttered around the Quarter and the river. It was pretty fun except that about every 10 minutes, Adam's cell phone would ring, Adam would look at the cell phone and say in best Tom Cruise/Very Important Businessman voice, "Sorry, I have to take this," and then a long haggling conversation on the cell phone would begin. He just got the damn thing a few weeks ago, since he's no longer just a rank-and-file organizer, but more of a middle management organizer-of-organizers, and I HATE IT.
For the record, it's not his fault--if he didn't have a cell phone he'd be in Flint, MI right now, organizing on the ground. But watching him has given me a renewed interest in resisting the cell phone for as long as humanly possible. The worst thing about them is that once you have one, people (me included) expect you to answer it at all times. No excuses--you must be in touch and available, at my convenience, no matter what! How horrible. It's like a punishment.
That was pretty interesting, wasn't it? I'm pretty much the very first curmudgeon to complain about cell phones, it's the hip new thing to do.
Anyway--Sat. night we went to a party for this girl Ellen that I barely know, who's leaving the same day I am. Ellen is sweet (Adam complains that she's boring), but she has an extremely boring and kind of evil boyfriend. He's about our age, maybe a year or two older, and has already managed to quit his job by becoming a slumlord. He owns a couple of shitty properties and squeezes the tenants bone dry. Luckily for Ellen, he's apparently not going to follow her to Austin. The party itself was okay--the best thing about it was that there were millions of dogs and naked babies running loose. Sometimes I feel like I really should have been a frontier woman with ten kids and herds of dogs and cats. But then, frontier women needed useful skills, and I don't have any of those. (Can you tell I've been watching the reruns of Frontier House on PBS? I really have a problem.)
Yesterday we took a drive out to the bayou, which I'd actually never seen. You start driving out of New Orleans and suddenly, about 10 minutes later, you're surrounded by Spanish fishing villages. Then you're driving next to an inlet of the bayou, and then pretty soon the bayou is everywhere, and the strip of land you're driving on is pretty much all there is as far as the eye can see, and it's lined with houses on stilts, and everyone has a boat instead of a car. And then you get to the end, and there's a sign that says "End of the World," and there's water water everywhere. And you turn around and drive back. (We stopped and threw rocks in the bayou, but that step is not strictly necessary.)
Last night we went to see the Austin Powers movie. I don't know why I thought I wouldn't hate it. We were stoned to the point of heinous paranoia, and it still wasn't funny. (Ellen and her Evil Boring Boyfriend sat right behind us, and we couldn't talk to them.) We mainly went because it was the movie playing at our tiny little neighborhood cinema, and we could walk there, but I can't recommend it unless you are really into star-fucking on a major scale. I really like fart jokes, but even I couldn't get excited.
Speaking of, here's a joke I heard on NPR this weekend:
q. What do you call a school teacher who won't fart in public?
a. A private tooter.
p.s. Recent googles to this site include "giant woman" and "hilarious photos." I can't help thinking that both of these searchers were disappointed.
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