Today did not start out the way I had planned. In fact, rather the opposite. And there will be time to talk about that, because it needs to be talked about. But not now. Not tonight.

I know that there are many people who think that football is silly and that what happened today was just a game. And maybe it was. But it was a game that meant a lot for a city that I love. It was one that meant more than just a victory in a sporting game.

The Saints won the Superbowl today. 4 seasons ago, people said that they’d have to take the Saints out of New Orleans and all the New Orleanians were outraged. Tonight, I hope everyone can see the symbol of hope that this team has been for the city. And more than that, how the city of New Orleans has risen up beside their team.

Congratulations to the Saints, and to the city who refused to give up on their team.

Tomorrow night, I’m flying to New Orleans.

Before you ask, yes, flying is a horrible idea. Yes, I am aware of this. Yes, I’m doing it anyway.

I NEED this trip.

I need to go back to that city, my city, and I need to get out of this one.

I need to see my lovely friend (who comments here under the name of SSB, and who I cannot even begin to describe to you how much I love) get married to her fiancee, who I also love dearly.

I need something to look forward to.

Because after this weekend is the call to the doctor to schedule the cisternogram. And after that is a big scary test, with big scary answers and probably really big scary surgery.

After this weekend is 4 exams in 2 weeks. (That is assuming that the cisternogram doesn’t sideline me for a week like I’m pretty positive it will.)

Right now, I can’t read, it’s taken me HOURS to try to write this and it’s only 8:45pm and I’m in bed because I cannot fathom even trying to be upright. Even though this trip is, by all logic, a terrible idea, it’s what I need.

I need to make stupid decisions. I need for my brain, my pain, to not be in control of my life.

I know I won’t see normal for a long time, but I need to be able to pretend like I have a chance at it. Because I have nothing else right now.

A year ago I was driving riding dead asleep in a car on the way back from Nashville. We were on the way back to New Orleans, after evacuating from Hurricane Gustav. On the way back from a week filled with fear, worry, frustration, elation, Sara Palin and most of all, homesickness.

Some of you might have noticed that I didn’t write a post about the 4 year anniversary of Katrina. I wanted to. I planned to. But when I sat down to do it, I just couldn’t. Talking about that city makes me sad, not for what happened to it (of course that too), but for the distance from which I am away from it. I’m sad for the 2000 miles that stand between me and my former home.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you- I never imagined that I’d miss New Orleans. That city was foreign and strange. It was hot, humid and drunken. It was unsafe and crowded.

It was also filled with character. It was filled with people who cared. It was filled with non-chain restaurants, friends and something new to do every. single. day.

And I love being close to my family, I really do, but I miss New Orleans in a way that feels almost tangible some days. I wake up, and for a brief moment, don’t realize where I am. I am always brought back to reality when I set foot on carpeting instead of hardwood flooring. Or when it takes me 15 steps to get to the kitchen, instead of the flight of stairs it was for 3 years.

Fridays are always the most difficult. We had an AMAZING temple in New Orleans and we went each Friday and then out to dinner with friends. With the kind of friends you’re just not always able to make in your 20s. The kind of friends that you sort of want to selfishly keep for just yourself. And now we go to a temple with strangers. Where the Rabbi is great, but he’s not the one we came to know and love. Where the community is lovely, but it’s not ours. We’re strangers where we used to feel like family.

I’ve been in California for 3 months now, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of that city. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t fantasize finding a way to move back there. That city that was my home. That city made me into a grown up. That city will, for as long as I can imagine, always hold a piece of my heart.

That city.

I know what it means to miss New Orleans. To miss that city.

Goodbye New Orleans. It has been a privilege to be a citizen of this great city and though my tenure here was only 3 short years, the memories will be with me forever.

We will miss you tremendously.

Laissez les bons temps rouler.

At Slappy’s graduation, someone sang a song, probably one that a lot of you are familiar with called “I know what it means to miss New Orleans” and at the time I sort of laughed at the song because for a few weeks now, I really haven’t thought I’d much miss it here. Truly. I’m going back home. Back to the place I want to be, or so I have long believed.

When Slappy was applying for medical school, we had only been dating a few months. I had no pull, no sway and no real say in anything in the process, and I watched from the sidelines. In the end, the choice came down to a school in New York and a school in New Orleans. Honestly, I prayed that he’d pick New York. I know that sounds crazy, but what I knew of New Orleans was dirtiness, and drinking and raucusity and other such stereotypical things.

And yet, to New Orleans he went. I had my first tripped planned to see the place on September 1st, 2005. If you’ll check any history book anywhere, you’ll know that I did not get to go on that trip. Just 3 measly days after Katrina, the hospital was still a hospital, the city still very much underwater. In fact, I think it was on September 1st that Slappy came home to California for a while.

And in August of 2006, after visiting twice, I moved to the Big Easy. The transition was actually much easier than I imagined. It helped that I started work almost right away and had that as a time occupier. It helped that Slappy had some friends and was my very best friend, so I was never lonely. But I was not at home either.

People in New Orleans don’t watch each other when they drive like they do in California. They don’t just say hello when they see you outside, and they really want to know where you’re at. I was not in Kansas anymore. But in time, I grew to love it.

I love the city and its changing personalities. I love the trees that cover the neighborhood we live in and tell the story of generations before us living in these very walls. I love the street car, even if it makes our house shake sometimes and even if I’ve never technically ridden it, because it reminds me of far off days and of scenic histories. I love the food, oh my God I love the food. The flavors are more amazing than one can even begin to hope to put words to and it has been a travesty that in our most recent eating jaunt, my sense of taste has been not functioning well.

I love the people here. I love that the person bagging up my groceries calls me “baby” and they’re not being condescending. I love that if you accidentally bump into someone, they also say excuse me, as if they weren’t sure if they were at fault. I love that waiters and waitresses will sit and have a conversation with you and I love that chefs and cooks wander around their restaurants chatting left and right.

I love the profound lack of real traffic, I love the ever changing weather, I love the feeling of community I get and I love the special feeling I have when I realize that, even if for a short time, I am a New Orleanian. I am a part of this city and this city is a part of me.

And in 9 days, when Slappy and I get in our car and moving van and drive out of here, I will shed a tear and I will remember this home, this period in my life with great fondness.

And I’m pretty sure that then I’ll know what it means to miss New Orleans.

How about two?

Okay, here goes.

I hate Mardi Gras. There. I said it.

I know. I need to get in the spirit. Cut loose. Have some fun. But I don’t know. Mardi Gras and I do not see eye to eye. Mardi Gras means standing for hours at a time, yelling for people to throw things at you. Or if you have the luxury of having space to sit in, it’s most likely near a very large group of very drunk people, who are always operating a barbeque or something else with fire and it’s like a train wreck. You just know one of them is going to light another one on fire or something equally brilliant and in the end, half the people are going to be hurling just mere feet from where you’re standing.

And then there’s the beads. I will admit that I love getting the “special” catches, especially glass beads. However, having beads thrown at my head a) scares the bejesus out of me and b) makes my neck really really really sore.

The only thing that salvages Mardi Gras for me is the company. For example, Slappy. On Mardi Gras morning, he and I arise at the ass-crack of dawn, throw on whatever clothes seem like they might match, pour half a container of orange juice into a different plastic container and then fill up the rest of both containers with champagne. Then we take our humongous mimosas and a few beers (to barter) and walk to Zulu, which is a solid 2 mile walk. In the morning. But it’s he and I (and not his mother!) and it’s great fun.

This year, Daisy is joining the fun. Whether she’ll take part in the Mardi Gras Mimosa fest is yet to be determined, but she’s only been in town 10 hours and we’re already having a kickass time. Or I think so anyways.

The other secret? Despite the fact that I really don’t like Mardi Gras? I lied to skip my class tonight to go to parades with Slappy and Daisy.

Perhaps my third secret is that I’m crazy. But then, that’s really not a secret at all, is it?

Okay, so a weird thing happened. You’re shocked, I know.

On Wednesday The Fiance and I went out to dinner at Le Crepe Nanou, which is arguably my very favorite restaurant. I’ve never eaten anything there that wasn’t outstanding and the fact that you can get a small cup of chocolate mousse to go at the bar, makes me seriously in love with it. As usual, we had a lovely dinner outside on the patio and just relaxed. It was great food and company.

We were seated at a table in front of a table with a man, a woman (who was not his wife, but who he was totally digging), and two little girls, probably about 7 years old. They were totally tolerable as dining partners (save for when one of the little girls turned around to play with the orange cat and proceeded to chew steak with her mouth open in my ear), but I could not help but notice that the man was talking with the thickest Yat accent I’ve ever heard.

I was in awe of the Yat. I listened intently. And I was spectacularly surprised when all of a sudden the Yat man was speaking to an Asian couple in a different language (I truly do not know which language it was, if I had to guess I’d have said Japanese, but now I’m doubting that a little). But seriously, after hearing my students try to speak spanish through their chalmation accents, I was very entertained at the idea of the Yat man speaking another language fluently. I wondered if it sounded as funny in that language as it did in English.

So fast forward to tonight when I had a craving for Thai food (Nola, so help me, if you even say it, I will hunt you down and rub my armpit all over you), the best I’ve had is located across the street from Le Crepe Nanou. Before I send all of you there, it is not the cheapest meal you will ever eat, but it is freaking awesome. So we go in and get seated and decide to order an appetizer (Calamari) which was blowing our minds, when the head chef of the restaurant walked over to our table and introduced himself and explained that he was the Yat man sitting behind us at dinner and because of that, he’s going to be fixing us something special. For free.

After a fantastic dinner of cashew chicken stir fry (chicken, veggies, cashews and rice) and Thai Coon (shrimp, crawfish, veggies, rice, etc.) he came back out with a free dessert. This man is totally speaking my language, even if it is oddly accented. He came back later with sweet coconut sticky rice with mango, blackberries and strawberries. I can’t begin to count the number of times I said “holy crap” in response to what I was eating, but it was a lot, and it was awesome.

So the bottom line here is if you’re in New Orleans and you’re looking for a great meal, in that little corner of uptown you really can’t go wrong. Be sure and tell the chef we sent you.

P.S. Look for a new genre of posts tomorrow: a recipe from my love of baking, to you. Pictures and everything.

P.P.S. In case you were wondering, the insurance company informed me that due to the fact that I’m good about taking generic prescriptions, I haven’t met my 100 dollar brand name prescription deductible so I do in fact, have to pay 12 dollars a pill. Whatever, it’s done and the staph seems to be resolving, though rather slowly if I do say so myself.

You know you’re having a bad day when someone asks you if you think your life has turned into an episode of Seinfeld.

If I didn’t know better, I’d really think that God did not appreciate my post about religion earlier this week. Yesterday, I got to physical therapy and literally, the nanosecond I opened my door to walk across the parking lot, it started POURING. I’m talking drops of rain the size of those bouncy balls (I feel like they’re called superballs, but like that phase seems inappropriate). I’m pretty sure the sky was actually falling.

When I went to make my appointment to leave physical therapy yesterday, it immediately started pouring, such that I had to walk back to my car in the rain and the grocery trip, also, in the rain.

I arrived at school to go to my open lab to study for my lab practical, I put the car in park and it MOTHER FREAKING STARTED POURING. I actually went into the bathroom and wrug (rung? wrang? rang? wrunged? runged?) out my shorts. It’s not like it rained all day yesterday, it rained in short bursts whenever I walked outside. I literally felt like I was in a Prozac commercial.

Fast forward to today, where it of course starts raining about 2 minutes before I’m ready to leave for the day. And it pours and pours and pours. And I haven’t learned and started carrying an umbrella nor to check the weather to see if it’s a miserably bad idea to wear a white shirt with a not-so-lined bra. Not being able to see your boobs through a shirt is totally overrated.

I had some time to kill, so I went to a coffee shop to get a cookie and something to drink before I went to class, noting that the rain is probably as bad as I’ve ever seen it. The gutters are all overflowing and there’s water everywhere. So I park, next to one of the overflowing gutters, get out and walk in the coffeeshop (I did find a sweater, which helped with the, um, boob issue). I ordered and walked out into the still pouring rain.

I get to my car, go to put my key in to unlock the car door and I dropped. my. keys. In the overflowing gutter, which had an amazingly strong current, leading to a storm drain about 5 feet away. Thankfully, after practically diving head-first into the gutter, I got my keys. But in this process got so wet, you’d have thought I’d showered. And my keys were all covered in gutterness. And I poured out my entire drink because I was so focused on my keys.

The rain did not let up when I got to school, but at that point, what did it even matter? Except that I walked in through the rain and realized I left half my papers in the car and had to walk back through the rain again.

And what’s great is that doesn’t even begin to skim the surface of why the past two days have been pretty sucktacular. That, my friends, is an installment for another time. So in short, yes, I feel like I’m living in an episode of Seinfeld. The one where they all live in a water-filled hell.

Holy shit.

We’re going to rewind to last spring. We had a cockroach problem, well 2. One was that we had an excessive number of them scurrying through the house, the other was that I was/am the only person in this house capable of killing them. At the time, The Fiance insisted that all of New Orleans had roaches, so for months we dealt with the constant onslaught of bugs all on our own. He had a good point, they’re all over the ground outside at night, so how can you possibly begin to make a dent in that kind of population of creatures?

It wasn’t until our landlord, who lives in the other half of our duplex, woke up with a RAT IN HER BED that an exterminator was finally called out this past summer. He said that we were infested with both cockroaches and rats and that major spraying would need to occur. Let us take a moment to contemplate just how big the brick I shat was.

So the exterminator came out and sprayed and low and behold, the cockroaches slowed down. We did suddenly have an almost constant cockroach death theater in our living room where each morning I’d walk out to at least three or four cockroach carcasses, always on their back, looking extremely painfully dead. We had a small resurgence earlier this winter so we were resprayed and besides the dead cockroaches, it’s been better.

Until last night.

It was 10:45 and I had just gotten settled to bed. I closed my eyes and heard a fluttering sound. Being the naive person I am, I expected to see a moth or something, you know, that should have the ability to fly. On the wall above my head/bed was the biggest mother freaking flying cockroach I have ever seen in my life. It was HUGE. I cannot estimate it’s hugeness because in my head it’s like 3 feet long and I think I may be exaggerating a little. Before I had the chance to kill it, the gargantuan roach flew onto the bed. It did meet its maker shortly thereafter, but the damage was already done, that roach desecrated my bedroom.

Two minutes later, dead cockroach’s life partner landed on the wall opposite the bed. I then spent the next, oh, roughly 15 minutes standing on a step-stool throwing a shoe at the wall trying to kill the wall crawler. It should be noted that I was not excessively clothed during this massacre, to put it nicely. As a result, it was pretty awkward when, using an uncoiled wire hanger, I managed to knock the cockroach down and then into the hallway. I ran about 3 paces into the common space holding my clog of death before I realized my state of clothing and retreated, never to find that particular roach again. ’tis both unsettling and very unsatisfying to lose the kill.

As soon as I got settled for the third time and began to relax, I heard the faint tapping of the 800,000 feet on the floor as well as the cat attack noises, which is never a good sign. The cat is an exceptionally poor hunter, so if she’s hunting, it must be something large. It turned out to be the first cockroach’s identical twin brother running about through my clothes on the floor. I managed to kill it and eventually went to bed, wondering if I would wake up covered in flying roaches, or rather, if I would wake up at all.

I did wake up, about 6 hours later feeling like a big pile of death. I got dressed, walked downstairs for work and saw one cockroach carcass and THREE lives ones scurrying in my kitchen. THREE LIVE ONES.

Needless to say, the exterminator will be here at 4 tomorrow. That is assuming that the next plague hasn’t yet begun.

One of the things I’ve learned since moving to New Orleans is that to celebrate any even slightly important day, like, you know, Thursday, there is a parade. Not a parade like the ones you see on TV or the ones your kids might have marched in at Christmas time- these are floats on a flatbed of a big rig truck and have wooden siding. And people do not ride and wave, they ride, drink a lot and throw shit (sometimes, literally shit, but more on that later) to the people screaming on the streets. It’s fantastic.

Today I went to see the St. Patrick’s Day parade with Nola, her family (not just CS and Sun, also her siblings, grandfather and more) and Pontchartrain Pete, and it was an absolute riot. I had read ahead of time about this particular parade, but even with advance notice I still found myself on side of the road wondering if some of these people were unaware of these magical places called GROCERY STORES. You see, at the St. Patrick’s parade people are literally screaming for food. Prized catches include cabbage, carrots (Nola got 2 moldy ones), Potatoes, Celery, Scallions, Lemons, Bell Peppers and of course, Ramen Noodles. What says Irish more than Ramen Noodles? The music is also quite fitting, I mean, I’m pretty sure Sir Mix-A-Lot was Irish, right?

Seeing as how I still lack the ability to tip my head back and stare up, this parade was particularly frightening because people are throwing full heads of cabbage and potatoes, and hey, did you know it hurts like hell to get beaned in the leg with a potato? because it does. There were also many beads thrown, and myself, Nola and at least two other members of her family caught beads with underwear attached. The man who gave them to us insisted that we put them on (um, no thank you) and I’m pretty sure one of the highlights of the day was when Nola’s sister walked up to her and said, “lift up this leg so I can put these drawers on you.” I died. It was great.

There was also some bartering at this parade, when someone in our group caught fake dog shit instead of the carrot she was yelling for, she made lemons into lemonade and traded the shit for a head of cabbage (ironic since when you cook cabbage they pretty much smell the same!). The only thing missing, and technically it wasn’t missing, I was just too stupid to use it, was sunscreen and subsequently half of my body is sunburned. It’s actually quite an attractive look.

It was really such a fun day, and a nice reprieve from the past two weeks of studying hell. The only things that could’ve made it any better were if The Fiance had been able to come, if this cold would ever die (I sound like a pubescent boy, it’s awesome) and you know, the sunscreen thing. I’m going to go bathe in some aloe vera gel and stalk my wedding registries some more.

In case you needed a visual, here’s what my chest/shoulders look like with the full sunburn having set in. Can you guess what kind of shirt I was wearing today? (and yes, I’m wearing a shirt in the picture, I just cropped it out…)

I heart weekends.