A Rainy Day Good For Any Blog

Lord.

It's been a while since I last wrote, but it feels good. It feels a bit like the first day of wearing shorts after a long winter.

A lot has been happening the past couple of weeks, so I suppose i'll just start chipping away at the moments.

Well, I've been on break for the past week and a half. Yes, even volunteer organizations have scheduled holiday breaks. They were apparently much needed for many of the long term volunteers, who were become a bit burned out from months of work without an extended time to recuperate. We got off the 21st, the day my parents came down and visited for a week. We celebrated Christmas in our hotel room with a faux christmas tree made of a long cardboard tube and pieces of cut wrapping paper. It was nice, if a little unconventional. Christmas treated me well, with my "big present" being the promise of a fancy little Canon Digital Rebel XTi. So eventually i'll start having more big, crisp, beautiful pictures to accompany this blog. I do have some for this post though...

of the ninth ward, something my parents wanted to see while they were down here. I'm apprehensive to start with any sort of opinion, so instead just look for yourself:

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These two are the entrance and kitchen of one house in the Lower Ninth. Believe it or not, this actually isn't that bad. The door lead right into the living and kitchen area. I took that from the door because it felt too strange to walk through the houses without a Tyvek suit on or a crow bar in hand. Without a job to do, being there felt too invasive

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Some Hurricane Automobiles
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January 4th, 2007

Right. Back to the posts.

I've found it interesting here to listen to people who have just returned from the ninth ward talk about their experience. They usually say something about how horrible it is, how it was worse than they imagined. How the entire car ride was silence. This was my second time visiting the ninth ward, and my reaction was the complete opposite. Things have gotten tremendously better there since March, although I suppose for someone who's never been there before it would be hard to think that from the photos. But I'd like to take this time to share something I wrote from my Biloxi journal waaaay back in March of 2006 from when I visited the 9th ward with Lawrenceville on a Spring Break trip:

March 8^th, 2006

Every house I walked by today, every piece of rubble on the ground, every piece of debris, is worth its own journal entry. I walked past houses that had been torn off of their foundations and thrown into the streets like play sets. I peered through a broken window of one of these houses, one that had caved in, and saw the ceiling of a house on its floor. The furniture was broken; walls had collapsed; rubble poured through every open space, and six months of dust and mold covered everything.

And I’d like to say that these were things unlike anything I’d ever seen before, but some of what I saw was so horrifying it almost bordered on the cliché. Today was cloudy, unusually cold. In the middle of the street was a child’s bicycle, this symbol of innocence, rusted, mangled, and broken, its bent wheel spinning and creaking in the wind.

It felt surreal. I saw children’s toys next to concrete slabs next to washing machines next to clothing, all scattered about on the same yard.

I saw sights that were strikingly bleak and poetic in their horror, sights that were absolutely chilling but, in a way, perversely beautiful, because I saw today a strange relationship between order and chaos.

You walk through these streets, past washing machines, refrigerators, bicycles, windowpanes, all with their 90 degree angles, glossy sheens, and perfect cylinders, but you see them in this reduced state, this destroyed state: dented, damaged, mangled, dirtied and thrown about…It’s an experience unlike anything else, and if this day has taught me one thing, it’s that man’s own power is microscopic when pitted against nature’s.

My experience of the ninth ward this past break was nothing like that is March. It's much cleaner now, with no houses in the middle of the streets, very few large piles of rubble, and very few collapsed houses. It looks very different now, and in many ways better, but that's the interesting thing about all the clean up down here. It requires a tremendous amount of energy to make something look genuinly nice again. You want to beautify a hit area so you remove all this ugly rubble, but now you just have a big empty hole where a big pile of rubble used to be.

Actually, and I'm finding it hard to explain this sentiment, part of me found my recent trip to the ninth ward a little more unsettling than the first time. The emptiness of the 9th this time was almost overwhelming. There are very few houses, very few cars, absolutely no people, but generally no signs life or community. Back in March, even though most of the houses were splintered piles of wood, there was still something there, filling those voids. It still felt something like a neighborhood, like something that somebody once lived in, instead of a deadzone between two trenches. I also feel that back in March the destruction was so bad, so unfamiliar that it seemed a bit unreal. I'd experienced emptiness before the 9th ward, but I hadn't experienced a house on top of a car. I hadn't experienced so many miles of destroyed houses that the senses overload and you lose touch.

So, I suppose I'm describing a bit of a contradiction. The progress in the 9th ward made me happy, but made me feel worse than the first time I went there. But I've rarely been internally consistant during my work in New Orleans. I'm constantly feeling a combination of emotions, and they're frequently at odds with one another. It's completely possible to be angry and happy and frustrated and satisfied all at the same time while gutting a house. What about this place isn't complicated? Very little.

I'll write more later. For now, ta ta.

Oh, and I also want to say that I recently published a post I had started a long time ago, back in the beginning of December, but never finished. So if you want to read something new, look back to early December. !

!!!!!

just a quick little post. I fiiinnnaallly have some internet access, and i'm just giving the quick message that i'll have a blog post soon, sorry it's taken me so long to write a new one!

Tonight,

Today was the first day I saw the power of the community here at Hands-On. I've been here for almost two weeks, and this place has become more familiar. Specifically, the people that were just faces when I arrived now have identities and unique qualities. They've become friends, and I care about a lot of them.

Tonight many of these volunteers had to say good bye, and it was one of the most moving experiences since my time here. Hands-On New Orleans has a strong relationship with Americorps, and there are shifts of teams that come through for two months of their ten month program. This group arrived in early October and their leaving tomorrow, and as is Hands-On tradition, the night before someone leaves they are given the option of standing up and speaking.

The air in the dining hall was quiet and heavy when the Americorps volunteers stood up to mark their farewell. They had become a force at Hands-On. They were all eager and interesting, they were all team leaders, but most importantly they had, with the exception of a few long term volunteers, been here the longest, which meant they've had the most time to forge a relationship with Hands-On and it's city.

They decided to speak in order of oldest to youngest, figuring a forced order would be easier. From the oldest, Kyle, to the youngest, Jennifer, they had the absolute attention of everyone in the dining hall. Some speeches were funny, some were heartbreaking, some were utterly poignant, but what struck me was that they were all unique. Each person had something different to say about their experience here, which made me realize, and a point which a few of the volunteers commented on, the time spent here is so rich and full of experience and friendship and enjoyment. I saw these people standing, speaking slowly, forcing themselves not to cry, looking awkward, shuffling their feet, not knowing what to say, laughing because they didn't know what to say, laughing so other people would laugh, laughing so it was easier not to cry, and I developed an incredible appreciation for what you can accomplish in your time volunteering here. Though every person had a unique perspective on their time here, each came away with one key sentiment: that we are here because we want to help people, and that this is an incredibly special quality.

One of the girls leaving stood up and brought up a point that I've been thinking about since she spoke. She encouraged us to think about our New Orleans environment after we've left Hands-On. She told us that blue tarps, moldy houses, and piles of debris are all around us, and so we are aware of it all, but that the rest of the country is not. And we can go home and tell people about the things we see here, but that ultimately, even if they think about the things for you tell them for an hour, for a night, they won't be moved by the devastation down here, moved by the work that needs to be done, moved by the work that does need to be done. She had no solution, but she begged anyone returning home to try their hardest to make people think about New Orleans, to care about the blue tarps and moldy houses and piles of debris. This is the future job for former Katrina Volunteers. We are a small group that cares about changing the Gulf Coast, but the big challenge is making the rest of the country care.

I thought about Trenton, my home, and (despite the fact it certainly has its problems) its lack of tarps and overgrown neighborhoods and rubble, and in a perverse way found the idea of living in a place without all that unsettling. I still don't have a perfectly clear answer for why that is, why part of me is comforted by all the damage here, but having thought about it considerably I have come up with a guess. This place revolves around the chaos of New Orleans. Its purpose is to clean up the filth and rubble. Having been here for a while I'm now comfortable with knowing that this place is going to be a second home for (at least) the next three months, and these people are going to become a second family. So why wouldn't I be rattled by the idea of living somewhere without tarps and rubble? My life here revolves around those things. If the volunteers are the heart and soul of Hands-On, then the derelict houses and debris are its body, and the idea of having all these thoughts and emotions of New Orleans swirling around my head without any means to take physical action is disturbing.

To be honest, thinking about all of these things is a little bit draining. I'm sorry my last two posts have been so serious and emotional, but there is such an incredibly amount to think about here that writing is a necessary way to process it. This is something that's been a challenge in writing these blog entries--distilling what I feel into what I really need to talk about. Every day there is an eye opening experience, and based simply on how much I've been feeling since my time here it's unbelievable to me that I've only been here for a week and a half. It's felt much richer than one would expect in such a short increment of time. But I’m tired from writing now and I'm stopping. I need a lighter blog entry. I have a ridiculously awesome story, but that's for next time.

Getting Into the Swing of Things

Well.

Today was a good day. A very good day.

I'm finally settling in to this place a little bit. My body is adjusting to the daily schedule. I'm getting tired earlier, I'm used to waking up earlier. My skin is less sensitive to the cold of drying off after an evening outdoor shower. And I'm getting to become friends with more of the long term volunteers, whose cohesion I initially found a bit intimidating.

I'm learning new skills. I did some roofing for a few days, and today I hung drywall on a ceiling. Any opportunity to try a new trade I immediately jump on to.

The home owner whose house we were working on had many interesting stories to tell about his Katrina experience. He had to get out of his home because he saw how fast the water was rising, and decided the best thing to do was to swim to Elysian Fields Ave, where the nicer, bigger houses were, so he could climb on to a taller house, a two story house. The idea of navigating through your city by swimming 10 feet over the streets is almost impossible for me to imagine.
He was eventually shipped off to Little Rock, Arkansas, but disliked it so much that he returned back to New Orleans. He's not living where he used to, though. He's living in a tiny shotgun house his family left him. I imagine his family is staying wherever they were relocated to. It's essentially three rooms, with a kitchen, a bedroom/living room, and a bathroom which is connected to the bedroom. He has a stapled sheet in front of the doorway seperating the two sections of the house. I peaked past the sheet and saw a mattress on the floor, a tv on the floor, various forms of clutter on the floor, and an electric heater. Luckily he has electricity; he has light, a sports team to watch, a little bit of heat. But his house has no ceiling and a bad roof, so he's been completely exposed to the elements. His house drops to the outdoor temperature, and it's been an unusually cold winter, with night temperatures dipping into the twenties.

This is a level of bareness that I'm not used to experiencing on such an up front and personal level. So the work we're doing feels that much more important. The dry wall hanging was that much more satisfying because not only were we putting up a ceiling, we were doing it for someone who will literally go to sleep tonight with something over his head when before he had almost nothing.

There are lots of people experiencing similar situations to the one in my example, and most of them are not fortunate enough to be getting help. You really can't think about all of it, because it quite literally, and I am not exaggerating this point, will destroy you. I was talking for a long time with a girl volunteering short term with Kalamazoo College, who had been crying while writing her journal because she has been working with eight to ten year old school kids, and has witnessed first hand the awful teachers, the awful role models, the utter anger and frustration that these kids are experiencing, and are powerless to avoid. She has tapped into the social consequences of the Hurricane, things that are much more complex and in some ways much more devestating than the physical ones, because they don't have the clean cut answers "money and labor." She looked around the room in tears and asked me how it is that we all seem okay, that we don't feel completely weighed down by such an overwhelming amount of problems. I didn't really have an answer for her then, but thinking about it now I realize that we don't seem that way because we can't let ourselves think so much about the horrible effects of the hurricane. We've all had our moments of ontological shock--I certainly had mine back in March--and we've learned that to constanatly dwell on these issues is suicide. We learn that the best thing to do is to compartmentalize our emotions, and seperate the physical action of gutting a house from the emotional reactions of why we're gutting a house: what happened here, what the home-owners had to go through, what used to be in the house, what the house used to look like. Those things get pushed back, in a sense ignored, save for the fact that we know that what were are doing is something good and something value and something that is making a difference in someone's life. And we know that pushing these emotions back is not the same thing as being apathetic, because anybody who didn't care about the issues in New Orleans would not be volunteering. Apathy has been a crime here, an absolute plague in this city, resulting in what a friend called in conversation a subtle form of genocide. People are not caring about the people here, and it is destroying them.

It's all been a lot to think about, but the combination of extraordinary people I'm encountering and the truly positive work I'm doing has made me feel incredibly at peace with myself. I know I'm truly needed here, and thus I know i truly have a place here.

And so, today was a good day.

The First Couple Days Of Hands-On, And Such

So...

I arrived in New Orleans on Saturday night, spent the night with the wonderful Farley family (without Joanna, unfortunately) and the next day drove to the site of Hands-On Neans. This will be my home for the next few months. I am an absolute idiot and am withoug camera at the moment, but I'll have one soon. In the mean time, here are my comments.

All the volunteers are staying in a church, with a dining room, kitchen, and a huge bunk room. It's definitely close living, with bunks pushed together, nothing more than a sheet separating them acting as a privacy wall. But I got here early on a Sunday during a weekend of calm, and the volunteer director (who has taken me under her wing and who I have taken a fancy to) picked me out the best available bunk, and it is suiting me well. There's a bit more privacy, and a bit more quiet. Even so, it's a strange thought that my 6 1/2 X 2 1/2 bunk, and the space underneath it, is what I'm calling home for the next 3 months.

The atmosphere of the volunteer community here has a great vibe. The majority of volunteers are probably in their mid twenties, but it varies greatly. and to be honest, i don't know for sure how old almost any of them are, but they all interact without any feelings of superiority or subordination, and that's what is so special about this place. You're respected based on your ability to work hard and do good deeds, and there are few environments where a 40 year old will commend an 18 year old as a peer.

Day to day stuff goes like this. We wake up at seven in the morning. We have a breakfast, choosing from toast, cereal, fruit; and then we pack our lunch for the day ahead (almost always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chips, unless you want left overs from the day before). We try to get out the door around 8:00 AM, making sure we grab our:

Tyvek Suit , Hardhat (and drill, occasionally), Crowbar




and respirator......... and set off for the project. Projects are all over New Orleans, but focus mainly in Central city. This is an area that's known for it's violence, but it wasn't hit horribly by the storm, and so there is hope for it to thrive post Katrina. Hands-On received a grant of 250,000 dollars to work on Houses exclusively this area, because it's an area filled with lower middle class folks, a demographic that's been largely ignored in New Orleans, since the working class get the most government attention, and the upper class can take care of themselves.

Projects vary from day to day. After dinner volunteers sign up for projects on a bulletin board, so you have the option to do something new every day of the week, with the exception of team leaders who bring cohesion to the project and stick with it from beginning to end. Nonetheless, despite the varying projects, there are always crews going out to gut houses and to demold them. This is the work that needs to be done most in New Orleans, so it's a large priority for Hands-On. It's important work as well because the work we're doing is saving the home owner anywhere from $12,000-$15,000, with less honorable contractors charging anywhere from $15,000-$20,000.

I started with a gut, wanting to get down and dirty my first day of work. It was an unbelievably frustrating building, a building known as the House of Pain, as Iron Maiden, as Satan's Den; a house made completely of metal. And I mean completely. Metal walls, metal studs, and the drywall was cemented on to metal chicken wire, that also held in the insulation. The day consisted of using worn metal cutters to cut away chicken wire. But my team was made of good people, funny people (a sense of humor can be essential on a tedious day, I've found) and so it ended up being a fun time.

And with that, I depart. More in the future. I'm looking forward.

"You gotta catch those, Nigger"

Well, I've arrived in New Orleans and my road trip through the South has come to a close, and while I greatly enjoyed my trip, ultimately it's observations like the title quote that make me realize I love the Northeast.

I feel a little guilty titling my Blog post with that quote, actually. I really did have a remarkable time, and stayed with some remarkable people, and saw a part of the country I had never seen before. And I experienced virtually no racism during my trip. But I did on my last stop before New Orleans, in Alabama, while watching a football game with some UAla boys, and listening to such an offensive epithet thrown out so casually,makes me wonder what could possibly lurk between the surface under more people i met. I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist up in the North, but I am saying that in such a situation the people I know would at least keep their prejudices to themselves.

But enough of that. The trip was great. I left on Sunday and made my down to New Orleans, stopping in DC, Chapel Hill, Atlanta, and Birmingham. I've been driving a 98 Buick LeSabre, with my clothes and a laptop in the trunk, and a pile of casette tapes in the seat next to me. The car is without CD player, so my road trip soundtrack was lo-fi. Usually my sountrack switched between Dr. John, The Police, a ridiculously cheesy (ridiculously good) 80s mix, and George Gershwin. These moments of driving down long stretches of road with nothing but wind and music were some of my favorite parts of the trip. I usually had the windows open, and one arm out of the car.

The moment I felt like I was really doing something special was in Virginia, as I crossed the Susquehannah river. The police was playing, the sun was glowing, the sight was beautiful. Maybe it was just because of how cinematic the whole experience felt, but the whole thing made me scream.

Nothing extraordinary happened. This wasn't a crazy road trip. I barely partied. But it was incredibly satisfying. I had an opportunity to see good friends at their homes, and such opportunities are bound to become few and far between the more years Lawrenceville falls behind us. And I got to see a part of the country that I'd barely visited. In fact, the trip down was so fulfilling I wish now I'd scheduled more time to get to New Orleans. A week seemed like a long time, but it was anything but.

Anyway, tomorrow is my first day of work. I'll try to publish something then.

The Final Day Home

Well, ladies and gentlemen, in a few hours I'm getting up and starting my journey down to New Orleans. Tonight is my last night in my home, in this bed, on this computer, for a long, long time. I'll keep this post short and sweet. I'll try to be as consistent as possible in writing journal entries, maybe even a few as I drive down. I'm taking a week to get there and stopping off at colleges, seeing friends along the way. Right now I'm too tired to be nervous or excited, but we'll see how I feel tomorrow. For right now, all I want to do is sleep.

wish me luck.

Oh Lord. New York.

Ah New York. It really only takes one visit there for me to realize that no matter which cities I go to--New Orleans for the next five months, Boston for the next four years--none of them will be as enchanting and close to me as New York is.

I suppose a lot of a Blog is essentially just literary masturbation. I talk about all the stuff that's going on in my life, even if it's trivial in the grand scheme of things, and i'm talking about it just for the sake of talking about it. So this may not be that interesting for those reading it, but nonetheless, here is my day in New York.

The last few days before I start my road trip down to New Orleans have been busy, balancing the time between being with my family, being with my friends, and reserving a little time just to reflect personally. But I decided to go to New York today to see my oh-so-wonderful friend Dena Yago. The train to New York was funny. It was crowded so I stood at the end of the train, near the door of the vestibule between cars, holding my ticket and scanning for empty seats. I didn't have to look long, however, before a woman asked me if I would like to sit with her and her two daughters. They picked seats that were facing each other. They were on one side, and I had an isle to myself. The mom was very New Jersey. She was loud and bubbly and loved to drink and was going in to New York to do the touristy things: see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, then see the Thanksgiving day parade the next day. The mother talked the entire time and occasionally pulled the kids into the conversation. One was a sophmore at an art school somewhere in Ohio and was mortified by everything her mother had to say. She rolled her eyes a lot. The other daughter was in a nationally ranked (ranked first, actually) High School marching band in South Jersey. She had recently gone to the Marching Band finals in Annapolis and won. So it goes.

And then New York. Everybody is moving in that city. Places to go. There's very little eye contact. You aren't aware of everyone you pass. And there's something about that that I love. I went up to Isabelle Delouvrier's house next. This charming girl happens to have a five story house in the Upper East side and it is amaaazing. We got food and watched stupid game shows and sat and talked and gossiped and I felt like i was at Lawrenceville again. Isabelle still is at Lawrenceville. She's still stuck in the system. And listening to her talk about all these Lawrenceville kids--and me knowing exactly who they are--made me think about when the time will come where I won't know exactly who they are, and who they dated, and what their stories were. In other words, it made me think about when I'll be done thinking about Lawrenceville. Not yet anyway.

I left Isabelle's and then went up to Columbia to see Dena. Now, I could write pages about how ridiculously wonderful this girl is. But I can't, so i'll say this: she's absolutely brilliant, utterly charming, and exhaustingly beautiful. That about does the trick. She has seen every good movie, read every book that goes good movies are based on, and on top of all that has a fantastic amount of knowledge about good, alternative music.

We ate Fallafel and we talked. I hadn't seen her in about a month. I'm preparing to go to New Orleans, so this is my farewell meeting. We then meet up with her friends, who are all smart and wearing tight jeans and hip, and decide to see a movie that is only suited for such people: Darren Aranofski's The Fountain. This is a beautiful movie to look at, and (amazingly) has no CGI. It's filled with these ethereal images of what looks like Nebula's exploding and such, but it's actually all this microscoping photography of, like, yeast growing. Excellent. Narratively, though, the film was weak, and waay to over indulgent and pseudo-philosophical. I decided that the person that thought The Fountain is their favorite movie is the person that I will hate most in life.

The movie ended and I had to go but we both decided that this was not nearly a climactic enough goodbye. So, I'll be going in on Sunday.

Anyway, I need to be going now. But i'm so frustrated with not getting this post finished that I'm going to post it anyway. It's not done, but i'll be finishing it later. Consider this a to be continued...



walking around and going to Rockefeller center
people watching in Penn station (drunk people0
Maya
train ride (lights off, people smoking up)

What Brittany's Friends Miss About Her Part IV

DHRUV!

What Brittany's Friends Miss About Her Part III

Shamsa.

Oh, and I know this is a rather obscure Blog, but anyone who reads this, please, pleeease feel free to give your opinion on which ones I should choose. It's two pictures each: one with the person holding the board, and one of them by themselves as a portrait shot. That's the word.

Complications

Here's the thing.
The work that needs to be done down in New Orleans is so, so broad in scale. I realize that I'm making a pretty obvious point, but I read an article in the New York Times today (although it was from a few days ago) that really made me think. The article focused mainly on one high school and on one type of student. The school is John McDonogh School, the largest functioning high school in the city. The type of student is the student who is alone, students who are either living with extended family or by themselves. The principal of John McDonogh school estimates that up to one-fifth of the student body lives without their parents, parents who are forced to stay in their relocations to pay off debts and rents. The psychological consequences for these kids living on their own have manifested physically. Since the school opened two months ago, six "very serious" assaults have occurred, and fights break out daily. A student, refused entry in to his class because he was tardy, beat his teacher "unmercifully" to the point of hospitalization. The violence has resulted in heightened security, but the 25 guards in the building, the four police officers and cruisers on the side walk, and the metal detectors are only adding to the unease and aggression.


What surprised me so much about this story is that it went against what I believed to be the intuitive response after Hurricane Katrina; that after such a devastating event, family becomes most important. Reading something like this feels unfortunate, but even more it feels unnecessary. We want so badly for a simple solution for rebuilding New Orleans, that if we could just raise a little more money, get a little more support from the government, build a few more houses, then everything could, and would, come back together again. But this article has made me think about how deep the problems run in Katrina affected areas. Rebuilding houses is one piece of an entire jigsaw puzzle of problems that need to be addressed. It'd be nice to have someone to blame for all of this, someone who, when fixed, fixes the problems of the city with them. Perhaps this is a wholly American response: quickly looking to find fault, quickly looking to blame instead of looking for change. I don't know who to blame. I can't blame the parents, because many of them are forced to stay to pay off debts and rents. I can't blame the guards, because the high school students are ignoring authority and fighting all the time. But I can't blame the kids, because being parent-less and having my every move watched by law enforcement would make me lash out as well.

I don't know who to blame and I don't know how to change things. All I know is that i truly wish I had the ability to do more than just build houses down there.





If you're interested, this is the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/education/01orleans.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=e95f64cb644eb8e1&ex=1163826000

What Brittany's Friends Miss About Her Part II

Now Ashley Pakenham. Um.... need i say more?

What Brittany's Friends Miss About Her

I'm doing a little photography project for Brittany Patton, and, well, for myself. I'm feeling starved artistically! So this: Brittany Patton is in China for her entire Junior year. I've assembled some of her closest friends and will be taking pictures of each one and then making a photo book out them. Each friend has two pictures: one of them holding a white board with the words I Miss _____ and then their filled in memory; and the other is a portrait shot. I'll keep posting 'em as I shoot 'em. Here are a few of Hunter.

Hill Weekend

Ah, yes, The Great Return. For those that don't know, Hill Weekend is essentially Homecoming for Lawrenceville, built around a day of all the sports teams competing against Lawrenceville's oldest rival: The Hill School. But let's be honest here--first year graduates posing in front of the Lawrenceville student body to get recognition is as big a part of Hill Weekend as anything is. My memories of Lawrenceville hosting Hill weekend involve sitting in the bleachers in front of the football game, but actually watching all of the graduates standing on the track that surrounds the field for the entire crowd to see. They were talking to each other, but their bodies were facing the stands. Think of how elementary schoolers act on stage during the second grade play, and you have an idea.

There was a bit of that this year, but Hill Weekend offered all of us returning graduates something more, something I had thought about while watching as a High Schooler, but hadn't really understood until I experienced it as a graduate. This weekend, most of us ignored everything non-Lawrenceville. It became more than just going back to high school. We were back in high school. All the graduates convened at the Pep Rally Friday night. This was where the hugs, the handshakes, the small talk, the "oh my god!"s and "you look great"s took place. But as the night wound down, the graduates fell into their Lawrenceville routine.
A group of kids went off to eat dinner at Fedora's, the restaurant across the street from Lawrenceville that is oh-so-frequented by its student body.
Most kids walked through campus, stopping at their old dorms, and talking with their old house masters.I went on one of these strolls with two friends who had prefected one of the Crescent houses, and within five minutes of greeting the House Master they were asking her for gossip.
And as I was leaving Lawrenceville on my way up to a party, I drove passed a group of graduates hopping over the Lawrenceville fence to get onto Main Street, just as they had done all of last year.

And the next day, of the forty-five or so returnees that arrived on Friday night, virtually all of us drove the two hours to Pottstown to see the games. I spent most of my time at the football game. I noticed very little of the graduate posing that I'd witnessed in previous years. Most of us were in the stands watching. Most of us cheered for a school that we were no longer a part of. And when Lawrenceville won, most of us there charged the field with everyone else and jumped in celebration with the massively forming huddle. I found myself more invested in this Hill football game than I had been in any during my time at Lawrenceville. Why? Why am I unusually excited for a school that, while good to me, has moved on without me, with players and fans who don't really know how to feel about us returning, who maybe feel like we're trespassing?

I think that Hill weekend became a second chance of sorts for us, a moment for us to evaluate our time at Lawrenceville and focus on what we cared about: friends, celebration, and ultimately, achievement. We were Lawrenceville students, but better Lawrenceville students--a little more excited, a little more unified, and looking back on the past few days I realize that to the graduates nothing else was relevant. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone say "I'm not going to think about how much work I have to do when I get back." Granted, maybe all these people mean to say is that the mental burden of worrying over homework would dampen the fun of the weekend. But that's not the only reason they don't want to think about their college work. There's something to it that's a little more profound. We do not want to think of college work because we do not want to think of college. In a way, we wouldn't let ourselves. The weekend had become about returning to being a high school student. We were in high school. The idea of college homework is anachronistic. We do not need to work on college things. Do not mention these things to me. Do not break our suspension of disbelief. Do not pull us out of our characters.

But I'm writing this on a Sunday night, and Hill Weekend, my friends, is over and done with. And the people that wouldn't let themselves think about college homework are now forced to. And they have gone back to wherever they were on Thursday and, in a weird way, they are leaving Lawrenceville for the second time. I was so comfortable this weekend, everything was so familiar, conversation was so relaxed and benign (and i don't mean that in a bad way. Who has a revelatory conversation every day of their lives?), that i was, I realize now, blind to the fact that I will probably only see most of those graduates a handful of times in the rest of my life.


And that. is that.

the key,

they say, to becoming a better writer is to write even when you don't want to write. Well, that's what I'm doing now. It's 11 30, I'm tired, but this blog is important to me, and thus i need to be consistent.

I feel that part of the reason I've been apprehensive to write in this since its inception is that i feel i don't have that much to talk about, or that i don't have a lot to talk about when it comes to what I've been doing. Most of my conversations regarding my deferral involve what I'm going to be doing (going down to New Orleans), but for now I'm just sort of hitting the daily grind--working in Trenton during the week, going out on the weekends, repeat.

But, for those of you who don't know what I'm planning this deferral (a lot of people think I'm up at Boston University), this is it:

In a little less than a month I'll be heading down to New Orleans for an indefinite amount of time, but at least four or five months. I'm planning on volunteering for a few months with Hands-On New Orleans (a well organized volunteer group--check them out), long enough to pick up some new skills, and learn the city a little better. When I'm ready, I'll leave, get a job for a contractor, and then get my own apartment.

The possibilities in this vague, idealistic plan are endless. I'm excited. I'm excited to see all the things that'll work out, excited to see what it will be like to have to work to put food on the table, to be self sufficient. But I'm also curious to see what's going to go wrong, what parts of my plan I'll have to change or compromise. So far things are going pretty well. The volunteer stuff is fallen into place, I have a job available to me in New Orleans, and apartment prices are reasonable.

I've also been corresponding with the editor of the Times-Picayune, pitching him the idea of writing a bi-weekly editorial for them writing from the eyes of a Katrina volunteer. It's a long shot, and he said there are no guarantees, but he asked for a writing sample. Who knows, i might, might, might just get to write something for the New Orleans Times-Picayune

I'm off. I promise to spice up this blog, but for now I need to set up the ground work. Wait for the end of November. I will have stories

Peace!

Just to get the ball rolling

This is my first official blog post. excited, world? i am.