A New Post After A Brief Hiatus

Well. Today is Saturday, and I have the day off. I haven't any intense things to talk about, but there's been a bit going on.

There was that stomach virus going around that, thankfully, I missed. Although I was one of the first to get a bad cold that circulated right after the stomach virus. It was bizarre having different types of sicknesses flow in to one another. There hasn't been a single moment in the past two and a half weeks where Hands-On has been without some sort of sickness.

Kirby came a couple of weeks ago and, I think, has really eased in to the community and lifestyle. I was a little nervous knowing she'd be doing this work having come from back surgery this summer and having finished physical therapy a day before she headed down, but it's not really affecting her. And, with her down here, I get to take her to my favorite places and see my favorite bands and watch her experience it all for the first time. I don't think I'll ever tire of watching friends experience the sights, sounds, and tastes of New Orleans. I wouldn't say I take the culture of New Orleans for granted, but it's definitely something you get used to. Watching her face light up at a brass band show, though, is a reminder that all of this is unique.

Now, a movie recommendation. Everyone that reads this must, must, must see Pan's Labyrinth. It's been dubbed a fairy tale for adults (it does have an R rating), but please don't let a fantasy movie deter anyone. It's my favorite movie of the past couple of years, and the cinematography and the art design are absolutely amazing. Please, please, please, please see this movie.

The last thing to mention would be that I finished my Team Lead training yesterday, so I'm know certified to take out gutting crews. Mold would be a part of the training, but Hands-On has temporary stopped demolding houses. The way the demolding process works:
volunteers scrub all the studs with a wire brush, then vacuum up the dust and mold spores after the scraping is complete. The volunteers then wipe all the wood in the house with Pine Sol. The final step is sealing the wood with a type of primer that also traps and prevents the growth of mold, called Kilz. Hands-On does all the gutting and molding services for free, but doesn't pay for supplies. So we ask that the homeowners pay the 150 dollars for the Kilz, and then we'll apply it for free. The problem is that so few homeowners are here, and are so hard to contact, that the demolded houses sit for months without the Kilz and eventually, inevitably, grow back their mold. It's a bit of a bummer, but I guess if the mold is growing back, it's a good thing that HONO is trying to revamp their demolding process for something better.
Pretty soon I'll be doing construction TL training as well. We just got a bunch of money from a soap opera...?Guiding Light?...to work on three houses from start to finish. The head of the project needs some long term volunteers to take out crews and work with crews to insulate, hang dry wall, mud, sand, paint, maybe even do some electrical work. I'll keep everyone informed on that as it progresses, but I'm excited to do something constructive.

And last, but certainly not least, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the New Orleans Saints. I have never been affected by a sports team as much as I was by the Saints. You really had to be in New Orleans during football season to understand how the Saints were infused in to every part of the city. Every time we saw music people shouted Saints' game chants, and the groups would break in to "When the Saints Go Marching In." Every restaurant and Bar had saint's posters, or "Geaux Saints" written on their chalk boards. And it seemed everyone in the entire city stopped to watch the game on Sunday. You didn't have to be a sports fan to support them. There are many here who will say "I'm not a football fan, but I'm a Saints fan."
I think it's a pretty obvious metaphor, so I won't dwell on it too much, but the Saints really had become saints in the face of Katrina, helping to pick the city off the ground as it rose to the Super Bowl. And they also provided a form of escapist entertainment for the current problems of the city: the low population, the horribly slow and ineffective Road Home program, the huge surge of violence in the past few weeks.

In any event, I am now a Saints fan, and will continue to be in Boston. Wow, Boston. To be honest, writing that has been the first time I've thought about my life up there. I'm not trying to make it sound like I had forgotten I was going to school there in September and just remembered. I'm always thinking about the fact that eventually I'll be leaving New Orleans, or more generally ending my year off of freedom and exploration, and going on to college like most kids in my situation. But I guess it took the thought of rooting for sports teams up there to make me think about what life is going to be like. I'll have new friends and a new social scene and new bars and new music and a completely new lifestyle; I'll be learning a new city from scratch. And shit, I don't know why all this is depressing me, but it is. I can't really explain it, but as soon as I wrote "I am now a Saints fan, and will continue to be in Boston" I got a little sad.
I think I'm going to miss the freedom of choice. Right now, If i wanted to, I could finish this post and then pack my stuff, go the airport, and fly back to New York, or LA, or Chicago. On Jet Blue round trip tickets to Chicago are 115 dollars. I've already thought about going there. I was planning on going when I was done here in April, but at the same time, I get to decide when I'm done here. And being here has shown me that college or high school don't have to be the best years of your life. I want to go to BU, I want to go to college, or at least I understand that I should want to and that I will enjoy it while I'm there. But I think this has been the first time where I've come to understand the main symptom of taking a year off and the main fear of parents everywhere: that because of their experiences during their gap year, that they will not want to go back to school.

It's trivial stuff that I'll miss: Po Boys, brass bands, walking through the french quarter. But God, that's the stuff that makes New Orleans unique, those things are completely unnecessary but so wonderful and special and specific to here. Whatever. It's a bit awkward that I'm talking about all this now. I'm still here for another four or five months, probably. But all this just just, BAM, hit me right now, and I thought it was worth talking about. I'm not doing a very good job talking about it. Let me talk about it in five months. But man, I've never experienced the power of words so strongly. Before I made that comment about Boston I was feeling completely differently then after I had written it, and hadn't even the time to realize what had made me feel differently.

Maybe in a later post I'll be a little more poignant. But for now, life is good, life is good, life is so so good. At the very least "life is good, without it we'd all be dead." Tomorrow, I promise, promise, to have a blog entry showing pictures of some of the important people at Hands On and their stories. So, look out for that. But, for now, farewell!

Quite a week.

Or two weeks, I suppose. It's hard; there's always a lot going on here, and I try and filter out what has been most interesting down here, but inevitably I'm always forgetting some things. So this post is going to be an attempt at catching up on everything that I've missed in the past two weeks that I want to talk about.

Most recently, there's been a stomach flu that has infiltrated Hands-On and is getting its volunteers sick. I don't know if any of you have ever been forced to live in an intensely communal environment during a contagious sickness, but it is terrifying. Every day I wake up with dread in my heart as I watch my courageous fellow volunteers get picked off like flies. I've been using hand sanitizer like a mad man, and have gotten ritualistic in my daily habits. I never use the front bathrooms at Hands-On because I haven't used those since the virus and so far I haven't gotten sick. I only sleep on my right side because that's what I'd been doing the first couple days of the virus and so far I haven't gotten sick. I have the tendency to always, always, always catch whatever virus goes around, so I'm determined to beat fate this time.

Being sick is the only time I really miss home at Hands-On. It really is impossible to have a moment of isolation that lasts longer than an hour here, and those are the moments I wish I could just lock myself in my room and sleep. It's also hard to not work on a work day here, because the drive and (unintentionally, of course) the pressure to work hard is so strong that skipping a day to rest feels awful. Well, I would imagine. I've never taken a sick day here. I will say that wearing a respirator in a moldy house while you have a head cold is a pain in the ass.

Last Friday my friend Kirby came to Hands-On. She's going to be here for a month. So excellent! She was the friend that I stayed with in Atlanta on my way down here, and in the first few weeks of being at Hands-On, I did a lot of phone talking about Hands-On and a little bit of convincing and now she's here. Having an old and established friend is a bit of a relief. I've made this point on the blog before, but one of the tragic things about friendships at Hands-On is that the majority of volunteers are only here for a couple of weeks before they go back home, so no matter how close you get to someone here and how wonderful it is, the truth lurks in the back of your mind that this is only temporary, that once they go home you will keep in touch for a while, but your lives are too separate to be as you were for those one or two weeks. Having Kirby here eliminates that. I've known Kirby for four years, and she'll go back in a month, but we will remain friends.

But now, at the risk of sounding contradictory, I think that I made a friend here that will go past the two weeks at Hands-On. A group from Skidmore came a couple of weeks ago, and I had the privilege of getting pretty close with a couple of them. One of them in particular, M.R., I think I'll stay friends with for a long time. I don't think I've ever met anyone that was so easy to talk to, such a natural conversationalist. Here's where having a blog gets a little tricky. Talking about the specifics of a friendship, what makes it tick, is an intense and personal thing, too personal for a public journal. So all I'll say is that I find it inconceivable that three weeks ago I didn't have such a great friend. In fact, three weeks ago I didn't know you existed.


Isn't that interesting, everyone? There are so many inspiring people here, but before they came I had no idea any of them were even on the face of the earth. Everyone should experience that. It makes the time here richer.

YAY SAINTS

WHO DAT? WHO DAT? WHO DAT SAY THEY GON' BEAT THEM SAINTS?!?!

This city LOVES its team. The energy is incredible.

The Fun That Is New Orleans

New Orleans has conditioned me to a life of fun. I'd been sick these past couple


of days, and had to rest up for a few days. It was nice to get the sleep and the relaxation (although gutting and wearing a respirator with a head cold is not fun), but I was ready to go out again. Thursday night is always a good night in New Orleans. It's the night that the Soul Rebels play at Le Bon Temps Roule. But last night was also featured a spectacular show at Tipitina's, I imagine one of the few jazz clubs in New Orleans most non-New Orleanians have heard of. It was a night featuring three brass bands (Free Agents, Treme, and then ReBirth, who are featured in that photo) with a whole bunch of Mardi Gras Indians. I don't have any pictures from last night--I broke my camera a couple of weeks ago...not the fancy one though--but these are what Mardi Gras Indians look like:

Music always starts an hour later than the posted show time here, so I waited around a bit, and ended up meeting a huge group of Bard students who are here volunteering. One of them used to volunteer at Hands-On, and was Ty Shon's Big Brother back in August, the role I'm now filling. I haven't forgotten about writing a Ty Shon post. I'll have pictures of him Sunday, and I promise I'll write it then.

It was easy to break the ice.

"You go to Bard? I applied there--I was SOOOO close to going!"

They were all hipsters and the girls were all pretty. I don't know what it is about that school, but really, every girl there is alternative, brunette, and attractive. Once the music started they made up the bulk of the dancers, and they were a great crowd: enthusiastic and in motion. And the music itself...what can I say about it. The point of New Orleans jazz is to make you move. Very little of it is cerebral, and the players are rarely masters of their instrument. But they are masters of the groove, and the brass bands are at the top of the hill. The two best were the Treme Brass Band and, of course, ReBirth.

Treme was much more traditional. The tempo was slower and it wasn't as funk oriented. But the instrumentalists were great and they had great harmonies. One of their trumpet players could play two trumpets at the same time. The two highlights of the night were when they played a slow dirge for Darryl Shavers, a drummer for the Hot 8 Brass band who was killed a few days ago. It was done a la jazz funereal. I can't really explain what it sounds like. Just Google jazz funeral and look for a sound clip. But its slow and all the instruments play their own melodies and drunkenly overlap, and it's incredibly emotional and beautiful. At a jazz funeral, a brass band follows the casket and the pallbearers and the crowd as the body is carried to the cemetary. Slow, mournful music is played all the way to the grave, but once the body is in the ground, the music turns up beat and happy, and the slow percession becomes a happy, upbeat celebration of life. It's one of those amazing, beautiful, unique qualities of New Orleans culture. I don't care where I am when I die, but I want a jazz funeral. Treme stuck to the theme. They played slow and wonderfully, and when the finished they broke out and everybody started dancing.

The second highlight was Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, a great New Orleans player who stopped by to play a few songs. He's a circular breather, and he used it last night, going on this funky three note groove and holding it for close to a minute, until finally spiraling out. The crowd went nuts.

ReBirth played afterwords, and they're probably the best brass band in New Orleans. And I could go on and on about how good they are, and the songs they played, but I don't want to get redundant. Besides, I don't know enough about music theory to explain what it is about their sound that makes them so good, why their harmonies are so tantalizing or their arrangements are clever. Then again, I think what makes New Orleans' funk and jazz so great is how accesible it all is. It's all about feeling good and wanting to dance, something I think only the most timid of wallflowers would want to avoid.

I'm off until next time. Saint's are playing tomorrow. Pray for them.

A Long Dinner Line

means that I have some time to kill. I realize I haven't written a post in a little while, so what better time to write something new?

But oh, lord, the spirit of this city is vibrant. Yesterday was a lazy Sunday afternoon until I heard the sound of horns and drums in the distance. I ran outside and and the Perfect Gentlemen Krewe was having a parade with hundreds of people following. Everyone was drinking and second lining and skipping and the Hot Eight Brass Band was getting funky. A friend and I followed them four an hour. Hopefully I'll have some pictures soon.

In what other city does this happen so regularly?

Hands-On has been up and running again for the better part of a week now. Coming back took a little bit of readjusting. I returned to a few missing faces and many new ones. It's something that I don't think I'll ever get completely used to, forming friendships you know are temporary. Most of the volunteers are college groups staying for a week or two at the most, so people leave when you feel you're just getting to really know them. I was sad at the beginning of the break because the friends I made all left and I stayed here, and I'll be sad again once the friends I've made after the break leave as well. Oh well. It is what it is.

Hands-On started up on Thursday, which means I haven't had many days of work since my return. Thursday was a tedious day of reorganizing all the tools in the tool shed, and then heading over to sand and repaint a house that a former group of volunteers had done a shoddy job on. There were many unsanded, flaky areas that could not be painted, so we had to go and tidy up. I'll say now, there are few jobs as mind numbing as sanding pieces of wood, but conversation and a sense of humor keep morale up.

The night was a whole 'nother story. I haven't really mentioned the night life in New Orleans, so I will say now: I'm having more fun in this city than I've had in my entire life. Every night is music and fun and friends. And every Thursday, the Soul Rebels Brass band plays at Le Bon Temps Roule. This is one of the many brass bands in New Orleans, but also one of the best, with an emphasis on the beat. This is one of the funkiest brass bands, the one that makes me want to dance the most. I saw them last month for the first time at a venue called the Dragon's Den and ended up sitting next to the girlfriend of one of the band members. Her name's Lavan (or at least that's how it's pronounced). She's as tall as I am, and she can tear it on the dance floor. It's intimidating watching that big a woman move so quickly. But she's extremely nice, and since that first meeting I've seen the Soul Rebels (and her) a bunch of times, and she's gotten me in to all the venues that are 21+. We saw them at Le Bon Temps last Thursday, and we got back at 2:30 in the morning. They had only finished their first set. I'm telling you, this city is one, big, continuous party.

Friday was my day off (thankfully): sleeping in and watching movies. I saw Snakes on a Plane, which, honestly, I don't think pushed through the "Bad Movies" category into the "So Bad Its Good" category. But I'll admit, hearing Sammy Jackson use "fuck" in various sentences at the end of the movie was highly entertaining.

Saturday is a change of pace for me at Hands-On. Normally Saturday is another work day like any other, but on my Saturdays I spend the day with a kid named Ty Shon. He's a neighborhood kid who started hanging around the Hands-On base five or six months ago, and since has become the adopted son of Hands-On. I've taken on a big brother role for him, and every Saturday we go to a volunteer bike shop and work on bikes from 2 to 6. It's a volunteer bike shop, separate from Hands-On, where a buyer will buy a bike in questionable condition for fifteen dollars and then fix it themselves with parts provided by the bike shop. At the end of the day (or two, or three, depending on the condition of the bike--some were caught in the flood) they have a bike and they know how to build and maintain it. We work there and then bike over to Cafe Du Monde for some beignets.

My relationship with Ty Shon is interesting, and deserving of a separate blog post. I'll have more on him later. For now though, I'll end by saying that time here is just as fun and dynamic as its been from the beginning.

And please, to any and all who are reading this, if you are coming to New Orleans, or thinking about volunteering, CALL ME! 609 577 1528. I highly, highly, highly, highly encourage it.

Farewell.