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!