friday evening i looked at the radar (i'm a total nerd about monitoring the radar) and I realized i was going to be stuck in my office for hours unless i booked it to the bar where I knew some people were meeting. Some friends, but also some people I think I want to be my friends. Friends I am courting, you could say. I booked it, and seconds after I arrived at the bar, the skies opened. It was a fun night. High point: a beautiful bike ride home along a path I really do not think was safe at that time of night, but i thought, okay-I'll-never-do-this-again and went for it. But seriously, I will never do it again, I promise. But bullfrogs and live oaks and the spanish moss and dark green night air. I can't find the right words to describe the relief of the coolness under the trees after a storm following an oppressively hot week in louisiana in the summer.

Low point: waiting outside the bathroom at the bar forever and after kicking it a few times, idly glancing in along the crack in the door and realizing I was watching a woman wind a tourniquet around her arm and inject heroin. Ugh. And it tells you something about my state of mind that I was mostly thinking, "am I really going to go through life without ever experiencing that? what am i missing?". I found another bathroom.

*
The next afternoon I had pizza and hangs with my friend and her two year old. Truly, I was not up for it, but I wanted to see them so I went and it says something about single parenthood that my friend was kind of envious of my hangover. But the baby is beautiful and we talked about how it is to be a parent (my friend: "sometimes i wonder how can he be mine because he is just the most beautiful person I've ever known") and I had some feels about babies. In the evening i went to see 'the lobster' in an newly opened independent theatre with my favorite friends/mardi gras co-conspirators. I loved the glamour of the theatre, which is in a newly restored old building, and also I loved the sweet sweet air conditioning. At the most suspenseful moment near the end of the movie, someone dropped a glass and it shattered, and the whole theatre cracked up, so grateful to have an outlet for our collective nervous tension.

*
today i had to go to the stores, ugh, but I left all my work clothes at BT's in Mtl and I have to go back to E Africa for work on Friday, so it had to be done. I spent too much money just to get it over with. Downtown was crazy because oyster festival, and for a while I people-watched from the sidelines while sipping a green smoothie I'd brought from home, but then I gave up on being virtuous and went for a burrito. While I waited for my turn to order, I looked at my twitter feed and started to read the letter that woman read at the sentencing trial for the Stanford Swimmer about the impact of her rape, and suddenly i realized that without noticing, I'd started weeping, right there, in the line-up.

*
As I wiped my eyes and took deep breaths and debated the wisdom of finishing reading that letter, my friend J, from the night before, tapped on my shoulder and pointed to where he and K were sitting. I was so relieved to have the unexpected company because I don't know what i was going to do with all that emotion. They were finished lunch, but they chatted with me while I ate my burrito, and then the three of us biked home along the edges of the festival. We watched a tugboat hauling what looked like an oil rig on a barge, slowly, slowly up the Mississippi, against the current. And then we watched an older woman reel in a big fish from her seat in the rocks along the bank. A big crowd gathered to watch the excitement (her fishing rod was bent almost in half). I heard someone say, "quick, open snapchat!" and suddenly there was a wall of phones. The old lady was looking flummoxed about actually catching something + the wall of phones, and a guy in a camo t-shirt went down to help her (first he handed her his bloody mary to hold). It turned out to be a huge catfish. We all applauded.

*
I came home and washed my hair. The cold shower was the greatest thing I've ever felt in my life. Then I went over to J&K's place, and K cut my hair. I am pretty sure she gave me Prince's haircut, but we'll see how it shakes out in a few days.

*
After she finished, I watched the NBA finals with J at the bar down the street. I ran home at halftime to move my laundry from the washer to the dryer. I had a gin and tonic, and then a beer, and debated prison sentences for rapists and what is the purpose of prison, is it deterrence or punishment or locking up people at risk of reoffending?

And now I am home. I made a scrambled egg for dinner, and hissed and ineffectually flicked a dishtowel at the giant cockroach on the counter. They are everywhere at this time of year.

I wanted to write out, just once, what it's like. A weekend in my life, in my home in New Orleans, in 2016. Not one of those things was planned in advance.

10:33 p.m. - 2016-06-05