It’s 11 pm on Mardi Gras eve and I am in my bed where I have
spent the greater part of my evening, oscillating between facebook updating and
napping. Though I suppose I should be
down in the Quarter right now facing the infamous Krewe De Bleu (riot police on
horseback who make a spectacle out of cleaning the quarter of all the living to
mark the start of Lent), I am much happier in my warm, slightly skanky
sheets.
It’s been a busy few weeks leading up to this. I have no clean underpants left and had to
buy a Clover Grill t-shirt just so I had something to wear the other day (and
because that place is the shit). Last
week my fiancé came to visit, this weekend I had friends from out of town, and
today I managed to yard sale while biking to the parade route from my palatial
Mid City digs (non New Orleanians – let it be known that this is rather far) –
I blame the five day Miller Highlife diet.
I also blame that on my inability to sleep right now, though I think
there’s more to it.
Not too long ago I was lacking a mission. Granted I had a sizeable ego and a few
useless degrees, but very little in the way of a life plan or goal. I thought perhaps I would be a professor, or
maybe a private school teacher ala Dead Poet’s Society, or maybe a Starbucks
Barista for a spell then backpack Europe like all good urban hipsters – but there
was no sustainable long term plan. Your teens
and early twenties are all about solipsism.
Want to backpack Europe? Why
not? Want a graduate degree in sixteenth
century drama? Do it. The possibilities are endless. Much has been written about this particular
period of freedom and the subsequent loss thereof as you draw closer to thirty –
but none of it seems fitting to me now as I sit on the precipice of adulthood.
I don’t want to grow up – and while I don’t want to be a New
Orleanian for an even a second past the stroke of midnight on my last day at
work – the thought of leaving produces a reaction far more violently sad than I
expected. This being my last Mardi Gras
as a resident, it was a bit sad to watch Zulu roll down St. Charles this
morning and think of how my friends at home would be appalled by this spectacle
at the very least. Men in blackface
riding giant paper mache floats throwing hollowed out coconuts to a rowdy crowd
of children. It’s like the poetry of the
damned, and it is this poetry that has given me a mission, so to speak. I am sitting in a little glass bowl, inside a
larger glass which is full to the brim with salt water. When the larger bowl experiences turmoil, the
smaller one fills. This is not just New
Orleans the city, but Bayou Country Generic Public School in which I
teach. When I shake the larger bowl of
stereotype, ignorance, and cultural degeneracy, the smaller bowls all
fill. When they shake the larger bowl of
prejudice, invisible bias, and solipsism, my bowl fills.
I now have a mission – however strange it may seem to
me. Had you asked me a few years back
what I thought I would be doing, my answer would have nothing to do with
indignant teenagers and even less to do with Louisiana. And yet here I am, though not for much
longer. Pretty soon I too will know what
it means to miss New Orleans – and though I was but a brief visitor, it will
always have a special seat inside my twisted heart. There’s so much that I hate in this place and
so much that I miss about home – but when I hear “HEY MISTER” and watch those
plastic tchotckes nearly take out someone’s eye, a little piece of me gets warm
and fuzzy inside.
