I don't know whether it was seeing the siding torn off the Comfort Inn I stayed at in June when I visited New Orleans to look for condos, or if it was the sheer overwhelming emotion of the entire strange situation, but with every mile that brought me closer to home I was brought closer to tears. This all actually happened.

It seems as though everyone is faking normalcy and I just want to scream from my car window, "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? WHY ARE YOU BUYING CANDY AT THE CVS WHEN THERE ARE TEN REFRIGERATORS ON THE CORNER AND NATIONAL GAURDSMEN WITH RIFLES AND HEAPS OF ROTTEN LUMBER AND BLUE TARPS EVERYWHERE?"

The past 6 weeks have been a redundant lesson in how life won't wait for me to be ready for it. First, my mom had surgery to make sure she didn't have cancer. Next, Hurricane Katrina destroyed any sort of feeling of "home" I had so desperately tried to create. Then Jody told me he wanted to put me in the back of a metaphorical filing cabinet, easily accessible when needed for a sweet memory, before telling me a week later that he has a new girlfriend. I was angry at myself for being upset, because I broke up with him. I should be ambivalent. I should be happy, or at least happy tinged with bittersweet-ness, that he is feeling better. But I should not have felt as utterly lost and hopeless and racked with sobs in the Learning Center bathroom because he decided to officially move on from the only thing I've ever known. I know I've tried to build a new reality in the past 4 months, one that is independent and free and unemotional, but it still hurts in that really, really deep part of your heart -- the part that you know there's nothing you can ever do to change. It hurts in that kind of way that makes you curl your fists and want to scream. It hurts in that kind of way that you feel like your heart is literally digging its way out of your chest with a dull soup spoon.

So I just pushed it away, the confusion and tears over lost love, lost city, and lost time, until it's easier. But it's not easier yet and everyday when I leave work I wish I had something to go home to -- some cheer other than the still-life flowers I bought Sunday with the hopes that their life would remind me that I'm still apart of the living when surrounded by the stench of the stagnant sorrow of a broken city. I can only drown in mindless MTV for so long.

It's hard to have hope when you can see, not 100 yards away, the wide hole that caused the massive flooding that ruined the city; it's hard to have hope when you feel like you won't ever be in love with your soul mate again; it's hard to have hope when you feel yourself treading water in a pool with no edges and no stairs. It's hard to have hope when geography keeps you from hopeful things like friends and

At work I can only think of 2 things when I'm not distracted by flowmeters, MOCs, and SAP, and one of them is how to escape the fog of depression that hangs over everything south of the Lake for a little while -- but I haven't worked here long enough to try to request an assignment internationally, and as much as the area sucks right now, I don't want to feel like I'm somehow quiting or escaping. I know that I'll get used to being in this different, more subdued New Orleans, eventually.

In the meantime, I've got a trip to Atlanta in a week and 2 days -- oh the awkwardness, I can't wait -- and my first Thanksgiving to learn to cook a turkey for, and a certain Intellectual Advisor to call back :)

Oh, and the rest of my European Adventure was everything I could have hoped for (or everything Danny and Hanson hoped for, anyway). I had a great time, and since my last posting visited Berlin and Gronengin. Maybe more on that later; it's hard to think that I was there less than a week ago. How does this dismal "rebuilding" area suck you in so much?

I listened to Michael Buble driving around Metairie to get my mail for the first time and see what everything looked like, and this particular part of a song struck a chord:

"And I feel just like I’m living someone else’s life
It’s like I just stepped outside
When everything was going right
And I know just why you could not
Come along with me
But this was not your dream
But you always believed in me"

...addition 15 minutes later....

Listen to this if you didn't hear it on Monday's All Things Considered: a great commentary on poverty and a similar sentiment to my lamentations about ... post-Katrina aid donations.

So I also just realized that my 22nd birthday came and went without any great, stereotypical Jen over-analysis. Sitting in the Grand Winston Canteen the week before my birthday, I tried to enumerate the great milestones of the last year of my life, and all I could think of to jot down was a list of places I'd been. How can a year of my life be characterized most aptly with a mere list of geographical locations? I want to immediately spring to mind the mental trips I've taken, the geography of my moral, ethical, and emotional map that I've plotted in the past year. I finally got brave enough to admit I could go to the CC and challenged my confidence. What good books have I read in the past year, aside from The Bomb in My Garden, about Iraq's nuclear weapons program (that stopped, according the the book anyway, a long long time before Bush's invasion)?

I'm too tired now to think. Goodnight world. And friends, I promise I'll be a real person again soon and call.