Boo, email is a dangerous thing when done tired.

This morning I went back to the Square to retrieve "items critical to business success" to bring back to the farm land; it was also my first trip downtown since coming back. The morning felt like the rough draft of a movie script, with a dense fog cloaking both sides of the interstate from view. I was tunneled into the Superdome area and the CBD, which looked surprisingly normal (aside from Poydras being squished into one lane each way for a stretch were signs reading "Falling glass!" shouted warnings from in front of a beat up office tower). Structurally, the city is fine. Windows everywhere could use some work. Being back made me realize again how much I fell in love with my office and downtown in general in those first few weeks. I missed my upside-down pictures and my ergonomic foot rest (I brought it back to RTC). I miss having my buddy next door instead of across a cubicle and not being able to hear Tom's phone when I call him from across the other side of the fake wall we currently have. It will make work a little easier to have my huge binders of process flow diagrams instead of piecing through them in online pdf files.

After getting our stuff out of the office, T, Buddy, and I drove through Lakeview (the area on the side where the canal broke that got horrrrrible flooding). With the fog still hanging heavily and the huge 30 foot wall of soaked, moldy household discards on the median, I expected to see men in biohazard suits and not just typical looking utility workers in orange safety vests. Most sobering of all was the almost cartoonish solemnity of the neon spray painted orange X's by every door. The top quarter of the X had a date and the right and bottom quarters had numbers for people trapped inside. In some places the Xs were almost at the roof, right above the dingy brownish/murky yellow line that striped the entire neighborhood - the flood's waterline. Those high Xs were made by men in boats. Boats.

One particular area that my mom and I ate at when she helped me move in a mere 9 (?) weeks ago was right on the Lake, with 4 restuarants, a park, and a large area with 15 sand volleyball courts. From the parking lot you wouldn't even guess there had been large structures at the site, because they were completely gone. No stray plywood haphazardly strewn about -- everything. Everything. Was. Gone. Completely, utterly, absotutely gone. There were also still national guardsmen in several areas we poked around, which is still disconcerting. Every house in the Lakeview area had 8 feet or so of water and every house will need to be completely gutted and rebuilt. Every one. When in the world is my city ever going to be normal again?

What physically, chemically makes words so seductive in my mind? How can a few well-chosen adjectives make me feel more inspired than any picture?

Last brief thought for the night, inspired by (sigh) The Real World: are people disposable? Can you use one for a little while, get bored of his or her features and no bad feelings move on? Is anyone actually capable of connecting with another person, physically or mentally, for a brief period of time and then completely forgetting them or easily brushing them off? Watching the show it seems like the answer is yes, with no problems - how, I wonder. I can't figure out how to put here the vague premonitions of thoughts my sleep brain is meagerly bubbling up, so I'll try again tomorrow (earlier.).