I made this a week or two ago, and I can't stop thinking about it.  Works better as a condiment/topping than eaten plain, because it is damn hot.

Kidney beans
Half onion
Green peppers
Red peppers
Mushrooms (chopped small)
Garlic
Hickory smoked barbecue Sauce
Crushed red pepper
Cumin (Tumin?  I forget what this spice is called.  It's dull orange, pretty spicy, smells middle-eastern)
Sugar
Sriracha

Cook, combine, then eat.

-

Also, tickets to Panama City, Panama are just under $200 if you fly before December 4th.  I've never spent a whole winter in Atlanta, and I don't want to make this the first.  Cold sucks.

And there's a really huge art show going on in New Orleans from November through mid-January.  I really want to go - a few other Atlanta people are heading over there to show/curate/shmooze, and I'm considering asking one of them for a ride.

I was talking to Flavia, the New College girl I met in New Orleans, a few days back. We were doing the usual catching up thing, working off a terribly small list of Things To Talk About (New College, being a freshman, New Orleans, New York, and her friend Maeve, our only mutual acquaintance). Apparently Flavia and Maeve had gone to a barbecue hosted by one of the team leaders whose name I forget; Maeve and the team leader had hooked up that night, somewhat unexpectedly. Even more unexpectedly, Maeve and the team leader fell in love* that night, and they've been corresponding ever since. I should point out that Maeve's currently in her first year of school in New York, the team leader's fairly mobile, in his mid-late-twenties.

I realize that I've spent the last paragraph gossiping about people you don't know. Which is almost always boring. There is a point:

What sort of cruel chance is it which makes two people so geographically distant fall in love? Is it just some sort of Before Sunset mystique which shaves the dice** in their favor? Why do two people fall in love now, instead of when they meet again 3 years later? How can two people love each other in New Jersey, but grow to hate each other in Kansas City?



*Let's assume this exists, for now.
**Back when I played pen and paper RPG's, I heard a rumor that you could "weight" a die by putting it in the microwave, a process which would melt the die's inner core but leave it's surface unmarked. It didn't work then, but I've got high hopes for the future.

Here's something that's been bothering me about the NOLA volunteer effort:

I've been working on rebuilding a ruined two-story house for the past four days, along with about eight other Oglethorpe students. Hands On New Orleans is involved in a lot of these projects - many of our materials are donated by corporations, and all of our labor is provided by volunteers, so the total cost of rebuilding or gutting a house is usually about a tenth of what a home owner would normally pay. Still, for a house like the one we've been working on, reconstruction takes about a year, and costs around $19,000 (which the home owner pays).

These houses are usually in the sort of area I'd describe as "ghetto", so it's pretty normal to see homeless people walk by the house or stop to chat with the volunteers. Talking to New Orlean's homeless, it's easy compare their homelessness with the thousands of people displaced by hurricane Katrina. In the case of the evacuees, volunteer organizations treat their homelessness as unnatural, an injustice to be remedied.

By working with a volunteer organization, I'm reinforcing the belief that one sort of homelessness deserves a greater effort than another, more historically accepted homelessness.

-

That's not the only thing bothering me about volunteering down here, but most of my other issues are with my own motivation as a volunteer, rather than the values that the entire effort reinforces. From what I can tell, Common Ground places almost equal amounts of focus behind resettling New Orleans homeowners, and addressing the larger issues of the city's economic injustices.

-

Also, that Kimya Dawson concert - fucking amazing. I forgot a camera, but a friend's got a few million pictures, which I'll eventually post here.

The future looms.  It has tentacles.

Bugging people about internships.
Writing things.
Trying to figure out loans and stuff.
Buying shoes.
Renting tux for upcoming wedding.

If you look at the chapter listing for Calvino's Invisible Cities, you'll find that the lengths of the chapter titles have been chosen and arranged to make a sort of picture.  It is a city.

My brother's been calling me every day or so.  He even joined facebook and gmail.  I think he's lonely, though I wonder how lonely he is for my company, and how lonely he is for familiarity.  It's actually worked pretty well for our relationship, as, in physical meetings, we generally get on each others nerves within the hour.  On the phone, we talk about how wasted we were/are going to be.  He says that the apartment didn't have power for the last few days, because neither he nor his roommate realized they needed to pay the bill.  He's actually taking some time off to visit on Wednesday and Thursday.  I'm gonna try and convince him to walk downtown with me.  And maybe we'll find out whether or not we're actually going canoeing, or even hiking.

That's funny.  I just reread that last paragraph, and realized that none of those sentences led to the next.  That's another thing I'm gonna have to work on in preparation for the future.

Oh, and I'm doing a week of volunteer work in New Orleans this January.  I did a similar thing the year that the hurricane hit, and it was great.

Contemplating making the whole journal private - I don't like differentiating between private and public thoughts, and I am supposed to be getting into the professional type swing of things, so future employers probably should not being hearing about my plans to shave secret messages into my pubic hair.  Actually, you probably don't want to hear about that either.

Alternatively, I could make the entire journal except my most favorite (worksafe) entries private.  This would still allow random people to figure out if they want to be my imaginary internet friend, which I always appreciate. 

PS: how do you spell canoeing?