Thought for Food

Let’s take a little trip down Jello Shot Lane to Mardi Gras 2002.

Good times, thin eyebrows, cool hats … and a buttload of Parliaments.

PS: I would totally wear that jacket today. And the necklace for that matter. Grrr! Why did I get rid of so much shit?

To the people who’ve asked where I went to college — this tweet says everything you need to know. (And this tag says the rest.)

(via cajunboy)

Big Tymers, “Get Your Roll On” (via haygirlhay)

Let me tell you about Scott. He was the first guy I dated at Tulane. He was from some town in Florida. He wasn’t hot but he was cute, I guess, and more importantly, he was 21 and he had a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee with leather seats and he and his friends took me and my friends to the Red Room on Saturday nights. (And that’s all you need to know about the direction of my moral compass in the fall of 2000.)

You wouldn’t call Scott a conversationalist. I can’t recall one word that ever came out of his mouth. He lived in a frat house and it was as disgusting as every other frat house but occasionally I stayed over, sharing his tiny bed, and in the morning I would wake up, as you do. But Scott didn’t wake up. He wasn’t dead, he was just famous among his friends for his capacity to sleep 24 hours at a stretch, and fall asleep anywhere, under any conditions. I’m pretty sure it was a certified clinical condition so I won’t say anything more about it.

Anyway, I would amuse myself by poking around his room (c’mon, you would too) and when I discovered the bulk food he had from Sam’s Club in his closet, it was game over. I loaded up my handbag with 20 Mrs. Fields individually-wrapped microwaveable cookies, 6 microwaveable individual portions of Chef Boyardee meatballs and noodles, and all the microwaveable bags of extra-butter Orville Redenbacher’s I could stuff in my tight jeans. When I got back to my dorm, my suitemates and I feasted like kings. I did that a couple more times until we broke up in front of the library. There were no tears.

I said I can’t remember any word that ever came out of his mouth, but I can remember words that he silently mouthed while spastically waving his forearms in the driver’s seat of that Jeep: every word to this moterfuckin’ song. He pumped the bass, closed his eyes, and just felt the music. (You understand that he was white, yes?)

It’s funny the things you never forget.

I read every page of this issue, something I rarely do. Their encyclopedic coverage of 9/11 and the decade that followed is excellent. I think I found it so gripping because in that time I’ve grown up — and found a home here. I remember at the time feeling distanced from the nation’s grief. I was emerging from an acute depression and I thought that people’s reaction belied their innocence: they didn’t already know that life isn’t fair. I figured it out early, with the death of my mother — something I was working through, once again, yet again, in the summer of 2001.

I look back now and can’t connect to that feeling. It seems callous. While I’ll never relate to the chest-thumping nationalism the attacks awoke in so many Americans — I just don’t have that gene — I find I now connect to the ten-year-old grief intimately, as a New Yorker. I am still the woman who, in the rush to war that followed, might paint picture postcards of the western hemisphere “upside down” and the words “United We Stand” (as I did), but I am also the woman who searches the sky to the south and the faces that pass me on the street, imagining what was lost.

Don’t mind if I do.

The irony is I’m meeting my Tulane girls — and this is our first hurricane together. I missed one that blew through Nola in Sept. 2002 because I was doing JYA in Dublin. Everyone evacuated to a friend’s place a few hours north (a former cotton plantation) and got drunk at the local redneck bar and had a blast. I was so jealous. The hurricane hit on my 21st birthday & I felt like it was kinda meant for me. Instead I was trying to convince Irish bartenders that a 21st bday means anything (and they should give me free shots). “Well you’ve been drinking for years, right? So what’s the big deal?” True, but….

A gin martini at the Whiskey Blue in the W, where we stayed. I remember feeling like such hot shit whenever we got in there with our crappy fake IDs.

I kept giving hotel employees the skulk-eye, thinking they were about to kick me out.

And then I remembered…

I’m almost 30.

The dress code at Ms. Mae’s The Club (that’s the full name).

Go home and change.