Remember

Yes, OK, I know what day it is. I'm just trying not to think about it. The last week has been very hard, not sleeping, black moods. I was disgusted by the faux cable news hysteria about Hurricane Irene. They were positively slavering at the thought of another Katrina, and when it didn't materialize, they pretended like it had anyway. Revolting.

I go on vacation in two days. Right now doesn't feel like I can hold on that long.

This is what it looks like ....

... when a library prepares for a hurricane.

We take items off the lower shelves and shift them up as high as we can. This was in the back room, so there's no risk of windows breaking, so we don't need to cover these shelves with visqueen. We unplug and lift up the computers too.

We were busy today, people coming in to turn in their materials, and pick up some entertainment for the evacuation. Everyone wanted to talk about it. People are incredulous, a little angry that this is happening again, AGAIN, now, so soon -- but also ready to man up and do what needs to be done, whether that means evacuating or bunkering down for the duration.

Myself, I'm not so steely. Mostly I just feel numb, stunned that this can be happening again. But I had a really hard time concentrating on my tasks all days, so I think it's getting to me more than I'd like to admit.

All NOPL libraries are closed saturday through monday. My husband and I are evacuating to Baton Rouge like we did last time.

Whether you decide to go or stay, GOOD LUCK.

Lights Out is Scary

This morning, Weekend Edition ran a story about a guy who wants to make an energy-saving gesture by convincing his hometown, San Francisco, to turn out the lights for one night: Lights Out San Francisco.

Pre-K, I used to be all for this kind of thing, but now, this idea makes me tense. Fires up my POKSS (Post-Katrina Stress Syndrome). I was here in the early days after the re-opening, when three-quarters of the city was still dark, and it was frickin SCARY. In the devastated neighborhoods. I'm talking pitch black, can't see your hand in front of your face DARK. Dark like the most howling wilderness, in the heart of the city. This is when there was no electricity at all, so no porch lights, no street lights, no traffic lights, no storefront signs, NOTHING. And quiet. No air condotioners, no radios, no cars, no buzzing streetlights. No crickets chirping, even, cause they were all dead.

Man! I don't care to repeat that experience! Next year the guy's trying to take this idea national. I think this will be a fun time for intact cities. But I don't think New Orleans will embrace it.

Katrina Index, Special Anniversary Edition

Well, this is interesting. It specifically mentions the library.

I wonder what it says about murders?

Happy Talk in the Ruins

I've noticed lately, since I've been back, that a lot of the Nolablogers that I read regularly are angry. Really angry. They have just had it with the crime, the incompetence, with the pumps that don't work, with the Corpse, the Road Home to Nowhere, Hizzoner C. Ray, Gov. Maw Maw, Dr. Flakely, the Recovery School District, the lameitude of the Picayune, just the whole stinking pile of hot bayou mess that is "the recovery."

And who can blame them? It is a mess. These things are bad. It is not going as well as it should. I don't blame them.

But for myself, I am coming from a different place. I just got back to town after two years away. And I feel good.

My husband and I are very happy. We are living together again, in our old stomping ground, the uptown Magazine Street corridor, where I have lived since high school. We are happy to have our old jobs back, more or less. I feel quite fortunate to have had gradaute school to keep my mind and spirit busy in the painful post-K years, and then to have the job I have, helping the recovery with a library in the flooded neighborhoods. My husband sings in the car on the way to work.

And speaking as someone who has spent the better part of the time away, who only came home to gut my house or visit family, I can say, things are better. Things are way better. Hey, the streetlights are working! The water is running! (In most places.) Magazine Street is open! Many beloved businesses are operating again. Vegetation is blooming. Rebuilding and recovery is all but complete in some neighborhoods, booming in others. In Mid-City, where my library branch is, it seems like every house is being renovated. People are even rebuilding in the Lower Nine. The search tags are painted over.

I've been away, so I see it with fresh eyes. But for those who have been here for the last two years, I know how hard it seems, how far there is to go. It just grinds you down, living in the recovery, the constant parade of bad news. I've seen it in my own family. Last year I had to have my Mom come and spend part of August in Baton Rouge, just to get away, because the one-year anniversary had brought her so low.

I'm sure I'll get there myself at some point.

But thst's the nature of the beast. Recovery. A long, grueling process. I remember hearing around the anniversary last year that people were still living in tent cities in Kobe, Japan five years after the big earthquake there.

It's a long grueling process. So if some people are angry and burned out, it's OK to step away for a while. I want to say to any of my fellow bloggers and citizens, that if you need to stop blogging for a while, or take a less demanding, more lucrative job, or go on vacation, or move to the Northshore, it's OK. I'm here. Other newbs are here. We can take up the fight. New people are moving into the city all the time -- I see it every day at my library. College students, Teach for America teachers, young professionals. I've heard several stories of volunteers who came down to help with cleanup, and loved New Orleans so much, they moved here. An amazing development. New people who are optimistic and ready to put their shoulders to the wheel.

This long haul is a relay race. No one has to do it alone. And I'm ready for my leg.

Now this ...

I did not know. Wild boars have infested City Park.

Wow! It's a whole new world down there!

Heads-up to Jeffrey as uaual for the link.

Still Truckin'

I have updated my GA Journal. I am beginning to learn how to give formal instructional sessions, which is a huge part of academic librarianship these days.

In other news, I have been reading Nola.com a lot lately, and am upset and frightened by the horrendous crime wave that is occurring in New Orleans lately. It is like the bad old days of 1994, when the yearly murder rate stood above 400, and New Orleans was undisputably the "Murder Capital of the United States." But with the population of the city so much less now than it was then -- less than 200,000 people by last count -- I would say it's actually, objectively worse. I am concerned about my parents down there, and my husband, still living in one of the devastated areas. For myself, I'm glad I'm in Baton Rouge right now.

Hopefully the recet dismissal of revolving-door judge Elloie will put some brakes on the crime spree. His was just another example of the lack of leadership that has plagued the city throughout the recovery effort.

I really struggle with the idea of returning to New Orleans after I finish my degree. There are good reasons to return, and just as good ones to "shake the dust of [that] crummy little town off my feet" and never, never return. The good reasons are: my family is there; all my friends are there; making a difference by contributing to the rebuilding, and; it is home after all.

The bad reasons are: why go to all this struggle and sacrifice just to go creeping back to my old life; the recovery is not going well; News Orleans will never be what it was; it is still lacking in economic and professional opportunity, and; it is a crummy little town after all.

I love New Orleans, don't ever say I don't. I love it with all my heart. Seeing the city ruined, the people scattered, has been a nightmare, a kind of living death. I grieve for the dead and for the city ruined. But having lost everything, I want to create a good, new life for myself and my husband now. That is why I am in school after all, trying to better myself, trying to take something positive out of this horiffic catastrophe. And I suspect I can do a better job of that somewhere else, than in ruined, staggering, broken New Orleans.

It kills me to say that. N.O. loyalists would call me a traitor, a weakling, and they might be right. I greatly admire people like Mark Folse -- expatriates who've come home and are struggling to rebuild their hometown. But as heroic as that is -- they didn't live it. They didn't flee with the clothes on their back and live a gypsy's life for months while the city lay submerged and off-limits. They don't wake from dreams of drowning in their own house, struggling to climb the attic ladder as the cold lakewater sucks at their legs and thighs. They don't know who lived in the houses with the numbers in the search tags.

You know, I'm just tired. I want it all to be over. When I graduate, I want to get a good job where I can put to use all the things I'm learning in library school, buy a nice house, and live in a community where I can shop and go to the movies and run errands without it being a major operation. I want a future.

It's almost a year still until I graduate. A year from now, I might find those things in New Orleans. But i don't know, I don't know. A fresh start -- is that so much to ask?

Katrina Anniversary Update

Oh, and in NOLA news, it seems City Hall has scaled back its official Katrina observances, due to a firestorm of criticism about its glitzy, convention-esque functions. No more Charity Jewels Auction or Platinum Gala. This is a good thing.

See if someone is organizing an observance in your own neighborhood. That would be more appropriate, I think. The civic association for Gentilly, my old neighborhood, is organizing a service at the London Avenue Canal, the breach in which destroyed the neighborhood. It will be hard, but good. Much better than some phony parade.

Katrina Dinner

This is a splendid idea:

http://www.katrinadinner2006.com/

A memorial supper on the anniversary of Katrina for still-distant New Orleans refugees. It's based on the form of the Jewish Passover seder, with some distinctive New Orleans touches. Menus and New Orleans-themed playlist included.

People actually in New Orleans could do it too.

This is way better than a "Diamond and Platinum Gala" and a phony jazz funeral.

Memento Mori it's not.

Recently City Hall announced its plans for the official city remembrance of Katrina at the one year anniversary. (I found it via Wet Bank Guide. )

Some of it is appropriate, like a prayer breakfast and the laying of wreaths at the canal breaches. But a lot of it is a tacky-sounding, conventionesque spectacle based at, of all places, Harrah's Casino.

• A silent jewelry auction?
• Cooking demonstrations by Emeril?
• A talent competition?
• A "gala ball" at Harrah's for Diamond and Platinum ticket holders?
  

And maybe worst of all, a One New Orleans Parade "in the tradition of a Jazz Funeral" from (shudder) the Convention Center to the Superdome.

I get what Nagin et al are trying to do with this. They are trying to create a tourist spectacle, trying to show that NOLA is still open for business.

But I think this is exactly the wrong approach. The one-year anniversary is not a tourist spectacle, not some twisted version of Mardi Gras. It should be for us, the survivors, the people. Not the tourists.

When they are still finding dead bodies in the Lower Ninth, when people still cannot live in their own houses a year later, when Gentilly and NO East have no phone service and spotty electricity, the idea of a "diamond and platinum gala" is offensive and inappropriate.

"In the tradition of a jazz funeral?" Why not a real, honest to God Jazz Funeral? A funeral for the missing and presumed dead. A funeral for the New Orleas that was.

Kirsten 2.0

I am a Hurricane Katrina survivor. When I lost my job, my home, and indeed my city in August 2005, I decided to go back to graduate school, and get the degree I had been putting off for years. When you don't know what to do, you go to graduate school, right? So I'm studying library science, working toward my MLIS, Master's of Library and Information Science, and looking forward to my first professional library job.

In his current "Internet Librarian" column in American Libraries (it's here), Joseph Janes mentioned in a discussion of the "Library 2.0" concept, that the ALA Annual convention was upcoming "in New Orleans, a city coming to terms with a 2.0 of its own." This analogy stunned me with its appropriateness. New Orleans 2.0. That's it, that's what it is. The same entity, but a new iteration. It'll never be the same.

And I realized I was living a 2.0 of my own. Here I am: new city, new job, new apartment, back in school, living on my own really for the first time in my life, husband still back in NOLA, and me, alone, fending for myself. A whole new life that I never imagined, and didn't want. Yet here it is. Same woman, new world. Kirsten 2.0.

So, a new blog for the new life. Here I will post my thoughts on my studies in the field of library science, as well as developments in the recovery of New Orleans. Even at a distant remove it is still vitally important to me.

I still cry often. I mourn for the dead, for the city ruined, for all the waste and tragedy. Get over it? I can't. Hurricane Katrina is a part of me now. You never "get over" something like that. You learn to live with it, which is not the same.

Reinstall and reboot. K2.0. That's what it is.