The temperature of things to come

The other day I asked one of my students, “Does it always rain this much in Louisville?” He gave me the hairy eyeball and said, “How did you think it gets so green here?”

Hm. I guess I should have put two and two together. It just never occurred to me to make the connection.

The first time it rained after I moved, I remember feeling a sweeping wave of relief. For the first time in 10 months, I could watch a downpour and not think about cheesecloth levees and ancient creaky pumps. I didn’t feel compelled to hop online and check out local message boards to see if anyone was concerned with rising water. In fact, the rain was a good thing. We’d just planted a few things in the garden; the rain would help them take root.

But around a month after moving in, the rain became a headache again. One particularly bad storm opened up leaks in the kitchen and bathroom ceiling. And for the next month or so, every storm made them worse and I spent way too much time wrangling with home warranties and repairmen. Pots and bowls and towels and stress.

Two weeks ago, I finally hired a maintenance man from work to fix the roof to the tune of more than $1000. The next storm came—the one that made national news for killing 8 people in the state—and new leaks popped up. He came back this week and fixed it. And it’s rained at least four times since then, and the house has stayed dry.

Ah the joys of homeownership.

The rain itself doesn’t bother me much. Now that I feel fairly certain that my ceiling isn’t going to cave in, I can appreciate the fact that the rain is, indeed, what makes Kentucky so green.

[The only remaining rain-related headache is that, shortly after we moved in, our clothes dryer went on the fritz. I’m sure it could be repaired, but after it konked out, in a wave of both nostalgia and environmentalism, I went out and bought a old-fashioned umbrella clothesline. It’s actually kind of charming. There’s something very Zen about hanging out your clothes. No energy used. Clothes last longer. Some of the clothes dry with fewer wrinkles (and some dry with more). But now I have to watch the weather forecast to determine when I can do my laundry. And there have been whole weeks when I’ve had to get very creative with my wardrobe because I had no clean clothes.]

What stuns me, though, is the cold.

It’s still September for godsake! Lows in the low 40s? I can’t get behind that. (By the way, between the time that I started this blog entry to this moment, the blue sky with puffy white clouds has darkened and it’s started raining). I refuse to put on my heat, so last night I bundled myself on the couch in long underwear, a sweater, and another long sweater that used to be my “winter coat” in New Orleans. And a blanket. And when I went to bed I covered myself in a bedspread, a thick down comforter, and a blanket. And I wore long underwear to bed.

Some people love it when they can break out the sweaters and the turtlenecks. I’m not one of these people. I am a t-shirt and jeans kind of girl, which means, I’m happiest in t-shirt and jeans type of weather.

Many of my colleagues (mostly, the ones who were involved in my hiring) insist that the Louisvillian winters are not so bad. But those who don’t know me and don’t know my deep and passionate loathing for the cold tell tales of weeks without sun and damp bone-chilling cold.

If I wanted damp and bone-chilling cold, I would have moved to Maine or Vermont. I think I’d like Maine or Vermont a lot. The only thing that keeps me away is, you guessed it, the damp and bone-chilling cold.

This is going to be a challenge. I’m definitely going to need more long underwear. It is still, by god!, only September.

How I spent my August 29...

... among the living dead.

It’s been a while. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve started a blog entry and just stopped. Some of it was homesickness. Sometime in mid-August, just about the start of school, I got hit with a heap of the blues. I explained to friends and family in emails that it wasn’t Louisville’s fault; I’m as happy here as I have been since Day One. It’s New Orleans’s fault. Just can’t shake that city. Maybe I never will.

And some of it was the start of school. Again, not my new school’s fault. So far, three weeks into the school year, I am very, very happy. There are kinks and quirks, and it’s going to be a year of adjustment and learned-from (hopefully) mistakes, but as a whole I am still surfing the Honeymoon period. For the most part, I’m happy, impressed, and reasonably comfortable. It’s my old school’s fault. Specifically, the old faculty, my old students, the old total ease with which I walked the halls and did my job.

Or maybe all of this is my fault: my own fear and rejection of change.

Anyway, backtracking…

Part of the blues was spawned by the Anniversary. Not being THERE on August 29. I wore my “Be a New Orleanian, wherever you are” t-shirt to work and showed my Advanced Comp class a slideshow of my pictures from New Orleans. But the day passed so quietly; it was very lonely, more so, I think because Jason does not share my same ache for the city. (Although, at times that evening, he spontaneously reflected on the past year in a surprisingly heartfelt way).

How did we celebrate the Anniversary, which is also his birthday? By going to dinner at a Cajun restaurant, eating crawfish tails and drinking Abita Turbo Dog, and watching the walking dead file by.

Louisville is weird. In fact, the “shop local businesses” campaign’s slogan is “Keep Louisville Weird”—but, it doesn’t seem like the locals need reminding. One of the many weirdnesses is that this city seems to have some (yet undeterminable) attachment to horror movies. There are many events in the city that celebrate this oft uncelebrated genre. One of these events is the Annual Zombie March. On August 29 (8/29) at 8:29pm, around a hundred or so zombies gather at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bardstown Road and march up Bardstown to Big Dave’s (aforementioned Cajun joint) where they converge for drinks and live music.

For weeks we’d seen stickers around town proclaiming “8:29… the end is nigh.” This was, of course, a bit unsettling to those of us for whom 8/29 and “the end” are already too closely linked. The week before 8/29, we saw a poster for the event and decided that there was no better or more ironic way to usher in this first Post-K year.

So, as the Weather Channel played re-runs of Katrina coverage on the TV above the bar, and as we sipped our Turbo Dogs, the undead streamed in, and I thought, yes, a little over a year ago, I felt just like they look. Still and all, unsettling. Click here to see more pictures from the Zombie Walk.

Moving on. Spent Labor Day weekend in New England. Whirlwind tour to visit Ma, Beth and famiglia, and my grandmother Vange. I dreaded the Labor Day travel (and the TSA security headache), but I was surprised at how smoothly it all went. Good to get away—no vacation at all this year, unless you count a 2-day trip to IKEA in Chicago—and great, as always to see family, no matter how brief a stay.

Ma’s in the hospital right now (or about to get released) after a fairly serious thyroid surgery. And I’ve decided that my addiction to television shows like “House” is definitely detrimental to my sanity. While medical dramas haven’t convinced me that I should straighten up and live a clean, healthy, active life, they have planted the idea that you can go into a hospital with a hangnail and come out with the plague. So far, it looks like Ma’s surgery wasn’t “House”-worthy, and I worried for nothing.

School has been very good. I’m struggling with teaching a new subject. Whenever I mention this to other teachers they come out with the adage: “Just remember, no matter how little you feel like you know, you know more than the kids.” And sometimes I’m not 100% sure that that’s true. I’ve spent more time researching Puritan literature this month than I have working on the house, planning my classes, and having fun combined. And believe me, while some research is fun, Puritan literature… well, it’s not so much fun. My growing dread is that I’ve spent all this time researching Puritan literature, and I’ll be done teaching it in a few weeks and have to spend as much time researching the next until. I’m on this train until… gosh, mid-spring I imagine, when I finally reach a period of American Lit I’m familiar with.

At McG, teaching was not just a job, it was a lifestyle. We were a family, a very dysfunctional one. The pressure to live your job was palpable. The “best” teachers were the ones who lived and breathed the work. And “keeping up with the joneses” meant giving over your August-June to the students and the school.

At LCS, this just isn’t the case. The school empties out after last period. If I stay even 45 minutes after school, I’m haunting empty hallways. The teachers don’t seem to be friends, at least not in an extracurricular sort of way. To some degree this is excellent; there’s no sense that the school is hungry for your soul. The pressure to give every last bit of yourself was institutional at McG. This school seems to respect your… well, your life. And that’s a lovely thing, but it takes some getting used to. That being said, I miss my dysfunctional family something awful.

It’s funny, I write these blogs in MS Word and then upload them onto blogger, and when I save them on my computer, I label them “hurricane journal # whatever.” This is #31. Will my post-K life always be a “hurricane journal”? I’m reluctant to change it. On the 29th, when I showed my Advanced Comp kids the Katrina pictures, I showed them a US map from the Times-Picayune that showed the spread of the Katrina Diaspora as of July 1, 2006. Houston and Atlanta are covered by huge dots representing the tens of thousands of New Orleanians still there. Louisville has a pinprick. I circled the dot and wrote, “Ms. Chipman.”

Diaspora is such a pretty word. A “scattering.” There’s no better label for me, I think. I am, I have been, scattered.