it's the end of the world as we know it

sorry for the protracted silence. i wrote a great long rambling post, the contentt of which i don't even remember now, that slipped into the ether before i could publish it. i didn't have the heart to rewrite it, and it seems silly now anyway.

i am beginning to get word from my shell-shocked friends from nola, thank god. d & d, the homeowners who are getting married soon, fled to her parents plantation in a place in LA out of harm's way. while they are certainly worried about their place, they are well insured and the flooding where they are doesn't appear to be too terrible. they are slightly worried that someone might have looted or set up camo in their house, but will not be able to find anything out likely for months so are not letting it get them down.

our friend j had just put a deposit down on a new apartment and bought a car from a friend. he was supposed to pick up the title on monday, but they got out of dodge on saturday. he reports that the cops who have pulled him over thus far have been pretty sympathetic. but he and our other friend (also a j) who left together are both service industry types and not really sure what they'll do. they are currently in memphis, where a local bar is having a benefit and letting them bartend to make some cash. they're talking about bugging out to cali. more power to you guys.

our friend n and his girlfriend e (a loyola law student) are safe in gainesville with their families. e is going to be going to school there to finish out her 3L year. many law schools around the country are taking in displaced students, including mine. most are only taking 2Ls and 3Ls, so i guess the poor 1Ls are automatically deferred at this point. they had a harrowing, 40 hour journey over the course of the last week, going first through texas and around the long way to FL.

s was in lake charles and apparently avoided the worst of it. i have e-mailed my friend coco, and she is the one i remain most worried about. her family is in tuscaloosa, which also got hit pretty hard, i think. she has no cell, and the home phone number i have for her is obviously no longer any good. i worry becuase she doesn't have a car, but from what d said, people really banded together to make sure all got safely out.

one crazy friend stayed behind and was there for four days. d says they sat on the front porch with shotguns, eventually siphoning gas to run their generator to keep some power and internet. they were evacuated to baton rouge, and d was going to pick him up when i called this morning. i imagine it's cluster fuck there...i mean, it's only about an hour out of the city and is the logical place to try to go if you only had a limited amount of gas coming out of the city.

no word yet from my lame ex or his friends, though i am concerned about them. he too is carless, but has a strong network of friends who would not let him float away.

i am awash in a feeling of utter powerlessness. i haven't been back to the city since we moved here from there, a year and some change ago. honestly, i have been so absorbed in all my own drama (preparing for 2 moot court competitions simultaneously, arranging callbacks, and trying to fit in my research and going to class) that i was a few days behind on the whole thing. i heard some vague rumblings about serious weather developing, but i think like many people i was nonplussed. we went through a couple hurricanes while down there and none really amounted to much. we were never evacuated during our tenure in nola, and saw minor flooding and such but nothing major. the levees breaking was always sort of a doomsday joke, and we would all say how screwed we'd be if it happened fairly secure in the feeling that it never would. that was when my ears pricked up, when i heard that more than one levee broke. i came home that night and w said that law school had saved our lives. we spent the rest of the night glued to cnn.

i don't really know what else to say. my heart is breaking. few people realize the depth of the functional poverty there. and how dependent the economy is on tourism. without that money flowing in, it will be hard to rebuild i imagine.