I AM GOIN' HOME!I have booked my flight, and as of this morning I have a place to live; I am moving back into the apartment that I slept in only once... the night before I fled from Katrina.
After eleven months away... I am finally returning to The Crescent City.
I will only be there for the month of May before needing to return to California for work here, but I plan on going back in July and then again in August, making this some sort of permanent (whatever that means in my life and this context) residence back in the city of my heart. I've struggled with this a lot. In the ensuing months since I returned to California last June, with the plan of being here for less than a month, I have been riding a roller coaster of confusion and indecision (those who know me well know that this is not a particularly unique situation for me, but something that was instilled in me at an early age) about what to do. I'm not feeling that any more.
On Thursday evening when I finalized my one way flight to New Orleans (much like the one I took almost two years ago, and flying uncharacteristically out of San Jose, the airport to which I last returned), I clicked the button to conclude the transaction and immediately started to cry. I dashed off emails to several friends in The Crescent City and then I put on Cowboy Mouth and danced around the room... and I mean that I DANCED AROUND THE ROOM!
It's all so very trendy these days (at least in California) to ask people the ever present and often annoying question, "What's your passion?" I regularly have a hard time figuring out an answer to that (though I am having less difficulty than I used to) and regularly I grapple with trying to figure out a true and honest answer (which frankly I think is the appropriate response...but that's for another blog). Well, Thursday night... and right now... I don't have that problem.
My PASSION is New Orleans!
I want to live there, work there, play there, party there, and even grow old there. Admittedly, I have other places I love as well... San Francisco will never be far from my heart (especially as long as my DDD is there), Ireland (and probably Dublin) is a place where I plan to make a home for at least part of my life, and New York, where I actually have a job interview on Tuesday (we'll see what kind of a monkey wrench THAT throws into the mix), holds its inevitable sway... But New Orleans, and everything about her... the cultural gumbo, the musical jambalaya, the slow and often maddening pace, the racial and cultural mix, my dear friends, the heat... and even the humidity, is the place that calls me home. Even with the painful chaos of the city post-Katrina, these things have written their name upon my heart.
I PLAN ON GROWING OLD ON THE AVENUE!
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