Adventures in Moving

First and foremost, I'm spoiling you, you know. Don't get used to this posting-on-a-regular-basis business, because it's just not going to happen. I'll fall off the face of the planet again soon, don't worry! Mostly because:

I'm MOVING!

That's right, folks, I really am moving to New Orleans! I'm very excited for this life change!! 

Yay! Sunshine and rainbows and daisies!

...But the reality of moving has definitely set in.

Ugh. Sunshine and rainbows and daisies take up a lot of boxes. 

Don't worry too much about me, though. I'm very quickly approaching the final stage of moving: apathy.

Don't worry. Mostly I donate it all. Everything but the clothes on my back.

This whole process is definitely an emotional whirlwind (mostly because I am moving and all my favorite things about Ohio are not), but it's also been a great learning process for me. Even just looking for places to live, I've noticed how much I've grown over the past few years.

Who cares?! IT'S MY FIRST PLACE!!!

Ah. There's the bitterness of experience right there.

Overall, I'm proud of myself. What a relatively responsible way of looking at renting, right? (I did not use that spreadsheet by the way, but I did think of those things! I still get points for good intentions!)

But, of course, moving has also led me to intense judgement. What kind of person am I? So many questions...

Seriously. I've never smoked ANYTHING. How could I possibly like Pink Floyd THAT much?!

No. I don't have a drinking problem. I have a storage problem.

Five or six pounds of beads.

Not everything has been left a mystery to me, though. I've learned some things, too!

Every piece of trash has a story, dang it!

This shouldn't be in past tense. It's still on my fridge.

Ha cha cha.

Please don't actually nominate me for that show.

Hoarding's not so bad though, is it? Look for updates with more fun facts I'm learning about myself... who knew moving was such a developmental process?!

LeeAnne's Bar Skank Guide

Well, I've survived the holidays and apparently I've spent a full two weeks recovering from NYE in New Orleans. It wasn't depressing as my last post promised, but I digress. I'm here to fill y'all in on what I have been up to these last few weeks... Beginning with a guide to bar skanks.

Last weekend we had an awesome comedy magician and an amazing hypnotist on campus, and what better way to celebrate that than to get crunked? Just kidding, but I did go out with friends that came down for the show to the village bar, "The Regal Beagle." At the time I joked that they were lucky they were such "Three's Company" fans, otherwise I wouldn't go in there. But if I hadn't gone, where would my blog inspiration be? And what would you, dear reader, be doing right now?!

It all started with my friend Evie, who sort of prides herself in her people watching skills.

I want to clarify here that she is announcing "Skanks, ho!" as in "Skanks ahead!" or "Skanks ahoy!" (hence the pirate hat) and not as in "Skanks and hoes!" That's just redundant, and Evie wouldn't waste her time with such silly announcements.

Anyway, what better place to spot bar skanks than in a college bar? To save yourself some time next time you're out, we've put together a skank spotting guide for your general safety and convenience.

You are bound to encounter any variety of bar skanks in the wild, so I've taken the liberty of illustrating four for you. 

I want to take a moment to say I didn't draw these panels to say that I'm a skank, even though I'm the example in each one. After my friend Jackie pointed out that I always make her my alcoholic friend in my posts, I realized I didn't want anybody else complaining that I always make them my skank friend. So there. Judge away, if you must!


If you disagree or have other bar skanks in mind, forget you, start your own blog. If you think these four are a little too specific and you don't know what to do with yourself, don't fret! If all else fails, study and remember the following bar skank behaviors and you'll be an advanced skank spotter in no time!

(As I finished the example skanks in that panel, I thought to myself, "Do I have a thing against blonde people?" but we'll save the self-discovery for some other time.)


In case you're wondering what a skank fight looks like, I imagine it looks something like this: 

Yeah, I just doodled crudely over the glitter explosion drawing I did for my Christmas crafting post. Have you seen what skanks wear? I don't think this is too far off the mark. Glitter, sequins, it's all the same.


In case you're wondering what a man fight looks like, fortunately for you we experienced one last weekend so I can share the whole thing in great detail:

Our reactions as I've described them are pretty accurate and say a lot about our character. Well, except Duke's reaction-- I don't really know what he was thinking, but he was working really hard on keeping his southern drawl all night so I hope against hope that he was thinking something like that. Or "those fellas are scrappier than a couple o' rabid possum" or "looks like two pigs fighting under a blanket." Well, that last one was from Steel Magnolias, but I think you get it.


Unfortunately, none of our reactions were at all effective. The fight was not broken up, the drinks were not saved, and although the table was initially flipped away from us, it eventually flipped back toward us, resulting in this:

(Technically I was covered in beer, but I didn't want to draw that because, well, let's think about what that would look like.)


Had we been bar skanks, we probably would have managed to get away from the man fight unscathed.


And just so Jackie doesn't feel left out of a blog post where I talk about booze:

Happy skank spotting!

(Some of) My Favorite New Orleans Stories

So I love NOLA, that's pretty clear. I have lots of legitimate reasons for loving that place-- harrowing stories of people that I've met and things that I've seen and special moments shared with great music/food/architecture/spirit-- but let's be honest, none of those stories are funny. So here are some of my favorite New Orleans stories. I hope they're funny to people who didn't experience them, but if not, screw you, I'm laughing.

I'll start out with a story that I'm sure I won't give justice, but hopefully that won't matter much:

FEEDING FRENZY!

So two friends and I went on a swamp tour. (Yeah, it was just as awesome as it sounds.) Lots of funny things that don't necessarily warrant their own stories but just imagine them as I flippantly list them here: me fawning over our 40 yr old tour guide because of his Cajun accent, the Australians in the boat ooh-ing and aww-ing over our silly accents, learning about alligator crack (marshmallows), and learning about Cajun swimming holes ("You betcha them suckahs gotta learn how to swim wit dem gators in de watah!"). Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle and all that. We had a grand time watching gators until...

All of the sudden we're surrounded by seven or eight alligators. It's all fine and dandy, just a little unnerving. One hops on the boat, people scream, the tour guide seems okay and tries to calm everyone down. Then he tells us we need to get the hell outta there and hands back oars so that we can hit the gators in the face if they get too close. When animals come out of hibernation, they are extremely hungry. And why would marshmallows and rotten chicken cut it with delicious imported meats like the Australians on board? At any rate, we got out okay, though we kept saying "holy shit" for the rest of the trip whenever we thought about our gator experience.

Oops

Again, this story probably not as funny either, but I promise it will get better. That's how writing works: you end with the good stuff so that people will trudge through the rubbish to get there. 

Anyway, I've done a lot of volunteer-work in New Orleans, cleaning up neighborhoods, building playgrounds, working on houses, yadda, yadda, yadda. One day we were in the Lower 9th Ward to help with clean-up around a volunteer organization's headquarters. They only had one weed eater and a couple of shovels, so of course the men took those leaving the rest of us to do "women's work" (aka picking up used condoms and other trash). I was bitter but pretty much fine until I got propositioned by some guy in a kidnapping van who was driving past... Then I hid behind the building picking up trash and chilling with my new lizard friend "Frankie." Then I heard a big CRASH! (Or, in Batman terms, KAPOW! KABLAM! or KABOOM!)

I liked to think it was karma for the men thinking that they could do better work than the women. Ha.

We had to ride around the city in this jankity rental van for a few days after that... Luckily it didn't rain!

And now...

MORE SORDID TALES

AKA Booze-y Stories.

I'll be honest, I don't drink that often. Period. But I am perfectly capable. Adept, really. Some friends who were in NOLA with me this summer said it was funny to see "LeeAnne go from zero to drunk in 60 seconds."

"Gone in 60 Seconds" has a whole new meaning, no? 

In my defense, I had a lot of compensating to do for the hours of lethargy we spent in our hotel room during the day. The air conditioning in our hotel (then just our room, then the whole hotel, then our room) was broken. With heat index, it was 110 outside. Inside, it was a sultry 84. So we'd cool down in that for a little while before we went out:

Miserable.

Anyway, drunkenness is wrong, but it can lead to some funny stories.

Drunken Jackie + drunken homeless guy = the most amusing intervention ever witnessed. Always the social worker, that Jackie. She didn't mean to give him $20 but it just makes the story all the better!

BEADS

Mardi Gras beads are like currency in New Orleans. You get pelted with some just for walking by, then nicer and nicer get-ups proportional to the amount of skin you show. Sometimes, though, people get beads NOT to show skin.

In our case, it didn't work, but I tell you what: we (+ our new friend "New Jersey") threw so many beads at that fat old lady and she just flopped around all night using our beads to throw to other people. Life's just wrong sometimes.

DRUNKEN AUTHORSHIP

My favorite drunken NOLA story is about the writer that we met on Bourbon Street. We were stumbling back from hurricanes at Jean Lafitte's and came across some chick with a laptop and a golden retriever. Drunk LeeAnne likes to talk to people and Drunk Jackie likes to make out with dogs, so poor Drunk Levi just had to come along for the ride. 

This gal told us about the book she was writing "about things and stuff." Drunk Jackie took a break from playing with the dog to say, "That is SO AWESOME. So many people take the time to write about THINGS but no one bothers to write about STUFF." Drunk Levi, always logical, kept the conversation going by trying to differentiate between "things" and "stuff" without much luck. We would talk, she would type, Jackie would propose to the dog. 

In the end, I got a good peek at her computer screen and I was thoroughly impressed at her progress:

If anything could give you information about "things" and "stuff" to write about, Google would be it.

5 Reasons I Shouldn't Be Allowed to Watch True Blood

"True Blood" is one of my favorite shows on television-- in fact, I've made it so most of my friends love the show, too. I love it so much that I'm giving myself an intervention.

Sometimes I have trouble differentiating reality from Bon Temps-world. The town isn't even real, for goodness' sake. But that doesn't stop me from feeling unnaturally connected to the characters. I follow the actors on twitter and pretend like we're good friends. When the lady who plays "Pam" tweets about her husband selling an album, I pause for a second and think about buying it. What the h@#% is wrong with me?

Above my skewed sense of reality, I have a really addictive personality. I'm obsessive. I don't just like something. I become it. I love purple, so 90% of my wardrobe is purple. I love New Orleans, so I go there once or twice a year. I love True Blood, so naturally I own a ton of paraphernalia, block out my Sunday evenings, read all the books, own all the DVDs, and read all the online wikis...
*By "want" I mean: "Already own."

Oh, if I like something, everyone else must like it, too. And I'm pushy about it. There's nothing more important than whatever my latest fad is. Nowhere is safe: not in person, not in cyberspace, not over the phone... Nowhere.


I lose all will to live when my show is over. Slight exaggeration, but there's definite sadness, like when you get your hair cut or see someone kick a puppy .

That's right. My name's "LeeAnne" but that's as Southern as I get. However, I have an entertaining* alter ego who's a steel magnolia born-and-bred. I talk in an accent, cook up jambalaya and remoulade, and use weird expressions like "I'm more nervous than a long tailed cat in a room full o' rocking chairs" and "I'm sweating like a sinner in church."

*"Entertaining" is a relative term. Friends might also say that the terms "annoying" or "obnoxious" also apply.

This can't be healthy.