Why Does Moving Suck so Royally?

Is it the PMS or the fact that I hate packing a suitcase let alone a whole apartment up? I just constantly feel like I can't get it organized the way I want it to, so then why bother? I have these fantasies of labeled boxes, stacked, tetris like with my things. My FAVORITE things. Unfortunately that's most of my things.

If my friends hadn't come over for packing party two weeks ago I'd be screwed. But there's still SO MUCH STUFF. If Bobbi hadn't come over tonight, I would have spent it watching To Love, Honor and Betray on Lifetime. The bad acting, the dramatic music, and oh the dialogue. But instead Bobbi helped me empty the dresser I have to get rid of since it won't fit in my new smaller (but more expensive, but has a pool and a porch and central air) apartment. We discovered I have a billion pairs of fishnets most of which I never wear. And the identical brown shirts. Lots and lots of brown. Throwing away is supposed to free you and be symbolic and the first ten or so bags were, but now it's an admission of defeat. Everything I buy comes with this bizarre childish fantasy that somehow if I can just find the right clothes or tights or shoes everything in my life will click. The three bags of stuff for the goodwill from one dresser and some shelves: testament to how wrong I am about that. Is it so emotional because stuff I don't use makes me feel greedy and foolish, each a soft piece of defeat? Or because I can't give it up, this belief in a platonic ideal of a wardrobe that will fix me? In the bottoms of the my drawers I find clothes that I forgot existed, but when I see them I can remember where and when and why I got them (and if they were on sale or not).

Fanatasy lives. In mine I'm neat. Organized. And I don't space out during conversations. I don't spend hours watching Tv. I do the dishes right away. I write every day. And exercise. Ok, so that sounds like the type of person I wouldn't get along with. In fact it might be the type of person I'd find myself irritated for hours afterwards just because they were so damn chipper when they said hello. But maybe that's why moving sucks: digging around in my fantasy lives and realizing that I can't measure up. And I'm the one making myself miserable. But will realizing any of this making packing tomorrow suck any less? I doubt it.

Alternative Grains for Swingers

I made some biscuits today with buckwheat, millet and whole grain flour that had been soaked in kefir to neutralize the wicked enzyme inhibitors in whole grains. Yes grains may seem healthy but according to Sally Fallon , nutritionist extraordinaire, whole grains unsoaked will attack your systems like Red Sox fans after they've won the world series (why do they get so violent? What is it about New England that makes people break stuff when they're HAPPY?). I digress. I soaked those mofo's and then baked them and ended up with biscuits the color of paper bags, only softer and perhaps a bit more bitter. Nothing lots of butter and honey wouldn't fix. So now I have a freezer full of paper bag biscuits instead of a revised thesis.

Last week I took it (yes, it, my thesis with it's contrived ending) out to work on and the mother board on my computer died and I couldn't work for a week. Today, I had my computer back so I made biscuits. And coconut kefir. Oh and last night I bought so many shoes on zappos that my credit card company called me at 7:30 in the morning to see if my card had been stolen. No, I told Bank of America, after answering a multiple choice quiz about streets I've lived on and zip codes I've inhabited, no one stole my credit card. It was I in a black-out shoe buying frenzy. They will be returned. Every last gorgeous pair.

Brooklyn, measure of all things worth attending.

Why oh why do I keep reading the Kane? I'm already pissed off enough in my life, but sometimes my regular angst isn't enough and I read things like the blog-which-shall-not-be-named. The Kane happens to be using Brooklyn as a yardstick of all things fun to do in Baton Rouge. As in commenting that an event was good because it was Brooklyn-esque. Oh, does that mean everyone there was oozing attitude instead of sweat? And yes, Cokane, I know it's so wacked that Baton Rougites actually do cool things besides wearing purple and gold and drive around looking at abandoned buildings and eating crawfish and funneling beer, but SURPRISE they do.

1) I love Brooklyn but if things in Baton Rouge were Brooklyn-esque, no one would be dancing or smiling or having duels with roman candles. Nor would a Brooklyn New Year's Eve party include the tying together of four (yes FOUR, geaux Scott) artillery shells. We crossed the streams and we paid the price with our clothing and some of us might have ended up with bruised legs and burns but wasn't that better than standing around in itchy sweaters with weird ass bandanas around our necks being cool?

2) Where else can you not be packed and then have stuff in your apartment moved out by random strangers who come by and haul away 300 pound elleptical machines, then later invite one over for beans and corn?

and

3) Ok Advocate, since when is hating on Baton Rouge NEWS? Am I a jealous writer who blogs out of spite? Perhaps. But seriously. I'm from Massachusetts. I bitch about everything and yet I have found a way to love this place where at 1 am I am sweating like...like someone who lives in Louisiana. Before I moved here, I had no idea the places sweat could trickle. Like from my stomach. Who ever thought stomachs could sweat?

Full Steam Ahead: Penelope gets all Sentimental about Louisiana

Quote of the Week: “Penelope, you’re a Yankee and no matter how long you live in the South, you’ll never be able to overcome that.”


(Buster the incredible fighting kitty among the coconuts.)

Ok no one said that this week. But Dub did say it last week at Anna’s surprise birthday party and I liked it.


I’ll admit that this week, I got a wee bit depressed about the fact that I don’t know what I’m going to do next year except be squashed by the ridiculous amount of student loan debt I’ve racked up. On Wednesday decided I would move to New York once I graduated and try to get a job in publishing. There I could copy edit other people’s books by day and try to make contacts at night so I could get my novel published, but instead I’d have to go home after work because my back would hurt and all the other entry level writer hopefuls who are ten years younger than me will go out to trendy bars in the East Village, and get drunk and sleep their way to book contracts, while I lay in bed with an ice pack on L4 and L5 and talk to my friends on the phone about all the books I copy edit which are so awful and how my book is way better and why wasn’t it published yet and then I’d hang up worried that I’d become a whining bore and all my friends hated me. Then I’d fall asleep in front of the TV, and try to get up early to write but keep hitting snooze until I absolutely had to get out of bed, and ride to work on the subway having panic attacks about getting trapped in a subway tunnel.

But Wednesday night I went to go see “Low and Behold” at the Shaw Center. It’s a phenomenal movie. It combines a fictional story of an insurance adjuster in New Orleans after Katrina with real stories of people after the storm. It made me change my mind about that day’s plan to move to NYC. I got all fired up and decided to move to lower Plauquemines parish instead and hang out with the Croatian fisherman.

“Low and Behold” gave me one of those Louisiana moments where my eyes tear up and I think, “Damn, I didn’t know what love was until I opened my eyes and saw all those live oaks and smelled the sweet wood burning during fake winter and stopped being so g-d judgmental of all the people here.” That movie made me want to hug Louisiana until someone can smack some sense into all the politicians and dickhead corporations who screw this state over again and again. Mostly, I can’t believe I didn’t step foot here until I was twenty-nine. I’ve lived in West Virginia and Florida and Colorado, but I always felt like the East Coast was the center of the universe (any East Coaster who says otherwise is lying). I didn’t even know Louisiana existed, really. And the first year and half I lived here I HATED it. (Just ask my friends who had to listen to me complain about it all that time.) I couldn’t stand the blatant racism, the conservativism, the strip malls and chain stores everywhere.

I grew up on a salt marsh in a small coastal town in Massachusetts. I was and continue to be deeply tied to that land, to the way one particular tiny stretch of the rocky northern Atlantic smells and looks. But I’m not sure I knew what it was to love a place until I let Louisiana in. It makes me think of the first four lines of a Sylvia Plath poem (please keep reading, I swear I’m not gothing out on y’all), Love Letter.
(from Love Letter)
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.

If you haven’t experienced that rush of expansion, the way Louisiana can touch your tender secret places, then scare the crap out of you and make you tear your hair out in frustration, and then show the best time you’ve ever had, this is not the blog for you.

I decided to start blogging in protest of another blog by a certain recent Yankee transplant to Baton Rouge who doesn’t know a thing about Louisiana and happens to be dissing on this town in a BIG way. A major, wicked, uniformed, holier-than-thou dis that is just plain mean-spirited at times. I mean, come on, if you’re going to hate on Baton Rouge, hate on the haters and the socio-political structures that f--- this town and the entire state of Louisiana over. We can start with the people who make mulch out of cypress trees and work our way up to Bobby Jindal. But griping about trick or treaters not wearing costumes and the name of the Advocate’s website? F U BaRou? Baton Rouge: Retarded or Just Slow? You better check yourself Miss BaRou. Or fais do do your hipster ass on outta here.


***Filled with innovative plans, ideas and good intentions, Penelope admits she’s been known to run out of steam on more than one occasion. She has thought about writing for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Elle, The Atlantic Monthly, The Baton Rouge Advocate, 225 Magazine, The Reveille and most recently the Baton Rouge Business Report. Other projects she’s planned but not completed include: Mary Queen of Spite, A Spite Documentary; making an Elvis Presley Mosaic out of Mardi Gras beads; stopping sweatshop production of Mardi Gras beads and creating a self-sustaining all Louisiana produced Mardi Gras bead economy; Sin and Salvation a weekend of strip clubs and mega churches; Pantoum, the Movie; reorganizing the stuff under the kitchen sink. ***