We arrived at the hotel here in Americus about an hour ago. I haven’t been keeping up with the writing/podcasting as much as I hoped for this week, but it just didn’t feel right. We spent the last two nights on Panama City Beach in a hotel without wi-fi (gasp), so there was that obstacle as well. The last few days have actually been fairly low key, the beaches are beautiful and I have been enjoying spending time with my mom.

Sunday starts the 11th annual Freedomwalk, a 100 mile walk that calls attention to jailhouse conditions, courtroom practices and policies and law enforcement behavior orchestrated by the Prison and Jail Project. I will walk with them on Sunday, recording interviews along the way. Check out the section on Koinonia’s website that discusses their activism. Makes me even more excited to get in there!

Orientation starts for me on Monday. I will be sharing a duplex with two other guys, there is only one female intern so she will have the other half of the house to herself. I am still not sure how easy it will be to put up podcasts while I am up there, it seems reasonable that I should be able to put up one a week at least. I am also looking into a way to make phoneposts into my podcast feed. Any suggestions?

Wednesday afternoon while I was talking to my (former) landlord it finally hit me that I really was leaving in two days and it was time to stop zoning out watching episodes of the Office on iTunes and get to work.

I spent the entire day Thursday packing up, throwing crap away, and inviting friends over to take home things they wanted. I took both cats to their new homes, collected a check from the woman who bought my piano, waited an hour at the bank to get a new debit card, and drove Tiffany insane with my moods swinging from tears, to avoidance, to being pissed off and overwhelmed with everything that had to happen to get me out of town on time.

Thank God for Tiffany. She was with me the entire day. It wasn’t until Friday that I realized how much she did that day. We turned an apartment full of furniture into this:

So Friday my Mom and I dropped her dog off at the kennel, and waited for the salvage yard to come pick up my car (perhaps you recall that the engine fell out of it a month or so ago). They were an hour late or so, and my we decided just to give the damn thing to Richard, the maintenance man at the apartments across the street. Thursday he made several trips to my apartment and took loads of my unwanted furniture, clothes, and kitchen supplies over to the families who live in his complex. I thought it was a good way to get rid off all this stuff, and perhaps I will be repaid with furniture karma when I get to Brooklyn and find a place.

We drove the rest of the day to New Orleans, where I was surprised by my sister, she and my Mom had been in cahoots on getting her here to NO. I was pleased, but so shocked when I saw her that I responded in such a strange way.
All in all, I feel so strange right now because I haven’t yet moved in anywhere. It hasn’t really sunk in that I am not going back to Houston. In moments I know it, but mostly it feels like I am just on vacation. Maybe when my Mom drops me off at Koinonia it will become more real. Really, I would like for it to. Such limbo I am in.

I haven’t forgotten about the second half of the Ray Hill interview. I will decide what to do with that soon. When the panic erupted in my last couple of days in Houston, I decided I needed to wait and put that next show up when I have time. Maybe I will just put it up in its raw form. Who knows.

As a side note, New Orleans gives me the creeps. I have been mostly in the tourist areas since I have been here, but the whole drinking, smoking, partying culture really just reminds me of my early twenties in a way that I don’t really want to revisit. People are extremely friendly here, but that smell of bars…just walking by them, the stale liquor and cigarette smoke smell reminds me of a really disgusting part of my life. I don’t wanna be one of those sober people, but that is just how it is. That, and people walking around with plastic cups full of warm beer. ugh.

p.s. can someone correct my French?