Babbles of a Lover and a Fighter

It’s 2010.  Twenty-ten.  The Future.  Where’s my hoverboard?  Flying car?  Interplanetary transportation?  I suppose it’s a bit far fetched to expect those things, but a few years ago, I never would have thought of being able to get instant celebrity responses to the most mundane questions, aliens and planets you could only dream of coming to life and popping out of a screen in the most realistic fashion, or competing computer companies coming out with laptops as thin as a few sheets of freaking paper (Apple with its Macbook Air and Dell with its Adamo XPS…so…beautiful.).

People have been having a hard time coming up with a name for this past decade.  The Aughts.  The Naughts.  The Zeros.  The Double O’s.  I, for one, am a fan of The Naughties.  From ridiculous lawsuits and socially deviant behavior to terrorism and swine flu hysteria, this past decade has been full of crazy weather (uh…Katrina?), crazy people (Lady Gaga…Kanye…oh the list goes on), and crazy trend explosions (Facebook, Uggs, leggings as pants [ew, put that away.]).

It’s weird to think that my entire high school and college education happened in The Naughties.  I remember I was sitting in the front row in Ms. Driscoll’s class when she came in, eyes watering, and said, “Class…America has been attacked.”  I remember getting the hell out of dodge in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-10 wondering how bad a hurricane could really be.  I remember graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering and thinking the world is my oyster, only to be denied job opportunities because of the worst recession since the Great One.

I think the biggest milestone for me this past decade was the whole Katrina thing.  It was my first semester of college, my first time away from 99.9% of my friends.  Going to a new school is scary enough, but literally getting blown away the first day of orientation is not what I’d call a smooth start.

A couple of excerpts from my livejournal from 2005:

8/27 – so…how about that hurricane katrina, eh? move-in day and my family made the trek from rowlett to new orleans in only 8-ish hours. they helped me move in the rest of my stuff into the dorm when i heard about people being told to evacuate the school. wth? apparently hurricane katrina made a drastic turn west and was headed straight toward new orleans. so i packed up a weeks worth of stuff and hopped in the car with my parents to go back home. i guess i’m just lucky it landed on move-in day otherwise i wouldnt have gotten to come home at all. and i also found it rather amusing that the hurricane has my sister’s name. i knew she would find a way to get me back home.

8/28 – so the question remains…what am i gonna do for a week and a half? i guess i’ll just mull over that for awhile. ummm…so hurricane katrina, eh? it’s a cat-5…meaning 175 mph winds and more than 12 feet (FEET!) of flooding. good thing i’m on the 5th floor. i guess just as long as it doesnt blow my window out and suck all my stuff out. oh, and please pray for the thousands of people in the super dome. that’s gotta suck. just sitting there waiting to get hit by the storm cause you cant get a ride out. yikes.

8/31 – prayers for the people down there and their families. i was listening to the radio today and i was amazed that every station, every single station is doing something about hurricane relief. so many good hearts out there.

Looking back on it, I don’t think the severity of the situation hit me until spring when I found my way back to New Orleans and in the Ninth Ward analyzing levee failures and gutting houses.  Gutting houses.  It sounds so…violent.  But I guess water-logged photo albums, rotting foundations, and toxic refrigerator innards are nothing to smile about.  The damage was/still is something that is impossible to wrap my head around.  Sure, you can put a number on it; sure, you can put a price on rebuilding this or that, but it is impossible to know how much was lost in memories, in people. It’s impossible to quantify the suffering in the Super Dome, in the Ninth Ward, all along the coast, living with backed up sewage, no electricity, no food, no water.

Four years later, New Orleans has come up stronger than ever.  Every Mardi Gras I’ve been to since Katrina has been bigger and more outrageous than the last.  I just got back after spending the week of New Year down there gallivanting around the city I’ve grown to know and love.  This decade has taught me how resilient the human spirit really is.  High school was great.  College, even more so.  2009’s over, and thus, the end of another chapter in this thing I call life.

…okay that was ridiculously corny.  Apologies.

I usually don’t count time in years or decades, I suppose the latter because I’ve only been alive for about two, but it just feels like wrapping up those teen-angsty days and care-free college days should be a pretty big deal, especially when landmarked with such huge events.  And what’s a better time to do it than at the end of a decade?

Here’s to the next ten years and to starting this new blog.