I’m feeling all Love & Rockets today because I’ve got no new tales to tell
(Um…that’s a lyric to a song from a band you might not know).

I had some of the gang over Saturday night for a meat fest. Conversation eventually turned to New Orleans and we talked about some of the horrible things we’ve been hearing. Our friends Mark and Robin have strong ties to New Orleans via graduate school and they are hearing that the ninth ward was deliberately flooded to save a wealthy primarily white area. The structure of the rumor suggests that this possibility is getting some play in the European press and there is a paper trail. I’m not finding anything concrete in my web searches to back it up, just other blogs with the same rumor. If you do see anything more legitimate on this possibility please send it my way.

I worked all weekend and I am contractually forbidden from giving you any details about that. Sorry. Believe me. I’d like to tell you all about it as it was silly. I suppose it’s not proprietary to tell you that I found myself at the front of a room to which eighty people had been invited, by a chair count there was room for less than twenty, but luckily only two showed up. Good thing I went to Kinko’s at two a.m. to make enough copies for all of them.

In other news I had a great deal of financial aid come in and I’ve been listening to it sizzle like water on a hot frying pan as all that cash hits my various past due accounts. My debts shall be visited upon the seventh generation of them that are… is… generated by me. Biblical debt repayment is the only way to go. It’s very declarative in a King James kind of way. Of course having children would cost much more than the debt I already have, so passing the debt buck to future generations does seem like a bit of flawed plan, at least for debt repayment.

I am sick of not drinking. Not in an I-need-a-drink kind of way but in a has-anyone-seen-my-social-life kind of way. Three months down on the fourth of September and six to go in drinkless land. I met a guy – well several people – at a work meeting who were all very excited about hitting a martini bar after our Saturday session. A substantial proportion of academics are drinkers – the vast majority. In many places I can limp along with my near beer, but a martini bar is not one of those places, so I had to bow out of post work bonding.

It is still a fucking sauna in the hottest city on earth. Our never-ending-worst-year-I-can-recall-sweat-fest continues with one hundred degree day after another. I could wax poetic about my evaporative tendencies but I think I’ll leave off blogging and get back to work, 20 papers to grade and three to write.