#roadtrip!

so i kept a running twitter log of things i did and saw while i was travelling. for your amusement, a road trip in 140 characters or less.

12/17, 11:41 pm: getting a milkshake for my drive south. miss my love already, but so jazzed to see my friends!

12/18, 2:18 am: dear henderson, north carolina: blow me. no open gas stations at all? come ON.

12/18, 5:17 am: welcome center, south carolina - that means a 20-minute pause for the cause before pressing on. naptime...

12/18, 6:19 am: greenville, SC: starbucks and hardee's at one exit. heaven.

12/18, 7:59 am: georgia welcome center: mmm. 5 more minutes of napping?

12/18, 10:47 am: AL welcome center: another state line crossed, another nap. so close. by the time i get to MS, #DADT had better be repealed...

12/18, 1:11 pm: greenville, AL: just like HS trips to youth leg, having lunch. makes me miss the man. getting closer to the pelican state...

12/18, 3:25 pm: gautier, MS: and down goes #DADT. beautiful day, beautiful moment.

12/18, 4:16 pm: et maintenant, bienvenue en louisiane. :)

12/19, 1:05 am: hammond, LA: drunk. smelling of cigarette smoke. desperately sleep-deprived. in a club. wish i was in bed with my man. i missed LA. really.

12/19, 11:34 pm: baton rouge, LA: my friends are amazing people. i love them dearly, and i miss them when i'm not here. LSU law 2010 for life.

12/20, 7:01 pm: new orleans, LA: my heart is this wondrous city, with its love and its life. so glad to be [spiritually] home.

12/21, 10:04 am: slidell, LA: morning coffee in the place where i learned to love estate planning. on the road again...

12/21, 10:07 am: aaaand there's the first rebel flag of the trip. four days in - think that's a record...

12/21, 10:40 am: gulfport, MS: too many memories. so much sin, in the buckle of the bible belt no less. makes me miss someone...

12/21, 4:38 pm: gulf shores, AL: my beach. god, i missed you.

12/22, 12:49 pm: mobile, AL: in the old life, i ignored people who mattered before i met him. that will never happen again. here's to true friends.

12/23, 12:37 pm: my family is exasperatingly sweet and amazing. prying and fussing over me across the miles. i feel claustrophobic and loved. :)

12/24, 8:38 am: mobile, AL: thus ends the "friends" portion of the trip; now begins the "family" portion. 80 hours till i'm home to him...

12/24, 1:36 pm: crestview, FL: met a middle school classmate in the gas station. small damn world...

12/24, 4:34 pm: moultrie, GA: and with that, i reach the edge of AT&T service. no phone, no internet for the weekend.

[here begins twitter-style note-taking on my phone]
12/24, 5:40 pm: tifton, GA: sharing a building here are the "southern heritage supercenter" (white guys) and "dirty south outfitters" (black guys). laughing together outside, dude in rebel-flag bandanna and dude in tupac shakur t-shirt. SO confused.

12/25, 4:12 pm: fitzgerald, GA: being a progressive southerner is a double-edged sword - so much good, so much cringeworthy...

[back to twitter]
12/25, 7:20 pm: arabi, GA: snow in DC = leaving family in a mad rush to get home. this'll be a long 24 hours...

12/25, 11:45 pm: greenville, SC: i swore i'd never eat christmas dinner at a waffle house again. [ed: there's a story here - another time.] and yet, here i sit. good times.

12/26, 12:31 pm: dinwiddie, VA: dear VDOT - it's a good thing that 18-wheeler flipped over. makes the fact that you left I-85 icy as hell obvious. grrrr.

12/27, 11:19 am: finally back home. great trip, but it's so damn good to be with him again...

quite an adventure. back to regular programming tomorrow!

sweet southern moon

[this all started when i found this picture while listening to this song. heard the song again today; hence the renewed nostalgia...]

i have one exam - one long, stupid take-home exam for a professor i, frankly, detest - standing between me and freedom for fall 2010. senior-itis (LL.M.-itis?) is hitting me hard. and with winter like this hitting the metro area as hard as it can, i was in the right frame of mind to get knocked sideways by a four-minute pop song about driving the river road in baton rouge.

yeah, i was never so sweet on baton rouge when i lived there. i love, love, LOVE the fact that i hold two degrees from LSU law center. i am proud as hell of that. GEAUX. TIGERS. but the town itself? meh. it's funny, though, how experiences twine themselves around your heart when you least see them coming. i find myself realizing just what i had when i lived there, and how, well, perfect LSU was for me.

i'll hit the road myself in a few days, heading back south for a series of amazing reunions with people all over the southeast, the family and friends who, frankly, got ignored for too long while i was living the old life, the one that wasn't me. but when i'm here, though i am blissfully happy with my surroundings, a shockingly intense twinge of longing for, say, boudin balls at the chimes whipsaws through me. i have no idea what causes this, but there it is.

this is an old habit of mine. for most of my adult life, and even when i was a snotty little college kid, i found it remarkably hard to just light somewhere. (to translate the southernism: light somewhere = be still and settle.) i spent my last two years of college constantly driving back and forth across the commonwealth of virginia. i always want to move, to go, to do. i am almost never at my house. it makes me wonder if it's the place i miss, or the action, the motion, the other-ness? interesting question, i guess. the time will come, very soon, when i put down roots for real. i've made commitments to this place, ones that i am not at all interested in breaking. the pliability that accompanied some of my old life choices is no longer available - the people involved in my decision-making process are adults, with lives and responsibilities of their own. balancing all of this inures towards staying still, being present and breathing for once in my life.

so the old strains of that silly little song, which really does sum up nights in baton rouge better than a thousand descriptions i could write, still tug at my heart. but when i'm done having some brews and marinating in that sweet, sweet southern moon, i'll get in the car and come back here, back to the arms of my love, my city, and i'll curl up in the comfort of home. the roots will grow. they're small, but they are most certainly there.

drive

one benefit of this insane week has been that i've had a rental car at my disposal. as much as i love walking, metro trains and the urban lifestyle, there is precious little in my life that i enjoy more than getting behind the wheel of a car. i've had a license for 13 years; this is the second extended stretch of time over that entire period that's found me carless.

the first time, i was a freshman in undergrad, seventeen years old, and living in a teeny little mountain town in virginia. alone for the first time, i thought i had everything well in hand. but then the walls of the teeny little mountain town started to close in on me. my world, which had never really been that big (i mean, there's only so much you can see in small-city alabama in the mid- to late-1990s), suddenly shrank to about three miles square. and there was no. way. out. i was stuck. every little problem became massive, and with my adolescent coping skills being, well, stunted beyond all belief, i reacted about as well as you'd expect: i freaked out.

so here i sit again, on the other side of over a decade of life experience, carless. this time it's different; i'm old enough to attain several means of escape, and i have a tight web of close friends and family to support me should i freak out again. but tonight, i took to the roads of my city, cruising around with no real agenda. i let my mind wander far and wide (the results of this wandering, by the way, will be seen later on this week; i'm brewing up a nice writing project which will debut here in pieces in august), and it was simply heaven. i've always thought so well while driving. it's one of the few places in my life where i know i can think clearly and without interruption. i used to go on long drives with my cell turned off. there was a freedom in being completely unreachable.

behind the wheel, you are 100% free to do whatever you want. i realized driving back last night that, if i so desired, i could have gone anywhere i wanted. there was nothing holding me back. in my new life, i miss that feeling. it's one to be savored.