A Big Fat Waste of Time

Oh yeah, we are so ready for an emergency situation in this country.

This is a picture of the bottled water shelves at a local grocery store in Austin, Texas taken two days before a category 4 Hurricane hits the Gulf Coast, which is over 200 miles away from Austin.

Being a native South Texan from the Gulf Coast, with family in Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville, (not to mention Austin), I am more than a little distracted by this here Hurricane we got in the works. Today I found this lovely posting in the comments section of one of my favorite sites, Austinist.com:

My family set out from Houston yesterday to Austin at three in the afternoon, with children and dogs stuffed into one car along with only their most needed belongings. By 8:30pm, they had traveled exactly 19 miles. 290 was completely bumber to bumper, with many cars overheated and out of gas on the side of the road. My family had to turn back, rather than risk being stranded somewhere near Dime Box at 4am with no gasoline. Gas stations were out all along the route. Now they're stuck in Houston, feeling trapped and panicked. They are not in an area of mandatory evacuation, and they set out three days before the storm was scheduled to hit, and STILL they couldn't make it out. This is really, really scary.

Photo and quote from, Austinist

Newsflash: We are no longer the kids in America.

After 7 years of New York City living, it finally hit me like a ton of bricks yesterday: Me and all my friends, mostly over thirty, some over forty, single and childless, live our entire lives in the pursuit of fun. For example, this past week: I had dinner and drinks at Pastis, tickets to the Stones, birthday gifts that REPLACED the Criterion Collection of some of my Wes Anderson films I had to dump last year , about 6 hours of various forms of self help, surf lessons and an internet date. One good friend of mine (the one who replaced The Royal Tenenbaums for me) is on his way to Kyoto, Japan this week. Another is on safari in Africa as I type. (He bought me skating lessons.) A third spent the afternoon with me at the Life Cafe sipping beers and lamenting our misery. WHAT FUCKING MISERY????

I had a dream last night that someone gave me a puppy to babysit and I transported it home in a shoebox wrapped in two plastic shopping bags. I forgot about it for two days until my landlord called and I remembered to ask him if it was okay for me to have a dog in the building. I had thrown the shoebox with the dog in the corner of the room and forgotten about it for two days the way I would a new pair of shoes I might have impulsively bought. Luckily, the dog was still alive when I opened the bag, but dyed blue.

I hate to say it, but I'm starting to feel like my generation is a wee bit spoiled.