Yes, I am Alive and Still Badass

So, I'm just going to pretend that I've been updating the blog for the past five months and skip the whole "catching up" post. As you and I both know, this past summer/fall has provided me with enough material to write a feature film. So I'll skip the boring details and start afresh.

I am now enjoying my Saturday "Mid-City" morning at the local coffee shop Fair Grinds. Mid-City is the district I live in. In my opinion, it's the best area: close to the French Quarter, access to Bayou St John, walking distance from City Park and the fairgrounds -- it has the right neighborhood feel. Here's a map of New Orleans to give you a picture of where I live:I live in the green area -- I'm not sure if this makes much sense to you. But hopefully it gives you some direction.

Anyway, it's the beginning of a three day weekend...thank God. This past week was a pretty standard week at Henry Ford Middle School. My days usually go as follows:

6:40am: Count the cows on the side of the road as I pull into the little town of Avondale Louisiana to teach 6th and 7th graders.

7:25-2:20: TEACH (usually consisting of me telling my students to chill out and then calling them all fools)

2:20-?: Trying to figure out how the hell to teach.

But, despite every day feeling like Groundhog Day, I had a few weekday events that deviated from the norm.
Firstly, I've started to volunteer for a City Planning/Architecture/Art organization called transforma. I'm working for a artist named Mel Chin who's doing a project called Fundred/Paydirt addressing the lead contamination problem in New Orleans. The idea is that with enough money, the lead poisoning issue can be mitigated by some sort of cutting edge science. Long story short, Mel Chin is trying to raise three hundred million "fundred" dollars to be presented to congress in exchage for the money/resources to pay for the soil treatment. The "fundred" dollars are hundred dollar bills created/drawn by students across the nation. My job, is to talk to art teachers across schools in New Orleans to try to implement the project...I'm hoping that I can leverage networking skills to get myself a planning job this summer. Here's some templates for what the projects about. So, if you our anyone you know works with kids and would be interested in having them create these hundred dollar bills here's some templates

Pictures of the Project's "Safehouse" where the bills are stored (in the 9th Ward of New Orleans)

In other news, Thursday night I went to dinner party via invitation of my my roommate Craig. His older man-friend lives in a quaint shotgun double approaching the ninth ward of New Orleans. Myself, Craig, Dave (my other roommate), Frank (host), and his friend Tommy dined on fine china and spoke of the many woes of New Orleans. I can't quite articulate it over the blog, but the experience was definitely one of the more uncomfortable ones I've had since I've been here. Imagine me sitting in a room decorated by a 50ish year old gay southern lawyer listening to him and his friends talk about how the housing projects need to be torn down and how the "certain minority groups" are plagueing the city. I bit my toungue all night. Hard. I was however, slightly amused by the naked man pictures in the bathroom.

As for the rest of the weekend, I'm planning on kicking Cooper's ass at Street Fighter II (yes, I have a super nintendo in my house) and trying not to poison him with my cooking. I'll let you know how it works out.

Yep, despite a little New Orleans trauma in 2008, I'm still the same 'ol LP Money -- playing video games, meeting crazy people, and finding eccentric art projects to get caught up in. Lot's of FPZ love from the Big Easy....