xtcian

they call alabama the crimson tide

10/2/05

My poor little baby girl has some kind of stomach flu tonight, so I can't really write anything - not with her screaming in the background when I know she's really miserable. She could have inherited my digestive tract, which makes me doubly upset to think my genetics have something to do with this. I blame my dad, which is where I got it from.

Hopefully Lucy will inherit a lot from her Aunt Michelle, who was just deployed by the Red Cross to help out on the Gulf Coast. In lieu of a real blog, I'd like to send out this email crafted by my brother Sean as Michelle was talking to him.

***

She's in Mobile, Alabama and she has been put in charge of a team of case workers, who's job is to discern who is actually deserving of funds and who is conning the Red Cross. Apparently, they have now served the equivalent number of citizens that reside in the affected states, and they think they have only managed to serve half of all those affected by the disasters, so you can see that fraud is apparently rampant. She said that women get in line with one another's children and collect as much as possible, and then pass the children off to someone else in line. The Liberal Nightmare.

She's staying at a motel, and the entire motel, I think it's a Radisson, is completely full of Red Cross volunteers. By which I mean, the motel is closed, it's open only to Red Cross volunteers. And I can only guess just how crazy that place gets at night. They had a, get this, Mardi Gras celebration last night for people who've been there for the entire three weeks and apparently a strapping twenty year old from Des Moines tried to get Michelle to go down and drink with her, leading to this conversation...

Me: "So, this is a great big guy from Iowa?"

Michelle: "He's adorable."

Me: "While he was talking to you, did he, like, accidentally eat an entire hamburger?"

Michelle: "I think he's my boyfriend, I'm not gonna lie."

Me: "He's totally your boyfriend."

Michelle: (sigh) "He's totally my boyfriend."

So, she's got a group of armed guards making sure that when she turned people down for money, they won't hassle her. Her day today isn't starting until 1 PM, but the rest of the time her days are gonna be outrageous. She's got her cellphone, and it works, but she doesn't have internet access or a computer.

They put her in charge of a group of people who are all older than her, leading to her life long problem of being a blonde woman who is twice as smart and twice as capable as the people around her, but those people keep saying, "So, why are you in charge?" Also, she tends to get what she wants by being nice, which is confusing to a lot of people. So, the battle rages on for her.

Michelle, East Village, 2002