Key to Men Mentioned Below:
A: French-speaking guy
B: Short, bald guy
C: Sports nut guy
D: Graphic designer guy
E: Guy with girlfriend

It is an ordinary Wednesday night, and I am reviewing my upcoming weekend plans in my mind. Tomorrow night I have a date with A., who I met last week at a friend’s dinner party, and on Saturday I’m throwing a “singles” party. Oh, and not to mention I have tentative plans on Sunday to go for Hungarian food with C, who I’ve gone out with four times (though it seems like 40). But more on him later.

You might think all of this dating seems glamorous, and that I must be a very popular and attractive girl. I’m no supermodel, that’s for sure, and at 34 even if I were I’d be over the hill. I am intelligent, have a wonderful job that IS glamorous, and I’m a very good conversationalist. So why am I single’ Well, grad school and living abroad for many years delayed my growing-up process, I think, but now that I’m “settled,” I am making up for lost time. In fact, I’m learning how to date for the first time. I’ve been on more dates in the past month than in my whole life up until that point. During one two-week period, I went on eight dates with seven different guys. I wrote little notes on each guy on Post-it notes tacked up by my phone so when one called, I’d know right away who had lived in Europe, who worked for so-and-so bank, etc. I suspect the reason for this sudden activity is a new photograph taken by a friend that I posted on two online dating sites. I don’t know what it is about this photo—guys have mentioned the smile and the thick, wavy hair but one girlfriend may have hit upon the truth: I look like I have big boobs.

Why did I turn to online dating? First, I’ve always been somewhat of a control freak. Now that my apartment and job are sorted, my life was falling into place except the guy situation. Friends said they didn’t know anyone they could set me up with, and after even my extremely social friends said there were no single guys out there period, I decided that I could get depressed or have fun. So I got depressed. I think everyone got sick of my whining, so I took matters into my own hands and went online, going out with guys I might not have considered a year ago. I won’t lie: my ultimate goal is to get married or have a meaningful long-term relationship. I have a lot to give to someone emotionally, and if not to a guy, then I’ll have to start volunteering somewhere—a lot. Could this all be for naught if I don’t meet anyone? Sure. But I’m less concerned with that now than I was in the beginning of all this. In fact, I’ve found that, after a few months, I’m more open about meeting men in the real world by encounters in the virtual one.

When A. and I met at the dinner party, which gathered together a group of people whose common denominator was the ability to speak French, I was very impressed with his fluency, and it seems, he with mine. I didn’t care if he later wrote to say I was the best speaker in the room just to get a date. It worked. His e-mail hinted that he was interested in art, so I invited him for a tour of the gallery where I work. He promptly said he’d like to take me to dinner afterwards to thank me. Of course we’re going to a bistro. I’m afraid no matter how good his language is it won’t compensate in my mind for him being a little plump.

The one thing I am not looking forward to doing this week, something I need to do right now rather than writing this, is tell B. I feel no chemistry between us. We met online, have been on the obligatory first lunch and then two dinners. After the second dinner, we saw a movie and the groping began. Touching my hair, knee, whatever. Now I really get along with this guy—he is very smart, moved to this country just before college with his parents who had very little money and put himself through school. Now he’s a successful IT consultant, living in the suburbs, and going on hiking trips all over the world. Only problem is, he’s shorter than me, and bald. Now one or the other I might be able to take, but not both, and I need to tell him there’s no spark. Normally I think I could get away with an e-mail, but B. requires a phone call. Ugh.

I can like a guy tremendously, enjoy going out with him and having great conversations, but if I’m not attracted to him from the get-go, I don’t want his hands on me. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those girls who find someone more attractive the better you know them. I am trying, but I think my problem is that I’m in the arts, and what I see doesn’t mean everything, but is certainly an important issue. If you still think I’m too picky, here’s my criteria: taller than me (I’m 5′4″); have hair (losing some is fine); not overweight. That’s about it. All colors, creeds, religions, etc. welcome. That’s not too much to ask, right? Well, maybe it is.

So on to C. I wrote to him first online. Several months later, once our travel schedules calmed down, we met for lunch. Our conversation was less than stimulating, but not painful, and he has the biggest blue eyes. Not wanting to play games, I wrote to him afterwards and said let’s meet again. We did—for dinners, a tour of the gallery (yes, that’s my M.O.), more dinners. I was ready to scrap him before the tour when I realized that I needed to face up to the fact that we may have nothing in common. He’s into football, basketball, anything with a ball, and likes bars where sports jerseys are considered decor. But something kept me coming back. He’s probably the nicest guy I’ve ever met. His dream job would be helping people, though for the moment he works in corporate law. Plus, I want to kiss him and perhaps do more. After four or so dates, I deserve that at least! It reminds me of that Violent Femmes song “Why can’t I get just one kiss?” (For now, I’m still up to only the first verse, but I know where your mind was going.) He responded very favorably to the museum tour and clearly had an interest in what I do for a living. Afterwards, over coffee, he began to open up about his life and career goals, a good sign. And when I told him I was moving into a new apartment, he offered to help me. He’s a keeper, right? Then, I got myself invited over to his place last Saturday night, and I’m really proud of myself for dropping the right hints. Well, not really hints exactly, more like, “Hey, when do I get to see your place?” But I have a cold, and then I admit I hate football and he admits that he hates Sci-Fi, so I go home with nothing. I am trying, though, racking my brain for any sports trivia and coming up with something about Andre Agassi and Manchester United. Since that night, he hasn’t made a move, and whenever I have tried to make the first move with guys it has disastrous conclusions, such as missing each other’s mouths. So I’m about to give up on him again and decide not to return the e-mails he, admittedly, isn’t sending me. But if he did, I vowed I wouldn’t respond—especially since I discovered he’s put up a new picture and updated his online profile since we met! The silent treatment spurred him to ask me out for Hungarian food, for a change, rather than the other way around. We’ll see.

And then there is D. We probably have the most in common (he’s a graphic designer and knows more about art than I do), and while he’s a nice guy, I wasn’t attracted to him. Told him so after the gallery tour, and he seemed to take it very well. After finding out not only do we have art in common, but music as well, he’s been the best person to see live bands with. Everything was going well until I invited him to my party. I think he got the hint that it’s a singles thing, and panicked, even though I made it clear I just wanted to be friends. On second thought, I might have said that I wanted to be friends with him “for now,” and grasping the 1 percent of hope in that statement, he decided to keep trying. He asked me if he could see me this week or if he had to wait until the party. Getting a little demanding, no? My cold and other plans prevent me from seeing him before Saturday, and I hope he won?t make a scene at the party.

I got a call from the girlfriend of E., who I met at a party several months ago. He was hot and seemed to be into me. I offered my business card to another guest, and he snatched it away. Then he wrote his e-mail address on a piece of paper and forced it into my hand. He e-mailed me every day, making clever comments that got me hooked. Then he invited me out to dinner. During the dinner, which I thought was a date (hello!), he called his girlfriend to join us. Not knowing about the girlfriend until that moment, I stayed and chatted with her for a few minutes before I fled in humiliation. Having since gotten over it, I invited both to my party because, well, she knows a lot of single men. She sent me pics of two of them today for me to decide whom she should bring. Now that’s what I call a good friend, well, as good a friend as one can make within a few minutes (and under duress). And for all she knows, I was trying to sleep with her boyfriend (I was). Either she is very, very nice or extremely clever. Probably both. No wonder E. is going out with her.

Up Next: A Thai-speaking white guy in the house of love

“Wassup Mister Thompson my nigger.” A 14-year-old black girl offers her clenched fist to mine in a gangster salute. I think she has a crush on me. Must be the English accent.

I’ve been teaching English literature to 11th and 12th graders at Wilson Prep, a public high school in Oakland, CA, for six months. I decided to become a teacher after working in the media and nonprofit worlds for 10 years, including five years working as a producer for the BBC and Channel 4 in London. I grew up in England, and studied English Lit at Oxford University. When I was at the English equivalent of a high school, nobody called the teachers “nigger.” For starters, we didn’t have any ethnic minority teachers; in any case, the N word was still plainly racist, free from the complex nuances it would acquire after being “reclaimed” by people of color (a la “queer”).

As an Englishman in the East Oakland ghetto, I am, it’s fair to say, an oddity. From the students’ perspective, sure, I’m an adult who tells them to stop using their cell phones in class or falling asleep on their desks. But I don’t quite fit in the same category as the white Bay Area liberals who make up half of the school staff. “Are you from France?” an eighth grader asked me a few weeks after my arrival at the school. “No, England,” I replied. “What language they speak in England?” he asked. I explained. Embarrassed by my reply, he asked me why I was in Oakland. It was a good question.

I fumbled for a reply. “Because I love literature, and I want to share it with you,”I tell the friendly Latino teen in a black hoodie. He looked bewildered, and no wonder, because while altruism is part of the answer, I am far from the Buddha, only a practicing Buddhist. But presumably it would have been a little disappointing for my poor teenage interlocutor to hear me say “because I need a job,” which is also true, or the whole, crazy story of my impetuous immigration to the United States during the dotcom heyday, subsequent unemployment, and existential meltdown, which would have kept him for several hours after school.

The funny thing about being an oddity in an inner city public school is that I think I fit in better here than in most jobs I’ve had in America. During my six years in the United States, working for an Internet film company, then a tech magazine, and then a nonprofit education organization, I’ve found the world of work more alienating than any experience thus far in my 35 years of life, with the exception of my teenage years at a Church of England secondary school, where they forced us to take naked group showers after long cross-country runs in the rain. I used to dread my eight hours of cube-confined misery, and constantly wonder whether I’d made the right decision to get married and settle down 6,000 miles from my nation of origin, and sometimes even ponder plans to return. But now, working among hundreds of awkward adolescents, many of whom have immigrated to the United States themselves in the past few years, I feel strangely at home. We are all oddities, in our own way, or, depending on your point of view, all quite normal.

Lionel Wilson College Preparatory Academy (aka “Wilson Prep”) is the first new high school to be built in Oakland in the last four decades. Named after Lionel Wilson, the first African-American mayor of Oakland, the school serves low-income Latino and African-American students in East Oakland. Wilson overcame the racism prevalent in the United States during his career as a lawyer. Similarly, the just four-year-old school was founded to redress the balance of a public school system that has failed to provide equitably for all socioeconomic classes, despite Horace Mann’s vision of free universal education as “the great equalizer.” The school’s motto is College Claro — College for Certain — and the staff is passionately committed to ensuring that all the school’s students continue their education at university. Last year, all the school’s seniors graduated to a four-year college. These young people are achieving this despite the potential obstacles of race and class, and in many cases despite tough family lives. Wilson Prep is the kind of place that can make you suspend your cynicism, a place where hope is both real and possible.

Last semester my 12th grade class was reading Herman Hesse’s masterpiece Siddhartha. The class was mystified by Siddhartha Gautama’s rejection of worldly riches in exchange for ascetic poverty. “You can’t tell poor people that poverty is good,” a colleague advised me. The Siddhartha that my students identified with was Siddhartha the Brahman, living in his palace surrounded by beautiful women and fine wine, not the deliberately impoverished mystic wandering by a river alone. “No, I wouldn’t swap rags for riches,” wrote one student in response to an essay prompt about material wealth and happiness. “I live in rags.”

In my first six months here, I do think I’ve bonded with many students, but I still feel as green as the fields of England when it comes to the crowd control skills needed to deal with large groups of students in the classroom. Perhaps my English politeness is getting in the way, but I have run out of ways of saying, “please be quiet.” I am learning that prefacing a command with “please” can incorrectly imply that students have a choice, which they really shouldn’t. But a deeper issue than my Englishness is an underlying resistance I feel to assuming the mask of authority. When I was at school, the teachers I admired most were iconoclasts who outsmarted the system. And even though, at 35, I’m long past adolescence, part of my identity is still tied up with the idea of youth, thus of wanting to seem and feel young — and wanting to strike the same anti-authoritarian pose that comes so easily to my students. But as their teacher, I have to lay down the law.

“Wassup Mister Thompson dawg.” I have no trouble adapting to my new, Oaktown Englishman identity, but I’m less happy dealing firmly with defiance or taking control of a noisy classroom. Slowly, slowly, I am learning. Yesterday I consoled a young woman who had been bullied by the class Queen Bee by listening to her story and promising to intervene if I saw her being bullied again. But it’s a long road I’ve gotten myself on — and I’m used to driving on the other side. I hope you’ll keep me company along the way.

Up Next: I Dream of Saint Tupac

So if you’re so manic about leaving the city for the ‘burbs, why do it? Why not wait until your edgy Brooklyn lease runs out, or search until you find your own 2BR with southern exposure, somewhere on the baby-crazed, sun-dappled lanes of the softer Park Slope? These are good questions, the right ones, and I wish I had a ready answer for them, or a better one, anyway, than “a backyard for Gus,” when friends, family, acquaintances, and committed Manhattanites first heard about our plans to move to Nyack, a town of 7,000 where the tired, evidently doomed Tappan Zee Bridge hits the far side of the Hudson 20 miles north of New York City. In the estimation of some I mentioned this to, I might as well have said we were setting sail for Columbus, Ohio.

Mind you, room for Gus to roam out-of-doors as he finds his feet (he’s all of one) is, in the end, the truest, sufficient motive. But it’s not quite enough to retire all of the ambivalence my wife M and I are experiencing about the move. Above and beyond the hassle of actually closing on a house (our first and only real estate), there’s the fact (well, not fact, but subjective reality) that moving to the country represents a failure of imagination, an inevitable, soul-leaching slouch toward conformity. Hell, we’ll be a ready made case study for David Brooks. (And yeah, yeah — who cares what Brooks thinks, but let’s face it, Brooks is the master definer of the New Typical, and who among us aspires to typical? I do not represent a sociological category; I … am … a ‘human’ being!)

Though we’re latter-day beneficiaries of the American Dream—and even though I’ve played a futurist at times—M and I are not the sort of people who ever saw our own future clearly, especially not the cars, house, dogs, kids (aka: CHDK). Little observed, even by Brooks, but completely real: folks certain of their 2.2-kid future are Dog People. Up to now, we’ve had cats.

In our twenties, in San Francisco, where we met and fell, we knew some dog lovers, but few Dog People. If someone we knew yearned for CHDK, no way were they uncool enough to admit it. The norm for our set was serial, pseudo-monogamy (some overlaps, periods of sexual confusion/ambiguity, affairs of the corazon). Our friends didn’t bring sweethearts home to meet the parents; they brought them to the Tuesday night dinner to see if they’d be welcome at Haiku 4 Beer, our Burning Man camp. (To his immense credit, one of our friends got a whole book out of this “never-married” phenomenon—the same year he got married, had a kid, and renovated his kitchen.)

Granted, if M and I didn’t acquire much of anything, it was more down to lack of funds than righteous principle, even if the latter made good cover. We made it nine years without a television (West Wing at its height and 9/11 finally forced the issue). We shared a car, a beloved Toyota FJ60, once, when we lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for 18 months. The other 11.5 years of our 13-year relationship we made do without, and rented cars for autonomy during extended visits to family. We’d dated for more than a decade before I could admit to myself—much less to M—that I wanted to “one day” be a daddy. When I did break it to her, on a Valentine’s Day at a café in Greenwich Village, I couldn’t have handled it much worse. In the midst of a conversation about our oft-postponed wedding, I managed, “If we aren’t going to have children, that would be a problem.”

Needless to say, a lot changed when Gus—Augusten, in full—arrived last February. For one thing, we needed to move down from our perch on a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. As space and a reduced rent were on offer in cheap livin’ Greenpoint, Brooklyn, we hit Craigslist, picked up a Polish phrasebook (G’Point is predominantly Polish emigres), and made our way north of McCarren Park.

Bad move.

If you try hard enough (and it?ll sure help if you?re working on a twopacka-day habit and consider carp at Christmas peaceonEarth), Greenpoint can be made to work. But where we ended up, on Morgan Ave., is 12 blocks from the G train, and the G is such a clean, safe, and reliable conveyance, it has spawned its own NGO/protest political campaign.

To reach the G (or home), we usually ended up hiking those dozen blocks because the B48 bus is so infrequent it rarely beats you to your stop. En route you inhale one or all of the following in place of oxygen: cigarette smoke, cologne, hairspray, and diesel fumes, the latter layered over an ever-present skunky whiff of the expressway known to those who live in its shadow as the BQE. Add the underemployed, hard-living neighbors to the right (all their children live with foster parents), the (since-evicted) rock-n-roller pot dealers a floor above, and, for example, the day EMT services removed a comatose drunk from the kiddies’ area where M had taken Gus for a swing, and you can well imagine the good times.

One of the few things I will miss about G’Point is the ceaseless freakshow of horrific fashion. In G’Point there are, generally speaking, women of two ages/styles: hussy (sub-25) and matron (26 and above). Both wear a ton of makeup. But whereas the matrons wear gaudy clothes to go with the caked-on makeup, the younger generation will combine vintage StarTrek levels of eye shadow and shiny lips with super-low-low-rise cut jeans that reveal midriff and hips in all kinds of weather. G’Point also has the highest per capita concentration of men in America who wear shorts and dark socks with sandals, and not just any sandals—gels and Adidas slides.

Most crucially (and this is not to make them feel guilty, really, even if they’re reading this in beautiful Mexico), the one couple with an infant we knew in Greenpoint—our original, cop-their-lifestyle inspiration to check it out—moved out of the country six months after we relocated. One of the hardest lessons for us as new parents has been that it really does help to live near other new parents. Much as we might disdain the competitive parenting of other parts of Brooklyn, or despair of the predictable conversations about breast feeding, junior’s BMs, rashes, allergies, etcetera, you need other parents for line-of-duty wisdom, and/or commiseration. We ought to have considered that one other couple does not a village make. In short, G’Point gained us all the isolation of the ‘burbs with none of the perks.

And so, during the worst of our troubles with the rock musicians upstairs, we began dreaming of escape. We did not yet have the means to buy a home, but we sure as heck had the desire to correct a bad move, or, to put it more closely to our feeling at the time—to get the fuck out.

In no time, M had developed a serious real estate habit online, and one morning her browser landed on an old colonial in Nyack. She forwarded it to me. I thought it was cute. We looked up Nyack on a map. She wrote the lister to ask about it. And the e-mail she got back would—even though I’d forgotten about it until I sat down to write this?change the course of our lives profoundly.

Up Next: "Don't tell Bill the Realtor, but I feel like such a fraud right now."

MARDIS GRAS HAS COME AND GONE, along with the St. Patrick’s Day parade (both Uptown and Downtown versions), the Italian parade, the Irish-Italian parade, the towering food altars of St. Joseph’s Day, and a scaled-down version of the Mardi Gras Indians? annual St. Joseph walkabout. So for a brief period between now and the big French Quarter Fest that immediately precedes Jazzfest, things are pretty much back to (ab)normal in New Orleans, or the New Normal, as Times-Picayune columnist and rising national media star Chris Rose calls it.

For me, the New Normal is life on The Island (as Chris calls it), which I like to call The Strip: the high and dry band of land right next to the Mississippi River, stretching from the far reaches of the Bywater and Marigny through the Quarter and all the way Uptown, which for the most part escaped major flooding and remains more or less intact.

Less is the operative word, even in The Strip: Home mail delivery happens one or twice a week if you’re lucky (and no magazines at all in the still-forbidden 701 zip zones of Orleans Parish). Garbage pick-up (maybe) once a week if you’re very lucky. No recycling until probably forever (and it still feels weird throwing bottles and cans and papers away with the boiled shrimp shells). Lots of traffic lights are still out, replaced by the ubiquitous four-way stops where distracted drivers glued to their insurance adjusters on mobiles bump and grind their way to meetings with their contractors. Stores and restaurants are open but with limited hours, scaled-back menus, and skeleton staffs. Translation: you can’t make a 10pm beer run to Save-A-Center, or get a pizza delivered from Ricky’s, or pay for breakfast with plastic at Slim’s.

But these are minor inconveniences. Our place, House of Boo (named for the cats that rule our roost) was only grazed by Katrina’s winds and not victimized by the Army Corps of Bunglers, whose man-made levee breaches flooded most of the town. We didn’t even have to toss out a moldy refrigerator to fester in the streets, thanks to the foresight of my husband, Donald — who may be the only person in New Orleans who emptied the fridge of food before evacuating. (Donald also put “Terrorist Target” high on his list of reasons to leave New York City for New Orleans, where we moved into our house on August 11, 2001. But that’s another story.)

When we came back home after two months of post-K exile in Asheville, North Carolina (which ain’t exactly the Superdome), most of the plants we’d dragged inside were dead. But our lucky “money” plant was still alive. And, more importantly, so was Tig — the outdoor cat we’d left behind, who reappeared miraculously right after I stopped searching for him online at PetFinder.com. (”Moron!” he meowed. “I’m out here, on the deck!”) Everything else was exactly the way we’d left it — not a speck of mold besmirched our artwork or Donald’s extensive collection of avant books and records or my stock of vintage clothes and costumes — which would soon help me spawn my most successful season ever as a Mardi Gras costumier.

So am I wracked with survivor guilt? You bet; though I swore off Calvinism years ago, there’s still an inner Methodist that says I don’t deserve my good fortune. But I also know that what Donald and I do — make music, make art, and keep the underground economy bubbling with flea markets and community sales — is a vital part of the recovery process. I also believe that those of us who don’t have to spend our energy gutting our houses have that much more to give to a city that’s given so much to us.

What’s astonishing is that people who are gutting their houses are right there in the trenches with us. The vast majority of my friends and fellow artists, even those who lost everything, are back in town and rebuilding their lives. There’s Brett, who made a harrowing escape from Mid-City at the height of the shoot-and-loot insanity and not only lived to tell the tale but is making it in into poetry. Wendy, a UNO communications prof who salvaged nothing from her Lakeview home and is staying sane by teaching a meta-class in post-K narratives and baking up a storm in her Uptown rental. Jimmy and Sue Ford, who gutted the first two floors of their flooded house to accommodate a home elevator for their two wheelchair-bound teenage sons, who suffer from muscular dystrophy — and didn’t let the heavy labor slow them down. Sue still rocked the Muses parade as the leader of the all-girl Mardi Gras band Pink Slip, Jimmy still served as Grand Marshal for the Lyons Marching Club, and the Fords still hosted a Mardi Gras bash for out-of-town friends in their new, vastly improved digs. That’s the thing about rebuilding; as long as you gotta do it, you might as well do it right.

“Everyone has a story” is true to the nth power in post-K New Orleans, and I’m going to try to bring you as many of those stories as possible as the weeks and the months go on, along with my personal take on the bigger picture. With so much at stake here, the big picture really does matter.

And I still don’t know who is getting my vote for mayor.

“Oh, No!” Mr. Bill leads off the parade in the float bearing his creator, Walter Williams, King of Krewe Du Vieux 2006 The T.O.K.I.N. subkrewe puts Mayor Ray Nagin on the (G-)spot Spoiled fridges were a favorite parade motif Blue tarp blue is the new black “Home is where the tarp is” One-man Blue Man Group

Five months after my husband and I applied for post-Katrina disaster assistance, we finally got our FEMA check — for $200,400.69! The official-looking U.S. Treasury note came in an official-looking FEMA envelope and was handed to me by a very unofficial-looking reveler wearing a giant dildo and a blue tarped roof on his head.

Welcome to Krewe Du Vieux, post-K edition.

The check was bogus, of course, marked “disaster assistance — you wish!” But there was nothing phony about the spirit of Krewe Du Vieux, the X-rated satirical walking parade that kicks off every Mardi Gras season by giving the high and mighty a raucous kick in the ass.

And in New Orleans after Katrina, there was no shortage of targets: Everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco to “heckuva job” Brownie got skewered in scurrilous send-ups.

Flanked by more brass bands than ever before — a terrific omen in itself! — Drips and Discharges and 16 other subkrewes brought visions like “(Nagin’s) Wet Dream” and “Blanco Blows Wind” gloriously to life on mule-drawn floats while outrageously costumed marchers dispensed a bounty of instant collectibles like the life preserver key chains emblazoned with this year’s theme: “C’est Levee!”