Rats. I just realized how cool it would have been to rack up an update in Central time, and I've missed my chance. But time shouldn't matter too much anyway, since I'm not planning to upload this immediately after I'm done writing. See, Roger claimed on his site that he'd make a valiant attempt at recounting this past weekend, but wouldn't need to do that if I beat him to it. So, I will in fact try to beat him to writing the update, but just not upload and thus let him know in a sleazy, manipulative attempt to score myself some more reading material. Well, okay. I could always disguise this under the higher motive of wanting to hear about things from a different point of view—but I think I'm too lazy for that.

I just cut up a credit card into a dozen jagged pieces, which were then dropped into the garbage can. Technically, I could have held onto it for a few more hours, but it's slated to expire tomorrow. No, it's not a big deal, and yes, there is a replacement, but the fact that I've had a credit card and all of its myriad responsibilities long enough for a card to expire just reminds me that I'm not allowed to be a child anymore. This transition period interests me enough that I tried to flip through some articles on defining the end of adolescence in a set of adolescent psychology tomes. After all, I think I'm in it, and everyone's required to have a healthy dash of narcissism. Right?

Oh, these books were in a used bookstore in New Orleans. Yup, I finally made it to Louisiana via a relatively uneventful flight Friday morning, and Roger and I headed straight into New Orleans to wander around the French Quarter. Some quirky stores and architectural features were entertaining for a while, but I'm not a huge fan of random city wandering. Before we'd fallen too deeply into that pit, however, we stumbled upon a sign for Beckham's Books. Being the good geeks that we were, we stumbled into the relief of air conditioning, and a good but generic selection of used books on the first floor. Having dutifully browsed its shelves, we headed up to the third floor.

It proved to be quite a find, with decades and decades' worth of National Geographic and The New Yorker. They, especially, the former, are magazines that seem to avoid datedness; had I the money and the storage space, I'd try to accumulate a complete collection of 'em. It also held a lot of cool records, sheet music, and even old player piano scrolls. My favorite find, I think, was a typography book with hundreds and hundreds of fonts. I didn't buy it, though, since I didn't want to lug the ten-pound behemoth back to school. Also, the book would have only served to make me jealous since I didn't own all of the listed fonts. The best part of the floor, I think, was its exposed rafters and uneven wood floors— could even see scorch marks on the ceiling from a previous fire! Being housed in a really old building, however inefficient, lends anything an intriguing air.

We backtracked to the second floor, which I'd previously dismissed as being full of boring academic tomes. When Roger tried to find himself a German-English dictionary, though, our true geekiness came out. The first candidate was a Cassell's German-English / English-German Dictionary, Concise Edition whose font immediately caught Roger's attention. It bore a copyright date in the '50s, and all of the German words were printed in the dark and barely legible Old Script. That definitely upped the coolness factor for me, but I wasn't going to be the one looking up words in it. So, we looked for alternatives and found a '60's and a 1906. The former, though printed only about a decade later, was a modern font and immensely more practical—but 1906! It would soon be a centarian, a fate which seemed to override its lessened practicality. Dilemma, dilemma.

While browsing for those, however, we found a thick tome that turned out to be really, really odd: a German-to-English/ French/ Spanish/ Latin/ Italian dictionary. Meeting someone who'd be able to use that dictionary to its fullest extent—meaning they'd have to be sexilingual (I think that's the term. Google only responded up through "pentalingual".)—would blow my mind. It immediately reminded me of this Euro packet we'd gotten about the well-travelled, multilingual, European (rather than national)-citizen intellectuals of the Enlightenment. I guess that compelled me to think that it was really, really, 18th-century old, but the cover font seemed at least post-Art Deco. A check in the first few pages revealed no copyright date, though, which meant that it had been printed before modern copyright law was standardized. We tried looking up dated words like "television," "soviet", "automobile," "telephone", and "airplane", which served more to remind me of how embarassingly much history I've forgotten than to pinpoint a precise date. When we brought it downstairs, the proprietor guessed that it had been reprinted later without further editing, which would explain the lack of more modern words but the presence of a fairly '30's cover font.

Satiated with our own dorkiness after at least two hours, but feeling pretty hungry in the stomach, we had lunch and went to the Aquarium. There, I made lots of smooth and insightful comments which revealed how truly discerning my vision is. Right. Well, not exactly. Well, not at all. We also saw an IMAX film on caves of all sorts, from ice crevasses to underwater caves. Funny: it's almost the exact opposite of climbing, in that climbers do the hard part first while cavers rappel down and then have to climb back up when they're all done.

We drove back to Mississippi, making a pit stop along the highway to put ourselves in mortal danger in a situation more commonly known as a carnival. Yes, the weird angles of forces on the one ride we took kept pushing my head toward the metal bar that held us in, so much so that I had to try really hard to keep my forehead from smashing into the so-called safety bar. Still, I like mortal danger =).

Writing this was sort of hard. I guess it's because I'm one person attempting to detail two-person events, a proportion that's harder than my own traipsings or even, ironically, a large group. The reason for the latter is that you're not expected—or, at least, I don't expect myself—to have interacted with everyone else and share nor understand their thoughts. The past weekend is based on two people's interaction, and I've got only fifty percent of the view. Okay, that was a grossly inadequate explanation, but I don't know how better to put it. If I did, I'd have replaced the previous few sentences with something much better already.

Well, maybe I did figure out what's wrong. It's that I'm trying to catalogue every nuance of the past 48 hours, and I shouldn't. After all, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle could be bent to say this: to some degree, you can either live your life or chronicle it. I think I chose to live the past weekend, and from now on I'm not going to duly plod through every event.

Later that night, we made dinner. Yes, I did ensnare myself in that silly bet with my parents this summer during which I had to cook dinner every day for a week, but I'd forgotten how much of a Process—capital P—a meal actually is. It's fun, but fraught with perhaps just as much danger as sketchy carnival rides. For example, I had a disasterous encounter with poaching eggs. I'll not get into the details, but just say that I let it shatter into a billion smithereens. I did dutifully down my mess, though. Hey, like I might have mentioned before, low food standards. Wait! By that, I don't mean that dinner was bad. I just meant that the egg I cooked was more reminiscent of egg drop soup than of poached egg, thereby making it officially tragic.

We pulled ourselves from the brink of sleep to head to the beach that night. The Gulf of Mexico was pretty surreal: so much water without waves, so much humidity that it kept the sand damp even above the highest of high tides and left your vision always slightly out of focus. We scraped out a fire pit and lit the fake log we'd gotten earlier with doubts about the availability of suitable firewood. I love fires. I love oceans. But I'd never before seen 'em both together, and the soft crackling a few feet from my head allowed me to bury myself deep in my sleeping bad and drift gradually to sleep. Except my drifting wasn't all that gentle, because every once in a while, I'd abuptly wake up but think I was still in my dream, blurt out something completely off the wall to Roger, and then wake up soon enough to realize how little sense I was making. I must have done this at least five times. So, while I was busy being possessed by aliens, Roger was purportedly being eaten alive by bugs. I say "purportedly" because I didn't sense any for a long time. Eventually, though, I started being really jittery as well. Whether that was from actual pests sucking me dry, or simply contagious paranoia, I still can't be sure, but

The morning was spent in the wacky pursuit of trying to establish a direct connection between his desktop and my laptop, which I'd brought home for break. The mission was eventually accomplished, but not before we went exploring down a bike path at the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge. The beginning of the path was nice, though nothing too unusual: three-foot-wide pavement, straight and flat, cutting through swamp and brush and moss and ducks. About two miles down, though, hugely tall reeds began to line the path, and the path took an abrupt 90-degree turn and about a 10-foot climb to a ridge. It wasn't until the top of the little ridge that we could see what was on the other side.

Water, rocks, reeds, tracks, grass, hill, and path lay in perfectly parallel swaths as far as I could see. The water wasn't the spectacular crashing waves of the Pacific; the rocks weren't intimidatingly large; the grass was a deep green, but not evenly so. I guess the awesome part was that these things just went on seemingly forever to my left and right, and were comforting in their infinity.

In retrospect, the fact that there was only one railroad track confuses me. I dunno. Maybe rail traffic only runs one way in the Deep South, or something. Home. Movie. Sleep. Plane. Refer to Heisenberg.