for a long time, i've said that i want to see a hurricane someday. this probably sounds odd coming from someone who has lived thru (quite literally thru) a tornado and thereafter went into a full-fledged panic every time a peculiar thunderstorm struck, who feels safer in the big bad city than in my comparitively sleepy hometown for the simple fact that tornadoes JUST DON'T COME HERE, but it might also be because of that. to me, a hurricane seems like a weather phenomenon i can appreciate because i can handle it.
i am, of course, irrationally and completely terrified of water that comes above my waist, but i've always figured that water couldn't get any higher than that anyway.
really, i ought to put two and two together and remember that my mother told me about hurricane andrew (?) when she was a kid, which flooded *her* hometown when it actually did the unthinkable and smacked into ontario. i guess it would be a good time to ask her to tell me the story again, but i distinctly remember something about people being on their roofs. that said, i somehow don't think it was quite as bad as what's going on in the south right now.
my dad, incidentally, arrived in canada within a day or two of said hurricane, which i never knew until my grandmother's funeral, when my uncle, giving the eulogy, mentioned how they left england and arrived in a very wet, very damaged new country. my grandmother, apparantly, was royally unimpressed and said they should all go straight back, but they made their way.
so, the point of all of this is that, while i still harbour this bizarre desire to see a hurricane (safely, with all my animals and family and possessions secure and dry at home), i probably do not want to see one of this calibre.
i know (thru the internet) only one person in the disaster area, and have thought about her often every day since the hurricane struck, but there's nothing to do until someone hears from her (not likely to be anytime soon since she is, as i understand it, not very far from new orleans and is probably looking at several weeks without power).
i keep thinking that i wanted so much to see new orleans one day, the french quarter and the old houses and all the areas that are written about so often, and it is essentially gone now. i will never see the french quarter because it's gone. bourbon street will still be there when i get there, but it won't have any of the buildings on it that it did a week ago. all the old cemetaries are ruined (the bodies are probably floating down the street, in all likelihood). all the typical, gothy, anne-rice-esque things i had been dreaming of seeing since i was but a wee adolescent scrap of a starry-eyed, would-be-world-travelling goth girl are washed away. i know that means nothing to the people who actually *lived* there, but it seems so evil that a city with so much historical value had to be destroyed.
you have to wonder, tho', if you've got a city below sea level that's at least close to the general hurricane path, why it wasn't protected better. why bother protecting it against a category three storm when there's such a thing as a category five storm? they've only had a couple of hundred years to build up the levees and floodwalls (whatever the difference is). i'm sure there's no way the city would have survived unscathed, but at least it might not have ended up under twelve feet of water.
i heard some mayor or governor on tv begging hotels to "lower their rates" and "not partake in price gouging" of the people who are staying there because they've been evacuated and/or are now homeless. all i could think of was how about letting people come in and stay there free, assholes? they're not losing any money, for christ's sake, who the hell's coming to vacation in louisiana or mississippi right now? what else have they got to do with their space? let people stay somewhere dry and try to feed them, even if you don't have power and running water. if hotels are actually *charging* these people to stay there right now, they ought to be taken out and smacked around.
on a brutally selfish note, i came out of work on monday night at about one a.m. to see that gas had gone up twenty cents in seven hours. i nearly crashed into the pump in shock. *thank god* i am not commuting anymore. as i said to kate when i was up visiting the gym last week, as much as i'm going to miss it, i'm so glad i decided not to come back. it's a bitter sort of thing, tho', because for the first time in ten years september doesn't mean going back to the gym and preparing for a new year. i'll be coaching here, of course, and charlotte is great and i'm reasonably happy there, but it's not my home, it's not my gym, the comp girls aren't the ones i've known since they were little (some of them, like janie's daughter, since they were quite literally babies), i haven't watched them grow from toddlers and little girls to ten and eleven year olds and teenagers. so many of the provincial girls now are girls i taught their first somersaults and their first pullovers to when they were three years old. i told kate the gym was more my home than the city or my parents' house, that i would miss it more than i ever missed my old room or my parents' place. she told me i ought to save myself the trouble and move back, which of course is not happening, but they all keep trying regardless.
but i do have a job and a group to attend to, and with all the fourteen and eighteen hour days i've worked this summer, i haven't done anything except for a couple of pages of warm-up complexes scribbled during lunch breaks. with about ten days to plan a year's worth of training, i have work to do.
ETA: it was, of course, not hurricane andrew, and i don't know where i got that from but it just kept sticking. it was in fact hurricane hazel that ripped up ontario in 1954 when my dad came from england.