Live from New Orleans, it’s guestblogger Maitri! First off, big shoves and quiches to the First Draft team for keeping my fair city alive in your minds and then inviting me to put up 2.5 cents at their house. From the New Orleans activists and blogging community: Thank you! We love you! Come back any time and bring more friends. As Scout has documented, we need a lot more help given how slow recovery is in the city that care and, now, the nation almost forgot.
A little about me: Shortly following the end of the Arab oil embargo, I was born in Kuwait to two very bright and well-educated Hindu Indian scientists who tried to instill in me a respect for learning and discipline. While aping Nadia Comenici in the 1976 Olympics, I dismounted (badly) from the dining table, was rushed to the hospital and promptly forgot that whole discipline thing. A wild sponge of a child, I learned calculus, six languages and fifty different ways to get spanked for being my school’s #1 public enemy. My father was taken hostage on August 2nd, 1990 by invading Iraqis and escaped a month later from what he later described as the most horribly run prison camp. Of the past seventeen years, I’ve spent twelve in the great American midwest – Champaign-Urbana, IL, Akron, OH and Madison, WI (go Badgers!) – and the last four or so in New Orleans. While not blogging, I pretend to be a geophysicist, code geek and law-abiding (teehee!) citizen.
I’m less of a Phoebe to the vacationing Holden and more of a midwestern Lucy van Pelt turned Blanche DuBois. But that’s where the dissimilarities end. First Draft and I overlap in obsessions with the Green Bay Packers, cute furry weasel-like critters and spewing mockery in the general direction of our esteemed ex-cokehead of a president. In other words, there will be a gaggle debriefing or two, just don’t expect it to be Caulfield Caliber.
In case the peeps expanding in your stomach don’t inform you, it is Easter weekend, when Jesus arises from the dead, until he kicks the bucket again next year because he “just can’t deal with the farce it’s become.” So, please get down on your knees and join me in a prayer:
Thank you, Lord, that, as of this writing, there are 653 days, 7 hours, 11 minutes and 46.3 seconds to the end of an error. Pardon this nation its trespasses and lead it to literacy, justice, less sickmaking and prosperity for all. Amen.
It’s great to be here. More in my next.