May 1, 2006 Festin'

It's kind of hard to get my mind back on the work week when I'm still stuck in the fun of the weekend. So I think I'll reminisce about it a little bit. I survived last week, quite a sucky week at work I might add, and headed to the big city for the big festival. We dined on some sushi and watched The L Word and were simultaneously scarred by the new theme song introduced in season two. The next morning, we prepared for the festival and watched the crowds mill by, and I was excited to see how many people were there. I guess I expected attendance to be down, but I was deluding myself. It was a veritable swarm. We set up our chairs off to the side of a big stage and chilled out peacefully for most of the day, enjoying crawfish strudel and hummus and pita bread and sno-cones and frozen cafe au lait. It started to get more and more crowded as the time of Dave Matthews, the biggest act of the day, neared, and we formed a strange little subculture dubbed "the neighborhood" with those sitting around us and tried (and failed) to keep our little area from being traversed by every other person making his or her way through the crowd. One of the most memorable aspects of the day was the dust. It hasn't been raining much here lately, and we were sitting in what is essentially a big field of dirt with some grass struggling to grow back after the hurricane. The wind was mighty as the storm that would hit later that night rolled in, and it blew the dust in a continuous mist over all of us. The dust caked every exposed inch of skin and blew into our eyes and ears. It got to the point where we all looked like we were covered in a faint coat of ashes. We tried to reapply our sunscreen, and it mixed with the dirt and turned to black sludge. It was gross but kind of bonded us all in a way. On Sunday, we sat on the front porch and played a game of Scrabble and then headed back to the fairgrounds. We had crawfish enchiladas and tabouli and more sno-cones and more frozen cafe au lait and ice cream bars. We bailed before the Boss because we had serious festival fatigue. I'm sure he was amazing, but we couldn't face the idea of another crushing late afternoon crowd. I'm thrilled that the festival has had such an amazing turnout, don't get me wrong, but I can only take crowds like that in small doses. Overall, I had a beautiful weekend with my beautiful man in a beautiful city that is clawing its way back to life as I blatantly ignored the fact that hurricane season starts in one month. ::: About this time in ... 2005 4/30: Poring over papers of my grandmother's written on brittle, yellowing paper about Dryden and Milton and Chaucer. 2004 4/30: I recovered slowly but surely from my dream that Donald Rumsfeld was my dentist. 4/25: It's now a Sunday morning of clouds and a respite between the rains of yesterday and today and Eva Cassidy and Diana Krall and Jonatha Brooke and Joni Mitchell and Nanci Griffith and a little Hedwigand Il Postino thrown in on the side. 2003 4/30: I love my cousin because he sends me emails that say things like, "Hope you had the day off and did something fun, like squish your toes in the mud or bathe in a spring ... I wonder if you think of Rilke these days." get notified. journal archives © Copyright 2006 elb