TOOLBAG TUESDAY

In times of crisis, like a hurricane, a tropical storm, or, I don’t know…a 1,000 year FLOOD, it’s nice to have a boyfriend around to protect you and your house; put up boards on the windows and scare away things like spiders.

This is especially true if you're a lady homeowner and don’t have the safety net of calling a landlord to do anything.

As such, if you live in a coastal area, I think this should be a standard dating question to anyone you date for more than three months: If there was a big storm coming, would you watch a Harry Potter marathon...uhh stay with me?

For Leon, that answer was no.

Leon apparently liked to play house with my friend Brittany when it was fun things like dinners and sleepovers, but not when things got scary and real…like A 1,000 YEAR FLOOD.

Brittany bought her first house less than a year ago, and the disaster that was Hurriance Joaquin's butt-debris hitting South Carolina shores earlier this month was the first storm she’d experienced as a homeowner.

No one wants to be alone for that!!

This is what boyfriends are for!!!

As county-issued announcements came that schools and offices would be closed, Brittany panicked and called Leon.

“Can you believe this?? I'm so nervous—the yard gets really flooded when it rains for one afternoon!”

She expected Leon, the guy she had been dating for FIVE months, who spent practically every night at her house, to batten down the hatches with her. 

He spent practically every night there. Eating her food and using her toilet paper (lol ew) and all that. It was also a weekend, and, like most big storms that hit coastal areas, was determined just that Tuesday.

But Leon already had other plans.

Uhhhh

“Yea, I’m going to go to Rock Hill (a few hours inland) with some friends and dodge the storm,” he said.

UM.

What?

“What?” Brittany asked. “What about me? I can’t leave my house!”

“Just text me,” he wrote.

Uhhhh

What??

Text you??!?!

WHO LEAVES THEIR GIRLFRIEND HANGING LIKE THAT??!??

Seriously?? 

JERK.

Brittany hung up and started moving everything out of her carport…alone.

And then the storm came. Relentless rain pounded down for days and days and days and the backyard turned into a complete lake. A rising one.  

Brittany texted Leon a picture of the lake-yard, hoping he’d be sympathetic.  

“It’s coming up” she texted.

Then she stared at her phone for the next HOUR. And then hours. And hours.

Nothing. No response.

UGH

Was he getting flooded, too? Brittany checked the radar for Rock Hill.

No real rain.

And no text back.

NO TEXT BACK!!!!!!

Hours and hours went by.

“What are you doing?” she texted him at midnight.

He wrote back.

“Oh just having some beers with friends,” he wrote.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

C-O-O-L

Brittany ignored him and stared as the water crept up to the patio line.

Two more days passed with the incessant rain and flooding cooping up everyone indoors.

…Which was a great time for Brittany to reflect on things.

Fast forward several days later, when the rain finally subsided and Brittany got WiFi back and looked at Leon’s Instagram account.

Apparently, he didn’t respond to her stressed out flooded out neighborhood photo text, but he COPIED HER PICTURE and POSTED it to HIS account to show the social media world the flooding in South Carolina.

LOL!!!!!!!! LOL!!!!!!!! LOL!!!!!!!

Ya'll

Really

HE RE-POSTED HER PICTURE (hahahahahahaha) yet couldn’t be bothered to respond to said picture with so much as a, ‘Oh my God are you OK?’ response.

LOL 

LOL\

HE WASN'T EVEN THERE!!

LOSER!!!

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(p.s. Another guy abusing social media!?!?!)

The ironic part was all of the “Are you OK??” posts people kept commenting on the photo.

That was supposed to be his line.

...To the photographer of the photo!!!

Yes, it took a 1,000 year flood to bring out Leon’s true colors, and a 1/100^th of a millisecond for Brittany to realize that Leon was no man at all.

So now let's update.

 Here’s the standard dating question to anyone you date for more than three months: 

If a storm was coming, would you leave me all alone and then steal my flooding picture and post it to Instagram as yours without asking if I'm alive?!??

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You know what? On second thought, that doesn’t sound like anyone a lady homeowner should count on to scare away spiders.

-Jenny

Five lessons Hurricane Katrina taught me

1. Buy real estate following a disaster. Houses in New Orleans are now being sold for HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA amounts of money, houses that you wouldn’t even walk by ten years ago. Empty lots have STARTING bids at $80,000 at auction. Think about that during the next major natural disaster in your town!

2. You don’t need home insurance. Katrina showed us that it doesn’t matter if you put money every year into home insurance, flood insurance, disaster insurance, etc. everyone got paid out (or bought out) from the government. And what didn’t get paid out, religious groups came down to fix it for free. ‘MERICA!!!!!!

3. Keep an ax in your attic. Before Katrina, I certainly didn’t consider the possibility that anyone would have to exit their house from the roof. And a roof does not have a human-sized door. Keep an ax in the attic so you can hack your way out in an emergency, or, you know, if a serial killer was lurking below.

4. Kids need therapy. When I was a newspaper reporter in New Orleans after the BP oil spill in 2010, I wrote an article about how BP was paying for therapy for all the children on the Gulf Coast who were traumatized by the spill. An excellent PR move and wholly important. And I’m sure there were some therapy programs for kids post-Katrina, but nothing that springs to mind. And now the “kids of Katrina,”—not the ones who were born ten years ago, but those who were impressionable 10-year-olds then who are 20 years old now—just may be EFFED up. I have no way to prove a correlation, but New Orleans has a major problem right now with teenagers and 20-something young people shooting, stabbing, terrorizing the French Quarter and beating people senseless for no apparent reason. I can’t help but wonder if these are children of the storm.

5. It forced you to care about your ex.  No matter how much you hated them in the end, after Katrina, you got in touch with your ex, asked them where they were, if they were OK and even asked them about their mamma. 

...Even if they were a toolbag.

-Jenny

Banging it out in Austin, TX

Why yes, I AM going to Texas this weekend #nothingsuspicious #carryon #southwest

A photo posted by Genevieve (@jennyjenny504) on Jan 22, 2015 at 12:45pm PST

Yes, banging it out is the perfect description of the weekend I spent Austin, Texas for a bachelorette party last month, even though no one actually got banged (in the biblical sense) in our shared suite at the famed Austin Motel.

We certainly banged out our tolerance for Mexican food (there really should be a competition for most tacos eaten in consecutive meals), we banged out our livers (of course) and banged out Austin’s Sixth Street with our various tests to see how many drink shakers we could take home as “souvenirs.”

Um. 

Moving on.

Four bridesmaids plus Angela, the bride-to-be, traveled to Austin from various places: South Carolina (me), Colorado (Amy) and New Orleans (Angela, Kristen and Kasie) because Austin is where Angela moved following Hurricane Katrina and she wanted to say HAAAAAAY (or, I guess, howdy) one more time before she leaves singlehood.

And she wanted all of us to see how wonderfully weird Austin was.

Case in point: I caught up with Angela for the first time that weekend in a train car...which was the women’s room at a country bar.

I had no idea that the entire "building” was actually a train car until I walked through the door to the women’s bathroom, turned around and saw that the wall was the side of an actual train.

A train, train.

Like the ones hobos jump on.

Once I realized this, of course I had to climb the nearby pole to the nook where the conductor would normally sit and yell various versions of CHOO-CHOO!!! even though I was nowhere near drunk.

For about 20 minutes, Angela and I sat the in the red crushed velvet conductor seat area, just two of us, hilariously talking about life, her wedding, South Carolina and New Orleans.

And even though I can’t remember the last time I even saw Angela, we picked up right where we left off. 

It was just like high school in New Orleans, laugh-snorting right there in the conductor’s box.

Choo Choo!

After we climbed down the pole and went back into the bar, I was immediately swept up by a man in his 70s named Gene who taught me how to do the “two-step” to the most talented band I’ve ever heard play inside a train car.

The other bridesmaids all clapped and cheered as Gene swept me across the floor, despite our two-foot height difference.

Over the next three days, I learned some fantastic things about Austin. 

First: You can’t get a bad meal there if you tried. 

Not that I tried to get a bad meal, but everything I ate—even a stop at a random hut to get out of the rain one afternoon—I had a tastier taco than most restaurants in South Carolina.

I even remembered how to properly say FRIJOLES!! 

I can’t stress enough how every meal was delicious.

Really. I mean, look at this:

Lobster grits #austin #foodporn #nofilter

A photo posted by Genevieve (@jennyjenny504) on Jan 25, 2015 at 9:12am PST

(Insert Homer Simpson drooling face.)

Announcement: I would like to give the honor of the Best Queso I’ve Ever Eaten (and I'm cuckoo for queso, y'all) to Polvos, this amazing restaurant in Austin that everyone knows about because there was an hour-long wait.

(Worth it.)

For that Friday evening, after a day of shopping and eating tacos at HUTS, we all changed into little black dresses and pearl necklaces (hehehe) and I learned another fantastic thing about Austin: Everyone I met was super cool, inside and out.

This includes the strangers I met who agreed to escort me across a dicey major intersection back to the motel, the manager of the motel who told them to go away (hahahahhahahahaaha since when did they hire my dad at the front desk?!?)

And of course, even more fantastic, all of Angela’s Austin’s friends.

I had such a great time meeting them all, who came out to eat The Best Queso In The World, who danced with us at a tasteful gay club, and one friend in particular, Christina, who drove us around town in her mom mini van (“Don’t steal those stuffed toys, my kids will be upset.”)

I spent quality time with everyone, laughing through the hangovers, feeding headaches with more tacos, trying out as many different preparations of tequila as possible.

REALLY. WE BANGED IT OUT.

We also banged out a proper vacation, which I’ve come to realize gets hard to do when people have things like jobs and lives and schedules (and kids who own stuffed animals.)

But we still all put forth the time and energy to plan a trip across the country, and the New Orleans bridesmaids planned a fantastic itinerary for when we got there (“dance the two-step...check.”)

I'd say the “bachelorette scavenger hunt” was even a success, if only for the inside joke of Angela awkwardly asking the Uber driver where he got 'dem shoes”

Silence.

Bwahahahahahaha

Amidst the tequila sunrises, there was a moment at Saturday brunch, a moment where we all went around the table and said how we met Angela and how happy we were that she was marrying the perfect person in the world for her (that was my speech anyway).  

Angela, my best friend since 1999!! So much love.

Then she went back around saying how much we each meant to her, and maybe it was the tequila but I thought about how of all the millions of people in the world, of all the millions of places in the world, the eight of us, from far and wide, were together at this exact moment for this momentous occasion, to celebrate our dear friend.

And I felt lucky to be in that number. 

...And then I don’t remember much more about Saturday. 

WHAT?!?!? I had to keep Austin weird.

(Sunday Jenny was not amused.)

Haha

So now, I have a big, fresh bag of memories from my Austin vacation and a bunch of new friends. 

And I can’t wait to be by Angela’s side when she gets married in one week.

!!!

It will be an awesome new chapter in our wonderful, wonderfully weird life.

:)

Love ya girl.

-Jenny

P.S. I know where you get dem shoes...

Ahahahahhahaa

How to prepare for a hurricane, according to my mom

My mom called me yesterday in nothing short of a tizzy.

“THERE ARE ALREADY LINES AT THE GAS STATION!” she yelled. “FILL UP YOUR CAR RIGHT NOW!!!!”

I paused.

“It’s only a tropical storm,” I said. 

“It’s not only a tropical storm!” she said sternly. “Bobby Jindal is going to declare a STATE OF EMERGENCY later today at a press conference!”

Then she told me to come over immediately and help board up the windows. 

I was still in my pajamas.

She continued with the “hurricane plan,” which I was told I was a part of, so this information would apply to me too.

“…And if it comes in at a Cat 3, we’re leaving,” she said.

A Cat 3?

(My mother was now abbreviating things.)

I told her that my car was filled up halfway, and I thought she people were overreacting about it. 

After a minute, even she calmed down. 

“Well, the ‘state of emergency’ is so they can open up federal funding…” she muttered.

I’ve never had to evacuate for a hurricane. 

I wasn’t living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and growing up we always stayed, waiting out each storm, frustrated that we had no power. (There are only so many rounds of poker you can play with your family using fake money.)

My parents live in a naturally high part of the city, so flooding isn’t an issue. But their power goes out FIRST, I remember that distinctly. (I also remember my mom bribing electrical workers with cans of Coca-Cola to get us back on the grid.)

It’s always a surprise how limited you are in food options when the power goes out. 

You can’t use the microwave and you can only open the refrigerator for two seconds at a time, so you need to know exactly what you need and where it is located before you open the door. 

My current apartment is no longer a basement, but the top floor, and the front door sits 25 feet up from the street. (If that floods, everyone else is dead.)

I haven’t waited out any major storms there yet, but it has rained a whole bunch lately and the power has never gone out. 

The last time everyone freaked out about a storm, I had to cancel a flight to Washington, D.C. and it turned out to be nothing. 

This storm isn’t even a hurricane yet. The only preparation I thought I needed to do was to make sure my roommate, who is leaving on vacation, was bringing her cat 3 to her parents’ house.

My plan was to buy a box of wine and a new book.

But, now I have to step it up. 

My mother has already texted me before 9 a.m. to ask me if I am working today – yes – and she reminded me that I am coming over after work to board up all their windows.

“And you should put your car in an elevated garage!!” she said. 

“AND YOU NEED TO CLEAN OUT YOUR REFRIGERATOR BECAUSE ALL THE FOOD IS GOING TO SPOIL!!! ARE YOU GOING TO BOARD UP YOUR WINDOWS???”

“No, mom, that’s the landlord’s job,” I said.

I told her that I would stay at their house if it got bad (even though my dad has gone on record to say that having multiple people around during a storm is “just more mouths to feed”). 

I said I would evacuate with them to Baton Rouge if the storm comes in as a “Cat 3,” although I have no idea what I would bring with me, since my massage chair won’t fit in their van.

Of course, no one wants to be the one to say that a storm isn’t a big deal, and then have it be a big deal.

And the cone model absolutely puts Isaac hitting New Orleans directly. But they say it’s coming in as a Cat 1, and not super formed and they don’t know for certain if it’s going to form too terribly in its short time over the Gulf. 

I know people who are already evacuating. 

Some say they don’t want to live without electricity; another person at my office said he didn’t want to be in the city, “if shit gets crazy and people start looting like they did last time.”

Schools are closed today through Wednesday, which I always enjoyed as a kid, but as an adult, I think it adds an unnecessary panic to the city. 

The grocery store was a mob yesterday. No one was in the 10 items or less line.

Speaking of panic, I’ll be in that number later today, as I stand on a ladder to fit boards over windows and make other preparations to my parents’ house that would rival the apocalypse. 

For a storm that’s going to hit TOMORROW at midnight.

I really hope this city doesn't run out of boxed wine. 

-Jenny

Why people shouldn’t compare the Saints’ penalty to Hurricane Katrina

I just Googled “bad comparisons” to come up with a more thoughtful way to describe the idiots who are comparing the Saints’ penalty to Hurricane Katrina.

All I could find was the word “ill.”

An “ill-conceived” comparison? An “ill-logical” comparison?

UH.... “YOU PEOPLE ARE MAKING ME ILL???”

(For those of you who don’t know, Saints players and coaches have admitted to participating in a “bounty” system, where they were essentially paid out of a pool of money if they injured players from other teams and/or took them out of the game.)

It’s all the rage on Facebook.

As punishment, head coach Sean Payton has been suspended without pay for a year, the team lost draft picks and we owe the NFL half a million dollars.

Man, it sucks getting bitchslapped.

But to quote local TV news anchor Sally Ann Roberts as a call for unity: “After Katrina when we were down on our knees, we pulled together as a community...as a team.”

B***, Please.

What a stupid analogy.

After Katrina, New Orleanians were UP to their knees in water, asking why this happened, what stroke of fate led this storm to annihilate the city that did nothing to deserve it, other than our coordinates on a map.

New Orleans didn’t do anything wrong. We had a stroke of bad fortune paired with a perfect storm.

The Saints on the other hand....OK nobody throw things at me...DID do something wrong.

Am I the only person on Facebook who will admit to this? (P.S. this does not make me any less of a fan.)

I mean, when someone in my kickball league hits someone in a moment of rage, they get suspended for a game or more.

When I was caught cheating on a Spanish test in high school, I got an F.

Everyone gets a copy of the rules.

So, what exactly are we New Orleanians supposed to “pull together as a team” in post-Katrina fashion to rebuild here?

Our team’s roster????

STORM THE NFL OFFICES??

BOYCOTT ALL FUTURE GAMES??

I mean it sucks, but this isn’t a tragedy. And I don’t think we should be told to feel as if the NFL robbed us of something as meaningful as what Katrina took away. Despite suspending the coach, we still have a team. We still have a season.

The Saints are getting punished for doing something wrong. Something they knew was wrong.

Instead of conjuring up powerful, raw feelings of the injustice and helplessness we felt after Katrina, a better message, SALLY ANN ROBERTS (and others), would be to just tell people to still be fans EVEN THOUGH THEY EFFED UP, just like my mom is still a fan of me even though I was caught cheating (lo siento).

I mean, I'm still a fan of my friend even though she got a DUI recently.

That was “ill”-legal, too.

-Jenny