Since I work form home, I try to venture outside of the house at least once a day.  This ensures that I get a daily dose of semi-human interaction (like listening to that man at the coffee shop scream into his phone “I did not call you dumb! I just said that Carol was smarter than you.”) and fresh air.  Typically I walk, but since I’m new to New Orleans I’ve been trying to drive every day and take a new way home in order to get my bearings. I get lost A LOT.  Yesterday, I did just that and ended up on Simon Bolivar Street in the middle of the gheeetoto.  I had no idea where I was but Simon Bolivar was the liberator of Venezuela so two points for me! I immediately called my mom and told her about my find and she was like: it’s a sign, get the hell out of there and stop trying to give me a heart attack by getting lost all the time.  Probably should not have told her how I ended up in an abandoned parking lot the night before after I insisted on picking up the take-out food on my own (I can do it.  I won’t get lost I swear) and missed the turnpike back onto that thing they call a highway here.  Made even worse by the fact that when I did manage to find the turnpike again, I wasn’t sure I had gotten on it in the right direction and just closed my eyes and prayed to the one-way gods that when I finally did see a car it wouldn’t be headed straight for me ( I like to refer to this as my female driver’s instinct).  I can’t even tell you how many illegal driving moves I’ve made in the past month, but luckily neither can anyone else.

This weekend we went to the horse races and this was another new experience for me.  That I should never be allowed to do again.  In between races, we stopped to admire some of the horses and one of them had to pee so he let out his retractable hose and had at it.  As a great admirer of all things disgusting, smelly, and sexual in nature, I could not stop staring.  Those things are HUGE.  If we could only get them all to pee in a line together before a race started, I’d have no problem picking the winner.

I loved the race track.  Not to get all cheesy, but it’s one of those places where people of all kinds  are gathered together for the same purpose – the possibility of winning or the thrill of winning or to satiate their gambling addiction– kind of like church, but better because there’s popcorn and beer and you know where your money is going.