If you are in New York, I hope to see you there. Now, I gotta go catch a bus to my plane…

Nor are we in Madison. I thank all of you family members and friends who have not yet sent me any hate mail for not updating the site since we moved. I’m catching up, though slowly.

So now we are in sunny North Carolina! It’s been about three weeks, and boy have those weeks been action-packed! It started with the actual move: we spent a couple nights on the floor with our camping pads before our truck arrived with all our things. Many thanks to my two brothers who suffered on the floor with us for a couple nights– it got so we were going into town or jumping in the pool just so we wouldn’t have to be on the floor anymore. It wasn’t really all that bad in retrospect, considering recent news events.

Once we had our stuff, we only had a short time to start unpacking before I needed to get on campus and start orienting myself to the life of a graduate student. There are ten incoming MFAs this year, and four second-year grad students in the program. It is a great bunch of people with pretty diverse backgrounds. In fact, the UNC and Duke campuses are the most racially and ethnically diverse campuses I have been on since high school. Anyway, I am looking forward to soaking up all the different perspectives.

This semester is looking great, so far. I have three credits of seminar for all the studio art majors, 10 credits of just plain studio time (make stuff!), and my last three credits come from an animation course over on Duke’s campus. I’m having fun already, and once I actually start producing work (rather than just generating ideas, like I have been so far), the fun just won’t stop. I’m positively giddy!

Okay, and I am really overwhelmed. It’s hard to be a student again. I’ve been asking for more time for a long time, and now I finally have it. It’s daunting– I’m scared to mess it up! But I suppose the only way to mess it up is to not do anything. So I am plugging along.

I have a commission to work on, my animation class is keeping me drawing a lot, and my plans for “play time” in the studio are finally gelling into executable ideas. This is going to be a good time.

This morning on NPR, they ran a story about how New Orleans is sinking, and it has been for over a century. This is really more Cailin’s field of expertise (fluvial geomorphology) but I’ll try to give that layman’s summary:

Basically New Orleans is built on sediment. LOTS of sediment. And the deeper layers of the sediment are compacting and eroding as groundwater flows through it over time. They said that over the past century, New Orleans has sunken about two feet, but that the rate of the erosion has been accellerating, and the city may sink as much as a yard or a meter over the next century. Obviously that’s not good, since much of the city is already below sea level.

The natural course of things, had people not interfered and dammed and leveed the river, is that the Mighty Miss would overflow its banks, bringing with it a huge slug of sediment to replenish the deeper layers that are constantly eroding. The sand and soil would get layed over the top of the land, the relative height of the land would stay about the same, and, most importantly, it would stay above sea level. But once we began to build on top of this land, we didn’t want it to flood, so we protected our property with the levees and dams. And now we are witnessing why that isn’t sustainable in the long-term.

Now this isn’t new information. People have known this was happening for a long time, and some people even wrote about it a year ago in this little magazine, called National Geographic. In fact the opening paragraphs of this story are so eery, they may as well have been written by Nostradamus.

But the truth is that the story was written by well-informed scientists who have been studying the problem for years. After the hubbub about who knew what and when regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center it will be interesting to watch the finger-pointing and the “special investigations” (Ooooo!) and see who ends up the scapegoat for this horrible natural and unnatural disaster.

Personally, I don’t think it matters much why or how it happened that “better” plans weren’t made for this hurricane, or more proactive steps weren’t taken to stop the hijackers four years ago. What matters to me is what plans we are going to make for the next potential hurricane or for whatever psychopaths might decide to do in the future.

To (roughly) quote a good movie I saw recently, “We can’t change the past, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. All we have is now.”