re:

new orleans is like vegas. you get to see yourself in all your nasty glory. this can be productive, even when it feels icky.

so attending a major professional conference in new orleans (why i'm here now, at c's) requires that i perform in very special ways. because all that internal reflection and contemplation that enables me to make it through the range of provocative, often soul-jarring sights, smells, and, um . . . "encounters" . . . it motivates me to sort of unwittingly devise new lifemaps i will need to get after internalizing. these new insights are worth remembering, and they both "get in the way" and enable the recollection of previous ways of being, sometimes inspiring new organizations that feel promising. maybe this sensation, fleeting but reliable, is what we're after in visiting other places that take us quite far from our conventional center(s) and habits. i could get fancy and talk Bordieu's "hexis," (to put it crudely, a bodily experience of social orientation) but i won't go too far in that direction, just now.

see, i often require something "in the way" (some new or recalled or reconfigured consciousness) because i can be compulsive. capturing images within these disorienting spaces seems to help me (more on this, some day). this, "bonnie's compulsiveness," will ring familiar for those of you who have seen that i sometimes post and re-post the same note several times, trying to get it just right and not always succeeding because i get some insight just after hitting "publish" (i should be smarter and more patient. but i am. apparently. not). and see, it's not all about what i'm saying but also how it appears (to say). hitting "preview" in blogger gives me a *sense* of how the post will appear, but it's an approximation that gives way to quite a different layout, once published. for me, the reposting is almost always about aesthetics. and then, it's the analog to my habit of printing a draft several times instead of simply "when it's done." i see in the printed pages things that i can't see in the screen representation. same, here.