I’ve figured out how I’m going to support my travels! I’m going to be a travelling masseur! I’ll find the health and fitness centers in the towns I travel through and offer my services, on a by-donations basis (you decide what to pay). They supply a table, and clean towels if they have them; I bring my own towels, oils, and a sign (“The Great Jimmilioso: Massages from across the World! Be amazed and relaxed.”?).

On what expertise do I plan to do this? I don’t have time to get certified, but I recently bought The Complete Guide to Massage, which I’m going to study over Winter Holiday, and I’ll get another book on Massage Therapy. M.I.N.E. is having a one-day Introduction to Swedish Massage workshop on January 7, and there’s a four-meeting class under MIT’s IAP. And then there’s you. I need subjects to experiment my techniques on. Want a free massage? Get in touch with me, and I’ll get in touch with you.

My only fear is that the idea is so obvious that everyone and her sister is already doing it and that the whole “wandering masseur” market is saturated over there.

I love the end of term. Most of the MIT frosh have de-froshed and are finding their places in communities that are finding new life through them, and the Birth of Math and Philosophy class that I’m helping with has ripened to a level of discussion and comradery beyond our expectations. On Friday a group of us in ESG broke out in spontaneous La Vie Boheme sing-a-long. It was glorious.

For the many of you who haven’t heard yet, I will be leaving at the end of January to finally pursue my wanderlust across Europe. I’m making no definite plans, but the general outline is this: I’ll fly into London, and go across the channel and down along the coast of France and Spain pretty quickly, to get south while it’s still cold, and then across to Italy. If the mood takes me, I’ll head across to Greece and follow the Adriatic Sea north, and then to Vienna, Prague, and Berlin; otherwise, I’ll probably go through Switzerland to Germany, and then back through Amsterdam to spend more time in France. In total, I’ll be wandering for between one and six months– most likely around three.

As for what I’ll be doing in Europe… I’m not really sure, and I’m open for suggestions. I’ll be staying in youth hostels some nights and sleeping outside in a sleeping bag others. I’ll be taking the train a lot and walking a lot. I’ll be following one of those “Europe on 25 cents a day” books, and I’ll run out of money and work a bit and then travel some more. And if I have the time, I’m going to put it all in a picture-ful blog.

Anyone want to come with me? I realize the sort of life situations that allow for this are few and far between, but I’d love company if you’re in one too.

I just added a bunch of Rocky people to my friends list– certainly not all of my friends from Rocky, but a start. So here’s a question that I’ve been pondering for all the Rocky’s.

Rocky parties are great hives of debauchery, with plenty of drinking, drugs, and some intimate contact. And a little public nudity, but not so much. In fact, I’ve noticed a real hesitancy from people to be fully unclothed at parties, and it seems so at odds with the stated norms of the group that I have to ask: am I missing something?

I think that most people, even some of the solidly gay ones, would agree that naked women are nicer to look at than naked men. Most men just look a little silly naked. But some guy has gotten publicly naked at the majority of the Rocky parties I’ve attended, while women almost never do. Sometimes that guy has been me, and the comments I get usually aren’t compliments (Variations on “Wow you’re hairy.” are most common), but people seem to appreciate that someone has gotten naked anyway. Wouldn’t naked women be even better? What’s discouraging them?

I understand that a lot of Rocky people are pretty young, and maybe haven’t come to terms with their bodies, but I don’t think that’s the issue– public nudity is just outside the culture in a way that surprises me. I happen to think that most people are more beautiful naked than in even the most becoming outfits, although I could understand people thinking otherwise. Is it that you’re concerned about being objectified or misunderstood if you get naked to quickly?

I’m also surprised at this because it seems more conservative that what I’m used to at MIT. At least in the groups that I frequent, when we have a play sex games (which admittedly isn’t often), sooner or later we’re all playing the game naked. And when we call shirtless’o’clock, it means topless’o’clock, and bras go too. Are MIT students just more sexually liberated then Rocky people?

I’m back in Bohemia. I spent a chunk of the flight back looking at my projects for this season and things will be pretty tight, so my blogging will return to previous low levels. I’m going to continue working with people down there to spread and improve the information system that we’ve been working on, though. As a side-note to that, the Astrodome-specific information system isn’t going to become obsolete after all, because they aren’t actually clearing out the Astrodome. Evidently the building we were using isn’t safe enough for New Orleaners, but its just fine for its new Galveston residents.

We heard today that soon-to-be Hurricane Rita is making a V-line straight for Houston, and all the Astrodome is going to be evacuated at noon tomorrow. Hurricane Rick, they said, would hit Houston as a category 4 or 5 hurricane, with storm swells of 20 to 25 feet, and the Astrodome complex could only withstand a category 3 hurricane and wasn’t safe. All of the evacuees are to be flown or bussed to Ft. Chaffee near Ft. Smith, Arkansas.

You might think, “How horrible for it to happen again– these New Orleaners must be cursed!” or “The hurricane is five days out and the projected path includes the whole gulf coast– aren’t they over reacting?”

My first thought (because I’m a horrible person) was “Ooh, how exciting!” My second thought was, “Wow, that was underhanded of the Red Cross.”

The Red Cross has been unofficially planning to clear the shelter on Tuesday since the weekend, although they hadn’t told evacuees, who still assumed that it would be open for weeks. It’s clear to all us veterans that the Red Cross is just using this storm as fear tactic to expedite their plans. This sort of thing is common here.

Here are a few of the underhandednesses of the RC that I encountered today.

1. In order to get housing help, a recent Red Cross information update explained, you need a yellow wrist band. To get a wrist band, you need to come to the housing center and wait. You get the band by waiting around for a full day, and then you can come back and use it the next day.
2. If anyone leaves the shelter for a night (including, apparently, sleeping outside the gate because they were release from the hospital after 11:00), they aren’t let back in. They have to find shelter elsewhere. If they lose their wristband, they’re out. If they weren’t around at the right time during the move from the old building to the new one, they’re out.
3. A sign reads “Volunteers and Workers Only” on the gate to the expensive transportation services. The sign is wrong, but only evacuees who ignore it find that out.

This hurricane trick really beats the rest, though. The higher echelons of the Red Cross unfortunately seem to welcome incompetence. By all means, please give them your money, because they’re here and they are helping and there are many truly excellent Red Cross workers. But their operation here has had real problems– solvable problems that don’t require resorting to using fear and misdirection– and we really need to figure out something better before the next disaster.

On Saturday I helped an old man who was looking for his mentally retarded brother by helping him post the man’s picture with a note. He explained that he had been quite a clubber until recently, and knew everyone around, although his brother had always stayed at home, and he was hoping that maybe someone would see his picture, and recognize the likeness between him and his brother, and make the connection. Today we learned that someone had seen his picture, gotten ahold of his sister, and he and his brother have been reunited! Today, I helped a man find his son. The last he had heard, parts of his family were still trapped in New Orleans, and he didn’t know if his son was alive or not. He posted his information and his son’s on one of the message sites, and checked it every day. Today, there was a response. He called the number, talked to his aunt, and found out his son was safe in Mississippi, got that number, and talked to his son. Although I have only been involved in a few such connections, the computer center here makes easily a dozen connections a day. Since space is so tight in our new building, the computer center is now in the middle of a hallway– but our more public location has meant more connections. I think we scare the nearby food service lobby when we ring the cow bell that signals that a missing family member has been found and erupt in cheers.

Equally common, though, are the people who come to us looking for someone they know to be somewhere at Reliant Park (the Astrodome complex), often having come from far away, and who aren’t able to find them. There are still entrance registration forms that haven’t been entered into the database– people that we don’t even know are here. The Red Cross wasn’t even going to include space for a computer or a paging center in the new building until we fought our way in. Decisions are made, and implemented (usually moments after the decision), but I’ve never gotten the sense that anyone is in charge. Without independent volunteers, the Astrodome would be a disaster of its own. Except for waste management, which is mostly phenomenal.

There are two women sitting behind a table in the Reliant Center, with a hand-written sign “Local and long-distance Transportation”. I had them in the information system for days as the primary “Transportation Information” resource, but I didn’t realize the connection when I was introduced to them. They had been associated with two different transportation organizations and were driven away by the incompetence. Now they are totally independent, but everyone knows that they’re the people to go to, because they know everything there is to know and they’ll do whatever they need to do to help.

Jim, one of the heads of the computer center has been repeating a simple story that deserves another repeat. A volunteer came to him and said that she really wanted to help an evacuee that she’d been working with, but didn’t know who to she was supposed to go to. Jim response was, “You are the empowered person to help that woman.” The volunteer said that she didn’t want to break any rules– Jim replied that there are no rules. So this volunteer found this woman housing, transportation to it, gave her her own money and drove her to the airport. And that kind of dedication isn’t even uncommon.

Too much today to fit in one entry. My illness is gone and things went well. I fulfilled the tasks needed for the information system by 3:00 and went off to do other volunteering. After sitting in the volunteer waiting area for a while, I ended up working for Aramark for the fourth time, but as a result scored a map of the big move that I’d been trying to find all day.

See, starting tomorrow, they are clearing out the Astrodome. The plan is to consolidate everyone from the two big buildings we’re currently using into a third smaller building. Look at the google map. The Astrodome (center) and Reliant Center (huge top building, able to fit about three Domes) are mostly full of people, with some breathing room. All those people will be racked like sardines (cots touching in long rows) into the building labelled “Astroarena”– specifically, just under the two dark gills on the building (one has a corner just to the left of ‘A’ in ‘Astroarena’).

I’m dreading it, and I find it difficult to imagine what economics could be used to justify such treatment of the evacuees. The computer center crew went out for dinner and drinks tonight, and we had a fantastic conversation which suggested an answer. The 3000 evacuees who will be left by Friday are truly the most underprivileged of our society, and are being treated it. Whether by habit or chance circumstance, they have been mostly unable to help themselves get a better life out what happened, and so they are being funneled back into lives just like the ones they left. These are the forgotten, as they were forgotten back in New Orleans, and mostly doomed to remain that way. They will be forcibly shipped out on buses to inner cities only marginally different from the ones they’ve lived in their whole lives.

We hear that hundreds of people are leaving every day, but I’ve never seen them leave. And the stories I have to share are of heroic dedication to helping single evacuees– volunteers spending hours with one person to get them out. Until today, the only sign I saw of the shrinking population was smaller crowds outside. But this afternoon I walked through gaping holes in the Astrodome cot fields, which would have been inconceivable a few days ago.

The number of volunteers has dropped too, so groups I helped with before have been asking me to come back, but I’ve been busy.

I’ve been working on a big information system, built by siderea and maintained by myself and E., a native Houstonian who lives in Carlisle, MA. We spent the weekend inputting all the information we could find, including fliers we picked up at information desks, updates from the Red Cross, and reports from individual (the only reliable source). Across the Astrodome complex, there are five different main information desks, and dozens of helping agencies, all of which get questions from evacuees, sporadic information updates from distinct sources, are constantly making internal changes, and nothing stays in the same place for more than a few days. Everything changes so fast, a bunch of people here are burnt out on information overload, and the Red Cross does everything by paper so it’s totally unequipped to deal. Fortunately, there are over 400 computers here, and two-thirds are laptops, so the problem does have a technological solution. For the past two days, I’ve been spreading the information system around to the various groups (all of which have been very happy to see it). Now I just need to see if I can get any of them to help maintain it.

There’s a disease going around we call “Astrodome flu”. It lasts 48 hours, with symptoms like food poisoning, and volunteers are being sent home. Plenty of people have other things too (like those who share my sore throat, which is clearing up), and many of the rest of sleep-dep’d. But it’s getting better.

We’re now down to around 4500 people– we’ve halved our population in two days.

A lot of people are sick, and plenty stay in bed all day. It’s easy to lose track of time in the Astrodome– the buildings are so huge and the air so conditioned that time seems to stay still (an endless dusk).

And people are getting tired of half-frozen bologna and cheese sandwiches(which are always available, and sometimes the only non-snack option), and Aramark food in general. Yesterday they had sweet-and-sour chicken, and the New Orleaners didn’t know what to do with it. They tried to add tabasco sauce to make it edible, but many just threw it away.

I’ve picked up a bit of a scratchy throat too– which isn’t a surprise, since I don’t pay the hyper-attention to hygiene that this situation deserves, unless I’m serving food. Which I did today, just to keep things real.

Before the information goes out of date, a San Franciscan who went home today maintained an extensive Astrodome blog: http://badgerbag.typepad.com/. Lots of good stuff.

Short entry today– late night setting up a central information repository for all the information centers– see recent posts from siderea, our CMS manager.

Basic identification is done by wristbands: orange for volunteers, pink for Astrodome residents, blue for Reliant Center residents, plus less common colors. This means that if you lose your wristband, you become a non-person. I spent most of yesterday trying to set up a system for evacuees to get replacement wristbands without re-registering, if you can get a Red Cross escort to the Astrodome, and today the system is widely known and officially endorsed. Fascinating.

Security seems to be getting worse. My first night, I walked all the way into one of the main buildings (the Reliant Center) without a hassle. Today they almost wouldn’t let me in, even with my volunteer wristband. There are guards at each entrance, and the number of army people seems to have increased geometrically over the past couple days. About 20 people showed up today to get in, and they were all going to be turned away. One had open lesions on his legs from walking in the water, and it took an hour to get him in. Three of us, including one Red Cross volunteer woman tried to get the group accept in and were told that under no circumstances was anyone being admitted. Later, though, a white male red cross volunteer came, said, “I’m taking these with me.” to the guard, and marched them over to registration.

Inside buildings, my little volunteer wristband is getting me fewer places too. Yesterday a Red Cross person asked me to set something up for him, and when I showed up today to do it at a time when he didn’t happen to be around, I was looked at like a criminal and sent back to the intro volunteering room.