My Louisianne sister is safe: she's up in Tulsa, OK, where her husband's family lives, far out of the path of Katrina. She and her husband woke the kids up at 3 am, Sunday morning, got out of the house by 5:30, and were in Tulsa by nightfall, long before the storm hit. I wasn't really worried about them: this is the third hurricane-type-thing that they've dealt with this year, and while this one is by far the most serious, the methods of dealing with them all are pretty much the same.

What I'm much more worried about is myself, and what it means for me. Natural disasters trigger an old and incredibly strong fear that I used to have, and guess I still do have. I worry that, all of a sudden, natural disaster after natural disaster, combined with the effects of global warming, will devastate the United States, destroying our economy, and making life for a poverty-stricken man such as myself very difficult. Tensions will be running high, and gay people, being the hot-button minority group these days, will see a huge surge of anti-gay attacks, both from everyday people and from the government. I'll have to move to Canada as a refugee.

At least my neurotic fantasy provides a path to safety: Canada. The only problem with this is that, in reality, I feel like I'm obligated to learn French, so that I'll be more likely to be accepted into Canada, and I'll have a slight advantage over the other refugees. Every time I think about languages, and try to decide what I should study for my language requirement for my degree, French rears it's ugly, nasally head, and I feel that I have no choice but to surrender to it; but then, as I begin to study the stuff, I realize how much I dislike it, and how much I just don't care about it. I've never met a French person that I especially wanted to talk to (not to say they're bad or anything, I've just never clicked with any of them), and I'm not particularly attracted to the culture. I have no French in my ethnic background either. There's no connection between me and the French language besides this neurotic fantasy. Therefore, to affrim to myself that I will NOT be forced to move to Canada as a homosexual refugee, that my life is not going to become a living hell that will force me to run away from my country, I'm going to study Swedish instead. My quiet, stony grandparents were swedish, and it's the closest thing I have to an ethnic identity besides being American. I'll study Swedish out of love, not out of fear.