N'awlins

Yay! So this weekend I get to go to New Orleans with my bestest friend, her boyfriend/sex buddy and my husband. Happy happy day.

I like N'awlins. It's such a vibrant city; opulence and poverty mixing willy-nilly with high culture that's stumbling over the bodies of sloshed drunks. My first trip to New Orleans was probably the best. I conned my parents into thinking that I was going to spend spring break down in the Crescent City with some friends from college. Instead, I spent a week in decadent sin with my boyfriend. He was 6 years older than I, and my underage status put a serious crimp in his drinking style. I had finally made the advanced age of 19 - just over the legal drinking age in Orleans county. So we spent the week drinking in public and just generally mooning around the city in luuuuuuuv.

My best New Orleans story starts with my second or third trip. The American Academy of Pediatrics held the national meeting in N'awlins last year and my residency program was nice enough to send me, free of charge. A whole passel of us went. On our first night there, some of the other residents and I met up with some of the attendings (senior faculty doctors) and proceded to go out drinking. Toward the end of the night, after several large drinks called hand-grenades, one of the other interns and I decided to go to Larry Flint's strip club. First of all, you would think a freaking group of doctors would know better than have drinks named after a device designed to maim and destroy. Secondly, we were with our bosses. People who would be trying to teach us the art of keeping people alive and sane. Does that sound like the kind of crowd receptive to ladies of the night? Even though the ladies did dance vertically instead of horizontally, come on! The strip club idea? Not so bright. But, it seemed like fun at the time. So we went. Not only did the two of us go, we dragged one of the most innocent, sweet, and damn near demure interns with us. The good news is that the attendings don't hold our misbehavior against us. The bad news is that at least three of the most prominent attendings in our pediatric program associate three of us with stripping and two of us with corrupting the innocent.

Not the reputation a respectable professional usually wants.

Oh well, the hell with respectable.