The last few days have been ... difficult. Not difficult compared to the life of someone living in Darfur or squatting in his own devastated property in the Lower Ninth Ward, mind you, but difficult.

On Tuesday, we found a house we loved and could easily afford, assuming we could get the financing. My real estate agent advised me to contact my mortgage lender right away, because (A) the seller had just dropped the price by $30K, making it much more likely that someone else will snap it up, and (B) she (my real estate agent) is leaving the country for two weeks on October 10 and we'd like to get an offer written by then. Of course we could write an offer contingent on getting the financing, but it wouldn't carry much weight.

So I ran home and called the lender and faxed over all the documents they needed, and since then ... nothing. I've called them six or seven times, polite but desperate to see if there was anything I could do to expedite the process, and they've ignored every call. Not a single acknowledgment, not even "Fuck off -- we'd rather throw money in Lake Pontchartrain than give it to you." Granted, my credit is not great, but I'm in the process of fixing it, expect to have it totally repaired within a few months, and have sent them the documentation proving it.

Apparently this is the thanks I get for being a good customer for ten years, for never missing or being late with a mortgage payment even after the storm until I contacted them and ascertained that we could skip payments due to disaster hardship. Of course there are other lenders, but if this is how the one I've done business with for ten years treats me, what hope is there for the others? I'm beginning to feel as if we will be stuck in this apartment forever, and it's a very nice apartment and we're very lucky to have it, but we desperately need a home of our own again.

I'm sorry. This is deadly dull, and probably also too personal. I recently had a conversation with a friend who doesn't keep a blog, but who said that if he did, he didn't think he'd be able to include anywhere near the amount of personal information that I do. I replied that I include a lot more personal stuff now than I did before the storm, and while I don't always relish displaying my angst for several thousand readers, I feel it's worth sacrificing a certain amount of personal privacy to let people know what life is like in New Orleans right now. Occasionally I include a news link, but you can find blogs with better New Orleans political information elsewhere. What I'm trying to give you is the experience of a single life in post-K New Orleans: the sorrow, the fear, the anger, the necessity of dealing with idiots who don't think our lives are worth rebuilding, the struggle to keep hoping, the drugs that prevent us from just blowing our brains out (most of us, anyway -- trust me, there have been a lot more post-K suicides than you've probably heard about), the occasional elation, the frequent disappointment ... the fact that it was never the Big fucking Easy and it sure as hell ain't now ... the love for our city and pride that we're still here in spite of it all.

But over the past few days, the fear has been ascendant.

My real estate agent has instructed me to call a loan officer she knows (with a different company) first thing Monday morning, then come meet with her, stat; we're going to go ahead and write an offer on the house contingent on getting the financing. And another friend has sent me the number of a lender who "can find money under sofa cushions when you didn't even realize you had a sofa." So maybe things are looking up a bit.

At the beginning of this year, mystified by the whole idea of the "50 Book Challenge," I began keeping a list of every book I read. I didn't do this so I could lord it over people who'd only read fifty books by year's end; in truth, I wish I could read more slowly, especially when I am enjoying a book. I was just curious. I tallied up my total today; so far I've read 160 books in 2006. A lot of these are rereads. I reread a lot in general, but particularly for comfort, and this has been a year when I needed a lot of comfort. Chris asked me if rereads "count." I asked him whether, if he sees a good friend more than once in his life, does only the first meeting "count"? I think he saw my point, sort of, but I don't think he really understands the concept of reading for comfort.

Chris doesn't read a lot other than cookbooks, food magazines, and other culinary material (including my work in draft form). He used to when he was younger -- in fact, he was a comp lit major in college -- but somewhere along the line he quit reading very widely and abandoned virtually all fiction other than mine. He claims he "doesn't have time" to read, and it's true that he works long, crazy hours, but I tend to believe that people who truly want to do something make time to do it. Sometimes his reading habits drive me crazy, and sometimes I even find them insulting; this is what I've devoted my life to, and he seems to find it of negligible value (not my work in particular, which I think he genuinely likes, but literature in general). It's as if, instead of caring deeply about food, restaurants, and cooking, I was content to heat up a Lean Cuisine every night. In truth, though, I've only ever dated one person who read anywhere near as much as I did, and we were incompatible in every other way, fought a lot, hurt each other almost unforgivably, and lasted less than a year together. I remind myself of this when wishing I could discuss Graham Greene or the Harry Bosch novels or Hearts In Atlantis with somebody not on the phone or Internet.*

(I think writing about Rickey and G-man has also given me a better understanding of Chris' habits. There was a time when I thought anyone who didn't read must be stupid. Rickey and G-man aren't stupid -- though, unlike Chris, they didn't have the benefit of a good education -- but I don't see them as readers at all, except of cookbooks, food rags, and the sports section of the Times-Picayune.)

I occasionally find myself wondering if it's possible to read too much. There's a wonderful bit in a novel by the vastly underrated writer Marcel Montecino in which a lifelong bookworm misses his wife's dying breath because he's sitting by her hospital bed with his nose buried in a book, lost in the story. Even so, I think I'd rather read than do just about anything else in the world, and if that's a flaw in my character, surely there are worse flaws to have.

*I shouldn't be such a snot; I do have friends right here in New Orleans who are big readers, and a few who've read more than I probably ever will. The trouble is that most of them are writers, and hence, like me, too busy holed up working their asses off to spend a lot of time sitting around talking about books. And even so, it'd be nicest to discuss these things with the person I'm closest to in all the world.