I’ve always been the type that would prefer an experience over a gift. My greatest birthday gift was having a bunch of people I love seek me out in New York and make it a cause for celebration. The unwrapping of the night was memorable. I thought about what Ernie was telling me last time I saw him in the Quarter – he was trying to put his finger on why we can’t live anywhere else but New Orleans – and today when I was walking around the park, I thought of how we are a very social lot, and we value experience over material gain – it’s that we are going to party while the hurricane is coming, dance to our grave, because we all have a deep abiding knowledge that life is fleeting and the here and now is all you have – so music + dancing + food + friends – ephemeral – fleeting – experiential – this is what we value above commerce and convention. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve always been the type that would prefer an experience over a gift. My greatest birthday gift was having a bunch of people I love seek me out in New York and make it a cause for celebration. The unwrapping of the night was memorable. I thought about what Ernie was telling me last time I saw him in the Quarter – he was trying to put his finger on why we can’t live anywhere… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-jV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}