I check my email neurotically like any good communication student. I’m talking roughly every 20 minutes or whenever I have Internet access, whichever comes first. So sometime between the end of my 1:30 p.m. class on Friday and arriving at my apartment, I received the e-mail that inspired this column.

I’ll start by saying this much: My mother loves forwarded e-mails. We all get them from time to time, the ones with cartoons of kittens and a subject line reading “Fwd: Hang in there!”

My mother has virtually no concept of technology and has no idea that I may have already seen them. She sends them with idealistic dreams that this shiny new message of hope will brighten my day or at least make me laugh, which it usually does. On this particular day perhaps her purpose was to burst that vein in my forehead that pulses when I get angry.

The subject line was “Fwd: How much is a billion?” I opened it up looking forward to random facts or quaint stories involving situational comedy. And that’s how it started. As it turns out, a billion seconds ago it was 1959. You get the general concept. The text of the e-mail was benign until it turned to the subject of our city. I’m going to quote directly because I’m still too annoyed to summarize it in my own words.

“While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans. It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division. Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking Congress for $250 billion to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number, what does it mean? Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans … you each get $516,528. If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787. Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012. Washington, D.C.: Are all your calculators broken?”

I can’t really describe my initial reaction because I was blinded by rage. All I know is that when I came to, my computer was miraculously intact. So I did what any of us would do. I wrote vicious hate e-mail to every person who had forwarded that email to my mother and presumably found it funny.

Let’s start with the obvious. Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city a year ago. The funds secured by our representatives will not be going to individual citizens, but considering the treatment most of us got from FEMA, it might not be a bad idea.

Most of the traffic lights are still out, and traffic court has been relocated to the West Bank. (Don’t ask me why I know that.) Our economy is down, Entergy’s bankrupt and many residents still can’t return to their homes. We don’t even have a concrete correction of our failed levees. The list goes on, but since you probably live in New Orleans – at least part time – you know what I’m saying.

I was absolutely horrified by the lack of sensitivity displayed by the rest of America in this e-mail. Maybe it isn’t the overwhelming majority’s feeling, but the fact that it’s out there is disconcerting to say the least. It’s not even the lack of sensitivity. It’s the sheer stupidity. Yes, tax money would go into the hands of individual citizens to the tune of 500 grand apiece. That makes sense. With that kind of dough to go around, you can see why people are returning to New Orleans in such high numbers.

So here’s my report on the state of the city one year later: The president of our country has already admitted to turning his back on New Orleans. My mother’s friends and co-workers are following his example. Maybe years from now, they too will take full responsibility for their actions. In the meantime, I will do the only thing I can do to hang on to the last threads of my sanity.

I’ll pay absurdly high energy rates and ponder the eternal question: In a world where the Trolley Stop Cafe is still not open at 3 a.m., how is the average drunken college student to survive?

Summer Zeimetz is communications junior from Mandeville, La.