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For a lot of us in the neighborhood, La Vita’s raison d’etre came to an end when Fatma departed. You will remember the high times we had when it first opened and we sat on the avenue with friends and neighbors and began our life again here in New Orleans after Katrina.

The latest restaurant swan song is Amy and Al sold Asia Pacific to Moosey and it is being opened as Nona Mia – an Italian restaurant. Meaning that La Vita has become redundant so it is now becoming Santa Fe, which became Del Forno, which had a fire.

Now mind you Santa Fe’s food sucked when it was in the Marigny and the only reason people went there was to have margaritas and sit in the big rattan chairs. Hopefully the Santa Fe recipes that I hear the new cook is in possession of will burn up like Del Forno’s roof did and both of these restaurants will be about making quality food at affordable prices.

That’s really what the neighborhood deserves.

I think I mentioned the article I was reading in Oprah’s latest magazine about straight women who fall for women. Well there is a segment on this topic today on Oprah – watch it.

The Bayou St John Conservation Alliance has been working to ensure that the floodgates remain active and manned to keep our bayou from becoming a stagnate puddle. Volunteers have been replanting the necessary habitat along the banks to keep the bayou healthy. Most of these shots in this news reel are near the lake where the bayou widens, but the shot back where you see the cupola is towards the LaLa.

Last night, I had dinner with friends and realized something – women are awesome!

Here I was sitting with a friend going through some troubles, a friend celebrating her survival of troubles, and another who cooked for us and brought us together. Women are supportive, funny, nurturing, and never boring. Obama was on the television set fielding questions about the stimulus package but our eyes and ears were geared to what was going on at our table – love, lovers, exes, relationships – you know the usual stuff that stimulates girl talk.

More importantly, we talked about gender. I forgot who said a woman is not born, she is made, but one thing we know for certain there is no one trait that signifies you are a woman. The women we are and know are made up of contradictions – looks like a boy, acts like a girl; looks like a girl, acts like a boy; looks like both a boy and girl, acts like both a boy and girl. All girl. All boy. And slice and dice that so many different ways and you still come up scratching your head trying to determine just what is feminine and what is masculine.

Take this I Love You, Man movie – Paul Rudd is a man who loves women-stuff, but he is man. Poor men, they are stuck with the same stereo types women are. I have known so many men who were married to powerful women and their role had no benchmark against the usual male traits – successful, rich, powerful – but they embodied a more enlightened consciousness and yet I have been guilty in the past of associating their feminine traits with weakness.

We’re all stuck with these blanket gender roles – male, female – and neither is 100% for any person. I am both in many ways but mainly I’m a woman who has strong male tendencies.

Feminine is about receiving, Masculine is about driving. All of us at any given time might embody these dual forces, but society makes an art of categorizing us as one or the other, as if they are mutually exclusive. And Western society has made it de facto that all things feminine are less than, not equal to masculine.

Before I even moved into the LaLa a war was underway with the neighbors to my right – I mean a war. And I zen’d it away by deciding to turn the other cheek and kill them with kindness. That’s why when my other neighbor sent me this, I laughed a full on belly laugh – only the truth is funny.

I woke up rested, had a pleasurable walk with Loca, accomplished work tasks that had been piling up, and then went to yoga where Michele held the most amazing class I have attended. Every moment of it – from walking in and hearing her gorgeous voice to working through challenging poses and going deeper into my body and further opening my mind, I ended feeling like I had been somewhere – someplace inside of me that is usually not accessible or someplace outside of myself, which was refreshing.

Yay to yoga. And to Michelle – wow!

I was walking in the park this morning and there were two Muscovy ducks chatting each other up by the banks of the lagoon. Their faces look like they are turned inside out and are covered with red skin that is bumpy, exaggerated, and frankly, gross, with a knob on top of the bill and lumps all over. I got a good close look at the bigger one and and recoiled then couldn’t help myself, I sang to it:

U. G. L. Y.
You ain’t got no alibi
You ugly, You ugly.

After almost a week of no sleep and stress attacking from all sides, not to mention a stream of news of the dead (yet this morning I heard of another celebrity who is dying), I came home last night from the movie, did my skin care, flossed extra special, brushed thoroughly, tucked in all the animals, turned off all the phones and I took an Atavan.

And I slept like a baby. I know that Xanax and Atavan have addictive qualities but really for a good night sleep once in a blue moon, Atavan in particular works much better than Ambien and the other zombie sleeping pills doctors love to prescribe.

When I woke up this morning, I had a song in my heart, but instead of it being the typical Marvin Gaye Motown Top 20 dance tune, it was more like a serenade so lovely. I walked through the park and the irises were so intense that I had to say out loud to Loca – “aren’t these irises gorgeous?” – she turned to look at them and then at me and I knew what her pea brain was thinking – “nutball” – but I ignored her because I felt stress leaving my body.

Disconcerting.
My gf is on her way to Istanbul. You could say it is a lesbian thing, but I don’t know. I did research on the subject of ex girlfriends and one article I read said for lesbians the real relationship is the ex-girlfriend. It was written by a professor name Tatiana – don’t get me started.

Discombobulating.
I mentioned my research to T; however, the professor loathes when I quote scholarly gay studies – perhaps because she’s a more holistic lesbian than me or maybe it bothers her what I don’t know. But my questions run from the mundane to the complex: are those my socks? to is it normal to travel to another country to see your ex?

Disorienting.
I would be disingenuous to say I like her there – with the ex – call me jealous and unenlightened, maybe even uninformed or maybe clinging to vestiges of my straight past. Don’t get me wrong, our love is strong, but I just don’t get why the ex needs not one but many trips (this is the third in under a year).

Dissociating.
I calm my thoughts in various ways, but the treatise on ex lesbian lovers haunts me – the notion that the true love is the ex – and I turn this notion around in my mind, turn it, split it open, turn it, put it back together, and I always come back to the same place, which is I’m not sure what lesbians and their ex girlfriends are all about, either culturally, sociologically, biologically, much less psychologically.

Deconstructing.
I only know who I am – a woman who fell in love with a woman.

Demanding.
Since T is the first woman I have been in relationship with, I might never get to figure out the whole ex girlfriend thing on account of T is not going to be my ex.

Been thinking about the rules – you know the relationship ones – and I’m somewhat confused by the rules I knew and the ones that exist in a gay relationship. Actually, I’m pretty sure none exist in a gay relationship because they are living outside of convention, so most cherry pick the rules. In your straight people, you’ll find the typecasts of faithful, philanderer, noncommital, jealous, giver, and taker and you find these all in gay relationships too. But there is something unwritten in the gay code, which is the most enlightened part of the lifestyle and that is “we don’t have to do it like they do.”

Which is curious that gays want to marry – DON’T GET ME WRONG THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO – but that they would want to? Ack – seems to me it would be better to change the law structure that favors marriage and rewrite it so that it makes sense in legal partnerships that there be transfer of assets, community law, and parental obligations rather than a $10,000+ wedding and rings. Sort of like a checklist legal document that asks you how much you want to be legally binded and the ability to leave unchecked the boxes where you don’t.

Think outside the box is what some will tell you – my gf said it to me one time when I was questioning something I didn’t like – the problem is that the greatest relationships are conceived within a framework – I have found few couples who work without a construct, and I have known a rare few who have successfully designed their own. It’s really the lemmings who adapt to the societal structure and either adhere blindly to the status quo or fail miserably because it’s too rigid.

I refer for the umpteenth time to the sculptor, Louise Nevelson, who said she made her world when the one she was living in didn’t serve her.

And I quote once again the hands-down best fortune to come out of a fortune cookie – the one I got when I arrived in San Francisco in 1990, which said, “A woman who tries to equal man, lacks ambition.”

A couple who won’t create their own charter because they fear the consequences, lacks imagination.