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One of the things I was thinking about on my walk this morning is that when T and I got together we had completely different rhythms to our eating. And I merged towards her way at first and then slowly made my way back to my rhythm. One of the fall outs of both beginning a happy relationship and changing my habit of eating was to gain weight. Boom, I’m 10 pounds heavier than I was. So I was walking and thinking about some of the factors that keep me from shedding those now ten plus pounds.

First, there is the low blood sugar. When I go more than three or four hours without eating, I crash and become grouchy and unfocused and basically useless. But what I learned from a nutritionist I saw in San Francisco is that simply eating something like a handful of nuts or a half a cup of yogurt is not the answer as it doesn’t stabilize my blood sugar, nor does it sate me, nor does it maintain my metabolism so in the end, my body reacts like its on a roller coaster and I gain weight not to mention feel totally out of sorts.

But another consequence that arose from my getting off course was fear. I would be waiting so long to eat, long passed my needs and so I would overeat or snack heavily out of fear that my blood sugar was waning or going to. Recently, I was reading about fear of being hungry and I know Oprah advocated allowing yourself to feel hunger between meals as no one dies from feeling hungry. But this is complete nonsense – you should not be letting your body starve, you should be keeping your metabolism steady – that is the key to good health, nutrition and weight maintenance.

The advice I received from my nutritionist is to eat four meals a day – each one should contain a moderate portion of protein, complex carbs, fruits or vegetables, 30 grams of fat. Eating this way helped me even out the highs and lows of my blood sugar, shed unwanted pounds and made me feel fantastic. I also didn’t have to worry about going hungry because I was sated. So no fear.

My gal pals told me about something that might help my back problem, which has been ongoing since February 2008. Massage therapy and acupuncture have helped somewhat and switching from Pilates to yoga has provided temporary relief. But I started taking Triple Flex on Monday and I must admit only two days later feeling some lessening of the pain.

A friend gave me a book for my birthday a while back – it was Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human. Tatjana ended up reading it before me and it is still on my nightstand as my reading time has been narrowed down to two sentences a night. But I’ve become aware of Temple as T told me most of what the book was about and I heard an interview with her and Terry Gross. I like that she says not to pat an animal – how many people go up to their dogs and pat them on the hips – they don’t like that. They like to be stroked, long and deep, like a mother’s tongue – that is soothing to them.

More importantly, I like that she is working in the world of livestock and showing people how to handle animals – even if they are being raised for food. She makes pig farmers more humane, and even teaches chicken farmers how to handle chickens. Her main premise is that because of her autism she thinks in images much the same way that animals do and so she is able to be more intuitive around animals than the normal person. And while images and emotions rule an animals life, fear is the primal emotion. She’s really incredible to listen to and she makes me thinks about two things that have been weighing heavy on my mind.

1. Expanding who you are and what you do.

The other day with a group of friends we jokingly said, what if everything you said was in meter. And I recalled an attorney who used to send all his correspondence in iambic pentameter. But more closely to what I’m thinking is that I was in the park this morning and there was a dog who had just gone through surgery because he had fallen off a bed and become paralyzed. The owner was telling me that he had been referred to a vet in Mandeville who had hooked him up with a specialist in Mississippi. The vet was someone who had enlarged his practice to accommodate the poor. He made it a part of his practice to make sure poor people with animals had access to good veterinary care. I like this idea. Expanding who you are and what you do.

2. Fear is the basic emotion

I was talking to some friends about this situation that arose with my niece, where her husband wrongfully accused me and that it had escalated into this situation. While I have chosen to just let all of chips fall where they fell instead of actively seeking a reconciliation I do know that most of what all of this was about falls under one category – fear. My niece fearing threat to her marriage, her husband fearing he had inappropriate feelings for me, others in the family fearing something might upset their order, and my fearing that if I did attempt to work it out that I would have to be defending myself against a lie, thereby giving the person who perpetrated it credence, the people who believed it an excuse, and that basically I fear validating any of this nonsense.

They say whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. I’ve always thought of New Orleans as hanging in the balance, a sort of faded beauty. When I stepped out of the airport after being to Boston, Nantucket, the new Jet Blue terminal at JFK, I thought, “Oh my.”

Even before you are out of the plane, the smells are obvious – a sort of fecundness permeates the cabin, then you enter Louis Armstrong International Airport (big name for a little airport) and you hear the jazz playing instead of Muzak or top 40 and you know you are someplace different. Walk outside and if it is still summer, you receive a large wet wool blanket thrown over you.

Goodbye freshness, hello jungle.

But it’s the look – the sidewalks look like they were constructed a few centuries ago with cracks and stains and no newness anywhere in sight. The taxi driver pulls up in a maroon van and the entire inside is carpeted in the same color and smells faintly of beer and cigarettes.

And everyone is moving a very very slow pace.

Welcome to New Orleans!

After Katrina – we lost one large poor neighborhood (9th ward), one sizable rich neighborhood (Lakefront), and one expansive middle class neighborhood (New Orleans East) – but the other neighborhoods have come back together, have gotten in their routine of life, and with summer now over, and four years post Katrina, we’re still a backwater, a third world country, a banana republic and still loving every second of it.

With a hint of fall in the air and the Cabrini girls wearing their plaid uniforms and trying to park around the bayou, I think nostalgically about school days past and school days future. I was hoping the intersection between past and future – my mom – was going to evolve into a multigenerational thing as we adopt and raise a child.

Right now, I’m calculating the enormous amount of energy it takes to deal with life.

The meaning of life is to live it. Life is not meant to be comfortable, it is meant to be lived.

All these sayings are fine except when you are standing in the hospital room looking at your mother, who is unresponsive, and so when I put my head down on my pillow at night, the wish I have for my mom is for her to be comfortable.