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Yesterday was the anniversary of the day I moved into the LaLa three years ago in 2007. Wow, it feels like I’ve lived her my whole life or at least lived a lifetime since I moved in. Sunday evening when we were all in the king sized bed that I bought for my fantasy of one day having it populated by a lover, a child, and my pets – I lay there with my lover, my son, and my dog and cat and thought, huh, and there it is.

Happy Anniversary LaLa – the house that love built.

This weekend Tin learned how to spin around in a circle. When you realize how much you just don’t know when you’re born, you realize just how much you “learn” and have to fight to “unlearn” sometimes.

In the hustle and bustle of workaday life, I fall into the category of an eight hour woman. Often times ten hours, depending on the day. What that means I give all my brains to work and when I’m done, I’m DONE, TOAST – FRIED. Today was the same – I woke to back to back calls and the alarm misfiring in my office then realizing that I had a stack of calls tomorrow all of which were right smack when I was supposed to see my dentist and so I got a hurry up appt to see the dentist today and reshuffled everything else.

At step class this evening the instructor kept eyeing me with a puzzled look, I know he wanted to understand why I could not follow the simplest command. It’s because the Chupa Cabra got me I wanted to shout at him – the CHUPA CABRA u heard? – the brain sucking goat that lives in the minds of South Americans. He’s here, sucking my brains out on a daily basis.

Whatyagonnado?

February 22, 2010

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   You’ve done nothing but work, worry and take care of business for days. So why not give yourself a night off? You’ve certainly had an array of offers, and some of them were quite appealing. Stop trying to resist and pick the one that most strikes your fancy. You know what they say about all work and no play? That applies to all worry and no play, too. Time to chill out.

I did things in reverse this Sunday, reading the New York Times before I went for my bike ride out to the lakefront. The sky was grey like Denmark and moisture has returned to the air here in New Orleans. I saw a dead possum and then began my road kill list – a dead orange cat – a dead sparrow. When I got to the boathouses along the point, I counted the boathouses that are still not fixed after Katrina, the entire restaurant section is still desolate, and I quit listing things in my head and wondered about all the anxiety I’ve been feeling lately – do you know that anxiety is not caused by stress, anxiety is an outcome of stress and it comes much later than stress, it comes from accumulating and accumulating stress and then one day when the world stops spinning out of control, people like me stop and take stock and anxiety bleeds out of every pore at odd hours like 3:30 am and catches you unaware and then you have to stop and remind yourself constantly that everything is going to be okay. And you make lists of what is right and beautiful in your life, and you focus on those as you pave your way into the now unwritten future. About the time I was able to take a deep breath I was riding on the little spit of land that goes out to the point and seagulls and pelicans were flying all around me, and the big salty lake was in all around me, and Louis Armstrong came on my iPod and sang, “I see leaves of green, red roses too… “

I was reading that the Big Bang theory indicates that there is a piece of the big bang in all of us, sort of like god in all of us, or your own personal Jesus, or whatever you want to believe but that we are all linked to each other in some cosmic way. I know the cosmic links I’ve had with some, but on a large scale, no, I don’t feel cosmically linked to the masses.

I was feeding Tin yesterday while T went to go investigate a Turkish lesson for us, and I was staring into his eyes when a song came on my iPod, it was that song, Where have you been?, and I was smiling watching him eat and stare back at me and singing to myself and to him, Where have you been?, when the song got to the part where she is in the hospital and her husband is wheeled in, I flashed instantly back to my mother’s face lying in the hospital and her saying every time I walked in the door, “Where have you been? I was thinking about you” and tears sprang into my eyes and I cried out without thinking. Tin looked at me and started yelling and crying violently and I had to stop myself and switch gears pronto.

I told him I was thinking about his Mimi, who he didn’t get to meet in person, and that I had a tear of sadness in my right eye for her, and a tear of joy in my left eye for him and that the world was funny that way.

He calmed down as I smiled at him, but I knew what he knew, that the moment I laid eyes on him I knew him, and knew we were linked cosmically together and I also knew that just like my mother had relied on me to be the strong one, that he now would rely on me to be so also, and so it is with these things that swirl and twirl and create matter and make people matter to you no matter what.

I was talking to a friend about boy noises that Tin makes – how he hunches his shoulders and tucks his elbows in and then grunts with weird football type noises. He said get used to it, boys make noises. He told me that he and his wife were at a parade and someone kept making farting noises behind him till he finally turned around. It was an old buddy of his he hadn’t seen in ten years.

Post Superbowl/Mardi Gras Blues or Detox?

Spring fever or Allergies?

Stress or Post-Stress?

What is causing my lethargy?

I decided it was too cold outside to turn the hose on and risk getting sprayed with ice water in order to clean the porch. I lay on the sofa listening to Tin on the video talking incessantly to himself while NOT NAPPING and while T napped as I read the third in the Stieg Larsson Swedish crime novel trilogy – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – unable to do anything but turn the page.

New Orleans has always been a third world country, it’s the reason why I love it so much. But when Katrina hit and knocked this city to its knees, most everyone thought we were done for. An ex-inlaw wrote me a nasty email about how stupid it is for anyone to live in New Orleans – this from someone in California (karma). And yet, we not only rebuilt this city, our lives, and our spirit, we have come back so much stronger – we have a new mayor, we have a Superbowl team, we have the best Jazz Festival and Carnival in the world. We have it all.

One thing that is happening here in this epicenter of the world is that we are attracting a lot of yogis and wantabe yogis. You ask why is that? It is that because we were a city in need of a whole lot of healing, and we had a catastrophe that shook us to our core, and we rose like a Phoenix from the ashes and we are now living the dream. While the rest of the world is stumbling under the weight of corporate greed and banker blindsides, we’re standing on our own two feet down here, albeit a couple of inches off the ground because of the Saints.

My gardener told me that he touched the trophy. He had tears in his eyes when he told me this.

Face it, how many women know what color their hair truly is? I thought I was a blonde leading to a light brunette – but the years sneaked in a new shade of dark on me and then decided to sprinkle it all over with grey. While all that red was on my hair – underneath my hair was becoming something else. When Scott at Jupiter told me that he was coloring my hair to match my natural color, I thought he might be blind because he was coloring my hair so DARK. Turns out – woga – it is dark! Who knew?

But my sideburns are as grey as a morning dove’s feather and the sprinkles around my part are becoming harder to ignore. So I went in and Scott put in some highlights this time against some of the warmer highlights I had from the time before and presto, change-o, grey hair camoflauge.

Who cares what their natural color is – my goal is to not go to the hair stylist every three weeks for all over color, to not sit and get regular pedicures, to not do anything that forces me to be a slave to my upkeep. Scott is taking it step by step trying to help me age gracefully.

There is something so wonderful about being an older mother, about having lived my life a thousand times over before meeting Tin and helping him to make his way through his life. There is also an ease to love at this age, I know myself better today than I did yesterday and this person is committed to commitment, to making this relationship work by allowing it to grow organically and not stepping in to guide it this way or that. In my new found philosophy on life, I’m trying to think of life in terms of not hoarding and recently explored an investment opportunity that was not about monetary gain, but about changing the way society thinks – a different and smarter way to invest. I also have been learning to say no from my gut, something that doesn’t come easy to me – yes pours out of my mouth before I think, yet this feels better – nothing to undo.

The Tao te Ching which I have been thinking about more and more even though I am not reading it daily – says on entry #81:

True words aren’t eloquent;
eloquent words aren’t true.
Wise men don’t need to prove their point;
men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

The Master has no possessions.
The more he does for others,
the happier he is.
The more he gives to others,
the wealthier he is.

The Tao nourishes by not forcing.
By not dominating, the Master leads.