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A friend was visiting this weekend and in a conversation he said, “A mom would think her kid’s the best even if he went out and shot somebody.” Well, that’s stretching it, but one thing that is for certain, ain’t no love like mama love. I was speaking to a friend today who recently lost her mother and since we both have just gone through this we were talking about how it sort of wakes you up and tells you to look around at your life, at your relationships, and at yourself and to cauterize anything that doesn’t serve you asap.

Indeed, I felt that when I was at Michele’s Rockasana class and she was describing this river of light that runs through us and that if we move too far to the left, we over index to the female and therefore are attracted to things that do not serve us and are attached too much to the past, and when we over index to the right, we are angry and impatient. The goal in life is to merge these two channels into the river of light in the center and that when we operate from there, we are truly ourselves.

Most of us know when we have gone off center, like the I Ching Master told me in Shanghai several years ago, don’t go too far in one direction in your thinking. If you push too far away from the center, you lose yourself.

I was thinking about all this today as I spoke to a colleague about our children who are no longer babies but now are toddlers, that being a mom is the best thing I’ve done in my life, and that I appreciate the fact that my mother loved me despite all the torture I put that woman through in one lifetime (not that she was an angel, you hear?). That endless well of love was natural and flowed through her like a river of light.

I miss her, and that unconditional love that she gave me every day of my being. Who is gonna love you like your mom? I ask you.

We had a doctor’s appointment this morning and Tin did fabulous considering he had to get two shots. Since I opted for a flu shot too, I went first to show him what a big girl I can be. But one of his shots was a doozy, so after that he decided he knew no words to tell his pediatrician. Except when he did calm down, he looked outside and saw the big sign for TOURO and said, “O” and she was impressed.

She told me the best way to deal with tantrums is to say I am not going to talk to you while you are having a fit, and then to wait until he has calmed down and say, “Now that you are calm, what is that I can help you with?” That this helps to not reinforce the fit, and to reinforce skills for learning how to calm yourself down.

Tatjana said she needed these skills. We probably could all use some lessons in how to curb our temper.

L’Shana Tova everyone – tonight begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Growing up in an orthodox family, my high holidays were spent going to the synagogue with my parents, sitting underneath the widespread wings of my father’s tallit, and listening to his beautiful voice chant the readings with that wonderful Sephardic inflection. We had rhythm. I often yearn around this time, when the sun’s rays turn to a slant and the days grow shorter to hear the shofar being blown – it’s an anachronism from my youth.

Obama had a message out today wishing L’Shana Tova to the world with a prayer for peace between Palestine and Israel – now that is one milestone I’d like to see crossed in my lifetime. After all, we are the world, right? A rich tapestry of cultures, right?

L’Shana Tova y’all – dream big – world peace, peace in the Middle East, peace in your heart and in your home, peace for all those little children who need love and support, peace for all those who suffer, peace for all those who are not as fortunate as we are and need our help. Peace and Love.

Who dat! Notice it is not a question mark anymore, it has become a declarative – Who dat! As the season opens tomorrow night with more hoopla that you could imagine in this city and this city has put on some hoopla, I’m sort of mixed about the whole thing. First, I was sort of unaware the season was starting tomorrow until clients, colleagues and sources started asking me if I was excited. Then I was very surprised when I saw Jackson Square converted into this giant outdoor arena. And the parade, well, forgetabout it. Restaurants are closed tomorrow so their staff can watch the game – are you starting to get a sense of what is happening here?

Am I excited? I feel like if the Saints did nothing else in their history they have done right by me and this city and I guess my expectations are sort of muted. Am I excited the season is starting – yes, I am, but do I want to get near to having a heart attack like I did in 2006/7 then again in 2009/10, no.

I was speaking to someone in a foreign country who told me they didn’t have access to something online because the government blocks the site. It made me think about Obama and how the big opposition to him and all the hullabaloo about whether or not he is a Muslim is not personal, it really stems from a fear of government.

Reading an article by Maureen Dowd in Saudia Arabia, my stomach clenches at the thought of being under a government that has that much control over its people. I was reading about someone who went to Argentina to farm and the government took control of his land. The reality is governments have interfered with our lives whether we wanted them to or not. Those who live(d) under socialist, communist, dictatorship rule give over a certain amount of freedom to gain a certain amount of support – but the average American abhors government controls, rule, and support.

I remember those cold dream wars just like most people of my age, where the Russians were going to come and take control of our country, our lives, our destiny. You wake up sweating and your heart racing. I can tell you now that I still bristle when I hear something like a government blocking a website. It sounds, well, foreign. I can remember being in China with a typhoon headed our way and most of the information being blocked on the web.

I don’t want to subscribe to fear but I do understand where it comes from, so Obama don’t take it personally. In an ideal world the government would step in and regulate the excesses on Wall Street, banking and corporate America in general, but the fear that the government might slip into regulating my body, my gender, my personal life is always a greater fear indeed.

The Ogden has launched their Start With Art kid’s program which combines music and art for one to five year olds on Tuesday mornings from 10 to 11. Tin and his nanny did this series three Wednesday in a row and it was great – he did his first craft projects, learned songs and more importantly he learned about classrooms, groups and museums.

Donna’s on Rampart Street closed its doors. The times we saw Evan Christopher and Tom McDermott on Thursday nights there for a mere drop in the bucket are now a memory. Goodbye Donna’s, we’ll miss you.

You know what they say about terrible twos – they’re horrible, yeah well there are terrible 18 months onward as well. Tin has entered the phase where he is frustrated by air molecules not blowing the way he wants them to and so it has become a little testy around the okay corral. My intuition and most of what I read all point to the same thing – do not respond to manipulative tantrums, and support him when they are frustration tantrums. But most of all it’s about keeping him on schedule – eating, sleeping, etc – anything that gets him out of his rhythm sets us all up for a meltdown almost as a matter of course.

The problem is that Tin is trying to tell us something but we don’t understand him so he throws his binky down when he’s angry, he flails his body when we don’t respond the way he wants us to, and generally, it sometimes feels for this little boy like it’s him against the world. So our time together is spent taking two steps forward and some days five back, and some days two equals three and we make progress. I’d have to say it’s all a guessing game these days but I don’t know why they don’t have a name for this stage – something like menses or monthes – when the mouth is full of words but no one understands but you age.

Petraeus Warns Against Planned Koran-Burning (NYT)

By ADAM B. ELLICK

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said that plans by a Florida church to burn Korans on Sept. 11 could play into the hands of extremists.

Since we hired Tin’s nanny, we asked her to keep a journal of the day, for things that are helpful to know – how many BMs, what new words or discoveries were made, or anything pertinent to our understanding of how his day went without us.

While my friend was here, he received a text message from the woman watching his cat. It went like this:

Went to visit cat, she came out to greet me. I petted her and played with her and her toy mouse, then I fed her and cleaned the litter box. She was purring and in a good mood. I sat on the couch and let her come to my lap and petted her some more. She seemed to enjoy the attention. She finished her food and drank some water then she ran around chasing her toy feather. She was curled up on the chair when I left.

Yesterday, for Labor Day, since the nanny was here, we took the day off and went with our out-of-town friends to tour the 9th Ward and then over to the Country Club in the Bywater. The Country Club is where I held my 50th birthday party, which was a blast and just so happens these same friends had come in for that occasion as well.

Since this was Southern Decadence weekend and the Country Club is a gay, clothing optional resort complete with restaurant and sauna and pool, the place was packed – every lounge chair taken and an overwhelming smell of Coppertone and body heat wafted through the air.

One of the issues about being in a same sex relationship as a woman is dealing with the ever spiraling up and down of emotions whether emotional baggage, emotional dissonance, emota-speak, emotional this and that. There really is no pause that occurs as between a man and a woman, where the woman’s ever increasing need for emotional connectedness and communication gets stymied by man’s ever increasing need to distract himself from weighty emotional matters.

However, the curiousness of men who are with men is that you rarely broach emotions at all, almost as if the entire discourse is hell bent on skirting any hint of emotional innuendo. Or maybe so it seems. In a 72-hour period, I am no closer to learning the emotional state of any of the six male friends I have been around than I would be with the fish in the bayou. Had these been six women, forgetaboutit, I wouldn’t have even needed six minutes to know how everyone was feeling and why.

The narrative of the weekend could have gone like this:

LOST AND FOUND: Time passes, we age. W, 22, woke feeling on top of his game. D, 47, woke thinking otherwise. The sun came out in the morning and disappeared behind greyness. A pricey pair of sunglasses were lost and reappeared. Blekica went missing. No one panicked. She was found.