12:00 p -
Greetings from N'ahlins
New Orleans. City of night life, history, amazing food, devastation. I can't see anything from my window that hints at the horror that still remains just miles from here. I can see Harrah's Casino to the left and the French Quarter is just to the right of our hotel. We are very near the water; the water that looks so lovely now but was a weapon of destruction in August of '05. We passed the Superdome yesterday in the taxi and I had flashbacks of the news we all watched unfold; the video feed of desperate people huddled outside and inside the very building that stood in eery silence as we passed. The streets last night were relatively quiet. Tourists are beginning to filter back into the city. Mardi Gras starts in a couple of weeks. God, what a reminder that things can change in a moment...life as we know it can be ripped from us and we can be thrust into a hell we never imagined. These people, the ones who stuck it out through the horror, were changed forever. We can never really understand this secret society of survivors and the impressions Katrina made on them. We can just stare curiously at the posters and books that are for sale in the shop windows, and remember how we all watched and waited and prayed and hoped and mourned with the masses of New Orleans and their families.
I am enjoying a little rest and relaxation with Diana. Well, I am relaxing....she is working. Today is chill day. Last night was fun, daquiris and good old blues. I didn't drink too much but was able to unwind a bit. I've been so stressed lately. Many forces working against me. To make matters more complicated, I failed the mystery shop just before my vacation. Not just a little slip.....a freakin' 76. I was vacant that morning. I knew it as soon as my co-worker identified the shopper. I was busted. Once again allowed my personal woes to interfere with work.
Between worrying about the wedding costs and being oh so "fish out of water" even trying to help plan, worrying about my grandmother and her having to surrender her home and begin a new life at the assisted living facility, worrying about Christa and the baby-daddy fiasco, worrying about my up and down relationship with Zach, AND the little things that come up between Diana and I......OH, and extreme PMS this month (peaking the morning of the mystery shop) I've been sort of between a proverbial rock and a hard place. But this shop disaster has taught me that I HAVE to learn to separate my personal/work lives. I dread the moment I walk into work on Friday morning and have to face my boss. This is BIG stuff to them. Very big. And our shops have been 100% straight across the board. Until me. Funny though, how things work out. The results luckily didn't come in until Friday. I left Thursday. And my return is on Friday so I only have one day to work through the discomfort of facing them for the first time since the big fail. I will live.
My relationship with Diana, despite occasional snags.....continues to flourish. My love for her takes my breath away. She sometimes asks me if I think I'm gay. I really don't know how to answer that. Not once has touching her felt strange. Not once have I thought this is not where I should be, from a girl/girl standpoint. There have been some regrets when it comes to how I handled things, and watching the pain I caused others. But never have I missed a man's touch. Do I have to label myself? I think what it all boils down to, is that I fell in love with a PERSON. It didn't matter what gender that person was.....I fell for the soul, not the packaging. I've always been a pretty sexual person so adapting to different styles of lovemaking just flowed. I do wonder at times, if we do not stay together if I'd end up with another woman, or a man. I look at men now differently. So many of them I wait on at work seem so .....well.....MANNISH. To stereotype....chest beating, sports loving, beer drinking, unemotional blobs. I always gravitated toward men who had emotions, not those types anyway. But I don't find that I'm even remotely attracted to men these days. So maybe I am gay....maybe I always was. Or not.
I called my grandmother today. She fell again at her new place. She's ok but a bit bruised again. She wants to go home. Home was just a familiar place to her, there was nothing else that was too special about it. She had no real support system in the neighborhood and spent most of her time just sitting (or lying) around watching tv. I didn't visit much. Now she is closer and visits are easier. It's hard to look at her and think that we all will be at that place one day. Unless of course we die an untimely death. Maybe that would be better? She's 88 and just in the last year started to "lose it" to the point where she couldn't drive or be left alone much. God, 88 seems like an eternity from now but as quickly as my life has passed I know it's not. I don't know that it's better that I've experienced so much in my 48 years or if it would have been easier if I had not. But I hate watching her fade. We were once very close....closer than I was to my own mother. Maybe before she passes, we will be there again.
