Tag Archives: Self-awareness

Mother, may I…

Posted on May 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

Moms give us life, and they also teach us how to live. There’s the heartfelt stuff, and the truly gushing moments at graduations, weddings and births.

But the real lessons?  These are in the mundane day-to-day admonishments, chore assignments, scoldings, and one-liners – all the stuff you hear in your first 18 years of life. The remarks you rolled your eyes at or slammed your bedroom door on.

And now, you live by these words (you know you do). It all seeped in. You find yourself repeating these lessons to spouses, kids, nieces and nephews. And, to yourself when no one is around.

Some of it is practical, some of it is true wisdom. It all depends on the situation:

  • Make your bed.
  • Don’t put dirty fingerprints all over everything.
  • Don’t touch glass windows and doors (see above).
  • Wash your hands.
  • Take your shoes off in the house.
  • Put your things away.
  • Clean it up. Now. This isn’t a pig sty.
  • Buy quality, but buy it on sale.
  • Take care of your clothes and shoes.
  • Put on your makeup and style your hair. You’ll feel better.
  • Moisturize, preferably with sunscreen.
  • Use eye crème.
  • Take care of your teeth.
  • Get your eyes checked.
  • Wear sunglasses. Good ones.
  • Wear whatever makes you feel good.
  • Tweeze.
  • Don’t ever pretend to be less smart than you are.
  • Look it up in the dictionary.
  • Do your homework.
  • Read the directions and figure it out.
  • Do it yourself.
  • Do it right.
  • You don’t get a reward for doing what you’re supposed to do.
  • Have pets. Love them.
  • Have plants. Love them, too.
  • Eat your vegetables.
  • Sweets are an occasional treat.
  • Don’t fill up on junk.
  • You don’t have to eat it all.
  • Just try a little.
  • Don’t overreact.
  • No one is going to do it for you.
  • Know when you’re being your own worst enemy.
  • Be tactful.
  • Be reasonable.
  • Let it out.
  • Don’t hit.
  • Don’t take any crap. Don’t give it, either.
  • Don’t embarrass me. Or yourself.
  • Admit when it’s your fault.
  • Life’s not fair.
  • The squeaky wheel gets the grease…
  • …but whining won’t make anyone go faster.
  • “Because I said so” – is a valid reason.

I’m sure there’s more, and different iterations of each nugget. I don’t always succeed at each or remember each lesson exactly when I should. But, as Mom would say, it had better not be from a lack of trying.

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Posted in How I got "here", Motivation

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3 Things NOT to skimp on…

Posted on January 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

It might be wear and tear. That’s the answer to a question I’ll ask later. To get there, I’m going to share what I think is the most important advice I can give: There are certain things that you should absolutely not skimp on if  you want to improve overall quality of life.

1. Buy the best shoes you can afford. Save up if you have to.

My gender will likely give a chorus cry of horror when I say that I hate shoe shopping. I have very small feet (women’s size 5 ½) and shoe store shipments come with only 1-3 pairs in the 5 – 6 size range for each shoe style.

The display shoes are *always* the smallest size that a store has on hand for that style. It just looks better than a size 12 canoe balanced on the edge of a shoebox. I always check the size of the display shoe before I get my hopes up. More often than not, I go home empty-handed.

This has saved me from buying cheap shoes (or many shoes for that matter). Even so, I wouldn’t buy a pair of $9.99 pumps if you paid for them and then paid me every time I wore them. I have tendonitis which can make my right foot swell up like a sausage. My toes won’t bend and I hobble. A flare up is closely related to the quality and style of shoe I most recently wore. Fact.

I like walking. I want to continue to walk. So when I’m wearing my admittedly unattractive Doc Martens oxfords or Merrell hiking shoes it’s probably good that my feet (and the shoes) are small.

High heeled pumps and hard-soled flats are bad news for me. I own a few pairs for situations that call for it, but made sure to buy quality.

And while we’re on the subject, I really don’t get these kids who walk around everywhere in $3.00 flip flops.

2. Buy the best mattress you can afford. Save up if you have to.

You spend an average of 6-8 hours on your mattress every day. You know how a bad mattress can ruin a trip? What about your mattress at home? If it’s more than 7 years old and you paid less for it than you did for your TV, then I would be willing to bet that you don’t sleep that well anyway. You have back pain or neck pain, or both.

Don’t skimp on your mattress. Take the time to shop for the best you can afford. It will change your life.  As for the potential high price, ask yourself this: If this was the price tag of a top line plasma TV with surround sound, would you balk? No, because you can see the quality. One night on your new mattress and you’ll hate that you made yourself suffer for so long.

3. Buy the best home office chair you can afford. Save up if you have to.

The average retail office chair is made for the average size person. I am petite and chairs that fit me are “Task” chairs. I.e.: Not meant for long term use. I have purchased three office chairs in three years trying to find one that fits both my stature and my usage.

Herman Miller Aeron Chair

Yes, it’s worth every penny.  (Milton stapler photo bomb.)

Last week, after calculating how much I stand to spend at the chiropractor this year, I dipped into my savings to buy a Herman Miller Aeron chair. Yes, that chair. I had one at The Job and I have missed it terribly in the last year of freelance writing.

It is “size A” (for petite persons) with all the adjustments that make this chair really fit me. For all the hours that I will get lost in typing, at least now I won’t stand up feeling like I just got hit by a truck. I’m sitting in it right now and, yes, it feels good.

When preparing to spend your hard-earned money, be aware that our throwaway consumer culture has turned our priorities upside down. Some people will buy an entire meal for $1.00, get it from a hole in the side of a building, and wonder later why they don’t feel so good. Cheap ≠ good.

A big sale on already cheaply made shoes, mattresses and office chairs is the same kind of equation, except it might take years to notice the downside.

Most of us sit, sleep, and walk every day. It has taken me several decades to figure out that not skimping on what goes into these things  make for the biggest return on my quality of life.

Why did it take decades for me to figure this out? It might be that the wear and tear on my body finally caught up. Twenty years ago, I sat on the floor, slept soundly on a thin dorm mattress, and worshiped Payless.

I plan to sit, sleep, and walk for several more decades. Buy quality and you cry only once. Don’t skimp!

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Posted in Business of Freelance Writing, How I got "here", Motivation, Old jobs

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Like…So… The New “um.”

Posted on November 11, 2012 | 4 Comments

They’re called discourse markers. Short utterances such as “um” or “uh” are cues to the listener that you are about to pause or that you’re placing emphasis that will become apparent in context. (ref: ABC News)

Then there is “Like” and “So.” I hate them, but am, oh-so guilty, of using them myself.

By my unscientific estimation, “Like” started creeping into everyday speech about 20 years ago. I don’t know who started it, or why, but clearly our spoken language is changing. It’s rarely ever written, unless you are, like, trying to be edgy or are trying to prove a point. (And because it looks stupid.)

If either of the Presidential candidates stood at their podiums on election night and peppered their speeches with “Like” and “So,” even we among the “Like-So”-guilty would be unimpressed. Our everyday vernacular may have become artless, but we certainly expect public figures to speak with more poise.

Why do we do it? Why, when we speak, do we end a statement with “So…”? Usually, “so” indicates there’s more to come, but in this new case “so…” is followed by nothing.

Why has the word “Like” become a way to build up emphasis? Or, replacing “she said” with “she was all like”?

For example:

“She was all like, I’m not gonna do that.”

Versus:

“She said, I’m not gonna do that.”

The ‘she’ of the first statement has an implied body language and tone, and possibly did not even say anything. This is a description of a scene as filtered through the speaker – and in this way we are invited to speculate on ‘she’. The ‘she’ of the second statement is attributed with a quote – the quote is reported and there is no further speculation invited. Do both statements mean the same?

I do accept that discourse markers convey meaning, even as I reject “Like” and “So” as language hijackers that erode vocabulary and creativity.

As a writer, I have a dictionary, thesaurus and Latin dictionary within arm’s reach. The words that I type have for too long been shown more care than the words that come out of my mouth. For my part, I have started to make an effort to stop using “Like” or “So” as filler words when I speak.

For language’s sake. Even if the lexicon is against me.

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Marines, police prepare for mock zombie apocalypse

Posted on October 28, 2012 | 1 Comment

That’s a real headline that I read in my morning newspaper for an Associated Press article on a counter-terrorism summit being hosted by a security firm. Marines, Navy special ops, soldiers, police and firefighters are attending the training demonstration being held on October 31st at a 44-acre resort island on a San Diego Bay.

Um, what?

This tongue-in-cheek event comes after last year’s CDC campaign that “urged Americans to get ready for a zombie apocalypse, as part of a catchy, public health message about the importance of emergency preparedness.”

Wait, what?

If this guy shows up on Halloween, we cheer and give him candy. Any other day, he gets a sharp blow to the head.

Halloween is only 3 days away, but you have to admit that America is obsessed by an overwhelming horde of un-dead all year long. I’m sure that a few ‘zombies’ will scratch at my door moaning for fun size candy bars, but a part of me does hope that it’ll just be kids in good makeup and I won’t have to nail plywood over my windows (…like people are doing up and down the east coast getting ready for Hurricane Sandy/Frankenstorm.)

Little do the CDC and our SoCal war games friends know, but a Zombie Apocalypse has, in fact, become my newest irrational fear. I’m a faithful viewer of AMC’s The Walking Dead, despite my nightmares. This summer I read Max Brooks’ 2006 bestseller World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. More nightmares. In these nightmares, however, I never actually encounter a zombie. It is more about the running, the hiding, trying to find food, a secure shelter and weapons.

What I’m really afraid of, I guess, is social collapse. When Hurricane Katrina finally swept out of the Gulf Coast, the compounding horrors of complete disorder during and after the storm dominated the news. A zombie horde may as well have staggered through New Orleans.

I’m beginning to think that it’s okay to be worried. The fact that there is a real event training real military personnel how to deal with a crowd of non-compliant, unarmed individuals kind of scares me.

“But they’re zombies, not people.”

How easy it becomes to dehumanize the opposition in a desperate situation. Like last week on The Walking Dead when Rick machete-d the perfectly alive convict’s head after he shoved Mr. Bitey in Rick’s direction during a Walker melee. Line crossed yet? Who crossed it?

Fear and self-preservation are powerful motivators. Zombies, though, have neither – the problem is that there are just so many of them. They overwhelm. It’s not that they flout the laws of civilization – that would imply consciousness. Zombies don’t have that, either.

At first glance it seems that the zombie has been able to shed our cultural obsession with material goods and physical image. They have simply distilled it down to a single imperative: Consume. Nothing else matters.

The CDC campaign and the emergency response simulation are officially meant to be “playful” and “fun.”

But, what does it mean that a security company named Halo Corp. is training military, law enforcement and medical personnel how to manage (kill?) an overwhelming force of ultimate consumers?

Maybe it means that we should be scared. Board the windows. Stock up on water and batteries. Unwrap a Snickers.

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Posted in Outside my comfort zone, Storytelling

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First World Problems

Posted on October 21, 2012 | 13 Comments

My new home office. Wonky furniture placement and air-seeping windows are good problems to have.

The new home office/writer’s den is finished! We moved in my furniture, wired the room for the network, and I’ve spent the last week enjoying the view from the windows overlooking our pine tree. Bird watching here is a far better occasional distraction than garbage trucks out front.

The first furniture arrangement had my laptop worktable facing a wall, which is bad feng shui. Turning the table 90 degrees to face out the windows is, however, awkward placement related to my desk. In the end the view outside won over. It was angst-filled and time-consuming furniture shuffling, and a prime example of what is called a First World Problem.

I didn’t coin the phrase, but I am going to co-opt it. What’s a “First World Problem” you ask? A Google search will open up the phrase for you in far more morbidly illuminating ways than I could ever hope to accomplish here. Urban Dictionary defines it as:

Problems from living in a wealthy, industrialized nation that third worlders would probably roll their eyes at.

For example: Oh, I’m so conflicted – which way should I turn my worktable in my private, hi-tech equipped home office overlooking a pine tree bird sanctuary? In the last couple of weeks, a girl in Pakistan was shot in the head for going to school. A 16 month old Mali child was brought into a clinic with pneumonia and anemia, weighing nine pounds. A 20 year old woman in Afghanistan was beheaded for refusing to become a prostitute.

These stories are shocking on their own, but deeper tragedies emerge when you consider the ‘why’ of each situation. What is life like where it is dangerous for a schoolgirl to learn? Where a toddler is so malnourished as to be outweighed by western newborns? And where refusing to sell your body for sex to feed your extended family is grounds for getting your head chopped off? Where to put my worktable, indeed.

Problem perception is highly subjective. A few weeks ago during our trip to the Adirondacks, my watch battery died. I couldn’t stand not knowing the time and ended up buying an inexpensive watch. First World Problem.

Have you seen the commercials for scoop-shaped breaded chicken? Apparently, standard chicken strips are under performing when it comes to scooping up ranch dip. No doubt a focus group revealed that fast food customers spend a lot of time dredging their fried chicken for proper dip coverage. First World Problem.

To be fair, westerners do suffer a share of real hardships from economic woes, health issues and criminal violence, just to name a few. We don’t necessarily have to flog ourselves out of guilt.

But, lost sunglasses? Uncharged smartphone? Cable signal out? Forgot to start the dishwasher? In our everyday, western world, richest nation life, any of us would number these among our problems. No judgements.

From now on, though, every time I find myself bemoaning a similar problem, I plan to pause and luxuriate in the moment. Just to be grateful that this is the problem I have, as I’m sure there are some starving, wounded or dead people who would trade places with me in a heartbeat.

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