Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

When I was 23, I left my first husband after being married for just about 10 months. Of course, we should never have gotten married in the first place, which was, I have always said, painfully obvious in hindsight.

But really, it was obvious beforehand. It was obvious when he brought home size 6 clothes for me, when he knew I was an 8 (but I could be a 6 if I tried). It was obvious when I found out, after a car accident, that he didn’t have a valid driver’s license (just some tickets he hadn’t taken care of. No big deal.) It was obvious when he took a hammer to my engagement ring after a fight (full disclosure, I’d started it by criticizing his treatment of his mother, which was, he said, none of my business, and had wrenched it from my finger and thrown it at him mid-fight.) Not the best signs. But I stayed. I took that deal. And I married him.

If I could go back, I don’t even know what I would say to that girl. Shake her, maybe. Because she was so willfully blind, or so willfully focused, or maybe just incredibly stupid. I thought it would get better. I thought we just needed to get settled. Or maybe we needed a change of scenery. We were just passionate, not dysfunctional.

I’ve heard it said that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is that we’re foolish (naïve, irrational, bone-headed, desperate, reactive) and make bad choices. And there it is, sometimes bad things happen because we make bad choices. Sometimes the bad choices are painfully obvious, to us, to those around us. And yet we make them anyway. We accept a deal that’s a stacked deck because of a myriad of background issues, our own personal foundational cracks and insecurities, previous heartbreak and heartburn. We don’t live in a vacuum, and we don’t make decisions in one.

When I was 23, after 10 months of marriage, my brother had a health scare on the East Coast while I was thousands of miles away in Colorado. I got the news in an email from my mother the next morning. I was late getting into the shower. I was late getting out of the shower. My lack of basic consideration meant that my ex was now also running late. Might even be late for work, because of me. I don’t remember if he was. I do remember that he said things no one should say to anyone, let alone their wife. Mean things, especially to someone who was never a natural size 6, but had tried, and who was still wrapped in a towel, and inescapably vulnerable to the icy acidity of the cutting inventory of my bodily and marital flaws.

And so I left him that day.

Realizing a bad decision, or even coming out of a bad decision, doesn’t negate it. We’re a sum of our parts. It simply means that I made bad choices, but am now making the choice to make new choices. There’s almost necessarily some collateral damage along the way. Some of it is repairable. Some is not. Some people will forgive you and welcome you back. Some will not. It’s not up to you and you have to make peace with that, even when it hurts.

New choices take some distance, some soul searching, some willingness to see that we weren’t irreproachable ourselves. I was culpable in my own disgrace. I could give you a dozen easy reasons why it wasn’t my fault. But in the end, I made that deal with all its concessions. But also my choice to rebuild, refocus, rebrand, remake.

Whether a person believes that the nation’s electoral college win for Trump – which is a win for the presidency, I don’t dispute – is a black hole of bad decisions doesn’t matter much at this point. We can unfriend and hashtag and yell into the void for as long as we want. As a nation, we made that choice. We decided, apparently, that we’re just passionate, not dysfunctional. As a nation, we agreed to certain concessions.

And so, we jumped into a relationship that is bound to be volatile at best. Bernie Sanders supporters may blame the DNC. Hillary Clinton may blame Jim Comey. The blue states may blame the Rust Belt, or the 40% of Americans who don’t vote. Millennials who are too entitled. Baby boomers who are too rigid. I’m not convinced that even Donald Trump is super happy with the result. It turns out he applied for a really big job, and he got it.

In the end, though, retrospective armchair quarterbacking is only significant if we do a little soul searching on top of it. I’m still angry. And I’m still despondent. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how incredulous I am if I don’t question my own culpability.

Enough Americans feel they’ve we’ve been hurt tangibly as a country because of [personally-specific reason here], that we’re willing to go in a completely new direction, as long as it’s unrecognizable from our past. Sometimes our choices don’t say nearly as much about who we are, or our foundational beliefs, as they do about what we have just immediately walked through. Sometimes we whiplash from painful into toxic before we can walk out. I’ve been there. In the end, it’s as Shakespeare said, “What’s past is prologue.” We can’t change it, but we can react to it. There’s a whole play after the prologue; we’ve all got parts.

No matter what we’ve done, “inexorably, unalterably done,” we control our next choice. We choose when to stay, we choose when to walk. And it’s infinitely more complicated than that, of course, and far from fair. Regardless, our choices can’t be expunged. And sometimes the consequences are incredibly high, either to ourselves, or others, or if you’re the President-elect of the United States, then potentially for the world.

While I might despair that the new administration’s first Cabinet choices include white males known more for their racism than their open-mindedness, I can celebrate that social justice and civil liberties groups have seen a huge groundswell of support, record breaking donations.

For all the good people who voted against Trump, we feel pummeled, irate, afraid, inspired to activism, but with the election in our rearview mirror, our outrage is only as good as our follow-through, and only as useful as our pragmatism.

For all the good people who voted for Trump, the country needs your voice now more than ever. To speak for those who are afraid. To speak up against a Chief Counsel with alt-right views. To protest loudly when a new Chief of Staff will not rule out a Muslim registry on the Sunday talk show circuit. To admit that to be white and straight in America is not the same as being gay, or brown, or otherwise marginalized. To admit that some people are marginalized, and to commit to using our privilege to protect their rights.

For those who voted against the president-elect, for those who voted for him, but reject the rhetoric that came with the campaign, there are myriad of choices that can be made now that will reassure a nervous nation and a worried world.

And for everyone who voted neither blue nor red, it’s time we all make choices so that every voter feels like they have a voice in this process and are motivated to use it. We each need to hold ourselves accountable. We need to agree that we hold some truths to be self-evident. That verbiage should sound comforting and familiar and seems like a good place to begin.

We’re in this horrible chasm right now and chasms create echo chambers and have such little light. We start thinking the shadows are real, and we forget we have the ability, and the responsibility, to walk out into the light, confront life in all its three-dimensional forms. When Trump objectifies, patronizes women (et al., et al., et al.), I think back to the young woman who was never a comfortable size 6, but who – for a little while – tried to be. And who faded away, insubstantial but still a size 8. For a little while, she believed the shadows were real.

The reasons that we make choices that compromise our best selves isn’t because we’re bad people, or incredibly dumb, or hateful or uneducated. We make choices because of our own backstory, because for each of us, in this moment, there are certain things we fear more than others. The 22-year-old fears of the girl who stayed were different than those of the 23-year-old who left. The 23-year-old made the choice to make new choices, and years later, I’ve been shaped by her renewed resolve. I’m grateful to her.

As a country, we’ve made choices, but we aren’t beholden to any past choices going forward. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to nullify a relationship so soon after minting it. But it’s even worse to let ourselves be subservient to it.

Knowing the right steps to stop demonizing each other while also staying true to our personal beliefs is hard. The chasm feels deep and painful. I will never be okay with the rhetoric of racism. I will never be okay with casual misogyny. But I am open to the idea that we are better than both of those things, no matter who we voted for. Now we become braver and stronger than our anger and despondency and fears. We live up to our potential instead of down to our fear. With one big choice behind us, we can now choose to stay or go. We can choose to make sure that no one in our country feels afraid because of who they are, how they worship or who they love.

When I was 37, I voted for the losing candidate in a demoralizing, poisonous presidential campaign that took a piece of my optimism and idealism with it. It feels a little like a bad relationship foisted upon the country and throws lurky shadows of poor choices and ghosts I’ve left behind.

But as I’ve learned, the best time for good choices is after a bad one.

 

When I was young, and not so young, I found a lot of comfort sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, in the maybe three feet between their bedframe and my father’s vinyl collection. I listened to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Little Feat and Leonard Cohen. Abbey Road and Sergeant Pepper. I danced with my father to Jesse Winchester at my wedding, Lay Down the Burden of Your Heart.

Someone at some point had painted the hardwoods of the upstairs of our house. Eventually, we sanded and resealed some of them, but we never got to parents’ room. The paint on the floor there was brown, but had started to wear away. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel like it needed to be changed, repainted or sanded down, polyurethaned to a glossy oak. It was a safe space. A cubby and a generation of singer-songwriters. It was your most comfortable, much-worn sweatshirt. The kind that you put on when life threatens to crush your spirit, and you just want to wrap comfort around you. But also the kind that you slip into when everything is going right, and you need no frills or trimmings to feel content. It’s soft, and faded and dependable. That nook in my parents’ room was soul affirming.

Right now, I’m so awfully tired. I cried myself to sleep Tuesday night. I almost worked from home on Wednesday, but decided that that was weak, and that I am weak, and I’d spend my day diving into too many commentaries and opinions and dire forecasts. So, I went to work, to my office where it is 85% male and military, and my political affiliation is probably just as uncommon as my gender.

I tried to keep it together. I didn’t completely fail, but I didn’t completely succeed, either. And no one said a single thing that was anything other than considerate, even though by and large, they didn’t feel the same despair. People with whom I had crossed swords throughout the last seemingly interminable few months were deferential, knowing it was a dark day for me. I had been so sure that I would be the one who would be gracious and respectful, restrained and tasteful in victory, that my vision for my country was the only one that would, could, win out in the end.

It didn’t work out that way, and I was – am – heartbroken. But unlike the online vitriol of the last 18 months, the click-bait and the partisanship, the actual people in my life whom I appreciate, but share little political common ground, those people were still my people first. There’s a lesson there, obviously, when everything hurts a little less, and I’m ready to start looking at lessons.

Ray Bradbury said, “Stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you.” Part of me thought, what is possibly left to say, and what’s the point? Many, many people said everything already, and much more succinctly, much more eloquently, much more powerfully than I could. People chose not to listen. And so a few more tears grew hot behind my eyes, tears of frustration and anger and disappointment. Aloud I said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I anticipated the news of a rise in hate crimes and felt darkly vindicated in my grief when they appeared, as expected. What did we expect? What words are there?

As as I processed the grief, as the initial shock began to wear off, I remembered that sometimes words aren’t for other people. Sometimes they are for us. Sometimes they are cathartic, sometimes cauterizing. Sometimes they’re just there, and ask to be let loose.

I rolled sentences around as I brushed my teeth. I composed introductions as I shampooed. I scribbled down thoughts at work. Despite the deference at work, I’m grieving and will be. I’ve lost a piece of my idealism, and it hurts. When something hurts, writing is my go-to to process that. Stage 2. Anger. “I was summarily fired 30 days after maternity leave,” I wanted to scream to the doubters who said that Clinton’s sex had nothing to do with her defeat, who somehow saw the race as a level playing field in a culture that still plays to archetypes. “Raise your hand if you’ve been assaulted by anonymous hands in a darkened bar, or a crowded street, or if you’ve stared down someone who you thought you knew, who touched you without permission.” Are we all raising our hands now? I know I am. And yet 42% of women still voted in the person who normalizes sexual assault culture as locker room banter, and demonizes the women who would dare to confront him. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, my tired, tired heart cried. Maybe I could understand not voting for Clinton. But how could people vote for a veritable caricature of patriarchal power? How?

What it comes down to is that I don’t understand. I probably won’t. I’m middle class and white, though. I’ll weather the next four years. But I’m afraid for women who are afraid to wear their hijab. I’m brokenhearted for Hispanic children who are taunted on playgrounds, “Build the wall, build the wall!” I wonder if we’re going to even have snow this year, as we enjoy another 70-degree day in November. Or if we’re going to have snowmaggedon in March as the pendulum swings.

And then Leonard Cohen died today.

That’s really piling it on, Universe. Could you maybe leave 2016 alone for the rest of the year?

And so I listened to my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. Suzanne. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. Dance Me to the End of Love. Hallelujah. Anthem. And then I listened to the entirety of the Jesse Winchester album, Let the Rough Side Drag. If I close my eyes, I can picture the yellow album cover of the vinyl record my dad still owns. I can hear the sound of the needle dropping onto the vinyl. I can picture the fading brown paint under my feet and the bedframe at my back. Even though that house no longer exists, the scared floors long gone, it feels so solid.

I still don’t understand how everything I hold so sacrosanct could be so fluid to someone else. I know it works both ways. I am an enigma to a solid handful of people in my life who do not understand how I came to my own immutable truths. They like me, anyway, and they are no more one-dimensional than I am. I want to be optimistic, but for me, it’s too soon for optimism. The future seems far less solid than I anticipated. I worry for those who have been promised disenfranchisement. My heart contracts painfully each time it thinks, SCOTUS. No, no, no. (Be well, RBG. Be well.)

In his final creative gift, Leonard Cohen gave me my favorite, well-worn much-loved sweatshirt to pull around me tonight. And though my world has otherwise been rocked this week, I’m going to take comfort in the fact that even when I don’t have the words, he does.

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.

My brother and his wife just had a new baby. Because their family lives 1200 miles away, I’ve only seen him virtually, but by photograph you can still swear he’s already smiling. Content, protected, much anticipated and much loved. You can see his tiny little fingers with their even tinier fingernails curled up against his cheek as he’s sleeping, and you can imagine that he’s dreaming sweet dreams. Since I can’t nuzzle his soft, downy baby head and breathe in his baby smell, I can anticipate the winter slipping by quickly, so that we can meet in person.

Having a new baby, especially the first, brings out so much hope for the world, and so much fear. In one tiny baby is the story of every baby. It’s amazing, and it’s magical, and it’s scary as hell. The world becomes smaller, knit with that common bond of parents everywhere. But it becomes bigger, and you realize that when your parents let you travel through it, on your own, as a teenager, they were the bravest people you knew.

You cry at the evening news, and you rejoice, and cry, at St. Jude’s success stories. As our children get older, parenting becomes a little more routine. We get a bit lost in the endless loads of laundry, and we aren’t thrilled anymore when our child eats two bites of green beans. There’s still joy and wonder, but once they can throw a granola bar wrapper on the floor and walk away, the moments of awe are balanced by moments of discipline and monotony and sometimes near hysteria, as we find our child covered from head to toe in orange and black marker or red nail polish. Always an adventure, we say, eyes a little crazy and smile a little too bright.

Babies encourage us to look forward, but they also prompt us to look back. To our own childhoods, to our parents’. Beyond. There have been many times, if I’m being honest, that I have compared my life to life on a wagon train heading West, just to remember that I’m probably going to make it through.

My brother carries his grandfather’s name as his middle name, and now so does his son. I was blessed to have amazing grandparents. We don’t necessarily appreciate our grandparents as much as we should when we’re young, and yet they have incredible impact on us, as I know my own children, and my new nephew, will come to know, as well. Grandparents shape our worldview because they’ve lived so much more than we have, they’ve learned what to fight for, and what to let go. Through them, and the children they raised, we learn what’s worth fighting for.

On my father’s side, my grandparents were longstanding volunteers with the Salvation Army. I can picture the vintage push button phone on the side table by the stairs, the notepad beside it. Someone would need help, that phone would ring, and just like that (or so it seemed to a child), help was en route. They were everyday heroes in plain sight. I realized that in retrospect. At the time, I mostly thought we watched a lot of Lawrence Welk and This Old House, and I liked my grandmother’s backyard goldfish pond, and going fishing with my grandfather to restock it.

I grew up in the same house as my maternal grandmother. She was a church youth group leader, taking teens to areas of need within the US for service projects, she joined adult service trips annually and encouraged me to participate for multiple years in ASP, Appalachian Service Project. In the days of my mother’s childhood, she garnered a reputation of a “friendly house” to railroad hitchhikers. She wrote letters to prisoners and believed passionately in Heifer International, an organization her family still supports today, three generations deep. That my daughter, her great-granddaughter, spends as much time inspecting the Heifer International livestock gift catalog as the Toys R Us wish book is a testament to her enduring service, goodness and grace. She lived, “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”

I’m not at their level. I have better intentions than actions. I get busy with my own life, and I forget my roots. I’m proud of who I come from, but I’m not sure that I’m always living up to their example. But my world view is still foundationally theirs. It’s why I’ve been wound so tightly the last year or so, and even more tightly still the last few months. My world view is at odds with my world, it sometimes seems. My husband and I went to see Billy Joel in concert last fall. He played the classic, We Didn’t Start the Fire, and his stage show showed classic imagery from the original song, spliced with today’s news. We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning, since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire. No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it. …We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re doing much to fight it lately.

In the three months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, validating the Brexit campaign which was built largely on anti-immigration rhetoric and dissatisfaction with the status-quo, homophobic attacks in the UK rose 147%. Hate crimes in general spiked and have now begun to stabilize, in a depressing way, to levels above the pre-Brexit vote. The country voted in intolerance by just 4%. And yet it was a referendum on ugliness. I’m terrified by the parallels in the US.

The day after the Brexit vote, pro-Brexit politicians admitted their grand plan was mostly lip service that they would not be able to deliver. Many voters said that they voted for Brexit never thinking it would actually win, but wanting to lodge a protest vote, to feel heard. Afterward, some voters wondered aloud if there could be a re-do. Except, elections don’t work that way. Voters have to make adult decisions in the first round. How often have I wished that I could see two parallel paths play out. But way leads on to way.

I’ve often seen, and appreciated, and identified with the sentiment, “Who let me adult? I can’t adult.” It feels true in so many ways. I might be the one with the paycheck and the mortgage and the paid-off, hail damaged car, with the carpool duty and the children who are constantly out of clean socks, but surely someone else around here is the adult. I can’t always be counted on to take my make-up off at night, or have plans for dinner, or get my oil changed on time. I can’t adult.

Except – crap, crap, crap – we are the adults. We are the ones in charge of making decisions. We are the ones who have to instill in our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, the worldviews, priorities and basic human decency that will shape their generation. It’s the most adulty part of being an adult.  We get to set our own bedtime and drink on a school night if we choose, we can buy seven shades of pink lip stick in shades from coral to sweet magnolia and watch uncensored HBO shows. But in exchange, it’s up to us to make sure we don’t muck up the world, miscarry justice and botch the compassion and decency meters of our progeny.

Why am I wound so tightly lately? So that my children and husband tip toe around me, soothing and evading in turn. Because I’m not so sure we’re doing a good job. I think about the old metaphor of a frog in a frying pan… the heat increases little by little, but the frog keeps adjusting, little by little, and it never jumps out. I think of the phone ringing in my grandparents’ house, letting them know that a stranger needed help, and their unquestioning devotion to those strangers. I think about my grandmother believing steadfastly in the light of the world overcoming the darkness. In people’s mistakes not defining them, not making them unworthy of prayer and love. I loved my grandparents. I love their memory, and my memories of them. And honestly, I’m glad they aren’t living through this period of US history. I think it would break their hearts.

These are the principles I want my children to live by:

1. Help each other.

Actually, I guess that’s it. That’s what it boils down to. I want them to know that helping someone else is the fastest way to feeling better ourselves. I want them to know that 99.999% of people in this world just want to ensure their own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews are safe, healthy and happy. Our differences are small. Our similarities huge. As my youngest once said, “When people fall down, help them up.” Our 8-year-olds get it.

Our country is currently split, according to the latest polling, at about 45% for each of our major party presidential candidates. In this post-Halloween candy fog, I feel the same way about that as if someone told me that 45% of the country actually likes Good ‘n Plentys. How could that be possible? How would one even begin to comprehend that?

45% split. For arguably the most powerful office on Earth. I realize that my own views make it hard for me to be entirely objective. But one candidate, despite being caricatured as cold and shrill and power-hungry, has spent a career ensuring children’s health care, and seeing that 75% of the world’s AIDS patients are able to seek treatment. The other has spent a career literally gilding his house in gold while both not paying taxes and suing and stiffing those who worked for him (who, by the way, almost assuredly did pay income taxes, in the event they were ever fairly paid.)

No, neither candidate is perfect. No one is. I’m not, either. Even my esteemed grandparents were not. But in this race, one candidate has advocated for fair pay and women’s rights worldwide, and one has mused publically about what a pretty picture a woman can make dropping to her knees. One has visited 112 countries and brokered a peace accord in one of the world’s perpetual hot spots. One wants to have play dates with Putin.

We’re the adults here.  We are the ones who not only get to choose, but who are quite literally responsible for the future. We are the ones who decide whether our politics and policies are helping each other, or helping ourselves. We are the ones who will live with these decisions, because we’re the adults. But we’re not the only ones. Our children get to live with them, too. And while it may make me crazy to pick up those wrappers and argue about homework, I’m still in awe of their amazing compassion and potential. I don’t want to tarnish either of those things for them.

Do we tell them we voted in hate crimes and petty retribution? I’m not speculating. Ask anyone from England, they of the 147% increase in the same. When we talk about building taller walls instead of longer tables, we are telling our children that when the phone rings, we don’t answer. When someone falls, we walk by. That when we disagree, we threaten our opposition with their life and freedom, because we’re out of real ideas. We are telling them that we’re tired of adulting.

We are defining a generation by our actions. I want to affirm for my children the world that my grandparents prepared for me. That world cannot be based on fear and division, stoking hate under a paralyzed frog in a frying pan. We’re the adults. We have to jump.

Every four years or so, people become significantly more vested and attentive to the first ten amendments to our Constitution.

People who mostly live their lives thinking about how to attend soccer games of both children on Saturday morning while also getting groceries and cleaning bathrooms before the in-laws come over for dinner are suddenly faced with the manufactured choice between being able to shoot their potential rapist in a dark parking garage, or letting 20 kindergarteners die at the hands of a maniac.

Except, of course, the truth is always somewhere in between. Most conservatives have no issue with ending gun show and internet loopholes. Most liberals have no wish to rid the country of guns. I’ve never even held a gun myself, and yet I’m able to walk by the gun club next to my work without shouting angry slogans. Remarkable, right? I’ve also never sky-dived or collected stamps. I’m fine with anyone doing those things as well. I avoid horror movies like the plague. And yet am married to someone who loves them. It’s almost like we’re different people with different preferences, living in the same house by simultaneously indulging and avoiding what doesn’t appeal to us individually.

But as a nation, stoked by the assumption that someone who doesn’t think like us thinks against us, the rhetoric ratchets it up and up until a country that actually sees eye to eye in broad strokes is consumed by animosity toward each other.

And meanwhile, we have a love hate relationship with our very first tenet in our Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, religion and the press. It’s all good when it’s protecting our value system. When we feel like our principles are being served and validated. But it feels a lot more uncomfortable when our sense of righteousness is encroached upon. Then it’s pretty easy to call foul. Then it’s pretty easy to be shocked by the unprincipled, downright immoral actions of those saying what we would never say. Sanctioning what we would never sanction. Of those reporting what we know in our hearts to be red herrings and outright misdirection, salaciousness for the sake of a bored and hungry, and impassioned, audience.

Lester Holt said, “As Americans, we rightfully place tremendous value on having a free and independent press. Our role as journalists is to give voice to the voiceless, and hold our leaders and institutions accountable. But the circle is only completed when that information is consumed by a free-thinking and engaged audience.”

This morning, reading the latest news cycle, I broke out in hives. I’m prone to hives, so this isn’t like I’d suddenly developed Skittles pox. But I don’t usually develop hives by reading or watching the news. My husband would tell you I often develop verbal deluge syndrome, but not usually hives.

I am wound so tightly lately. The news of the informationally empty but politically charged headlines of more email hoopla made me simultaneously vow to stop reading all news for the next 9 days, and also spend 45 minutes immediately reading a dozen headlines about it. They all said the same thing. What do we know? Not much. Are these emails from Hillary? We don’t think so. Are they emails that have already been vetted? Could be. Are they likely to change July’s FBI verdict? Unlikely. Is Anthony Weiner literally the last person any Democrat is putting on their holiday card list? Yeah. For sure.

“10 days before the election, and there’s no new information there at all,” I ranted to my husband, scratching my hivey neck. “It’s completely irresponsible to even report it.” “There’s nothing to it,” he agreed, “And it won’t take much to spin it to why it was addressed at all.”

Spin. Ugh. When did we become this nation, a people, a world, of Spin Rooms and flashpoints and predetermined bias? Maybe about the time that Gutenberg invented the printing press and opinion could be easily digested from those we’ve never met. Probably much farther back than that.

And that was about when I realized that I was not fulfilling my part of Lester Holt’s contract, or trusting anyone else to do so, either: a circle only completed when information is consumed by a free-thinking and engaged audience. It’s up to me what news I digest, what facts I dig for, what biases I acknowledge or stand against. That’s a bummer, obviously, because knee-jerk reactions and preconception is infinitely easier.

I can’t decide who watches horror movies and who collects stamps. And I certainly can’t, and don’t want to, sit as judge and jury for those whose only crime is not being me, inline with my every preference and predisposition. As much as it sometimes rankles, the point of those first ten amendments is to keep everyone – including me – from becoming a sanctimonious despot, sitting high atop a moralistic throne.

So, I’m going to take a deep breath, push the crazy back down a couple levels, and trust in our estimable system rooted in that sometimes exasperatingly objective and equitable Bill of Rights, intrinsic to our national fabric, allowing everyone a voice on matters of sky-diving, horror movies, and even politics, trusting us each to make free-thinking, engaged and informed decisions.

Adulting is hard.

This is the time of year that we are still sleeping with the windows open, even though it gets down into the 40s at night. I’m always so excited to pull the big cozy blankets out of their summer storage that I spend two weeks in a self-imposed night sauna, just waiting for the temperatures to dip enough to truly warrant the extra covers. And when they do, it’s worth the chilliness of the morning to have been able to cocoon all night. The problem with crisp fall mornings is that they are suddenly crisp, dark fall mornings. It’s nearly impossible to get out of bed. I start reminding myself that dry shampoo is better for my hair, definitely a couple – to a few — mornings a week. And I hit snooze one more time.  Five minute shower just to warm up, and… go.

I’m not sure what it is about fall – I love fall, the clarity of those breathe deep blue sky mornings and the apple cider and the turning leaves – but I often find myself a little down, a little nostalgic, a little overwhelmed.

Maybe it’s a natural rhythm thing, left over from when we had to prepare for winter, the anxiety of not being quite sure we had enough nuts squirreled away. Or the knowledge that days are getting shorter, and the realization that, again, the summer sped by without having nearly the amount of bask-on-a-sunny-rock time that I anticipated.

Add to it the entrenched school and activities routines, the job that spins on a contract year and is naturally busy every third and fourth quarter, and it feels like the days aren’t just losing daylight, they’re losing time.

Lately at work, I’m buried. Lately at home, I’m sprinting. Or I’m home, but still at work. I have the luxury of a flexible job, for which I’m grateful. But it means that when I leave early to get to Girl Scouts on time, or to get my youngest to Reading Buddies at the library, my work day isn’t over just because I left work, and once the majority of us are home, once dinner is done, I’m back at my kitchen table office. It feels like I’ve put in a 12-hour day, but I’m actually still 90-minutes and one dance class pick-up away from just a solid 8. Or still at the office, “I miss you. Plees leave work soon,” my youngest texts. Heartbreak.

Sometimes I feel like I suffer from a bit of poor little rich girl syndrome. Except, you know, not the rich part. And I have long since left girlhood behind. But the part where I have a loving family, a comfortable home, a beautiful view out my front door, a flexible job and a bevy of good friends, but still feel a little like crying at the end of a long day, just because there haven’t been enough hours, and there won’t be again tomorrow, and I’m not quite sure how to climb out of the time hole I’ve dug.

Glennon Doyle Melton said, “Life is hard. Not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”  And it’s not hard because it’s bad. Or because it’s somehow deficient.  It’s hard because it’s hard, and we’re all winging it. A decade ago, I’d never had a child before. And they just give you one and wish you luck. Seven years ago, I’d never had two children and two lost jobs before. Tightrope, white knuckles. Today my oldest asked to Skype with a friend about a school assignment. She’s a very sensible, even-keeled person. But I blanched. Even Microsoft was cautious. We take the safety of Skype end users very seriously and have security measures in place to help protect children… Is Microsoft judging me? Forget about me winging it ten years ago. That was just diapers and pink eye and the occasional pebble up the nose. Social media and dating and driving? The days are getting shorter, but so are the years.

A few weeks ago, talking to a coworker about how demanding life is and how little time we have, when we both had a dozen other things to do, he suggested a conscious one-to-one ratio of bad to good. The last minute discovery of cat puke in the foyer is still pretty disagreeable (just kidding, I don’t have a foyer, I just mean the place where we kick our shoes into a pile), but if specifically opposed with a child enthusiastically offering to pack my lunch to save time, maybe it’s a wash. Even if it doesn’t save any time.

 

Stage 1 orthodontics. Dancing in the kitchen with a giggling daughter.

Car making a weird noise. Over-using the library’s hold system because of my avid reader.

Non-wheat, non-dairy pizza sitting right next to the real thing. Family tv picnic and Friday night Netflix.

If sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed and start a hectic day, and if some days my make-up is more war paint than cosmetic, if sometimes I feel tears prick behind my eyes for no particular reason as I just sit at a stop light, in between work me and mommy me, trying to identify a little bit of independent me, well, maybe that’s just because sometimes life is hard, and days are short and it’s hard to wake up in the dark. It’s a part of the whole. Figuring it all out is exhausting. Rewarding, but exhausting.

And maybe it’s just evolution reminding me it’s time to squirrel away some more nuts for winter. And by nuts, I mean Godiva and red wine. And those really soft fluffy winter socks. And a good red lipstick.

When I was in high school, I had Mr. Roseberry for history, twice. Once for World History my freshman year and once for American History my junior year. There are history facts that I will know forever, because of those classes. For example, I can never unlearn that the Moors invaded Spain in 711. That’s with me forever. It’s possible that I was unable to learn calculus because that brain space was already taken with immoveable facts about the Spanish Inquisition.

As a teacher, he believed, believes probably, that history is a living thing, not just something that happened in the past. As such, one of our daily assignments was to look for Connections – those reflections of yesterday that appear in today. They were supposed to be more than mere allusions, or On This Day history channel facts. They were supposed to wake us up to the fact that current events almost always have deep roots in the past, to make us aware that headlines – we still had literal newspaper headlines back then – were deeper than who played who in Friday’s football game. Connections were to show that the Bosnian Serbian War occurring across the world at the same time that I was taking World History was historically resultant of the division and fall of the 700-year-old Ottoman Empire. (Note to self, look up They Might Be Giants’ Istanbul (Not Constantinople) for what would have been a lazy Connection, but a good song…)

Besides Connections, another thing Mr. Roseberry believed in was history through literature. Among others, he read aloud to us A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, and a little book from the 1860s called The Man Without A Country. It’s about an associate of Aaron Burr (who is made contemporary these days by the smash hit Hamilton, of course), who is tried with Burr for treason. Found guilty, he rashly claims that he never wants to hear another word about the United States again. The judge takes him at his word, and sentences him to a life at sea, where no one is to speak to him of his country again. Slowly, the man without a country realizes, by its complete lack, what country means. He dies fiercely patriotic, even while he’s spent decades without a word uttered about the country he realizes he loves.

And so I’ve been thinking about The Man Without A Country. I’ve been thinking about Edward Snowden, who I have mixed feelings about, and I’ve been thinking about how so many people threaten to move to Canada every time something doesn’t go their way at home. I’ve been thinking about people who claim that government is rigged and the election is rigged, and I’ve been thinking about all the animosity that seems to bubble up every election cycle, but especially this one, and about what patriotism means, and whether it is made of uncompromising tenets of red, white and blue, or if it’s flexible enough to mean a multitude of different things to so many different people.

I’ve been thinking about the anger and danger and fear that childhood me saw in black and white photographs in history books, and about the nightly news that sometimes I wonder if I should allow my children to watch. I wonder what Edward R. Murrow would have thought about the news that Lester Holt has to deliver every night. I’ve been thinking about Anne Frank and about Syrian refugees. About the books my grandchildren might one day read as part of their American History canon.

On Saturday morning, we wake up in a house, our house, that has been abused all week by our busy schedules, our tired brains and bodies, so that we have to spend hours cleaning up after ourselves, when every week we realize that if we just did a little more each day, we could skip the full weekend press. My daughters can’t clean the same room without sibling war, which leaves them separated, but still with a path of unfair pitfalls.

“But this isn’t even mine,” my youngest protests, looking at a small pile of her sister’s things. “Why should I have to clean up her mess?” And then inevitably I fix her with an icy stare and ask whose dishes I’ve been washing all morning, and how her clothes happen to become clean again week after week. “We all live here,” I say. “It’s all of our mess.”

Because the point is, we’re a family. Sometimes it’s Christmas morning and there’s hot chocolate on the stove and music playing and love flowing so thick it’s palpably tangible. Sometimes we don’t particularly like each other every moment of every day. And sometimes the mess isn’t ours. And sometimes we think about what it would be like to walk away, not for good, but maybe just for the day. To just grab car keys and turn the radio up and disappear down the highway for a while. Maybe not to Canada, but at least far enough to have to stop for gas. Family is fierce, but it’s messy.

Sometimes, instead of words, I think a Connection is more a feeling. But if I had to verbalize it, I would say, In this house, we don’t always agree, and we love, but don’t always like each other every minute of every day. But this is our family, damn it, and we love each other so damn much that on Christmas morning, my heart bursts with it, and on days when I wake up early and see still tiny feet peeking out of a cocoon of covers, I could weep with the beauty of it, notwithstanding that I could also ugly cry at the piling responsibilities of growing children, aging houses and busy jobs, and Saturday morning spent yelling, “I am not going to live like this for another week. We are all going to start doing our part; do you hear me?” Fierce. Messy. In for the duration. But messy. I said that, right?

Because unless we all plan to move to Canada – and I’m not really sure that Canada wants us – it seems like it’s about time to imagine an icy stare fixed our way that says, This is our nation, damn it. We don’t always agree, and we don’t always even like each other, but this is us. It’s our damn mess – all of ours – and so it’s our job to spend Saturday morning – or all of 2017 or the next 20 years – fixing it, whatever it takes to get this house in order again. And if that pile is your sister’s, pick it up.

Except, if it was a Connection, I’d probably leave out the swearing. I don’t think Mr. Roseberry would approve.

24 days. And then maybe Lester Holt can get back to news Edward R. Murrow would understand.

 

*With apologies to Mr. Roseberry for any historically inaccurate mis-remembering.

If you’ve ever watched your child replay their entire day, in real time, using their favorite stuffed animal, you might be a parent.

If your security system on your home has nothing to do with laser sensors and everything to do with a pile of backpacks right at the front door, followed by a maze of shoes and blankets, you might be a parent. Sometimes I walk in and think, how would we even know we’ve been robbed?

If you’ve ever poured yourself a bowl of cereal, from a wide open bag in a wide open open box, noted – unsurprised – that it was stale and not only put it back in the cupboard, but ate it anyway, you might be a parent.

If you’ve ever hidden the last … anything. Cinnamon roll, Reeses cup, working pen…. specifically planning to bring it out after bedtime, or keep it secret until you yourself also forget about it… well, you might be a parent.

This has been a long and busy week already. And it’s about half over. There’s been something going on each night after work. My husband has a cold. Work meetings starting an hour before I would generally get to work, which means an hour earlier than my children generally get up. Luckily it’s at least been warm again. It got slightly cooler last weekend and I panicked, just a little, because I knew that my oldest was still wearing jeans from six months ago, when she was four inches shorter.

I have now recorded two episodes of This Is Us, which I’m sure I’ll love, and have been told I’ll love, and I am in Season 4 – only halfway – of the family re-watch of Gilmore Girls before the new episodes appear on Black Friday. I just ordered two books from the library on the recommendation of a friend, while I just returned another one unread, because after I renewed it twice, the library called my bluff and told me I couldn’t renew it again. Just when I was going to get to it! I still have hope for the new arrivals, though, because sometimes you just have to cut your losses and begin again, fresh.

I am tired. I have at least three overnight spots on my face, and my meal planning for the week consisted of two crock pot soups, with one day of leftovers in between. Today, I added grilled cheese, and I felt kind of guilty that this was my above and beyond, and kind of like a rock star for adding a two-course meal to my week.

And yet, when I got home tonight, I looked at the high school soccer practice going on across the street, and at the beat up pink soccer ball left in the front yard, the fall flowers blooming while the leaves finally begin to turn, the sun slanting across our front walk, and in my head I sang a chorus of, Our house…. is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard….

 

I wouldn’t necessarily say that everything is easy. In fact, I’d say it’s not.  And when I think too much about the outside world, I’m a little prone to despair. When I look inside, I wonder how we’re ever going to catch up on our basic housework, let alone the pet projects that I have for myself. And yet, in the end, it’s a house full of morning squabbles, laundry that has yet to be put away, and birthday invites from parties attended two weeks ago… and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty great.

If you’ve ever watched your children read with a beloved pet tucked under their arm, and let bedtime slide just a little bit because it’s a perfect scene, and then ten minutes later yelled up the stairs that tomorrow, bedtime was going to be early unless teeth were brushed in three, two…. then you might be a parent. And probably your house is a very, very, very fine house, too. Don’t let the general chaos convince you otherwise.

Let’s not mince words. I regret that Hillary Clinton has walked back her statement that half of Trump supporters are deplorable. Because, while I don’t know if it is in fact literally half, or more, or less, there is no mistaking the crux of her argument: Donald Trump is deplorable. His views are deplorable. His lack of policy knowledge is deplorable. His bilking of contractors and “students” and workers is deplorable.

It is deplorable to suggest the deportation of 11 million people is justice, breaking up families, sending people back to neighborhoods and regions with such appalling conditions that they were willing to risk absolutely everything to try to escape. It is deplorable to refer to these same people, flippantly, as rapists and criminals.

It is deplorable to suggest banning refugees solely on religion while their homeland burns around them and their children die of starvation. It is deplorable to suggest a database of people of the Muslim religion. It is deplorable to support torture, which has been scientifically disproven as effective, to say nothing of inhumane and dangerous for our own troops.

It is deplorable to disrespect POWs and Gold Star families, to call women pigs and dogs and reference their hormonal cycles as proof of instability. It is deplorable to start unsubstantiated and roundly debunked rumors about your opponent’s health, and to use 9/11 to apply for small business loans you don’t deserve or need.

The list goes on and on. There has never been a campaign like this. The press doesn’t know what to do with it. The public doesn’t know what to do with it. We were scandalized and incredulous. And then we were puzzled. Now we’ve been numbed and this behavior has been normalized.

When Hillary Clinton calls it deplorable, she’s exactly right.

When a couple of guys beat up and then urinated on a homeless Latino man in Boston, saying that “Trump is right!,” Trump tepidly denounced the action, and then followed up with, “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”

If that doesn’t immediately turn your stomach, if that doesn’t make you question the very fabric of this country, then yes, you are deplorable. And if you can read through the list above and find no issue with it, then that, too, is deplorable.

Trump has now tried to leverage this completely legitimate criticism as an insult to his supporters. The real insult is that his supporters are so caught up in Trumpism that they can’t even recognize the stench that emanates from this man and from this campaign. Or perhaps it’s just that he has so normalized bad behavior, intolerance and the bellowing louder technique that this is actually what our country has become. In a long-ago blog, back on Super Tuesday, in March, I said that Trump had invited the Orcs out to play, and they had come in droves. I stand by that characterization.

Trump is a child caught red-handed stealing someone else’s bicycle from the playground, and then howling with such ferocity that he didn’t do it – probably the Mexican or the Muslim did – that the facts become a buried lead, halfway down a news article that no one read past the headline of his manufactured outrage.

The defense will be that not all Trump supporters are racists. Not all Trump supporters are xenophobic. Not all Trump supporters believe that encouraging one of the world’s thug autocrats (whose opponents end up dead) to meddle in the US election is a good idea. Fair enough. I’d like to believe that.

As Hillary Clinton said in the same section of her remarks, there is a sizable faction of Trump supporters who are simply looking for change. Who “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”

Not everyone who will vote for him is formed in Trump’s image. They will vote for a myriad of reasons I won’t understand, but that I can’t discredit. But enough people who call themselves Trump supporters have lapped up his – yes, deplorable – racist, xenophobic fear-mongering as to give the United States a black eye on the world stage, and a case of full traction at home. It will take years for the nation to overcome his hateful campaign rhetoric and that is another tragedy of this campaign.

Vote for Hillary, or don’t. There are other choices. Vote for Gary Johnson who is a two-term governor and businessman who wants to, in his words, “Make America sane again,” or don’t. Vote for state and local government who you believe in to make communities strong again and skip the top of the ticket.

But before voting for Donald Trump, ask yourself if you’d be okay with our nation’s children growing up listening to his greatest hits. If that is what you want their backbone to be. If that is how you want them to treat their siblings, their classmates, and eventually their own children.

         “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me… I would bomb the sh**t out of them.”

     “I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them. No, no. I was going to hit them, I was all set and then I got a call from a highly respected governor… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard his head would spin and he wouldn’t know what the hell happened…”

       “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems…they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

      “If she gets to pick her judges – nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people. Maybe there is. I don’t know.”

      “Women: You have to treat them like s–t.”

 

If the answer is yes, yes this rhetoric is okay, yes this is how we would raise our children… then Hillary Clinton is talking to you. I hope she keeps talking. And I’d think of all people, Donald J. Trump would appreciate her telling it like it is.

Some mornings, before I even get out of bed, my heart is pounding, my eyes narrowed, my blood pressure skyrocketing. It’s not an illness. It’s not a proclivity toward horror or suspense novels at dawn. It’s my habit of checking my phone for news and media before I roll out of bed. So, maybe it is an illness.

In my head, it’s a nice way to start the day. The equivalent to the morning paper 20 years ago, which hearkens back to my childhood and the beautiful simplicity of it, at least in retrospect. In reality, this “check in” with the world before starting my day is a black hole that I repeatedly jump into and come out late for my morning, angry and judgmental about wide swaths of the population.

It boils down to this. This political cycle is ruining my fairly optimistic outlook. Have previous political cycles done the same? I’m sure, to some extent. But like anything, it’s hard to look back with the clarity of today. Today’s politics thrive on misinformation, and misinformation is easier to propagate than ever before. It’s hard to find unbiased news sources. There have been studies that show that a liberal and conservative Facebook feed of recommended news articles and suggested websites basically show us the world we already subscribe to. This is further proliferated every time we click into one of those baited links, telling the web world what more of the same we’d like to see, and then the sharing of these at best biased and at worst blatantly untrue viewpoints masquerading as news.

I’m as guilty as anyone. I absolutely believe that my side is misrepresented. It’s what makes my jaw so tight. In lucid moments, I realize that in fact, each side has legitimate viewpoints. That we need different viewpoints to have well-rounded citizens and policies. But we’ve strayed so far from facts as to mock people who use them. The last time I got sucked into a political discussion online — which obviously no one should ever, ever do because it’s lunacy — I used a fact check website to, in my view, point out the partisanship of certain misinformation. I was roundly criticized for doing so. A non-partisan fact check site should be where we all go for a reality check, and yet facts have become suspect and passé.

This morning, FactCheck.org called a claim I checked into about the history of social security an “elaborate collection of falsehoods so detailed as to be an intentional and malicious effort at misinformation.”

For the most part, I don’t think that people are willfully spreading malicious misinformation. We’re just hitting “share.” I think that this political cycle has made our country into cartoon characters, standing on either side of a Grand Canyon that is our information void, and we’ve decided that it’s easier to live in two-dimensions than three.

The problem is, we do live in three dimensions. And we’ll vote for two-dimensional policies that will affect three-dimensional people. We need to take the responsibility more seriously.

We owe ourselves a fact check. We owe ourselves a reality check.

There are any number of lessons that it took me a long time to learn. And a lot I haven’t learned yet… Those I’ve learned, but still have a hard time living. But, in celebration of the fact that every day, we get another chance to figure it all out, here are 37  things that I have arguably learned in 37 years of edification.

Inch by inch…

1. It’s probably not personal. Nine times out of ten, it’s someone else’s issue and someone else’s bad mood. It stinks anyway.

2. Sleep actually is that important. I feel physically ill when I’m too tired. Same goes for water. Hydrate!

3. There are some people in your life who you will always hope are doing well, but who aren’t healthy for you to maintain relationships with. Let them go.

4. I don’t like green tea. It may be crazy healthy. It may add years to my life. I still don’t like it. And I have stopped trying.

5. There are friends who you may not see for years, and then within the first ten minutes of seeing them again, you can tell them your deepest fears, failings and embarrassments; that friendship will never fade.

6. It is not worth trying to make a left from Parkway Drive onto Acres Green Drive unless it’s the middle of the night or 10am on a Tuesday morning. Just go around.

7. I probably won’t die from anything found in a porta pot. But that doesn’t mean I ever have to make peace with the idea of them.

8. If a cute workout tank top has a built-in sports bra with multiple straps, tenuously connected by a couple darts on either side, just walk by. I don’t have the ten minutes to spend organizing those straps, layers, and then trying to get into them.

9. It’s really lucky that I had children in an age where mismatched socks are cool.

10. I will absolutely burn two pieces of toast in a row, because it needs “just a little more,” at which point, I will inevitably and inexplicably walk away. I will not learn, nor will I change the toaster setting.

11. Having regrets doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate your present. But it means that you got to your present by one of dozens, perhaps hundreds of different possible routes. We can’t live each one, and if we didn’t wonder about the others, we wouldn’t understand how we arrived where we are.

12. Be loyal, but not naïve.

13. The extra money for the direct flight at 10am is worth it.

14. I rely on the discretion of my children far more than I would like to admit. I can only imagine that my good friends whose children my children love, and whose houses they feel completely comfortable in, know at least a handful of things that I’m just as glad I don’t know they know.

15. It’s okay to politely dislike some people.

16. Gummy fruit snacks shaped like carrots, apples and grapes are not actually health foods. But they do make me feel more virtuous than fruit snacks shaped like Dory and Nemo. Well played, product development.

17. Between time and money, my time has increasingly become more valuable to me.

18. Buy the good bra and wear it when you want to really get things done. Your subconscious knows when you’re pulled together from the skin out and mean business.

19. If the higher purpose of the books I read is only to entertain me… that’s enough. I read smart books in college. I have nothing to prove. 19^th century Russians are best in moderation, and not after a 16-hour day, brilliant or not.

20. Look up! I first learned this as a college kid traveling around Europe, where the most impressive art, architecture and views were often up. But I re-learn this all the time. Even when taking a walk, I sometimes realize I’ve been staring at my shadow on a gravel trail and then I look up… and there are fields and mountains and blue sky and whipped cream clouds. Always look up.

21. Everyone should own a crock pot. They are like a butler you gift yourself.

22. Invest in irons, curling irons and coffee pots with auto-shut off. It saves so much what-iffing.

23. Whether it’s filling muffin tins, loading the dishwasher, or cleaning up spills, it will be considerably messier and take longer, a lot longer, for one’s children to do said task. Let them do it, anyway.

24. Believe in things passionately. But if you can’t discuss them dispassionately, keep them for like-minded fellowship, or be emotionally prepared for strained relationships and hurt feelings. (But never negotiate your non-negotiables.)

25. At least once, live somewhere where you don’t know anyone. Don’t call home until you’ve met at least a half dozen new people. Find out who you are when no one has preconceived ideas of who you’re expected to be.

26. Drinking too much is increasingly passé. What’s the point, with kids at home who will still want someone to “watch this” at 7:32am? Honestly, staying out late is the new drinking too much. Combine both, and I might actually die. It will, at least, definitely take me a week to get over it.

27. The more single-ingredient food you eat, the better life becomes.

28. The person on an airplane who most wants that baby to stop crying is the person holding said baby. Glaring, judging and tut-tutting are not helpful. An “I’ve been there, too” can go a long way. And if you don’t have kids in your circle, remember that you were one. Samesies for grocery stores, zoos and theme parks. Creating memories is excruciatingly hard sometimes.

29. Yogurt cups are pressurized when living at high altitude. Open them accordingly, i.e., carefully.

30. Take your turn doing the things you don’t want to do, but don’t be a martyr. “I can’t this time,” does not require a novella in explanation. Be cool, live your life, help when you can.

31. Every time I have said, “Oh my gosh; I had no idea,” another person’s story becomes a little more tangible. We all have stories that we don’t broadcast. Life inevitably knocks us down from time to time. Even fairy tales begin in darkness.

32. It’s worth taking two minutes to check your larder before grocery shopping. Otherwise, you may end up with a hoard of salsa to rival a small Mexican restaurant but have no ketchup. It’s also worth using old-fashioned words like larder as often as possible.

33. The comments section of any online article will never, ever make you feel better about humanity.

34. Travel is absolutely the best path to an open mind, bar none. Travel often, travel early, travel regionally, travel internationally. Have an up-to-date passport, just in case and just because. The United States is home to less than 5% of the world’s population. That leaves a whole lot of people whose very legitimate world view is not our own. Plus, had I not studied abroad and met people who were not just like me, and grown to love people who were not just like the me, I would have missed dozens of amazing experiences, perhaps including being open to meeting my husband, who is also not exactly like me.

35. Downtime: so essential. If we don’t recharge, nothing else works. I need to be alone – alone alone – 10% of the time to be able to function within society 90% of the time. The anxiety that we feel if our phone dips below 10% battery on a busy day should be mirrored by our own need to recharge. We should put at least as much effort into it as we do our electronics.

36. One of the proudest moments of child-rearing is when your kid becomes fluent in your personal brand of family humor. It’s a first day of kindergarten, training-wheels-off, first overnight away sort of moment. That’s my kid.

37. Ask for what you want. Ask for 90 seconds of complete silence, for someone else to make dinner. Ask for the promotion. And if the daily special can be made without cheese. Shape your destiny in little ways, day by day.