admin, Author at Adulting: Second- Half

God Bless You, Friday

My son was telling me a story about one of his science professors. She is a strict, brilliant German woman. She is currently teaching him Organic Chemistry 2. He said that the most interesting trait about her is that no matter what is going on in the class, no matter if she is in mid-discussion of a highly complicated subject or demonstrating a lab experiment, if someone sneezes in the class, she stops and says, “God bless you.” My son said that this has become such an obvious trait of hers, that he sometimes thinks that students fake sneeze on purpose, in order to get her blessing. I love that story! It clearly demonstrates the truth of the saying that what people will remember about you won’t be as much about what you said, your brilliance, your looks or your possessions, but more so, how you made them feel.

On that happy note, “God bless you, readers!!” It’s Friday, the easiest day of the week to feel blessed!!! Here at Adulting Second Half we call Friday – “Favorite Things Friday”! I typically list at least three favorite things, songs, websites, videos, books, etc. that have added positive vibes to my life and I encourage you all to do the same in the Comments section. (please feel free to Comment on anything, any time. I see the stats, I know that you are out there – I would LOVE to hear from you!) Please check out previous Friday posts for other favorites.

Today’s favorites are all quotes. I took these from a list of 77 of supposedly the world’s most popular quotes. I narrowed that list down to my favorites (at least for this Friday)! Here goes:

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
– Dr. Seuss

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
– Oscar Wilde

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
– C.S. Lewis

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
– Marilyn Monroe

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
– Albert Einstein

“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
– Malcolm X

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
– Helen Keller

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
– J.K. Rowling

“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
– Abraham Lincoln

And to end with where we started:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

Happy Friday, friends!! God Bless You!! Thank you for blessing my life and making me feel heard, interesting, and worth your time!!

Big Balls

So, I did something really strange this week. (perhaps regular readers are used to me doing strange things) An electrician doing work in our house, was listening to the radio and AC/DC was playing. The song was “Big Balls.” This triggered a memory.

For those of you who are not familiar with “Big Balls”, here are the lyrics to the chorus:

I’ve got big balls
I’ve got big balls
And they’re such big balls
Dirty big balls
And he’s got big balls,
And she’s got big balls,
But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all!

The memory that got triggered by this interesting song is that the first time that I heard the “Big Balls” song is when I was introduced to it, late at night, at a sleepover, when I was in elementary school. We were giggling a lot, listening to it, and I am sure that my eyes were the size of saucers but I probably pretended that I already knew the lyrics. What bad-ass little kids, my friends and I must have been! Ha!

So, I thought about the friend who hosted the sleepover. She was one of my best friends in elementary school but we lost touch after that, as we never went to the same schools after elementary school. I remember her being daring, brutally honest and smart as a whip. Now, I don’t go on to Facebook very often, so I decided to just “Google” her name and the first site to come up, was her professional website. Turns out that my elementary school friend is currently a successful tax attorney in Chicago. Even though we haven’t seen each other in 40 years, I immediately recognized the piercing, “see right through you” expression on her face, on her professional, attractive, lawyer-ly picture that came with her bio.

Now, here comes the crazy part. I emailed my friend, at her law firm email address and I entitled the email “Blast from the Past.” I admitted, in my email, that the reason that she came to my mind was because of the “Big Balls” song. I gave a little blurb about my life and I asked how she was doing, hoping that she remembered me and then I sent it before I rationally thought about how weird and desperate and stalker-like the email could come across. (and I sent it to a lawyer . . . )

And then I waited. And then I started thinking rationally and feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. I mean, people expect you to reach out on venues like Facebook and Instagram and Linked In, but sending a random email to someone you haven’t had contact with, in over 40 years, to their place of employment, discussing a song called “Big Balls”, started to seem a bit “out there”, even for me, the lady who doesn’t embarrass all that easily.

So then I started rationalizing. I allowed myself this crazy blip. This was perhaps, just an unfortunate lack of judgment. I have been very stressed, having my house swarming with workers and dust clouds. I’m probably in some kind of mild midlife crisis. I miss my kids. . . even the kids who still live here. (those of you with teenagers, know what I mean)

I had just finished reading a great book, a thriller, and I got to thinking that even if I didn’t hear back from my elementary school friend, I could turn this whole scenario into an excellent start of a psycho-thriller novel. A bored housewife reaches out on a whim to an old, intriguing friend, who still lives on the edge (remember she’s the one who introduced me to “Big Balls” when we were probably only nine or ten years old) who ends up working for a “law” firm, which secretly does espionage work for the government or the mob or the Russians. And somehow the bored housewife innocently gets involved in all of the intrigue, and has to outsmart the government (easy) or the mob or the Russians (less easy and more dangerous). I realize that this makes for a great premise of a best-selling novel. (and someone out there who is better at writing fiction than me, should definitely steal the idea – it has Hollywood written all over it) Anyway, I started getting overwhelmed thinking about all of the research and fiction writing classes, a book like this would entail, when I noticed that I had a new email message.

It was from my friend, of course. And she remembered me! And she was thrilled to hear from me! And she was glad that I didn’t look for her on Facebook because she, like me, has dropped off of that scene for the most part, too. The best part of the email was that she had recently heard a different AC/DC song (Dirty Deeds) and when she heard that song, she said that she thought about our fifth grade picnics and she reminded me of a few more people that were good childhood comrades who I had long forgotten about. She laughed about us listening to “Big Balls” at her house and she said while she doesn’t remember the instance, she now realizes that it was “wildly inappropriate”. (her words) I thought about that and I thought that probably a less “wildly inappropriate” song would not have stuck in my memory and I would not have likely reached out to her, forty years later and experienced some really nice email exchanges and fond laughs and impressions, about shared childhood memories.

I think that this is how the Universe works. The Universe does not know time. The Universe does know that “wildly inappropriate” can be used in wildly appropriate ways to bring joy and remembrance and connection to people, perhaps when they need those feelings the most. At the very least, I don’t regret my “Big Balls” decision to email my long, lost friend.

Experience Forever

“One of the most bittersweet feelings has to be when you realize how much you’re going to miss a moment, while you’re still living it.” -u.fo Twitter

This one hit me in the gut this morning. There are a lot of moments in life when you just wish time would fly, when the clouds will pass and quickly. (waiting for a job offer or medical results or for your teenage kids to get safely home at night . . . for renovations to be finished and strangers out of your house) But then there are those perfect moments, like the author described, that are so perfect, so beautiful, so profound, that you wish that you could just freeze those moments and go back to them, again and again. These moments remain in your memory, of course. You may have even gotten a few photos to help outline that memory, but the actual feelings, sensations, experiences will never be duplicated in quite the same way that is happening in that very moment that you wish could last forever. Often times we don’t even grasp that we are in one of those “big” moments until the experience has already passed. The most poignant experiences are the ones when you are fully aware of just how amazing and awe-inspiring these moments are, how special and fleeting these particular happenings are in life and you want to enjoy and savor them, but at the same time, you are already mourning their future loss.

I have become one of those annoying middle-aged women that pissed me off when I was a young mother.

“Enjoy these moments. They grow up so fast!”

When I was younger, that statement, spouted to me by a woman with grown kids would often overwhelm me with fatigue, and anger, and guilt and stress. But I think sometimes it jogged me into a new perspective – added a little bit more patience into my demeanor with my children. It put a little more awareness in me about the preciousness and fleetingness of life, and the moments that make up life. Sometimes, in my utter exhaustion, I slowed down enough to see the constant changes and growth in my children, sometimes on a daily basis. And on rare occasions, I was so overwhelmed with love, and gratefulness, and the awe of the gift of their lives in my life and our lives intertwined, that I wanted to crystallize and become a static statue of that particular moment, with all of the feelings and sensations encapsulated, so that I could experience it forever.

“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”
― Georges Duhamel

Book Binge

I’ve been on a book binge. There are worse things to binge on, right? I love to read. To me, reading is one of the greatest pleasures in life. Two books that I recommend are My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.

I finished My Lovely Wife in a day. It is a horribly dark, scary thriller about a suburban couple who become serial killers together. I’ve been frustrated with how long our renovations are taking, so I thought that reading this book was a healthy way to vent my dark side. The book is not particularly gory or gruesome, but it is chilling and I have been jumpy ever since reading it. I like to tell myself that I read My Lovely Wife to see what a successful first novel looks like, but the truth is, I found the premise of the book, kind of intriguing and interesting and I like books with twists and turns. It’s a page turner, for sure, and it is likely to end up as a movie, starring Jessica Chastain.

I’m halfway through Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Lori Gottlieb is a Stanford educated therapist who writes a weekly advice column for The Atlantic. She turned into a therapist later in life, as she also attended medical school and worked as a producer for TV shows like “Friends” and “ER”. Lori explains all of this in her book in such a candid, honest, funny way that I stayed up late to keep reading it last night and now, this morning, I am cranky as hell. But as soon as I finish this post, I am going to get back to reading the book. It’s really good. The book is the true story of a “therapist going to a therapist” after a bad break-up and the insights from both sides are hilarious, helpful, insightful and a truly honest look at what it means to be human, and sometimes flawed, in our thinking and our perspectives.

Please share in the comments section your book recommendations. When I’m on a book binge, I just want to keep on going. I want to eat the whole box of doughnuts and/or the entire cake, you know what I mean?

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee

You Matter

I love people who return their carts to the return station.

I love people who are kind and interested, no matter what or who the subject matter is, at hand.

I love people who still write thank you notes.

I love people who laugh at everyone’s jokes and make them feel special and at ease.

I love people who are honest about who they are and do not perform metamorphosis, depending on their company.

I love people with sparkle in their eyes.

I love people who believe that almost everyone has good intentions.

I love people whose whole body smiles, when they do.

I love people who get excited about their passions.

I love people who remember little, seemingly inconsequential things that are meaningful to other people.

I love people who love nature and animals.

I love people who are comfortable in their own skin.

I love curious people.

I love people who can laugh at themselves.

I love people who you can rely on.

What’s on your list of favorite traits in people? I imagine you fit into my list, so thank you for being you. You brighten my life! You brighten other people’s lives! People notice. They really do. You matter.

That’s Weird

So, I am not sure what to write about this morning. I slept in. I feel kind of foggy. Nothing is striking me. So, I decided to google quotes for inspiration. My first search was “prettiest quotes”. This gave me a monitor full of quotes about beauty like the one oft repeated by Aubrey Hepburn, “Happy girls are the prettiest.”

That wasn’t really what I was going for, so I looked up “loveliest quotes.” This search filled my monitor with syrupy, sickeningly sweet romantic quotes to read to you lover, at bedtime. I won’t even repeat any of them here.

So, I finally searched up “most meaningful quotes”. For some reason, today all of these quotes just got on my nerves, but I kept looking. Then this one showed up (on the most meaningful quote search . . . seriously). This is one I had to share:

I’m not really angry today, but this struck me as hilarious. I find it even more funny because it showed up on a page full of wisdom from Aristotle, Confucius, Anne Frank, Einstein and Maya Angelou. I never knew how wise the minions were until I saw the company that they keep.

I get that this blog post has a Seinfeld-like quality to it – a ramble about nothing. But that is what makes Sundays so great, you can ramble on, or not. You can do meaningful things, or not. If there was ever a day to just be in the moment and to savor being alive, it is on Sundays. Savor your Sunday. I’ll be back tomorrow.

The Disrupted Nest

Once upon a time there was this little bird who loved her nest. She loved being in her nest with her mate and her hatchlings. Of course, her hatchlings quickly grew to be big birds themselves and they started leaving the nest more and more. One hatchling grew up to be his own bird and left the nest and created his own nest, in a tree, far away, of his own liking. The bird family still flew to see each other, though. They were chatty birds, who liked each other’s company.

This story isn’t about hatchlings leaving the nest, though. This is about the time when the little bird’s nest was completely disrupted and the poor little bird thought that she would go cuckoo or even batty. Though a bit flighty, this little bird wasn’t a natural cuckoo, and bats, obviously, are a whole different species, but this little bird found that she was really starting to empathize with cuckoos and those beings sometimes described as batsh*t-crazy. You see, the disruption in her nest felt like it would never end and it was turning her into a whole different animal as much as she tried to stay pleasant and chirpy.

It all started when the little bird and her mate for life, decided that their nest was in serious need of some new straw. They found some birds who were particularly good at nest renovation and they agreed to give lots and lots (and lots) of seed to these birds, in exchange for some fresh straw. When it was time to take out the old straw and bring in the new straw, the expert new straw birds arrived and hung out with the little bird all day long, every day, for months and months. The poor little bird tried to stay positive and she could see that the new straw would soon look very nice, when she looked past all of the old straw, and dust feathers lying all around the nest. She tried not to pluck out the feathers in her chest, in distress, but she found it hard to resist sometimes. She tended to get a little “pecky” with her mate and nestlings who still lived in the nest with her, when they came home to the nest in the evenings.

This little bird was an old bird who had been around the flock for a while. She had even been through previous nest renovations in earlier times in her little birdy life. She knew that the process of the rebuilding of a nest would be annoying and disruptive. The little bird knew some calming yoga poses like standing on one leg that helped her get into balance. (a lot of birds stand on one leg). Still sometimes she felt pushed to the edge of her nest . . . and her sanity.

This story doesn’t have any ending yet, but the nest is progressing a lot and I suspect there is going to be a happy, calming ending for the little bird and her mate. I suspect that they are really going to appreciate the changes and updates to their nest, to the point that they will soon forget about all of the upheaval and disruption that this renovation has caused. And I suspect a few years down the road (maybe give it a decade), they will have conveniently forgotten how stressful it was to have their nest torn apart and displaced (they have little tiny bird brains that aren’t known for good memories – see elephants, for good memorization skills). Then, the little birds again, will get a wild hair (or a wild feather, in their case) and decide to yet again, exchange piles and piles of seed for an updated nest. That’s just how birds work.

Stop Stressin’

“It doesn’t need to be a great day, as long as it is Friday.” – upJourney

Happy Friday, readers and friends!! Here at Adulting Second Half, Fridays remain fun and frivolous!! We don’t take anything seriously on Fridays. On most Fridays, I list three Favorites (whether they be things, books, music, etc.) and I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in the Comments section. Please check out previous Friday blogs for other excellent ideas to brighten up your living experience!

Here are this Friday’s Favorites:

Toffee-To-Go – I adore toffee. I love Heath bars. However, this Toffee-To-Go is the best toffee that I have ever eaten. It is the best combination of chocolate and nuts (which is the best combination in the world to begin with). It is totally impossible to not eat a small box of this mixed perfection in just one sitting. Go to their website now and order yourself a little box to be delivered to you or to your friends and associates, straight from Heaven.

Ballard Designs Clothes Drying Rack – A very wise, creative closet designer suggested that we add this dream contraption to our newly remodeled laundry room and I am so happy that she did! (shout out, Jo Anne) This drying rack hangs on the wall of your room and you pull the racks down from their magnetic closures, to dry your socks and intimates and whatever else you prefer not to put into your dryer. When you are finished, you just close the racks back up and they fold nicely back into the frame on the wall. Before this, we used to haphazardly dry our things on various pieces of furniture and unfortunately, some of the wooden furniture shows that we did that, with ugly water wear marks. (so sorry, my lovely, beloved rocking chair) This rack comes in all different sizes and is sturdy and attractive and yet, still extremely useful.

Madonna’s Medellin video – Love or or hate her, you have to hand it to her, Madonna remains transformational, relevant and interesting to this day. She came on to the scene when I was just 12 years old and now at age 48, I am encouraging you to check out her new video. The video is raunchy and racy and controversial (would we expect anything else from her?), but it’s fascinating to watch and I do really like the beat of the song. I watched a little bit of her MTV interview about the video and here are a few interesting tidbits that I took from it:

Madonna picked the directors for this video because she wanted it to look “painterly” (her words) and surreal. It does seem otherworldly.

Madonna currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. She moved there so that one of her sons, who wants to become a professional soccer player, can get his best training. In her words, Madame X (her new persona) is a “soccer mom” at heart.

Madonna believes that it is MUSIC that universally connects all people of the world. “We were connected before Instagram, people, seriously.” (her words)

Finally, Madonna told one of her fans that she wanted to get back to her naivety. Now, most people don’t look at Madonna and think, “naive and innocent.” She explained that what she meant is the naivety that she had when she just started out and didn’t care, at all, what people thought of her or of her work. Madonna explains that when she was young and starting out, she created herself and her craft, out of pure passion and inventiveness, without giving much credence to other people’s influence and criticisms.

I have never found Madonna to be a particularly warm, ingratiating person, but I really do respect her vision and her daring and her inspiration. She is encouragement for all of us Second Halfers to keep on creating, doing and exploring what makes us alive and “naive”, in the best sense of the word. And for that reason, I’m grateful for her influence.

The Negative Committee

The above is another great post on Twitter’s Think Smarter. Esther Hicks says to tell ourselves, “This unpleasant thought is unnecessary” any time a negative thought enters our minds. It scares me how much I have to use that mantra.

What if just for today we treated ourselves as kindly as we would treat a blameless child or an innocent animal or a service person doing a kindness for us? What if just for today we gazed at ourselves in the mirror as lovingly as we gaze at the people, the pets, the flowers or anything else that we love so much for the joy and happiness that these persons, animals and things bring to us? It’s our eyes that allow us to do the gazing. It’s our minds that process our senses and feelings about what we are gazing at and it is our hearts that fill with fullness and joy and wonder, when we are doing the gazing. Don’t our eyes, our minds, and our hearts deserve love and gratefulness for helping us process all of the marvels in our world? Shouldn’t we be careful what we feed into our eyes and our minds and our hearts? We have more control in this regard, than we think we do.

Image result for quotes on avoiding negativity — **Better yet, I think it might just be apropos to fire this committee and shut the door on them forever, dear readers!! Just for today, at least, cancel the meeting with the negative committee!!**

Balancing Act

I think that the internet was started by the little kids who ask, “Why?” all of the time. And not the little kids who asked, “Why?” just to be annoying, in order to get a rise out of the adults in their lives, or just to hear themselves chatter, but the kids who really wanted an answer. And good answers. I can’t be certain, but I think I was one of those “enquiring minds want to know” kids.

“What is vacation constipation?” and “What does dreaming about bald eagles mean?” are questions that I have already looked up this morning on the internet and I have looked up the answers, at more than one website.

“I don’t think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.” – Daniel Levitin

I read the above quote and I thought about it a bit. It is interesting to me that social movements often beget other social movements. We are having renovations done on our home, and inevitably the one project has now been the impetus for 3-4 more minor projects that all stemmed from the “open can of worms” of the first project. In the same way, the last line of the above quote about the information age suggests that information overload can lead to bad decisions. Hence, we have the “Being in the Now” movement, where meditation and self-awareness have become mainstream concepts. The trick is to balance the amount of information that we are assaulted with on a daily basis, with a healthy dose of relaxation and counting our breaths. . . . and not acting on everything we see and feel and hear and read, impulsively.

“Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilizations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it – to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru