In 2012 I am Going to Try Something New

With the start of a new year, comes the hopes and dreams of it being better than the last.  And that we will be better than we were.  In my head a new year looks like this:

and ends up looking like this:

I don’t make resolutions anymore.  Sure I sit down the first of the year, and look at all the Self and Shape magazines I subscribed to last year, and think “Wow I’d look amazing if I worked out and ate right.”  Then, I go eat the last few Christmas cookies that escaped the girls’ radar.

This year, instead of improving myself, because let’s be honest, the road to success is not paved with good intentions, I’m going to try something new.

iTunes offers free music every week.  Starbucks offers free downloads as well.  It is always a band, a group, a soloist I have never heard of.  I’ve never tried them. I have no idea why not, I have nothing to lose.  This year?  I’m going to try new music.  New music+free downloads = win/win. Or at the very least, break even.  Also included in this, would be podcasts.  I have two I listen to consistently I need more.

For years, my mother would give me a subscription to Taste of Home magazine for Christmas, along with the hardback cookbook of every recipe they had published the year before.  Great gift. I loved it.  I have stacks and stacks of magazines, and more recipe cards than Vegas has playing cards.  And I have about 8 meals in my repertoire, and that is being overly generous.  So this year, I’m going to try new recipes. I’ve got plenty at my disposal. I have time to shop, and plenty of time to cook, and if the girls don’t like it, I’ve got peanut butter and jelly.

I have an amazing camera.  My Nikon D40.  Meredith and the cheerleaders have insisted it be brought to every home game.  I have spent years shooting people.  Guess what? My camera takes pictures of other things besides people.  I’m going to try to photograph less people, more things and places. My cousin Melissa has started a Facebook Group, The 52 Week Photography Challenge which will push and encourage me to shoot things besides people.

I love to read, but I’ll admit, I am afraid to step outside my comfort zone and read new authors.  I go to the library every. single. day.  Library=free books.  What do I have to lose? If I don’t like it, return it, get something new.  This year, I’m going to try to read new authors, new books.

Since I am open to trying new things, I am, therefore, open to suggestions from you.

What would you suggest I try first?

Also, don’t forget my review and giveaway that ends on Jan 5th.  A free copy of digital scrapbooking software.  Please?

 

Stories I Only Tell My Friends, by Rob Lowe

For the past year he has played the role of Chris Traeger on NBC’s ‘Parks and Recreation’.  He’s also spent 4 years in the ‘White House’ as Sam Seaborn. But he started out as Sodapop Curtis in S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders”.  The movie that launched his career, along with the career of one Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez.

And now, along with husband, father, producer, director he is a writer.

And a damn good one.

I don’t usually do reviews on my website.  I tried, I tried to write for Buy-her.  It just wasn’t my writing style.

But for this I’ll make the exception.

Rob Lowe’s career took off just as I was entering high school.  He was the Rob Pattison of my day.  I mean really who didn’t fall in love with him in “St. Elmo’s Fire” and then again in “About Last Night”?

In his book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob (is it ok to just call him Rob?) tells the story of his first brush with celebrity (meeting Liza Minnelli in a hotel in Ohio) to the day he finally realized it was time to say good bye to ‘The West Wing’ with an easy conversational style that makes you, the reader, feel as if you truly are one of the friends he’s telling these stories to.

Rob’s mother was trying to live with depression and not doing a very good job at it.  His father was left behind in Ohio, and Rob was left to chase his dream on his own.  It was a different world he lived in, traveling 30 miles by bus alone for auditions.  He was not always alone, he lived close enough to the Sheen’s (yes, Charlie, Martin and Emilio, who professionally took the family’s original name Estevez) he spent as much time with them as he did at home.

Because he was basically chasing his dream on his own, he had little to no guidance or adult supervision.   Alcohol was a constant companion.  In school Rob was far from popular and rarely if ever caught a girls eye. (How the hell is that possible? Do they grow them dumb and blind in Cali?) but he made up for it after “The Outsiders”  The press made no secret of any of Rob’s romantic encounters and relationships.  In his book, Rob mentions the women he dated, but does it with respect and kindness.  This is not a kiss and tell kind of book.  This is a book that tells his story in a way his sons can read and not be embarrassed.  The drugs, the parties, the drinking, the women, are there but the ugly details are not as they are not necessary to the story he tells.

Rob does drop names throughout the book.  Virtually every story told is a brush with a celebrity.  What I really liked about his stories is he doesn’t start with ‘The night I met Sarah Jessica Parker….”  He tells about how his agent asked him to have lunch with Sarah, who has been playing Annie on Broadway.  Rob brings his high school girlfriend to lunch (Because he’s an idiot and doesn’t know the ways of Hollywood apparently)  Rob and Sarah hit it off, talking about their hopes and dreams of acting in the future.  They enjoy lunch and then she leaves.  Years later, at an award ceremony Rob does not win the award he was nominated for, but he was quite happy for his friend Sarah, when she accepted her award for her role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

The stories he tells are not about the celebrities he meets, they are about the people he’s met in his life.  Yes, at times he’s in awe of the person’s career and achievements, but the story is always about the person underneath it all.

He’s honest, he doesn’t gloss over his failures, his short comings.  He doesn’t go into great detail, but he tells the story in such a way the nitty gritty isn’t needed to make the point.  The emotions are real, and you can read them, feel them.  All throughout the book you’re rooting for him.  He tells you about his trip to Fiji with his now wife Sheryl, and how he knew they would be together.  He also tells about how he goes out with the guys the night they return, and gets drunk and takes a girl home with him and ‘gets caught’ when Sheryl calls him later that night and hears the girl in the background.

When he talks about his family you can feel the love and pride and joy radiate from the page.  When he tells the story of meeting his son Matthew for the first time in the delivery room, when he calls him My Son, My Matthew your heart swells with the love you know he felt at becoming a father for the first time.  When he talks about life with his wife Sheryl you can feel the love he still feels for her 20 years after she married him.  (and maybe you’re a little bit jealous b/c that lucky bitch gets to spend the rest of her life with Rob Fucking Lowe)

From the nerd who couldn’t get a date to save his life in high school, to the leader of the Brat Pack, from the sex symbol of the 80’s to the West Wing, Rob Lowe has traveled an amazing road and has the stories to prove it.

P.S.  The pictures he included?  um, yes please. No matter what age he is he’s just gorgeous.

Parenting by the books. You're doing it wrong, which, ironically is right

Have you ever been to a bookstore and looked at how many parenting books there are? There are books for every age, in fact there are books for what to expect BEFORE the child gets here.

So basically, we’re piling on the you’re doing in wrong guilt three weeks after the stick you peed on turns blue.

There are all these decisions to be made from the time the child is conceived. OB-GYN or midwife? Hospital or birthing center or home birth? Epidural or natural? (I recommend the drugs, almost from the time the pregnancy test comes back positive) To video the delivery or not.  (the answer to that one should always be NO unless you can get a stunt double for Mom then maybe.)

After the birth there are the important questions, cloth or disposable diapers, breast or formula, daycare or nanny, gin or vodka.

No matter what choices you make, no matter the reasons, no matter your thoughts or feelings or the fact that you were the one screaming as this wrinkly red screaming person was pushed from your hoo-ha, there are those out there who will tell you, You’re doing it wrong.

Because they know best.  Clearly.

The thing is this. Unless you’re beating your child, feeding them crack, buy them a pole for their third birthday, you’re doing it right.  You’re screwing them up just like the rest of us.  Our parents screwed us up, their parents screwed them up, and our kids will screw up their kids.   It keeps therapists in business.  My sister (who is not a parenting expert, clearly. She just plays one for the purpose of this blog post.) has said of her two sons, “I’m not saving for their college education, I’m saving for their therapy.”  It’s the circle of life.

Our parents managed to raise us without eleventy billion parenting handbooks. They did the best they knew how to do with what they had, and guess what? Most of us turned out fine.  There are the exceptions (Miley Cyrus, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan), but most of us…OK.  I think the basics are, if you are present in their life, spend time with them, not at soccer practice or dance class, but them, and if you let them know they can talk to you about anything, well, then, you’re doing a damn good job.

My sister said in a text message to me today “Every kid is like a new car. It’s going to get dented/scratched. You’re better off taking a hammer to the fender on the dealer’s lot so that you can enjoy the car rather than being all freaking stressed constantly about avoiding the ding”   While we don’t advocate taking a hammer to your child, the thinking is, “just like a car depreciates in value as you drive it off the lot, and nothing is perfect forever, you as a parent are going to blow the ‘perfect” thing by the end of day one.” It’s easier and less stressful if you just accept that somewhere along the line you’re going to screw things up, but look at them not as mistakes, they are character building activities.  And their therapists will thank you years later.