OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

Many years ago, I was working as a pharmacy technician in a small town in Oklahoma. I hadn't lived here long, and I still had dreams of moving west to Seattle or Portland or somewhere in Northern California. Basically, anywhere except Oklahoma. The pharmacist's son was also a relatively new transplant to Oklahoma. He wasn't a fan, either.  One afternoon, he and I were talking about how we couldn't wait to move "anywhere other than here." Our highschool-aged coworker overheard us and asked: "What's so wrong with here?" We were shocked. "Have you ever been anywhere else?" he asked. "No," she replied. "Well, I mean, I've been places on vacation, and that's fun, but it's always nice to come home. I like it here." She went to help a customer, and my friend and I just shook our heads. Our coworker was obviously too young to know any better. Or maybe she just didn't aspire to much. Eit

I've spent most of my life in the South, where "nice" is a point of pride. Our niceness is one of the first things non-Southerners notice when they visit. Mothers teach their children to "be nice" before they teach them basic human skills like using the toilet and brushing their teeth. I'd go so far as to say many Southerners are a little prejudiced against non-Southerners when it comes to niceness. Some of us act as though we've cornered the market on being nice. And there is one place we consistently point to that seems to prove this point: New York City. I've visited New York a number of times over the past 20 years. At first glance, this Southern girl concluded the rumors were true: New Yorkers aren't nice. But then again, they aren't mean, either. This puzzled me, because in the South if you aren't nice, you must be mean. After a couple of visits, I concluded that - at least in New York - the opposite of "nice" isn&

For as long as I can remember, my mom made me promise three things under penalty of haunting: I would never put her in a nursing home. If she ever had to be on life support, I wouldn't unplug her. I would make sure she was buried, not cremated. Ultimately, #3 was the only promise I could keep, and Mom wasn't the type to grade on a curve. Yet, she isn't the parent who haunts me. When my dad died, I was two states away with a newborn baby. I had made the trip to see him four weeks postpartum, and there was no doubt the end was near. But I couldn't make the trip twice in such a short period of time, and other family members couldn't get together for a funeral right away, either.  So, we did the only thing we could do: My older sister had him cremated, and we had a memorial service a few months later. That was 12 years ago, and I still have dreams that my dad has called but we have a bad phone connection and I can't understand him. I dream he

For several years now, I've made a conscious effort to be overwhelmingly positive and optimistic. As a once-proud pessimist, this is something I have to work at daily. It's also something I feel I've gotten pretty good at. Most of the time. And then, someone will give me negative feedback. This can be about something I've done, something I've created, or something I've only been marginally associated with. Suddenly, my positivity is down the drain. I'm obviously the worst person ever, unable to do anything right, and everything I've ever created is crap. I thought my tendency to hear the negative louder than the positive was just proof that I might never fully overcome my pessimistic tendencies. Today, I learned there's actually a scientific reason for this. All the way back in the 1970s, Dr. Robert Levenson and Dr. John Gottman studied the differences between happy and unhappy couples. They concluded happily married couples have a praise