OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

Our electricity went out just before 1:00 this morning. When the alarm woke me from a light doze at 5:30 AM, power still hadn't been restored. I woke up sleep-deprived, grumpy, and thinking of everything no power meant for my morning: A workout in the dark with no Grace & Frankie to distract me from the fact I had voluntarily left my bed before dawn to torture myself with cardio. No daylight lamp to give me the wakeup (and mood) boost I desperately needed. A seriously cold shower after my workout. No tea (read: no caffeine) with breakfast. T.G.I.F.  On the bright side, I could still meditate. The thought of enjoying those few moments of undisturbed silence cheered me up quite a bit. As I settled in for my morning meditation, the power surges started. And they didn't stop. This caused our battery backups to beep incessantly. I grumbled. Then I smiled. To put it delicately, my morning had been shot all to hell. Nothing had gone according to plan. The routines I depend on for ...

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...