OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

I've often wondered how people in countries besieged by war or terrorism are able to live seemingly normal lives. They go to work, send their children to school, take the bus, go grocery shopping...just like we do. After this week, I think I finally understand. Look, I'm not going to go into a long lament about these "unprecedented times" or "weathering the current situation" or "navigating these rough waters." We've all heard enough of that to last a while. And that's my point. I realized yesterday that, for the most part, I've adapted to this new normal. My Facebook and Twitter feeds indicate many others have, too. We're starting to talk about things other than community spread and lockdowns. People are sharing pictures of their gardens and flowers and sunrises and sunsets. I'm not going to pretend I'm not scared, or that as a nation - hell, as a PLANET - we aren't all scared.  I'm also not ...

I hope I haven't caused mass hysteria. I hope I haven't sent dozens of people scrambling to their nearest bookstore to purchase books and avoid certain death. Okay, that second one isn't entirely true. If you own a bookstore and notice a spike in sales, you're welcome. Seriously, though, I do  hope you read the headline for this article and clicked on it to find out what on earth I was writing about. (I'll know how many of you did when I check my view count.) With that little headline up there, I intended to spark enough interest to get people to open the article and read it. Why? Because I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want the ego boost I get when I see a high view count for an article. The media wants the same things I do. Ever since the invention of the newspaper, headlines have been written to spark interest. The more sensational the headline, the more likely people were to buy the paper. This meant the paper made money,...

Poor Mercury. It seems like every time there is a communication or technology foul-up, or whenever people are just acting weird, the planet closest to the sun is the prime suspect. If a quick check of the website  www.ismercuryinretrograde.com  yields a positive response, that cinches it. Mercury is responsible. And when Mercury is retrograde, there's nothing you can do but sit back and ride it out. Brief astrology (and astronomy) lesson: Whenever a planet goes retrograde (some say "in retrograde," but this is grammatically incorrect) it appears to move backward across the sky. All planets go retrograde from time to time. They aren't actually moving backward - it just looks like they are because of how their orbit around the sun looks to us here on Earth. Astrologically speaking, the planet Mercury is thought to control communication. In mythology, the god Mercury was a messenger (he was known as Hermes to the Greeks...and he was a trickster to boot.) T...

I used to be obsessed with keeping everyone happy. My thinking seemed logical: If everyone was happy, there would be harmony, and everyone's lives would be easier as a result. Including mine. This obsession continued for decades. I became something of a master at making [almost] everyone happy. As you might have guessed, I was the [almost]. There were times when I did successfully make everyone happy, there was harmony, and life was easy for everyone. The problem was, those times were very rare. Usually, I felt like I was holding a giant, knotted, sparking ball of livewires, playing the world's most sadistic game of Twister while I tried to keep the ends from touching and blowing up the whole thing. I can't tell you when enough became enough or when I finally understood the adage "If you try to please everyone, you please no one" was a truism and not a challenge. And I won't lie and say I have it all figured out now and never fall back into that...

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...