I’ve definitely found that to be true. I’ve always tried to read as much as I can, both fiction and nonfiction, news and entertainment. And recently I’ve also started subscribing to other people’s blogs like a mad woman. For one thing, I enjoy reading the blogs anyway, but for another, I think it reminds me to focus on my own writing–and to work on improving it. 

And Tice also mentions one of my favorite reminders about writing: the importance of writing conversationally. When I was a newspaper reporter, I had a couple of different editors who used to constantly remind me to write more conversationally. It had to become a habit, but in order for it to become a habit, I had to practice it. Regularly. 

Now granted, there are venues for which conversational writing is not entirely appropriate. But even then, the habit of writing conversationally is helpful because it helps keep your (well, my) writing fluid and easy to read. 

Today, I have an article from a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association on my desk. It’s not written in what most of us would call a conversational style. It’s full of data and statistics and explanations of methodolgies for collecting and analyzing all those numbers. But you know, the comment portion is written in a very clear, easy-to-read (for a medical journal) style. It makes sense. It’s compelling. It’s inspiring to me because it shows that you can write about complex subjects without resorting to stilted sentences that are hard to read, even if they’re factually correct. 

And if you have any examples of great writing on complex subjects, let me know. I can always use a little additional inspiration!

But I digress.

I’m on record somewhere around here as saying that I really don’t put much stock in New Year’s Resolutions. It’s not that I think they’re a bad idea. Actually, all the research I’ve encountered in my work shows that it’s actually a really good idea to set goals for yourself. The trick seems to be in narrowing down your desires to a reasonable list and then setting  your main goals–and setting out some steps to help you actually achieve those goals. I’ve written several articles this past year on health coaching, and everyone I’ve interviewed has emphasized the importance of not only setting goals but also then breaking down the goals into steps that you can work on. Then you reassess every so often to see how you’re doing. 

So, instead of just saying, “I want to lose weight,” you might say “My goal is to lose 25 pounds this year. I am going to work on losing approximately two pounds per month. To do that, I am going to work on these steps that will change my life on a daily basis: I plan to replace my daily soda with sparkling water, eat whole grain toast each morning instead of a bagel, and walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes on weekdays. Other strategies that I’d like to try: I plan to keep a food journal so I’ll know what else I’m eating that might be high in calories, and I’m going to enlist my best friend to walk with me on some of those days to hold me accountable. At the end of each month, I’m going to see how it’s all working.” Or something like that. 

I’m about to go against all that good advice and say that I’ve sketched out some very broad goals this year but haven’t come up with any good solid steps to help me achieve them. My goals are more like mantras that I can repeat when I’m tempted to violate them. So, without further ado, here they are:

Spend less. Fairly self-explanatory. The holiday season leaves many of us feeling like we need to put our credit cards in the freezer for an extended vacation. Spend less means reconsidering if I really need another T-shirt or scarf. It means trying to cut back on the fast food. It means digging into my closet for a sweater that I might have forgotten about instead of buying a new one. If I’m standing in Target and whisper “spend less” to myself, I can put the bottle of nail polish back on the shelf.

Yell less. When you have young children and you’re not a naturally low-key person who lets things roll off her back, you sometimes (okay, often) find yourself yelling. I don’t like this. After the Newtown, CT, massacre, I made a conscious effort to back way off on being too uptight with my children. They’re children. They’re my children, and I love them. Not that I’m going to let them get away with deliberately bad or rude behavior, but let’s keep the big picture in mind. As MaryAnn McKibben Dana describes in her book Sabbath in the Suburbs, I’m trying to approach things more “Sabbathly.” If I remind myself that the person I want to be is a person who can remember to “yell less,” then hopefully I will…yell less. 

Save more. That includes for me and also for my kids. It costs almost $48,000 per year to attend my lovely alma mater these days. Yikes. My husband’s loftier alma mater runs more like $55,000 per year. My oldest child is not quite 7. Imagine what college is going to cost in 2024. Not that we’ll be able to afford to send to him to either of those schools. I’m thinking of enrolling him in lessons for some obscure sport or instrument to see if maybe he can win one of those random-but-lucrative scholarships for that sort of thing. Don’t worry, kids, I do have some plans fulminating for how to achieve this particular goal. 

Move more. That is, exercise more, not pile all my worldly possessions into a van and traipse across the country. (I did that in 2001. And again in 2007.) I actually did really well on this front in 2012. I visited the local Y at least three times just about every week, and often, it was more like four or five times per week. I ran some, too. I’d like to do more of that this year. I’m going to figure out how to achieve that later. But just knowing that I have vowed to move more tends to convince me to take the stairs more often or drag the kids to the Y on a day when I’m on the fence about going.

Also, I’d like to learn how to knit. Knit without swearing, that is. But that’s a discussion for another time.

I am the one not wearing a mask and a cape. But I do have on a costume. I am Super Mommy/ Super Writer. I have inkstains (from writing) and calluses (from typing) on my hands, cookie stains on my sweater, and jeans with a few smudges of who only knows what on them.

For example, I subscribe to a lot of email lists for writers. I belong to several professional organizations for writers and journalists. I’m a member of a couple of online communities for writers. I spend most of my professional time….yes, writing.

Or well, actually, I spend most of that time doing the things that will allow me to eventually write. Like contact potential sources, plead with potential sources to let me interview them, interview sources, keep in contact with sources, double-check info, buy office supplies (what is it with me and my inability to keep enough printer paper in stock?), make sure the printer has paper in it, contacting those sources again, going over notes, looking up stats, and so on.

And then I write. I write, then I edit, then I rewrite, then I edit some more, and then I (gulp) file with my editor or client. 

So today, I got my usual assortment of emails from that variety of organizations that I mentioned above, and you know what I did? I deleted them without even looking at them. All of them. They may have–probably did–contain amazing gems of information that would kick-start or nourish my career, but man, I am. just. tired. 

Every once in awhile, I get like this. I lose a little bit of steam. The big culprit right now is Summer. Endless summer. My son has been back in school–first grade, gah!–for more than a week, but it’s still full metal summer here. I’m tired of summer leaching all the energy out of me. I don’t want to market myself. I don’t want to send pitches to new editors…or even to old editors. I don’t want to send friendly emails to former contacts to check in and see if maybe they have any new possible work for me. I don’t want to network with other writers. I don’t even feel much like sending invoices to the clients for whom I do regular work.

I kind of just want to lie down. 

Does anyone else out there sometimes get burned out by the business of being a writer? It’s a necessary part of the job, absolutely. I get it. I really do. But sometimes, it’s just exhausting. Again, necessary. I’m not going to give up my professional memberships or stop reading articles about improving my craft–or more importantly, reading and studying the issues that I write about. I’m not going to stop being my own manager, either. But sometimes I think I just need a break from that aspect of it. 

The writing, though…I still like doing that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I think what I need to do is find a Really Great Book to read. That often inspires me. So does a Really Great article. Autumn will help, too. 

What burns you out? What do you do to move past it?

I’m having flashbacks to what it was like living in the desert, where it stayed above 110 for weeks on end. “But it’s a dry heat,” someone would always say when the triple-digit temperature was mentioned. Folks, I’m here to tell you that after it gets to be about 115 or so, it doesn’t really matter if it’s humid or not. It’s HOT. It’s awful. You feel like beef jerky. You begin to resemble beef jerky a little bit, too.

At any rate, I keep thinking of things I want or need to do–and then rejecting them. For example, I was thinking that my son and I would make cupcakes today after day camp. But that would require turning on the oven, which would heat up my kitchen. Pass. Okay, what about splashing in the baby pool or the water table on the patio? Hmmm, that requires being outside under the sun. Nope. What about going to the playground? Obviously not. The shady (sort of) greenway in the park a couple of miles away? Even in the shade, the heat is formidable. The outdoor concert series at the local park? Cancelled. 

Guess we’ll just stay inside and eat popsicles and watch TV. The weather’s making us do it! Who are we to resist?

Those are the words my grandfather murmured yesterday morning as my father drove him away from the town that’s been his only home since 1946. With those words, he bid a quiet farewell my grandmother’s grave, to the city where he raised two sons, to the house where he grew prize-winning roses, to the station where he worked as an engineer for many years, to the assisted living facility where he moved after my grandmother’s death. To the lifetime he spent there.

Nine hours later, give or take, my grandfather arrived in his new hometown. A new hometown at age 94. Many would say they could only hope to be around to have a new hometown at that age, but I don’t know if he sees it that way. So much of what made his life his life is gone. Even Vicksburg is now a different place. It wears a veil of memories that makes it resemble the old town only in his mind. And in our minds, too. But it still seems like it would be hard to leave the home you knew for so long, regardless of whether it’s actually still the same.

Around dinnertime, I met my father and my uncle at the nursing home. My older son, William, who is six, walked beside me, and I carried his little brother, Andrew, who is two. We walked cautiously into my grandfather’s new room, and I thought how on earth 94 years on the earth be contained in this one room. And yet it is. Those years are contained in the hunched shoulders, now birdlike in their thinness, of my grandfather, sitting in his wheelchair in a room with a motorized single bed and a call button for the nurse. My dad once referred to my grandfather as “robust,” and while I never thought of him that way, per se, he was always active, upright, walking around in his sensible gray slacks and soft-soled shoes. He never seemed to age at all, in fact, not until just a few short years ago. In my head, he was perpetually about 65 years old–the same age my father is now.

This past winter, my grandfather fell and fractured a hip. He was hospitalized, had surgery, and was discharged into the nursing unit of the assisted living facility, where he began physical therapy. He improved. He declined. He improved again. Whenever anyone asked me how he was doing, I always replied, “He’s doing okay. For someone who’s 94 and has a broken hip.” We knew then that he’d never be able to return to any type of independent living facility, so we resigned ourselves to looking for a room in a nursing home. By then, we also knew that my parents were moving here to Nashville, to be close to me and my young family. As exhausting as the boys can be, there is something so utterly compelling about their round smooth faces, their high voices and their excitement over the smallest things, and my parents didn’t want to miss out on that any longer. But if my parents were to move here, we knew that my grandfather would have to come here, too.

And so, he is here now, uprooted, because of me. Indirectly, I suppose. But still here. Whether it’s rational or not, I feel no small degree of guilt over this.

My grandfather is from Nebraska originally. He never lost his Midwestern accent, not even after all those years with my grandmother and her Louisiana drawl. She always talked more than he did, but I can quite clearly remember him telling stories and voicing opinions. He doesn’t say much now. I don’t know that he doesn’t have much to say, or if he feels that he’s already said it all. He is quiet, withdrawn, almost numb. He knew that he needed to move here; he said so to me on the phone last fall, when my parents decided to buy a house just a few miles away from my house. “Well, I can’t stay down here,” he declared in a no-reasonable-person-would-possibly-say-otherwise voice. He knew. He understood. He agreed. After all, he was the one who made the decision to move out of his old house once my grandmother was gone. But he is not saying much now. I don’t think he disagrees now. I think he still knows this is what needed to be done.

It doesn’t make the transition any easier.

My brother mentioned that I might want to take a treat to Grandaddy now and then. We all know that a macadamia nut cookie won’t solve anything. It won’t bring my grandmother back. It won’t magically heal my grandfather’s hip or erase the savages of age. It won’t take him home. He might not even eat the cookie. I’m still going to do those sorts of things, though. It’s the least I can do. And I want to find other things I can do to show him that he matters to me, so much. He matters to all of us.

So. We’ll see how it goes.

“It’s important not to talk in class when the teacher doesn’t want you to talk,” I lectured my son a few days ago, after he drooped his way off the school bus and admitted he got dinged twice for talking. “The teacher doesn’t like that, and you’re going to have to learn that sooner or later, because it’s going to be that way for the rest of your life.”

Dun dun dun. I know. My son is not quite six, and I’m already warning him about The Rest of His Life. Next thing you know, I’ll be busting out “you don’t want that to go on your permanent record” and “be careful; your face could freeze that way.” I freely admit that I’ve already mentioned that “there are starving people in China” (although I may have actually said India or Somalia).

Anyway. I like to Tell People Things. It’s what I do as a writer most of the time. That is, when I’m not asking lots of questions (the best part of being a journalist, if you ask me). I am conscious of this tendency, so I do try to rein it in when I can. But it’s just part of my nature.

So my son is playing his third season of soccer this spring. We’ve drilled it into him that this experience should be about 1) having fun, 2) getting some exercise and 3) learning how to play the game. He has already bought in. (Score!) If you ask him the most important thing about playing soccer, he will immediately tell you that it’s about having fun. And for him, it really IS about having fun. He loves it. He loves running around outside. He loves playing with his buddies. He even loves the actual game of soccer, as he’s played long enough to have a reasonably good grasp of how it works.

This does not prevent me, his dear mother, from lecturing him about the important things anyway. Today, before my husband took him to his game, I managed to “gently remind” him to play hard, to be a good sport, to watch the ball, to pay attention to his coach and to not hug on his teammates until after the game was over. (He’s a big hugger. Actually, a couple of the others are, too. Sometimes it’s a big old hug fest out there on the field. It’s cute during practice. Maybe not so much during a game.)

“And to have fun,” he reminded me.

Well, yes, there is that.

And sure enough, my husband reports, our son did all of those things during the game today. So either he has listened to me Tell Him Things and actually internalized them, or else maybe he just does those things on his own and I don’t deserve any of the credit at all. Actually, it’s probably the latter.

Here’s a picture of him, keeping his eye, yes, on the ball.

 
I’ve been writing, mostly. Writing, doing Zumba (is Zumba-ing a word? Can it be a word now?), running a little, writing a lot, going to meetings, writing and juggling the family. Ironically, I am currently writing an article about work-life balance for a health care publication. Yeah. Last week, I wrote an article about the top five things that are keeping you (that is, me) from getting a good night’s sleep and the solutions to the problem. Let’s just say that I’m a textbook example of almost everything that you can do wrong on that front. But at least I know what I’m doing wrong, right. Isn’t knowing half the battle?

Oh, and I wrote a fun story last week, too…

Taking Flight: One Nurse’s Unusual Passion

*Mom brought me some, my husband located some at a stand in front of Kroger, and a mom on my son’s soccer team gave me a box of Tagalongs. Mischief managed!

Not for lack of trying, mind you. I posted my GS Cookie Buying Policy on Facebook and Twitter, but no one came forward.

For the record, my policy is this: If a Girl Scout asks me to buy a box of cookies, I buy a box of cookies.

You see, I had to scrape together the courage to ask people to buy cookies from me for six years during my childhood. As I was born without the saleswoman gene, I hated every single minute of it. I cringed at the very thought of walking up to someone and asking them to buy something from me. I would rather floss my teeth than sell things. I’d rather floss someone else’s teeth than sell things.

But I did it. It was what you were supposed to do. You raised your hand and, on your honor, pledged to serve God, your country and mankind and live by the Girl Scout law…and sell expensive cookies. 

The worst was when I managed to steel myself enough to ask someone to buy a box, and the person told me, “Sorry, I already bought some from Mary Jane over there.” And from across the room, Mary Jane would smile smugly and brandish her order form, which was already completely full of people’s enthusiastic orders. Mary Jane’s mom took the order form to work for her so Mary Jane didn’t have to do all of the hard work of asking people to buy cookies. Mary Jane’s mom always unquestioningly bought Guess jeans for her, too, just so you know. 

Or sometimes people would smile kindly but tell me that they really didn’t need to eat any cookies, so thank you for asking but they were respectfully turning me down. To which I now say: “Who really needs to eat cookies, I ask you?” Who turns down a trembling seven-year-old girl in a brown beanie because you need to lose five pounds? The deeply cynical part of me wonders if there’s not some bad karma out there floating around for those people–like an extra ten pounds. You see, what those people should have done was order one box of something simple like those shortbread Trefoil cookies and then doled them to company with cups of coffee. Or purchased one lone box of Thin Mints and put them in the freezer for later. OR they could have bought a box and given them to a skinny friend. That way, they didn’t compromise their diet but they didn’t have to reject poor little knobby-kneed Brownie me. 

And so, as an adult, I have made it a blanket policy to buy at least one box of Girl Scout cookies from any young lady who asks me herself, either by phone or in person. That’s the key: she has to ask me herself. But she can rest assured that I will never, ever turn her down. 

One of my friends has promised to send her daughter to me next year when she’s old enough to start selling Girl Scout cookies. Zoe, mark me down for two boxes of Tagalongs. And if no one else asks me, I might bump it up to three. 

Normally,it’s cold, it’s gray, it’s gloomy right about now. Except this year. With the exception of, well, today, we’ve had this weird, glorious spate of beautiful sunny early January days. It’s been unseasonably…nice.

Now. I will admit something. I actually don’t mind having some cold, gray, yucky days in January. When I lived in California, we didn’t get a lot of weather like that, and absence made the heart grow fonder. I once overheard a woman compare the weather in San Diego to a person who smiles all the time. In theory, that sounds great, doesn’t it? In reality, it is nice….for awhile. Then it gets a little annoying. You find yourself wishing for a gloomy day so you can justify a nice cozy day on the couch, with no feelings of guilt over not going for a run or doing something healthy and wholesome and virtuous. When it’s 72 and sunny, you feel like you ought to be out there, even if you really really really don’t want to be.

But when you have a long long string of more typical winter weather—the damp frigid kind, I mean–those start to get tiresome, too. But usually I don’t get tired of that until at least February. The novelty starts to wear off around Valentine’s Day, and by March, it’s downright unwelcome. My perpetually cold toes start wearing holes in my warmest socks because I’ve worn them so often, and yet when I go to the mall, all the stores are selling bathing suits and tank tops.

So a few sparkling days in early January were maybe not quite as glee-inducing as they would be a few weeks from now. But you know what? I’ll still take them. The mid-winter blahs are still ahead. Might as well store up some Vitamin D while I can.