I started the 10,000 Pageview celebration with a video post this morning, but I didn’t have time to upload the video before dashing out the door for work. It’s silliness, as per usual, but I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Remember to leave a comment with your idea for a new The Outside Lane tagline! You can win a great, personalized prize.
And if you’re wondering how the sausage looked once the hair was finished and the work clothes applied:
We’ve hit 10,000 pageviews here on The Outside Lane, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I am chuffed! So, to celebrate, I am doing a giveaway tie-in.
I need a new tagline for the blog. “I have technology and I’m not afraid to use it,” is lame. I need your help! From now through Sunday, February 27, submit your ideas for a new tagline for The Outside Lane. On Monday, February 28, I will announce a winner.
I can’t tell you exactly what will be in the gift package because I would like to tailor it to the winner. I would hate to send lipgloss to someone who doesn’t wear it, you know? All I can tell you is that it will be fabulous!
So start tagline brainstorming. You can enter as many different taglines as you like.
Yay! Free stuff!
I may have taught my son to say Hooker while watching American Idol. But jiminey crickets! You don’t sing Here Comes the Sun like you just stepped out of a big, pink wad of bubble gum! B and I were wondering if it was the Michael Jackson half of the Beatles catalog being butchered tonight? I suspect, yes.
I’m spending a lot of thought on relationships because a close family friend is going through a rather acrimonious divorce. We speak about it frequently, so it stays on my mind. I think the hardest part is that the man in question was always, until he suddenly wasn’t, a wonderful, upstanding man of great character. In the twenty-five years I knew him–no, twenty-three because I don’t know this guy who manifested two years ago–he was my go-to manfriend for advice and help. But something happened somewhere, and he isn’t that man anymore.
I am not naive. I know that every relationship is only temporary, if only because everyone dies eventually. As Cher sang it, sooner or later, we all sleep alone. And I know that people change. Some people have nervous breakdowns, some people have strokes, some people develop dementia. Some people hear from god. Some people just get bored.
When all the big names started getting divorced at KCM and EMIC, I think I became immune to shock when people split. I also became very dogmatic about relationships being a daily decision and a daily choice. I was reading an interview with supermodel Yasmin Le Bon* the other day, and something she said stuck with me. I’ve been mulling it over and over since. When asked if there had been a lot of changes in her relationship with her husband over the past twenty-five years of marriage, she said
Of course, relationships change, and that’s the beautiful thing about them. Even now they change, even if it’s in a really serious way. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people separating and divorcing after being married for a long time. And it’s really surprising to me. The only thing I know is that I’m happy and that at any moment I choose to be with him. I don’t know what will come next. All I can tell you is that Simon makes me laugh. When you care for someone so much and they make you laugh so much, you simply want to do everything with them.
The emphasis is mine, of course.
I really believe that long-term relationships are built on little choices we make daily.
When I got married, I had never lived with a man before. I had barely lived with a roommate. I had a lot of learning to do! I was a doted on, only child, and it wasn’t until I moved into my marital home that I realized just how doted on I had been. It was a huge adjustment going from being the center of the universe at home, to being just the other person on the sofa.
It was a huge adjustment going from my family and their copious praise–and listen, when I say copious, I mean it. My mother, my grandparents, my adopted family (including the divorcing couple), and my friends are all very free with praise. I don’t think I went a day between 0 and Married without someone telling me I was beautiful, and brilliant, and wonderful, and talented, and priceless. I married a man who is perfectly happy without talking for days. And I married a man who figures I just know he thinks I’m the bees knees, otherwise, he wouldn’t have married me. Duh. We can go weeks without him complimenting me. THAT was an adjustment.
Okay, I’m still adjusting to that. I like words. Lots and lots of words. Sometimes I feel very sorry for myself. So, when I need to hear words of validation from B, I tell him. (Or I call my mom, and she tells me how perfect I am. I try to do this as a last resort, though. One day, my mom will be gone, and I need to find ways to fill those gaps so that I’m not in a dangerous emotional state the first time I ask B to tell me something nice and he says, “Uh…you’re pretty?”)
My relationship philosophy works like this: My marriage is my life-job. I intend to be in this job for the rest of my life. Just like any job, if I expect success, I need to take pride in the quality of the work I produce, and I need to pay close attention to the market. I have to provide excellent customer service, but I also have to be aware of the bottom line, and when customer service and the bottom line aren’t mutually beneficial, I need to figure out what will keep me in the black. I have a responsibility to live up to a standard. If I am doing the best job possible, I will see results.
But I also understand that sometimes a worker does everything possible, and the customer, or the market just don’t respond. There are hiccups in the economy, natural disasters, terrorist attacks…any number of things can shut down your business without you having done a single thing wrong. All you can do is your best, so that when you go to sleep at night, you know you have been the type of person you wouldn’t mind waking up with.
When it comes to making big decisions about how I will act, react, or behave myself, I do my level best to run everything through my motivation checker first. James 3:17, But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated [sic], full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. If my desired actions, reactions, behaviors can make it through that filter, I go ahead. If they don’t, well, crap. I have to start over again.
Every choice counts.
I promise I won’t be harping on this forever. I’m just writing out a broken heart. I miss the man who walked me down the aisle at my wedding. I’ll miss that man forever. Not nearly as much as his wife will, though. God bless them both.
I was having a really cute morning in my adorbs floral dress and sweater. I stopped off at a walk-in Starbucks (instead of my usual drive-thru) and pranced through the line. I was congratulating myself on my poise and style as I exited, and my toe caught the carpet outside the door. Arse over teakettle, my friends. Coffee everywhere, including in my shoes. So much for poise, but ten points for style of landing.
But just like midnight turned Cinderella back into a housemaid, one fall turned me back into Thor’s Mom. And believe, Thor’s Mom’s really cute moments are increasingly rare. Sad.
I saw a post on a new-to-me community asking about cosmetic surgery. Have it, or age naturally? I thought, and said, that as much as my fleeting youth saddens me, I would not have changed a line on my grandmother’s face. She looked like a walnut, but she was beautiful to me. Both my grandmothers. And I wouldn’t change a hair on my mother’s head or a thing on her face. So, I probably won’t ever change mine.
That made me think about the Bruno Mars song, Just the Way You Are. Here is the chorus:
But every time she asks me do I look okay
I sayWhen I see your face
There’s not a thing that I would change
Cause you’re amazing
Just the way you are
And when you smile,
The whole world stops and stares for awhile
Cause girl you’re amazing
Just the way you are
Gentlemen Readers, allow me to enlighten you. When a woman asks if she looks okay, the only proper response is, “Yes.” Unless she looks like the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith, in which case it is appropriate to suggest that she tone down her lipstick.
Never, ever, under any circumstances answer the question, “Do I look okay,” with, “I would not change a thing about your face, or your amazing smile!” Because, “I would not change a thing about your face, or your amazing smile,” actually translates through a woman’s brain as, “Dang, woman, you have got to do something about that backside!”
Also unappealing: Being told that a man would catch a grenade for you. That just makes a woman squint and blink, and back away slowly.
I did not grow up around any marriages that worked. My parents’ marriage was a disaster. My grandparents, both sets, though they remained married til the bitter end were truly working the bitter part of that end. I was pretty jaded about the prospects of a decent partnership by the time I was old enough to seriously consider it. Actually, I was jaded from the start.
I had no romantic notions about living with someone, and maybe that’s saved me some trouble in the long run, but I used to despair of even seeing friendliness in relationships.
When I worked for the ministry and the church, I did so during a rash of high profile divorces. Still single, I was horrified. If those particular people couldn’t keep it together, who could? I spent a lot of time howling at Irene about it. Then, something magical happened. Irene invited me to visit Spongeorama, a lure I could not resist, and I hopped a flight to Florida. Not only did I get to visit the most grotesquely, insanely beautiful monument to sponge diving in. the. world. I also got to meet Thom a/k/a Irene’s husband (and Liv, their brilliant daughter, who was about five at the time, and who woke me up one morning by crouching on her haunches, very still, and very close to my face like a lovely, blue-eyed cat, staring until I lurched to wakefulness.) I spent three days with a family that worked.
I loved how Thom treated Irene. I loved the easy way they moved around each other. I loved that he didn’t seem to mind that Irene and two friends were giggling like 3rd graders at a slumber party. And I loved that Irene never seemed to feel self-conscious around him at all.
Around the same time, Jamie looked me up. She had been married a couple of years, and though I had met Wes briefly when they were just dating, I didn’t know much about him. It didn’t take long to figure out I was watching another couple who functioned like Irene and Thom. They welcomed me into their home and hosted me through the next few years of job hopping and silliness, and never held against me that I subjected them to Armor of Light through their children–click the link and skip to 3:35 for my big scene. (Wes has been threatening to post this for years, I may as well do it on my own terms! And yes, I was directed to that cadence and delivery. Forgive me!)
I digress.
I got really lucky with Jamie and Wes, and Irene and Thom. I saw those two marriages and it hit me: THAT is what I want. It was two couples made up of imperfect people, who just really liked one another, and who were willing to work hard. They were clearly in it together, and clearly in it for the long haul. There wasn’t ego. No one was competing. They were just good people. They were the only couples I ever admired or envied. They are still the only couples I truly admire.
When I was dating, I was looking for a man who would treat me like Wes treated Jamie, and like Thom treated Irene, and I used Jamie and Irene as examples of good wives. Forget Proverbs 31. An excellent woman was one who didn’t mind game night and treated her in-laws well, no matter how they treated her. I had great examples.
With those two couples as a pattern, I decided I had been looking for all the wrong things, and I changed up my criteria in a dating relationship/future partnership to one thing: I wanted a person with whom I could be 100% myself in total comfort, and vice versa. That decision changed something in me, and I like to think it allowed me to become a better human being.
Since I told you about B yesterday, I thought I should tell you about the people who made B possible for me today.
The Outside Lane 