From the Mouths of Olds...

People love to quote "from the mouths of babes" to indicate that kids say the wisest things.

This is stupid.

Kids say extremely stupid things.

Sometimes they DO hit on a truth adults won't tell, of course. But that's not because kids are so inordinately wise, it's because they're jerks. They have no filters, so they just say the mean things the rest of us think, but know enough to keep to ourselves.

How Many Stories Do We Have?

There's a theory that most writers have probably heard, and some readers would probably agree with in an ego-cripplingly short amount of time:

Every writer, great, good, or otherwise, really only has one story to write, and s/he keeps on writing it over and over.

Or, in the case of Harper Lee, just the once, then mic drop.

And that's how you kill a mockingbird. Bitches. 

Points of Reference

A few months back, when I still had girl hair, I needed to get it up off my neck.

"Hey, do you have a binder?" I asked the friend I was with.

"What?"

"A binder. A hair binder."

"What?"

"You know, a...I don't know, a ponytail holder."

"OH, a HAIR tie."

Uh, yeah. A binder.

The Other Side of the Coin: Listening

Thanks in large part to a piece I published on ELLE last week--about speaking up on hard topics but also listening to them in the right way--I've been thinking a lot about listening, lately.

There's a reason I chose writing as my medium, forever ago: it allows me to be certain that I'm expressing things the way I want to, and that I then get to be "heard" from a safe distance.

"Safe" in this context means "anywhere further away than in person, at which range I have to react appropriately in real time."

I'm really well-adjusted that way.

Why do we want people to "settle down?"

I was talking to my sister the other day, and a mutual friend who'd had a serious, semi-scary "party phase," and with whom I'd recently reconnected, came up.

"He really seems to have settled down," I said.

I meant it as a positive commentary on the fact that his life now involves far fewer drugs and far more stability than it used to.

But it got me to thinking about the words we use to express that (because what writer wants to take words at face value when instead she can get confused and upset and obsessed by their iceberg natures?): "settling down."

Isn't it kind of sad that at the root of the idea that someone has found a long-term romantic prospect, or reached a good place in her career, or moved to a city that's he can see himself calling home indefinitely, is the word "settling?"

And both senses of the word are kind of depressing; it's not just the connotation of giving up and saying "good enough, I guess" that bugs me, it's the idea that you're losing your forward momentum, "settling" into place, forever relinquishing the potential of the other slots in life's roulette wheel that you're no longer skipping past.

Obviously plenty of people who settle down ARE settling. They're too tired, or scared, or worried about what other people will think to say "I can still do better."

But I hope that's not everyone. I certainly hope it's not me.

So next time I talk to you about the mutual acquaintance who seems to be drinking less and fitting in more yoga, don't get confused if I mention that I'm so happy she's "continuing forward" or "growing sideways" or even just "making positive choices."

Assuming all those things are true, the one thing she's NOT doing is "settling."