The Fountain of Youth

I was out to dinner with a group of friends the other night.  As a way of describing us, let’s just say that we are all past forty and looking forward to the wonder that is fifty; in two cases, anyway, the women are experiencing the wonder of fifty.  In any event, we were discussing the idea of plastic surgery and wondering if any of us would pull the trigger and go in for any procedures.  Having been the only one who had had a massive, unplanned surgery that didn’t result in the extraction of a baby too big to birth, I cautioned them that having elective surgery was something that they all should consider thoughtfully.  I let them know that surgery is not for the faint of heart. 

One friend’s response to the question of plastic surgery was the old Coco Chanel trope, “You can either focus on your ass or your face.”  My friend had chosen her ass but I have to say, her face looks pretty damned good, too, mostly because she’s Italian and Italians, in my opinion, age much better than the Irish.  (You’d think with all that rain, we’d have perfected that dewy complexion thing.  We haven’t.  In addition to the rain thing, we’ve got the booze thing, and that’s hard to shake off, even after generations of good dermatology.)  Another friend said she might consider an eyelift.  I, for one, would consider having the fat sucked out of my chin and then remembered the massive, unplanned surgery and put that idea to rest.  Another friend is so thin and so fit that she doesn’t have a line on her face and still looks like a sixteen-year-old.  We hashed this out over a few glasses of Chianti and then it finally dawned on me:  plastic surgery is a slippery slope.  It’s kind of like painting your kitchen and then looking at your dining room and thinking, “Wow, that looked ok before, but now?  Not so much.”  Where do you stop?  Do you stop with the chin and hope the rest of the face continues to look good or do you go whole hog and get the whole kit and caboodle done?  I suspect that if you get one “problem area” taken care of, you find that you need to get another one done, and then another, and then, all of them done until you’re deciding to get your ears—now too low on your head—moved up to accommodate your new, stretched thin face.

I had put this whole conversation out of my mind until this past weekend.  Every Rosh Hashanah, despite the fact that we are the goyest of the goy, we head to Massachusetts to visit my mother’s brother and his family.  The kids are off from school, which makes it the perfect time for a road trip.  My aunt and uncle couldn’t be more hospitable, but something I always forget until we’re there is that a) we eat a lot (making trying to stay on Weight Watchers fruitless) and b) there is not a light bulb in the house that is less than one hundred and fifty watts (which makes seeing yourself for the first time in the early morning light the most frightening experience you could ever have).  As I was putting my makeup on Friday morning, I regarded my reflection with alarm.  Had I sprouted a full beard and mustache overnight?  Did I have more wrinkles now than when I had gone to bed?  When did my eyes start drooping like that?  Were my teeth always the color of corn? What exactly had happened to me while I slept?

I came down to breakfast, a little defeated, wondering how I went out in the world without being chased by villagers with pitchforks.  It wasn’t until I was in the car with my mother—the only person you should ask questions of if you want totally honest answers—that I had the nerve to ask her, “Is it the lighting in the upstairs bathroom or do I look as bad and as old as that mirror would have me believe?”  I held my breath while waiting for the answer but her hysterical laughter was all I needed to hear.  Turns out that under the harsh light of an operating-room set of marquee lights, none of us look that good.  Including my twelve-year-old son who was mumbling about Botox on the way home.

So, I have determined that it’s not plastic surgery, or visits to a pricey dermatologist or esthetician, or shooting your face up with unknown products that harden under your skin and smooth out the wrinkles that are the key to aging gracefully.  Rather, it’s really simple:  good lighting.  A quick trip to Target for some forty-watt bulbs and I’ll be all set. Hubby will think that I slept in a time machine and have emerged looking like I did in 1991 (without the bad perm and the shoulder pads).   I’ll look dewy, fresh, young, and rested.  Now, I just have to figure out how to change the light bulbs in my aunt and uncle’s house every Rosh Hashanah without them catching on.

What are your secrets to the fountain of youth, Stiletto friends?

Maggie Barbieri

Living the Dream

Time was, long ago, before I was published, that I thought that once I had a book out, everything would be perfect. (It’s the same thought process that tells me that if I just weighed twenty pounds less, well, the laundry would do itself, I would always have on the perfect outfit, and my kids would do their homework the second they walked through the door.) I would have attained my dream and the birds would sing and all would be well. It wasn’t until I was on my third book, or maybe closer to my fourth, that I realized that living the dream meant something completely different that what I had envisioned.

I was at lunch the other day with a large group, sitting alongside a woman who is writing her memoir. She asked me, “so what is it like now that you’ve achieved your dream of being a writer?” I looked at her, and very thoughtfully said, “Here’s the thing. When you have a dream and you achieve it, you have to live the dream in the context of your reality.” And then I wondered why nobody from the Oprah show had ever called me to be a guest because that sentence alone a) sounded like something I had heard on one of her “Live Your Best Life” shows and b) didn’t sound like me at all.

But the more I thought about it, and what a horse’s rear end I sounded like, I realized that there was a kernel of truth there. It’s putting all of the pieces together around the achievement that’s hard. It’s living day to day when you think things should be a certain way and they’re not that’s challenging. That’s why a “dream”—a word whose synonym is also “vision”—is exactly that: it is never what you think it’s going to be. Fortunately, while living this dream, I’m not naked and I’m not being chased by people with no heads, two situations that dominate my regular nocturnal dreams.

I have dreamed of being a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote stories and novels and poems from the time I was small. Curiously, they all had dead bodies at the center, but that’s a post for a different time. And now that I am a writer—and those of you who read this blog regularly know that it has taken me far too long to admit that I actually am a writer and not just a “freelance college textbook editor”—I run into people all the time who ask me what it’s like to be a writer and how I feel about attaining what has long been a dream for me. They are often surprised to find out that I still work full time or that I don’t have a regular writing schedule. Writers, it would seem, don’t have regular jobs and spend every day, from eight to two or some other reasonable time frame, writing.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works in the real world.

I was at a family party a few weeks ago and a relative of my husband asked me why I continued to work full time if I was a “successful writer.” I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to say, “because my kids like to eat” because she was genuinely interested and not passing judgment on my doing both. So, I explained the vagaries of the publishing world and e-books and royalties and advances and such until her eyes glazed over and she was sorry she ever asked. (That’ll learn ya.) Thing is, we live in an expensive part of the country and we’ve got a kid going to college in a mind-numbingly close eleven months and those textbooks don’t come cheap. Just ask me—that’s my day job. But the truth is that the joy I get from writing can’t be measured in dollars (thank God) and despite not having a “writerly existence,” I am still living the dream of putting pen to paper every day (or fingertips to keyboard, as the case may be) in between dealing with smelly soccer socks and a garbage bin that smells suspiciously like death and water that seeps into the basement at the first sign of drizzle.

None of this is a complaint. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But the older I get, the less wise I seem to become, and the more surprised I am on a daily basis. I wonder if I’ll ever be that full-time writer who labors in my attic, only to emerge at a decent hour to continue thinking about plot, structure, and characters while drinking a whimsical white Rioja, but then I remember that if I did that, no one would have clean soccer socks.

And we don’t want that.

Tell me, Stiletto readers, what dream have you attained in your life and how has it been different from what you imagined?

Maggie Barbieri

The Follow-Up Question

My picture pops up every few seconds above…does this look like the face of someone you should tell everything to?  No?  Well, if so, you’re in the minority, because everywhere I go, I hear at least one life story in a day.

No kidding.

My husband always remarked on my ability to make small talk with people around me, perfect strangers even, and wonder what it was that made me a magnet for people who have stories to tell.  It was our friend, a retired New York City Police detective named John, who came up with the only theory to explain this phenomenon.

Apparently, I ask the “follow-up question.”

What is the “follow-up question,” you ask?  Well, seemingly, it’s that one extra question that will get the person telling you the most intimate, darkest secrets of their life despite the fact that they’ve never laid eyes on you.  It’s the question that I guess lets the teller know that you want to hear every single detail of their story—of their life, even—and that you won’t rest until you do.  It’s the question that keeps you molded to the same spot in the local pharmacy or in the parking lot at Target or on the phone with “Marco,” in India, who is helping you reconnect to the internet after a recent storm.  It’s the question that separates me, just your average writer/housewife/mother/textbook editor from anyone else I know.

A less generous friend calls me a “psycho magnet,” but I don’t think that’s what I am.  I am just a person who is interested enough in some lonely—or maybe just talkative—person’s life to ask the one question that will set the monologue wheels in motion.  John, the detective, said that if the textbook thing (my day job) ever went south, I should apply to the police department and focus on interrogations.  Jim says that if assigned to the terrorism task force, I would be busting terrorists left and right.  People tell me stuff even if they’re not supposed to.

Unfortunately, I usually hear a lot about intestinal trouble or a diatribe about the horrendous service at _________________ where the person telling me tried to buy ___________________ only to have no one wait on them.  That usually dovetails into a more personal story about their spouse, or their children, or a wayward niece of nephew.  Don’t ask me how we get there, but somehow, we always do.

But there are other, more interesting stories that come out of the follow-up question.  Case in point:  the day my first book, MURDER 101, was published, the only place that had copies was a local gift store which was owned by a dear friend who had placed his order early and had what seemed like the first copies printed.  He had set the books up on a large round table in the middle of the store, announcing their arrival with much fanfare.  He called me the minute the display was up and I headed over to the store to see what it looked like to have fifty copies of your first publication displayed in the middle of my favorite store in town. 

It was fabulous.

As I was gushing over the incredible display, a woman sidled up beside me.

“These your books?”

They were, I assured her.

“What are they about?”

This was back in the day before I had perfected my “elevator pitch;” you know, the one-sentence description of the book and the series that would perfectly describe what it was and let the potential reader know if it was right for them.  I set about describing the book from start to finish. 

The woman held her hand up to stop me when I got to around page fifty.  “So the murder is fiction?”

Rather than tell her that I thought it was compelling and leapt off the page, despite being “fiction,” I let her know that it was and asked her what she liked to read.  She shook off that question.

“I know about a real murder,” she whispered, clearly dismissive of my character, Alison Bergeron, and the body in the trunk of poor Alison’s car.  (In the interest of full disclosure, this was not a confession on her part.)

By this time, my husband and the owner of the store had wandered off to peruse the latest men’s offerings from Crabtree and Evelyn and I, despite my internal warning system, said, “Really?  Who got murdered?”  Most people, when confronted with a woman with wild hair, and even wilder eyes, would have probably joined Jim at the Crabtree and Evelyn display to see if their razor balm really did cut down on razor burn, but to me, this was too good to pass up.  The woman proceeded to regale me with stories of her “research,” and how she kept it all in a safe deposit box lest someone else get a hold of her ideas and the story.  It was just that good, in her mind.

I let her ramble on and then the kiss of death: I asked the follow-up question to the follow-up question in the form of “have you started writing?” which led her to a list of reasons as to why she hadn’t. (She, apparently, was very busy.  At the time, I had two children, a husband, a dog, and a full-time job.  Oh, and daily chemotherapy to attend to.  I wasn’t busy at all.)

I never did find out who got murdered and I also don’t know if she ever wrote her story, never mind get it published.  I used to see her around town and she would always give me a look that would either say “Do I know you?” or “Now that you know about the murder and the safety deposit box, I have to kill you, too!” but I couldn’t tell which it was.

 So there you have it, one example of where the follow-up question can lead.  And trust me:  it’s never good.

Hey, Stiletto friends…are you one of those people to whom others tell everything?  Do you ask the follow-up question to your own detriment?  And thanks to my friend and fellow Stiletto blogger, Susan McBride, for prompting the topic of this post.  After reading about her sharing with her A/C repairman, it dawned on me that I, too, had this special gift called "tell me your life story."  Thanks, Susan!

Maggie Barbieri

In Defense of Paranoia and Over-Protectiveness

My kids say I’m paranoid.

They also say that I’m overprotective.

Yes, and definitely yes.

Being a parent is to know fear as you have never known it before.  Maybe I’m a little overly dramatic (ok, I am), but to wait for your teenaged daughter to come back from a run that inexplicably goes past dusk brings anxiety.  Or to have your twelve-year-old walk through the door ten minutes later than he is supposed to from his trek home from school is panic inducing.  I’ve tried to explain to the kids what goes on in my mind, but they still think I’m crazy, and I guess that’s ok.  To me, it’s a dangerous world out there, something I try to communicate to them without scaring the dickens out of them and making them paranoid like me but they still think I’m crazy and I understand that. I thought my parents were crazy, too, when I was both a tween and a teen. 

Now, however, I “get” it.

Last week, here in New York, an eight-year-old boy went missing on the first day he was allowed to walk home alone from camp.  After begging his parents to let him walk home from camp, they had relented, telling him that they would meet him half way.  He left camp, got lost, and encountered the one person—because I am convinced that 99 out of 100 pedestrians would have led him to his parents—who saw his situation as an opportunity to do harm.  The man, Levi Aron, a citizen in the tight-knit Hasidic community where this little boy lived and worshipped with his family, took him in his car—probably telling him that he would take him to his parents—brought him home and kept him in his attic apartment for a day. The manhunt that ensued after little Leiby Kletzy’s disappearance caused Aron to panic.  So, he killed the boy by suffocating him.

My husband read the story in the paper and looked at our oldest, saying, “And this is why we’re crazy.”

We’re crazy because one chance encounter can have dire consequences.  Sure, these situations are rare, but they are not completely out of the realm of possibility and that’s what makes them all the more horrifying.  Here in the New York metropolitan area, no one can get the image captured on a security camera of that little boy, walking along a busy Brooklyn street, his backpack on his back, walking toward a stranger who had more than one screw loose.  Every time I see it, I want to scream at the boy in the video to “keep walking!”  But he keeps going, not a care in the world, toward the stranger who will do him the ultimate harm.

All parents have been in situations where they have had to make a decision like the one Lieby Kletzky’s parents made.  “Can I walk home today?”  “Can I stop at the ice cream store on the way home from school?”  “Can I take the bus to the mall?”  “Can I go to the midnight show of ‘Harry Potter’?”  His parents, who are raising their family in an insular, and up to this point, practically crime-free city neighborhood, probably felt somewhat comfortable letting him go.  After all, the streets in this neighborhood team with other families, other parents, and people who would help the little guy find his way when he got lost.  I’m sure that they never banked on the fact that a lunatic walked among them on their quiet city streets, someone who would look for the opportunity to hurt a child.

The letters to the editor in our local paper were, for the most part, sympathetic, but of course there were the few that placed blame squarely on the boy’s parents for letting an eight-year-old walk home from camp, a distance of about ten blocks.  He was too young, they claimed.  He didn’t have enough experience with the world, they wrote.  It’s too dangerous out there, they opined.  Perhaps all true.  But once the decision was made the parents fretted a bit, I’m sure, but decided that in their neighborhood, one where everyone is very similar, very family-oriented, very religious and caring of one another, nothing bad would happen.  It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, the one where you make the decision that you have fought against only to acquiesce and have it turn against you in the worst way possible.

I read an editorial in yesterday’s paper by a mother in Los Angeles who allows her young child walk to and from school and who gives him freedoms that even my teenager doesn’t have.  Giving into fear, she posits, means the terrorists have won or something like that.  By not allowing our children some basic freedoms, she says, we are imprisoning them in our hysteria, creating fearful and dependent children not ready to take on the world. She’s right about one thing:  I’m not ready for my children to take on the world.  If that makes me an hysteric, so be it.  Intellectually, I know I cannot protect them from every harm or every monster that roams the landscape. I know that ultimately, I have no control over every situation.  But I have to control the things that I can in the hope that I can keep them safe.

I can’t stop thinking about the little boy in the striped shirt, walking down a safe city street, his backpack on his back.  In my mind, he turns around and goes the other way, away from the maniac who took his life and ruined his family’s.  I don’t think I ever will forget him, just like I have never forgotten six-year-old Etan Patz, a little boy who disappeared in 1979 on a New York City street on the day he walked to his bus stop, never to be found.  His disappearance changed how parents viewed freedom and independence for years to come.   So every time either one of my children asks me why I’m so overprotective, why I’m so paranoid, I’ll say a little prayer for sweet Leiby Kletzky and his family and tell my kids that some day, they’ll understand.

Maggie Barbieri

Turning "Off"

I’m the kind of person who when faced with nothing to do, a long stretch of interrupted peace, finds something to do.  I’m not good at relaxing.  Mr. Maggie often refers to it as my “on/off switch.”  He says that if I’m not “on,” I’m “off,” which usually means that I’m asleep.  I have a hard time turning off my mind and my body, which is why doing yoga has proven spectacularly unsuccessful for me.

The last few weeks, however, have forced me to do just that—turn off while awake.  I have just finished a day job project that required me to get twenty books revised and to the printer—all in India, no less—by the middle of June for a mid-July collective pub date.  To say that the project nearly did me in is not an understatement.  (For proof, you can ask either the northern half of Evelyn David or Susan.  They have heard enough whining to last a lifetime.)  I had to deal with the first round of edits on my next book (PHYSICAL EDUCATION, out in November) and then the copyedits.  I have a number of other projects for work in various stages of readiness, and with varying degrees of author compliance.  By say the twentieth of June, my brain was fried.

So, I decided to play against type and take a few days off.  At first, it was an unsuccessful experiment, with me going deep into the bowels of the Barbieri basement (you remember, the one with the vermin) and beginning to clean.  Three giant black plastic bags later and I was only mildly sated in my quest to bring order to the house.  Suffice it to say, we still have a long way to go, but we’re getting there. Then there was the issue of packing child #2 for camp.  That took all of two hours.  I still had a lot of energy and not a lot of things to do.

I decided to read a book.  And then another.  I took long, meandering walks down by the river, through town, and even through the woods.  I spent a lot of time at the Laundromat while waiting for the delivery of our new washer.  I bought a notebook and started outlining chapters for a new book I’m working on.  I wrote down a few ideas for yet another book.  I wrote the beginning of the new Alison Bergeron book.  And I started to see the benefit of this relaxing thing, this turning off of the mind.  By turning off the mind, I discovered, you are actually turning it back on, and are able to think.  And for a writer, that feeling is priceless.

I guess I’m finding that there is a lot competing for space in my over-packed brain so I’m going to have to think of ways to carve out time to get some thinking done, as sad as that sounds.  When do your best ideas come?  When you’re busy?  Or when you’re “off”? 

Maggie Barbieri

Redefining Infidelity (and oh yeah, stupidity, too)

I live in the greater New York metropolitan area but I don’t think I’m getting any more coverage of the Anthony Weiner fiasco than those you elsewhere.   I have been treated to a variety of salacious and ridiculous front-page headlines in my local paper, thought, poking fun at Weiner’s antics as well as his name.  I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say, sometimes I wonder if my twelve-year-old son is the headline writer for the Daily News.

The other thing I’ve been wondering about since the scandal broke is: What are we currently calling infidelity?  And why, overwhelmingly, are men at the heart of these salacious sex scandals?  Weiner has vociferously protested that his marriage to the gorgeous Huma Abedin—now pregnant with their child—will not end, and maybe that is so.  But did he really think that texting provocative pictures of himself was a minor thing?  The number of women with whom he has now been “involved,” albeit virtually, is almost reaching double digits but I think there are still some people out there who don’t think “sexting” is a breach of the marriage vows because there was no physical contact.

I heartily disagree.

A couple of rules of thumb:

-If you don’t want your spouse catching you do it, it’s wrong. 

-If you wouldn’t do it in front of your spouse, it’s wrong. 

-If you’re doing it in secret, it’s wrong. 

-If you deny that you did it, it’s wrong. 

Obviously, putting all those things together would indicate that you are either shamed by what you did or afraid of being caught.  By very definition:  wrong.

Basically, if you can’t figure out how to use Twitter, you really aren’t qualified to do many jobs, not the least of which is New York City mayor, Weiner’s aspiration.  Most kids I know are fluent in Twitter.  Most of them also know that posting pictures of yourself online, either on Twitter or your Facebook account, can lead to undesirable things happening.  Why?  Because we’ve told them.  We’ve told them to be careful and to not post anything that they wouldn’t, potentially, want the whole world to see.  So why does a politician do something so bone-headed?

I’ve been wrestling with this for the past week.  Why is it that seemingly not a month goes by that we don’t see a male politician taking to the stage to give his version of events, and his excuses for his actions?  Why is it that we rarely—or actually never—see a devoted husband standing beside his incredibly stupid and oversexed wife as she recounts what she did and how she got caught?  Sheryl Gay Stolberg tackled questions like these in her recent New York Times article, “When It Comes to Scandal, Girls Won’t Be Boys.”  A quote from Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said it best:   “The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody.”  The article went on to say that once elected, women feel more pressure to work harder, to prove themselves in a man’s world because even though we’ve made tremendous strides, let’s face it:  politics is still a boy’s club.  We’re just allowed to play sometimes.

Of course, there are women who cheat, female politicians who have been accused of adultery and other sordid actions, but they are in the minority.  And when that does happen, instead of not being surprised, we’re disappointed.  As the article points out so eloquently, we expect more from our female politicians.

Ok, so I know that this post has about three thesis statements and multiple main ideas, but that just goes to show you how hard it is for me to wrap my brain around this stupidity.  (Or just that I was having an “off” writing day.)  Men with beautiful, accomplished wives texting/sexting women they’ve never met…it boggles the mind.  Does it really just come down to the fact that these men crave sex of any kind so badly that they’ll risk everything for even a virtual encounter?  Are they still the uncool kid at the uncool table in high school, wishing a girl—any girl—would talk to them?  Or does it speak to a narcissism so great that they believe that they are invincible?  I’d love to know what you think, Stiletto friends.

Maggie Barbieri

Perspective

First, I want to take moment to remember the people of Joplin, Missouri. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than being trapped in a store while a tornado bears down, knowing that the store will probably collapse and bury you alive. The devastation is vast, the damage unthinkable. So, sending good thoughts and prayers to the people who are trying to put their lives together, one day at a time.

I am reflecting on this because I just passed the sixth anniversary of my original melanoma diagnosis. (There would be another, more serious diagnosis, the following year after I had achieved NED—no evidence of disease—just two months prior.) This past Friday, the day I had been diagnosed all those years before, was the same as every other here: get up, make lunches, walk dog, feed cat, do laundry, find lacrosse stick, carpool, grocery shop, walk dog again, feed cat again, make dinner. In between all of that, I juggled the management of twenty books for my day job, all of which need to go to the printer by this Friday at the latest. All were in various stages of being finished. Finally, after everything was cleaned up, I poured a glass of wine for me and my husband and sat down. I then proceeded to belly ache about my day and how busy I had been, how tired I was. He matched me, complaint for complaint. After we had finished, I looked over at the calendar to see when the next Little League game was and saw the date: May 20th.

I had a couple of reactions. The first was awe that I had not counted down to the day as I had in previous years. I was making progress on that account! The second was that I needed to shut my freaking pie hole.

I looked at Jim and said, “Six years ago today, I was an unpublished writer with a Stage IIIc diagnosis. Today, I have five books in print and I’m healthy.” I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to complaining about the little things.”

When I was dealing with my cancer situation, people would say things to me like “It really puts everything in perspective, huh?” or “I bet you’ll never complain about the little things again, right?” Wrong. I didn’t need perspective then or now. I had and have it; I know how lucky we are. And being able to complain about the little things, the stupid stuff, means that you don’t have anything big to complain about. To me, focusing on the little problems that we all deal with on a day to day basis—standing in a line we consider too long, driving behind a car we think is going too slow, having an appliance break down—is a gift. It means we’re human and we can focus on the small stuff.

One of the best days in the last six years occurred when my kids—who normally get along swimmingly—had a knock-down, drag-out fight over something ridiculous. There was screaming, yelling, and eventually crying. There was Mom “taking sides,” according to one kid, and blame placing. Eventually, there were hugs and resolution. And all of it was music to my ears. When you go through something like an illness, or god forbid, a death, things change. The way people behave around you changes. Your kids stop fighting because they don’t want to upset you. They think you’ve got enough on your plate and are wise enough to settle their disagreements in private, away from you. So the way you know that things are normal again is when they have a knock-down, drag-out fight in your presence, and expect you to make everything right again.

All of that, to me, is perspective.

Today, take a moment and thank the universe for all of the petty annoyances that make up your day. I have already given thanks for the dishwasher that really doesn’t wash dishes, the dog who refuses to do anything in the rain, and the manuscript that won’t edit itself, no matter how long I stare at it.

Blessings to all of our Stiletto faithful and to anyone else dealing with the things that life can throw at you and that you have to learn to deal with without any preparation whatsoever.

Oh, and May is Skin Cancer Awareness month! Wear your sunscreen, even if it's cloudy!

Maggie Barbieri

Paddling Against the Current

This past Sunday was a beautiful day in the Northeast, so Jim and I strapped the kayaks onto the roof of the car and headed down to the River. This wasn’t the kayaks maiden voyage of the season; child #1 and the French exchange student had kayaked last weekend and christened them for the new season. We hopped in and paddled away from the shore, the water calm and the wind barely blowing. The day had the perfect conditions for kayaking.

About five hundred feet into our trip, I started complaining. My life vest was riding up. My paddle didn’t seem to be working correctly. Someone had changed the foot pedals in the boat and my feet were too far away from them. Jim calmly told me how to adjust everything and we started out again but this time, I noticed the underlying problem, the one that was making the beginning of the journey so hard.

We were paddling against the current.

Makes sense. The river we kayak on feeds into the great Hudson River, so the water is going to flow in that direction. I had forgotten that for the first part of the trip, you were paddling upstream, as it were, going against the flow, which made making any headway more difficult. When we reached the turnaround, a little stretch with a copse of wild overgrown trees smack in the middle of the water, I put my paddle down. There was no need for it. The current carried us through this stretch, our boats moving silently and gracefully along.

See where I’m going here?

Sometimes life feels like being in a forty-pound kayak paddling upstream. Other times, it feels like you are on autopilot, being carried along by the gentle current, the one that leads you in the right direction. I think this analogy applies even more so to writing. You jump into your work-in-progress and….thunk. No where to go. Paddling upstream. Your vest is too tight. Nothing is working.

I always tell my kids that it takes way more energy to be negative than it does to be positive. I’m trying to bring this approach to life in general, and writing, more specifically. Paddling upstream on your book is a waste of time. So, show of hands: who likes to waste time out there? (I’m looking…I don’t see anyone.) I thought about what I do when I hit a bad patch in the plot or a character does something that doesn’t make any sense to me or I get a case of your garden-variety writer’s block. Well, in kayaking terms, sometimes I whine that my vest is too tight. Sometimes I blame it on the paddle. And sometimes I just row back to shore and rest a while until I realize what’s been stumping me. It may be as easy as starting over, putting my character in a different situation. I may have him or her run into someone and start a conversation. I might have them make a phone call. I’ll do anything to get to that tranquil place where I let it all go and let the current—or in this case, my imagination—guide me back to shore.

I may have stretched this analogy thinner than a taut rubber band and for that, I apologize. Sometimes, though, things just hit me in the face and make me wonder if other people experience the same sorts of issues in life and in writing.

What do you do when you find yourself going against the current or paddling upstream in either your writing or life in general?

Maggie Barbieri

It's French to Me

There came a time, around my junior year of college, when I realized I had enough credits to qualify as a French minor to go along with my English major.  There also came a time, when I realized I really, really liked this guy in my French pronunciation class, that if I continued to take more French courses, I could graduate with a double major, French/English.

That doesn’t mean I can actually speak French.

The cute guy eventually became my tutor, and then my husband.  My mother often tells him how much money he owes her because, dag nabbit, if she sent a kid to college to get a French major, said kid ought to be able to at least order off a French menu with a modicum of confidence.

As my French teacher, the wonderful Madame Marzi, once said to me, “You have a wonderful accent.  If only I could teach you to actually speak French.”

Why do I bring this up?  Well, as luck would have it, tonight, we welcome a French exchange student to our home for ten days.  She is visiting us from a coastal town in France—the same one that my husband visited when he was part of the first group to partake in this exchange thirty years ago.  We are all very excited:  my daughter, because the young woman visiting us is the same age as she is and seems to have the same interests; my son, well, because he’s twelve and what twelve-year-old wouldn’t want a female French exchange student living in his house?; my husband because he is thrilled that the program is still in existence and thriving; and me…

Well, I’m not so sure.  See, the French exchange student will be spending most of her free time—the time when she’s not at school with my daughter or visiting New York City—with me.  The French major.  The woman who once told her children, in French, while on vacation in Quebec, that we would soon visit the factory to make cheese.  (What I meant to say is that we would soon visit the pool to go swimming.  Trust me, a lot of these vocabulary words sound the same.)

The goal of her visit is to speak as much English as possible, something that will be necessitated by spending time with me, the non-French speaker.  I am hoping that her English will be better than my French, but based on our meeting with last year’s participants, it’s a virtual crapshoot.  Some students have more English than others and are very enthusiastic about using the language, while others have a rudimentary knowledge of English and prefer to speak their native tongue. 

Regardless, it should be interesting.

And fodder for future books.

At the very least, it has gotten my family on board with cleaning.  She will be staying in my son’s room, which has become the de facto guest room for all visitors.  He remarked the other day that his room never looked so clean, and that he liked it that way.  (We’ll see how long that lasts.)  I spent the better part of Saturday at the laundromat washing blankets, comforters and sheets so all bedding in our house is nice and fresh.  I scrubbed the bathroom tile and grout so that the room feels new again.  If nothing else, her visit has prompted us to make this place spic and span.

Stayed tuned for updates on her visit and for the misadventures of “Maggie, the Only Diploma-ed French Major Who Can’t Speak French.”

Maggie Barbieri

The Royal Wedding

Do you remember where you were when Charles and Diana got married?

I do.

I was on Cape Cod with my good friend, Kathy, staying at a house her parents had rented.  She and I, great friend all through high school, would be heading off to college in the coming weeks, she to Georgetown, me to Manhattan College, and the summer was bittersweet.  On one of our last days on the Cape, we set our alarms for four o’clock in the morning because the event that we had been looking forward to all summer—the royal wedding—was set to begin.

It had to be pretty special to get two teenaged girls up from their endless slumbers.

I remember that in order to see the wedding and remain in bed, we had to sleep on a creaky pullout bed in a drafty added-on room because that was the only room in the house that had both a television and a bed.  I remember that once four a.m. came, Kathy seemed less enthusiastic about the wedding than she had the night before when we were roaming Chatham, looking for a good time and only finding a plethora of fudge and tee shirt shops.  I, however, roused myself, not wanting to miss a minute of the Charles and Diana nuptials.

I remember, even though it was the early ‘80s and fashion was decidedly different than it is now, not liking Diana’s dress, thinking that it made the twenty-year-old look dowdy and frumpy.  I also remember laughing when she flubbed his many-parted name in the vows.  I remember the beautiful cathedral, the gorgeous music, and the fanfare.  I tried to envision what it would take, however, to find Charles remotely attractive, his prince-hood aside.

Diana wasn’t much older than I was at that time, yet being married was the last thing on my mind.  I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to get married in front of the entire world to a man older than I and from a very different station in life.

Well, we all know how it ended and yes, I was one of those people who were truly heartbroken when I found out that Princess Diana had died tragically in a car accident.  For many women of my generation, she held a special place in our hearts.  She was buried on the same day that my sister’s bridal shower was to take place and I remember setting the tables at the restaurant where it was held, crying as a television in the background showed her funeral, her sons walking behind her casket.

I have a 17-year-old now and not once have I heard her mention the impending nuptials of Diana’s son, William, and the lovely Kate Middleton, a woman older, and probably a little wiser, than her late mother-in-law was before her own wedding.  What was it about the royal wedding of thirty years ago that captured so many hearts?  And what is it about this one that seems so predictable and not all that special? 

It’s hard to know.  I suspect that with the media being what it is today, we know a lot about what’s to come.  We are also going to witness the marriage of two people who have been living together for a while and who seem like a very stable, familiar kind of couple, a couple we could know.  There’s not a lot of mystery here like there was thirty years ago.  We’ve watched Will grow up and we’ve charted his relationship with Kate, having been with him almost every step of the way.  Yes, there may come a time when he could be king, but a lot of things would have to happen first.

I think maybe, too, the bloom is off the royal rose.  In the last thirty years, we’ve witnessed weddings, divorces, infidelities, scandals, and a lot of heartache.  The mystery and romance of a royal wedding just doesn’t exist anymore; we’re far too jaded.  We know them too well.  We know that in a lot of ways, many of them are just like us.

I’ll still be setting my alarm on April 29^th to watch the royal wedding, however.  What about you?

Maggie Barbieri

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

If we’re friend’s on Facebook—and if we’re not, we should be!—you probably have been following the saga of my walking pneumonia.  Long story short, I started feeling crummy about a week ago, but as is my way, I figured I could power through it, working a regular day, burning the candle at both ends, and just generally ignoring it.  My doctor confirmed what my mother (not a doctor, by the way) had diagnosed:  I had walking pneumonia.  She (the doctor, not my mother) was seeing lots of cases of it in her practice and it was basically characterized by a persistent, non-productive cough, fatigue, chills, and congestion.  Check, check, check, and double check.

Upon getting the diagnosis, I collapsed into bed like a house of cards, where I have been ever since.  I can’t remember the last time I stayed in my pajamas for days on end; even when I was undergoing treatment for cancer, I got up every day, got dressed, and combed what little hair I had.  With this illness, though, I figured my body was telling me something and it wasn’t good. I needed to take it easy.

Fortunately, I just bought myself a MacBook and the Barbieris, for the first time in the new millennium, are wireless, so I could keep up with the goings on in the world through my trusty computer.  On a lark, I started following Twitter more closely, if only to see what all the rage was.  I even tweeted a few times myself, things along the lines of “I don’t feel good” and “someone bring me pretzels” but I only have a few followers and no one really seemed to care as evidenced by the fact that nobody brought me pretzels.  But after following a bunch of people for several days, I discovered that tweeters fall into a few different categories, some of which I will describe for you here.

1.   The oversharer:  This is the person who shares intimate details about their life on Twitter.  I find these people oddly fascinating.  I know that social media has wrought an entire generation of oversharers, but it is still like rubbernecking to me to learn what person x said to their child about their homework, or how their husband pleases them like no other.  Keep it in the bedroom, people! 

2.   The crankypants:  This is the person who has an opinion on everything and it is generally contrary to popular opinion.  This is also the person who tweets about what he or she thinks other people should or should not be tweeting about, e.g. promotion of their books.  I follow “Very Famous Author (heretofore known as VFA)” and she does a lot of this.  As one of my kids would say, “I’m sorry, but I think this is still a free country.”  VFA rails against other people’s tweets and again, while I find this oddly fascinating, I wonder if there is a better use of VFA’s time than telling people what they should and should not tweet about, bedroom behavior notwithstanding.

3.   The feuder:  This is the person who takes to a social media platform to pick a fight with someone with whom they have a disagreement.  While again, fascinating (sorry, it’s the antibiotics; I’ve run out of adjectives), I wonder what the purpose of this is.  I have strong feelings on a variety of topics, but no one that I follow on Twitter could make me so angry that I would take an opposing stance on something and take the argument public.  Is this a function of our new, completely transparent world or just an indictment of one’s own level of personal aggression?  I’m not sure, but I do know that taking someone to task for an opinion expressed on Twitter seems cheap.  Call them up.  Have a discussion.  Express yourself in more than 140 characters to get your alternating point across.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  And then, call it a day.

What about you, Stiletto friends?  Any serious tweeters out there?  Who do you like to follow and why?  And what Twitter behavior makes you want to rip your hair out?

Maggie Barbieri

When Technology Goes Bad

I was going to write about my building excitement for the royal wedding, but will save that for next week. Today, instead, I write about the horrors of technology and wonder how you, Stiletto faithful, deal with dead laptops, frozen flash drives, and assorted other problems that befall the innocent in this technology-enabled world.

It all started last week when my trusty PC, the one that I've been working on for over six years, turned itself off and wouldn't turn back on.  It was as if it was saying "go on without me; I'm just so very tired," while I was screaming, "Don't you die on me, PC!"  (Did I mention that I don't back up my documents as a general rule?)  I walked past it several times during the day, disconsolately pushing the "on" button to see if it would come back, even just for one day so I could gather some of the work I had been doing.  No chance.

I did what anyone would do and called my friend, Susan, the baker, to lament my problem.

"No problem!" she said cheerfully.  "My cousin is a tech wizard!"

And indeed he was.  I brought him the laptop, he recovered everything and also installed all sorts of new bells and whistles so that the thing runs like a top.  And there was joy across the land.

While I was waiting for the PC to return, I decided to buy a Mac, having had my fill of computer-killing viruses.  I had heard wonderful things about Macs and decided that the time was nigh. I bought a fun, little 13" laptop (the 17" was $600 more and I didn't want to spend the extra money).  While I was waiting for the new modem so that I could install the wireless internet capabilities on the Mac, I used the kids' computer, otherwise known as "Old Faithful."  Old Faithful has served us well, now being into its second decade.  Sure, it's slow, but it's dependable.  I'm working on a new book and made some headway, not having the distraction of the internet to help me veer off course.  I had made great headway, and had twenty pages written...some of them even good.  Today, after catching up on work, I plugged in the flash drive, the new book being the only thing that I had backed up, hoping to write another five or so pages.

The flash drive was dead.  It won't load, it won't open, and none of the documents seem to be on there anymore.

I went through several stages of grief, but thankfully, never broke down as completely as I wanted to.  It's just twenty pages, right?  They might not be any good, yes?  It may be the writing gods' way of telling me to start again.

I'm not buying any of it.  The flash drive is now in the capable hands of Susan the baker's cousin who hopefully, will work his magic.

In the meantime, if you hear the rantings of a mad woman in your neck of the woods, it is just I wondering why we need all of this stuff in the first place when paper and pen served us just fine for centuries.

Horror stories, please.  They will make me feel better.  And the ones with happy endings will really make my day.

Maggie Barbieri

A Glass Half Full

With so much death and destruction in the world, I look to find any glimmer of hope in the news of the day.

I found it last week in the New York Times where an article discussed a recent study which reported a 20% rise in cancer survivors in the United States. I, for one, was thrilled. More people surviving cancer is a good thing, right?

I thought so until I posted this new, thrilling fact on my Facebook account and found that at least one person didn’t think it was very positive. Instead, that person wondered if that statistic was inflated because more people are being diagnosed with cancer. This person, a “friend,” went on to wonder if this statistic was even legitimate. “What about all the people who get diagnosed every day?” he wondered.

I was dumbfounded, as were several of my other Facebook friends. Several of them immediately commented, taking this person to task for 1) his insensitivity and 2) his glass-half-empty view of the world. He recanted, obviously chastened, and removed the offending comment from my post. He didn’t know that I was a cancer survivor, not that that really mattered in responding to my update.

To me, there was no way you could read the NY Times piece and see any downside. If there are more diagnoses, it still means that there are more survivors. And in my opinion, that can only be positive.

It just brings me back to that eternal question of just how optimistic can we be? Should we be? There is a lot of talk these days about optimism, the so-called “happiness” gene, one’s emotional outlook, all of the above and their relationship to physical health. Maybe my Facebook friend was having a bad day, or maybe he just isn’t optimistic. Maybe he knows someone who has just been diagnosed and isn’t seeing any value to a study. Hard to tell. But I always find it interesting to see how two people can take the same information or circumstance and look at it in an entirely different way. It makes me wonder: is it the way we’re wired or a choice we make?

I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain, but the latest issue of Oprah magazine does tackle the question of how beneficial positive thinking actually is, citing a study that says that cancer patients who explored their feelings about their illness and talked about it with others had to schedule fewer visits to their doctor. It goes on to say that there are a few things within our control like the quality of our diet and our commitment to exercise, but also our level of optimism. So it is something we can control and something we can unleash when necessary, like when we’re faced with a dire diagnosis and few options.

There are a few secrets to living an optimistic life including expressing yourself, meditating, seeking help if necessary, using your friends to help you, and looking on the bright side. The idea though, expressed simply, is that it is within our power to choose an optimistic mind-set and that we can practice to train ourselves to see things in a positive fashion rather than going negative at the outset.

Sure, we all fall victim to the doubts and the negativity, but I find it interesting that by doing a few simple things, like naming your adversity and identifying the consequences, to name a few, we can train ourselves to look at the bright side.

If you read the Stiletto Gang with any regularity—and because I’m a positive thinker, I’m going to assume that you do!—you know that optimism and positive thinking are two things that I think about and write about a lot. As a result, I was interested to take the quiz in the magazine which would score my level of optimism. I was happy to find that from my perspective,” things usually work out.” I am not “highly aware of potential disappointments,” nor do I “plan for the worst.” Optimism and its effect on health, according to the article is now a “scientific certainty” so in a world gone mad, we have the power to control how we feel and to focus on what’s good despite being constantly bombarded with the notion that the worst is yet to come.

With all that is going on in the world, though, how do you, our Stiletto faithful, keep a positive outlook?

Maggie Barbieri

Of Spring and Things...

I’ve been mulling over what I was going to write about today and I came to one conclusion: not Charlie Sheen.

Haven’t we all seen enough of this most public of implosions? I, for one, continue to wonder where his parents, siblings, friends, and yes, even exes, are in this mix. Can’t someone forcibly commit this man if not for his own well being then for the sake of his five children? The whole thing is really sickening.

Rant over.

Let’s focus on the positive. For one thing, spring is on the way to the East Coast. Yes, the weather people say that we may get a big dump of snow on Thursday, but the best thing about March storms is that if they come, they are over quickly and the snow melts within days, if not hours. After having a snow drift on our front lawn that was close to five feet high, we can now see our grass. It’s a little worse for wear, but it can be saved with a little grass seed and a little love. The next thing we’ll look forward to is seeing buds on the trees which will signal that the winter of 2010-2011 is a thing of the past.

With spring comes one of my favorite traditions in the village in which I live: the outdoor farmer’s market. Of course, we do have indoor markets but they just don’t feel the way an outdoor market feels. In a few short weeks, within walking distance of my house, I will have fresh vegetables, pies, breads, cakes, and quiches available to me, all made by local growers and producers, all within a fifty-mile radius of my house. Sometimes, a local vineyard will come and sell wine which makes the farmer’s market a one-stop shopping expedition for this vegetable lover and oenophile.

Another wonderful spring tradition is Little League. Child #2 is still of an age where he can play on the “Majors,” which is essentially a group of boys (and some girls) between the ages of 9 and 12. The “Majors” have their games on the field smack dab in the middle of town, complete with bleachers and lights—when they’re working—to illuminate the field when the sun has set on an early spring night. We can walk through town and get pizza on the way home and if we’re feeling virtuous about our exercise for that day, ice cream. Sitting in the outfield for our last year of Majors is bittersweet and I’m going to savor every yawn-inducing game just so I never forget the sight of my son in permanently stained, formerly white baseball pants, his hat cocked to the side, trying to catch mosquitoes in the outfield.

We also have a new season of Mets’ baseball to look forward to, but if history has shown us anything, it’s that we should gird our loins for disappointment.

As a writer who works from home—but not in her pajamas as some often assume—I spend a lot of time indoors. Seasonal affective disorder is always around the corner on a dreary day and I think most of us who work from home have a nodding acquaintance with it. So, to see the sun at hours it hasn’t been seen in the past few months is a mood elevator better than any drug and to think of fresh peaches, wine from the Hudson Valley, and Little League baseball at just days away, I, for one, have quite a spring in my step. Pun intended.

What do you look forward to come spring, Stiletto faithful?

Maggie Barbieri

What? Me Worry?

I was reading a magazine yesterday morning and worrying about how much I had to face once I got to my office when I was confronted with an article on living longer. The article listed several key things one could do to live a longer life but one point in particular struck me. It said—get this—that people who live longer fret occasionally. Apparently, too much optimism can leave you unequipped to deal with the worst possible scenarios that you might encounter in your life. “A little worry,” the article says, “keeps you warmed up for the curveballs life throws.”

See? I knew I was on the right track.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a constant worrier but I do have moments when worrying consumes so much of my brain power that I need to use specific coping mechanisms to stop. There are a few things I remind myself when I get to worrying:

1. Worrying won’t change the outcome. There have been times when I’ve been so consumed with worry, e.g. a test will reveal more disease, a deadline will be blown, someone I love may have an accident in icy weather, that I can’t get out of my own way mentally. Worry just consumes me, eats me up, so to speak. When that happens, I tell myself that whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not I worry; I have no control over the situation. This takes some mental energy, and sometimes it works, other times…not so much.

2. I should set aside a few minutes each day to worry. Someone once told me that if I was consumed by worry, I should set aside a time—say eight o’clock in the morning—and set a timer for fifteen minutes during which time I should worry about the things that concern me. After the timer goes off, the worrying stops. There are a few problems with that plan. First, I don’t own a timer. And second, I don’t have the mental fortitude to put my problems or concerns out of my head after a set period of time. I learned that while doing the ostensibly mind-clearing exercise of yoga. Not going to happen.


3. Worrying is a giant waste of time. Now this is a coping strategy I can get behind. Why? Well, I’m what is called in scientific circles a “Type-A personality.” (In regular circles, I’m just a hyper lunatic.) When I thought about all of the times I worried about a particular situation, only to have my feared outcome never come to fruition, I calculated that I had wasted approximately a year of my life worrying about things that turned out just fine. Or didn’t turn out at all. Or had become completely irrelevant by the time there was an outcome to note. Wasting time is a concept I can get behind and when I think of wasting precious time when I could be doing something constructive or positive, I seem to stop worrying immediately.

Right now, I’m worried that a book I’m working on for my day job won’t get to the printer in time. Or that my daughter won’t do as well as she wants to. Or that my son will get hurt playing lacrosse. But then I remind myself that if the book doesn’t make it to the printer on the day it’s supposed to, it will probably go the week after. And that my daughter has been working day and night to make sure she’s prepared for the “big test.” And that my son wears so many pads while playing lacrosse that it’s amazing he can move at all. See? Worrying is a giant waste of time.

Any other champion worriers out there in Stiletto land? If so, what do you do to stop yourself from biting your nails to the quick, chewing the inside of your mouth raw, or grinding your teeth?

Maggie Barbieri

The Voices in My Head

I recently attended Crime Bake, a convention in Massachusetts for mystery writers and fans. I was fortunate enough to see Dennis Lehane, one of my favorite authors, speak about writing. Recently, after publishing several stand-alone novels, which unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ve heard of: Shutter Island, Mystic River, The Given Day. But it’s his series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro that I’ve been eagerly awaiting another installment of, and this past year, my wish was granted when he published Moonlight Mile, the sixth book in the series. One of the attendees at Crime Bake asked him why he a) stopped writing the series and b) why he returned to it. He answered that after he published the fifth book in the series, around ten years ago, Patrick stopped talking to him. And he decided to write a new book in the series a year or so ago because Patrick had started talking to him again.

I understood exactly what he was talking about, because Alison Bergeron talks to me constantly. If she’s not complaining about her pot belly, she’s itching for a new mystery to solve. So it has been easy working up a new story because Alison has a lot of stories to tell me and they are easy for me to transcribe. But lately I’ve noticed that I have a trio of new characters talking to me and what they have to say is very interesting. One is partially deaf, the other makes jam for a living, and another is an obstetrician. Yet another, whose role is yet to be determined, is a very handsome detective with his own secrets. All very disparate, all very much alive to me. And all involved in a murder.

With all of this going on, my head is a very crowded place right now. No wonder I keep forgetting to buy toilet paper at the grocery store.

I never anticipated that this would happen. I just assumed that Alison would keep talking to me and Crawford would whisper sweet nothings in my ear every now and again that he would, in turn, then whisper to Alison. Max would continue to screech about her issues, and Fred would grunt. Other people would cycle in and out of the stories I was told and they would provide new life for the next book. The nuns would make me feel guilty for thinking impure thoughts. So it’s very exciting to think that there are a bunch of other characters floating around in there, just waiting for me to tell their stories.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Writers write and there is so much potential in the world and the people around us to come up with new ideas and new characters. It reminds me of when people talk about having extrasensory perception: you just have to be open to the energy around you. It’s the same with writers. We just have to be open to what’s around us—and listen to the voices in our heads—in order to make a new story come to life.

I’m interested, most of all, from our Stiletto faithful if your characters talk to you or if there is some other way that your stories begin. What makes you want to sit down and write?

Maggie Barbieri

You Can Dance if You Want to

Is the rhetoric responsible for what happened in Tucson over the weekend? Probably not; we’ll never know. Should everyone stop flinging blame? Yes; it serves no purpose than diluting the argument. Should we reevaluate what we say and how we say it? Absolutely.

End of subject for me.

This is a tragedy that I cannot even comprehend and my blog sisters, Rhonda and Marilyn, have already done the topic justice with their impassioned posts from Monday and Tuesday. Rather than try to chime in with a plaintive cry for more civility, which I’m not sure we’re going to get despite the loss of six lives, I would rather take a stab at another topic entirely and one that might make us smile: dancing.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to dance and will do it anywhere. That means you may find me dancing in the toiletry aisle at the local grocery store, where they play particularly danceable music, or at Target, or even waiting on line at the DMV. I can’t help myself. And believe me, my kids wish I could.

In Sunday’s NY Times Magazine section, Deborah Solomon interviewed the Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin. The questions centered around her role as Surgeon General and today’s focus on solving the problem of our increasingly obese population here in the United States. Surgeon General Benjamin is no skinny minny herself, and readily admits that (after it was pointed out by Ms. Solomon), but says that everyone should find an activity or exercise that makes them happy and gets them moving. For Benjamin, it’s disco dancing. She doesn’t go to the clubs to get her exercise on, so to speak, but finds that after several hours of dancing she feels invigorated and knows that she has gotten some good aerobic exercise. She recommended that if you could do nothing else, you should dance. I couldn’t agree more. My kids are now running and hiding.

While I was reading this article, I was listening to my Ipod, set to “shuffle.” I’ve got a ton of disco music on there, but the song that began playing as I turned the page was “Dance Away” by Roxy Music, which implores the listener to “dance away the heartache…dance away the tears.” That got me thinking: What are the benefits, if any, to dancing?

I did a little research and this is what I found.

1. Dancing increases flexibility. As we get older, we get less flexible; that’s a fact. But by dancing when you can, you increase the flexibility of your joints, the elasticity of your muscles, and your ability to move overall.

2. Dancing increases strength. According to About.com, “Dancing builds strength by forcing the muscles to resist against a dancer's own body weight.” I think this applies to amateur, recreational dancers, like me, or professional dancers.

3. Dancing increases endurance. Because dance is a physical exercise, and exercise increases endurance, dance increase endurance. Any kind of dancing will do, but rest assured that as a result of your busting a move, you will increase your endurance.

4. Dancing gives you a sense of well being. Dancing is a social activity that usually—unless you’re me—takes place in the company of others. You may even dance with somebody, something I haven’t been able to achieve because I like to lead (but that’s a blog for another time). Being in the company of people who are having fun while exercising can help you build self esteem and give you a positive outlook. What can be better than that, really?

As I write this, I am seeing parallels between dancing and writing. Writers need to be flexible, something I’ve learned from years of revision of first drafts. You may be entirely committed to an idea, only to find that it doesn’t work, or so says your editor or writer’s group. The more you write, the stronger you become; just ask Stephen King who talks about developing “writing muscles” by writing every day. Writers need endurance; you’ve all felt this as you’ve approached a particularly tight and perhaps onerous deadline. But ultimately, writing gives you a sense of well being. Why? Because you’re able to express yourself creatively, just like a dancer, or a painter, or a singer.

The world is a scary place sometimes and this past week only serves to highlight that. Dance more; nobody is watching and nobody cares about seeing expressions of pure joy. Write like you’re the only one who’ll read your work. You can only control what you do and how well you do it, so as the old Mark Twain saying goes, “Dance like nobody's watching; love like you've never been hurt. Sing like nobody's listening; live like it's heaven on earth."

Maggie Barbieri

Of Blizzards and Resolutions

Back in August, my mother, daughter, and I visited my sister in Savannah for the weekend. When it was time to leave, our first flight home was cancelled. Our second flight home—the next day—was also cancelled. And so on and so forth until we got a three-connection itinerary that took us to some of the most delightful airports south of the Mason-Dixon line before we were desposited, twelve hours later, in New York City.

We were lucky. It was summer and we didn’t have anywhere to be, and I work for myself. We stayed calm. Others among us—namely the other passengers on our first flight—all must have been heart surgeons with actual hearts in their carry-on luggage because everyone needed to get home ON THAT DAY. No ifs, ands, or buts. We watched in amusement as people plugged numbers into their cell phones with such force that we were surprised that the phones didn’t break on contact. We watched as every single passenger berated the ticket agents for this inconvenience, as if the ticket agents were responsible for the fifty mile an hour winds in New York. We watched as husbands yelled at wives, and wives yelled at children, and children played in the aisles, blissfully unaware that their trip to Hilton Head had been extended by one, or maybe two, days.

It all came back to me as I watched the news coverage of the “Blizzard of the Century” these past days. Oh, and since the century is only a decade old, should we have trotted out that moniker too quickly? So willy-nilly? Surely there will be other blizzards in the next ninety years; what will we call them? Anyway, many reporters worked through the night to bring us this news: “It’s snowing. A lot.” But pity the poor reporter who was stranded in LaGuardia Airport—a hell hole on regular days—to talk with travelers who had just a slim hope of getting home before New Year’s Eve or in this calendar year. Amazingly, they were all extremely calm. One woman, carrying her Port Authority-issue mat with her in case she needed to sleep on the floor again, spoke of washing up in the rest room, eating lots of healthy airport food instead of junk, drinking water, and waiting it out patiently. She knew that there was nothing to do but be positive, and as a result, was incredibly calm and poised. She even had on makeup! I don’t know about you all, but the first thing to go in the face of life’s inconvenience is makeup. But this woman was all made up, dressed fashionably and appropriately for the weather, and had every hair in place. She talked about the beauty of the snow and the kindness of airport employees. Jim and I looked at each other in awe, wondering where this Zen-filled woman had come from. And if she would ever make it back there.

How we react to life’s inconveniences really shows our true colors, don’t you think? I know it’s easy to go with our first instinct, which for me is to rail at the injustice of it all. But by taking the high road along with a deep breath, accepting that things sometimes are out of our control, is not to relinquish the upper hand. It’s called ‘going with the flow’ and one of my New Year’s resolutions is to do that whenever I can. (I can hear my family members laughing heartily at this proclamation but I’m going to give it my best shot; I’m proven myself to be spectacularly pig-headed and not flow-going.) This resolution will prove to be challenging and will definitely take me out of my Type-A comfort zone but hey, it’s worth a try. And it will be far less challenging than sleeping on a Port Authority-issue mat in the middle of LaGuardia airport. That, my friends, takes a force of will I just don’t have.

How did you weather the storm, Stiletto friends? And what are your resolutions for the new year?

Maggie Barbieri

The Time Is Now

Last week, I received a lovely note in the mail from the Assistant Principal at my former high school, asking me to be the commencement speaker for the 2011 graduation. I was beyond thrilled. My four years at this all-girls, Catholic high school were some of the best of my life; I just didn’t know it at the time. The heavy academic workload saw to that. Surrounded by some of the best and brightest the tri-state area had to offer, it was an intellectual hotbed of young women striving to be the best they could be. Seriously. I’m not joking. Many of us are still in touch years later and I am astounded by what these women have accomplished. Some are business executives; one is a doctor of theology and expert on the subject of medical ethics; another is the mother of five and grandmother of four; another works tirelessly on various fundraising activities, all on the volunteer level.

I have been thinking a lot about what wisdom I can impart to these young ladies and believe me, I’ll need every day of the next seven months to figure out what I want to say. Here are a couple of thoughts I’ve had. Feel free to add your own after you read this post. (I need all the help I can get!)

1. You’re thin enough, you’re beautiful enough, and gosh darn, you are smart enough. So stop sweating the small stuff! When I think back to my twenties and how I exercised for two hours every day and watched every morsel I put in my mouth, I shudder. I was slim, in excellent shape, with energy to spare, yet I criticized my own appearance every day when I looked in the mirror. As long as you’re healthy, you’re set. Enjoy your youth, because someone who is happy in their youth will look great as they age. (At least this is what I tell myself.)

2. Do it now. Whatever “it” is. Don’t put off gratification until a later date. I’m not heading down a morbid path here—although I could; I’m Irish after all—but there really is no time like the present. You’ll always make more money, there will always be time to work, but don’t underestimate the joy of travel, or writing, or singing, or dancing, or doing whatever it is that makes you happy. When we’re young, I think, we’re racing toward the next step in our lives instead of enjoying the life that we are leading at the time.

3. Don’t settle. For anything. Be it a husband, a wife, a job, a meal at a restaurant, you deserve the best and don’t let anyone tell you differently. You are the author of your story and it is up to you to make sure you live the best life you can.

4. Give back. Make sure that your life plan includes a healthy dose of volunteering, works for social justice, or just plain giving. Studies show that people who give back are healthier, happier, and may live longer. So look around, identify the need, and do something about it. The world will thank you for it.

Obviously, I’ll come up with more, but these are my top four for now. What words of advice would you give to a group of 18-year-olds, or to the 18-year-old who you once were?

Maggie Barbieri

The Deadline Approaches

Seventy-thousand words and no plot.

That’s where I found myself right before Thanksgiving. I fretted and moaned; I knew there had to be a plot in there somewhere but I just couldn’t figure out where it was.

But I knew that I had two trusted friends—both amazing writers and as it turns out, editors—who would be able to set me straight. So off the manuscript went.

It is amazing to me that you can spend so much time with your manuscript and your characters and write yourself into a corner that you think you can’t get out of. One comment from one of my readers, my friend, Alison, and I knew exactly where I should go with the story as well as who I should whack in the first chapter. Let’s face it: I rock it old school so if there isn’t a body in the first ten pages, I’m not completely satisfied.

Alison and I were once part of a writer’s group, but found that we really were very much in sync with each other in terms of how we wrote, what we liked to write, and our processes in general. Now, for lack of a better term, we consider ourselves a “writer’s duo,” because really, with just two people, you don’t have the cohort for a group. At least I don’t think we do.

It’s not easy to find “beta readers,” as I’ve heard them called by no less than Charlaine Harris. Well, let me be more specific: the good ones are not easy to find. Anyone can read your manuscript but only a few trusted friends will tell you the truth. After Alison had read over the manuscript and sent me a lengthy email detailing her issues with it, she immediately felt bad and told me so. Had she been too critical? She wanted to know. I told her that we were way beyond feeling bad when it came to criticism; all any of us want is to produce is the best book possible and if we have to go back and rewrite, or god forbid, start over, we need to know that.

Anyone can tell you that they like your book, but is that really constructive? Probably not. I remember when I showed my husband the first chapter of Murder 101, which was the first thing I had ever written in a serious way, and asked him for his honest opinion. The relief on his face after reading it was almost comical. “I liked it,” he said. I asked him how relieved he was to have liked it. “You have no idea,” he said.

I think back to that time. Would I have been disappointed if he hadn’t liked it? You bet. But it would have been crueler for him to tell me he liked something, or that he thought I was a good writer, if he didn’t think either. I had put him in a tough position, but fortunately, it all turned out for the best. The moral here, then, is to find readers who you respect and who you are not sleeping with. This way, when a criticism has to be leveled as it surely will at some point, your romantic entanglements can stay unentangled from your writing life and bruised ego.

Fellow writers are often the best to help. Sure, I have friends who read drafts but they are already fans and may not be willing to give me their honest opinions. Fellow writers, however, know the drill and know what’s at stake and know what you need to hear, if not necessarily what you want to hear.

I’m now thirty days from my due date. I now have 71, 561 words, a body in the first chapter, and a subplot that will hopefully keep you guessing.

Maggie Barbieri