COMMENTARY: Things I know now that I wish I'd known when I was 18

1. It really doesn’t matter what other people think. Don’t spend your whole life worrying what’s going on in other people’s heads. The most important thing is how you feel about yourself not how others feel about you.
2. Don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about. Sometimes things are just completely beyond your control. Things that you can’t fix or change are not worth stressing about. All worrying does is make you frustrated and depressed and stressed out. It doesn’t fix anything. (This is sometimes a tough one to remember.)
3. If you mess something up, just remember that it’s not brain surgery (unless, of course, you are an actual brain surgeon!) Nobody is going to die just because you screwed up. Things are never as big or bad as you think they are.
4. You are stronger than you think you are.
5. You may be odd, but that’s okay because most people are odd in one way or another.
6. Everyone’s family is co-dependant, narcissistic, psychotic, stupid or weird. It’s really not just your family.
7. Being a parent is even harder than you thought it would be. And you never will really be ready to have a kid. You just have to move forward and be the best parent you can be.
8. Be friends with people that make you feel good. Don’t just be friends with someone because they’re there. A “friend” who is emotionally draining, always negative or only concerned about themselves, is not much of a friend. Sometimes ending a friendship is better than being caught in the vortex of someone else’s whirlpool of negativity.
9. Be a good friend to your good friends.
10. Love yourself. If you can’t love yourself, you won’t have any love to give anybody else.
11. Disregard pretty much everything your parents taught you about health, politics, religion, holidays, education, relationships and parenting. Be the kind of person who finds things out and forms beliefs and opinions on their own.
12. Sometimes just plastering a smile on your face really does make you feel happier.
13. It’s a good thing to be smart.
14. Don’t take your health for granted. Ever. Do everything in your control to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
15. It’s unwise to pay too much for something, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
16. Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
17. It takes more wisdom to accept advice than to give advice.
18. If you have the option of giving advice or giving assistance, give the assistance.
19. Don’t judge people by their relatives.
20. Learn how to say “I do not know.”
21. Never miss a chance to offer a sincere compliment.
22. Whatever you do, do it the best that you can.
23. The most important thing in communication is the ability to “hear” what isn’t being said.
24. Don’t panic.
25. Admit when you’ve made a mistake. It’s easier to ask forgiveness if you didn’t try to cover it up or fix it by yourself.
26. Forget the Joneses.
27. Give yourself an hour to cool off before responding to someone who has provoked you. If it involves something really important, give yourself overnight.
28. Give people a second chance, but not a third.
29. Respect other people’s time. If you’re going to be more than 10 minutes late, call.
30. Never let your gas tank fall below a quarter full.
31. Live beneath your means.

BOOK REVIEW: "Love and Other Near-Death Experiences"

Love and Other Near-Death Experiences
By Mil Millington
Copyright 2006
Villard Books Publishers
Adult Fiction
1 ½ Bookmarks

Wow. Talk about complete and gratuitous overuse of the F-bomb. Not to say that I never use that word myself, because I have been known on occasion to let it slip, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a book that had such an unnecessary abundance of it!

Love and Other Near-Death Experiences does have an interesting premise. Because of a few random choices he made, the main character, Rob, runs late for a business meeting. By the time he shows up, he finds the building has just exploded and collapsed in on itself, killing everyone inside. So now Rob finds himself in a quandary. Every decision he makes COULD be life or death, whether it be which foot to put into his pants first, if he should use the salt or the pepper (or, heaven forbid!, both!!!), or which pair of underpants he should wear. His fixation on the mundane choices of life is actually pretty amusing, but those darn F*@#’s just keep getting in the way!

Obviously written by a British writer, the book is full of colloquialisms that we always associate with the English. Some of it is funny and some is very cliché.

When Rob meets a few other characters who have also narrowly escaped death, the story takes an interesting turn and we get to see something a little more dark and disturbing—a conspiracy theorist who tells Rob that there’s a group out there who are going to try to kill him because he cheated death. The book then follows the group through a few interesting adventures as they avert death again and again.

While the book itself is light in tone, the F*^#’s are VERY distracting in this book. I’ve never really been bothered by use of language in a book before, but this one really took the cake. If you don’t like adult language, I would definitely NOT recommend this book.

BOOK REVIEW: "Escape"

Escape
By Carolyn Jessop, with Laura Palmer
Copyright 2007
Visionary Classics, LLC/Broadway Books
Biographical
5 Bookmarks

What an incredible story!!! This amazing book is a shocking look at what can happen when one perverted man is given too much power. The Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) is a male-dominated dictatorship that has suppressed women for over 100 years. Warren Jeffs and his male predecessors have created and maintain a society where a woman is nothing more than property and her only job is to bear as many children as she can.

Carolyn Jessop is born into this polygamist cult. When Carolyn is 18 years old, she is married to a 50-year-old man who already has three wives. She tries to make the best of it, but her story details the suppression and fear that Carolyn lives with from day to day. The abuses she must endure at the hands of her husband and her “sister-wives” are unbearable. Carolyn has eight children with her husband before eventually escaping from his hands and the strong arm of the cult she has lived in her whole life. She ventures into the world as the first woman to ever escape with all of her children. She fights her husband and the cult in court to win custody of the children; a victory for women’s rights everywhere.

I really liked this book. Carolyn Jessop is a strong woman thrust into a role of submission and subservience that she can never fill. As we read about her experiences in early life, it is difficult to imagine because the world she lives in is so vastly different from our own. Can one even imagine a society where you have no right to choose whom you will marry? A society where your only value is in how many children you can bear? A society where girls as young as 14 years old are married to men who are five times their age? A society where women don’t even know that they have any rights at all? Members of the cult are not allowed to watch TV, read a newspaper, or have any contact with the outside world. The children are not allowed to go to public schools. The women are forced to wear their hair in a certain hairstyle and wear clothes that would have perhaps been stylish in the 1850s.

Watching Carolyn go through what she has to go through, you just want to reach into the book, grab her and say, “You don’t have to do this! You have rights!” But women in this cult do not believe that they have any rights. They are ruled by fear and oppression. They don’t know what they’re missing. It brings a whole new light to the things that have gone on in the FLDS ranch in Texas this year. The 15- and 16-year-old girls that were found pregnant or were already mothers on that ranch are evidence of what goes on in this heinous cult.

A very eye-opening book. I give this book a very high recommendation because it was so well written and because I feel it is an important book for our society, especially to those with historical ties to this community.

BOOK REVIEW: I Have Lived a Thousand Years

I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust
By Livia Bitton-Jackson
Copyright 1997
Simon & Shuster Children’s Press
Biographical
3 Bookmarks

What can be said about a provocative look at the Holocaust from the eyes of the 13-year-old girl who lived through it? Elli Friedman is 13 when she and her family are evicted from their homes and driven to a Jewish ghetto. From there, they are separated and she is imprisoned at Auschwitz with her mother. She is one of the “lucky” ones who has a family member with her, but as she watches death occurring all around her, the reader wonders if “lucky” is the right word. We are engaged with her day to day life as she eats her moldy bread and worm-ridden soup, as she endures the torment and tortures that occur each day, and as she watches those that are marched directly to the gas chamber. She watches and cares for her mother through injuries and illness. There is a point in the book where their roles are reversed and the daughter becomes the mother/caregiver. It creates an interesting dynamic.

The details in the book are difficult to read, but the reader is always hopeful, always anxious to see if she will make it through the day.

Somehow Elli survives and is liberated along with a small fraction of those that were taken. From her small town, there are 36 left from the 500 Jews who originally inhabited the town. She and her family members that are left make their way to America and start anew.

So here is my rant of the day. Whenever I read a book about the Holocaust, I am horrified at what was done to these families at the insistence of one deranged madman. This book is no different. How could anyone have stood by and watched it occur? How could the soldiers carry out their orders? How did anyone survive? We watch and we learn and pray these atrocities are not repeated again. But can we know? The German citizenry claimed to have no idea what Hitler was doing with the Jews. How easy was it for them to turn a blind eye?

This was a good read and not too graphic (it was written for a children’s press, after all). But still a difficult read. For someone who wants to read a heartrending personal account of the Holocaust, this is a good choice.

POEM: In Memory

Her laugh was contagious;
It rang out like a bell
And you just couldn't help but join in.
Her hugs were like sunshine,
Soft and warm and all-enveloping.
Her love was as overpowering
As the scent of a lilac bush,
Wafting over you in waves of deliciousness.
Her smile was the window to her soul;
She could not hide her happiness when she smiled.
She was simple, and yet amazing.
She was selfless and kind.
She had faith in life and faith in love.
Her talents were many
And she shared them freely.
She was a creator of many "gifts"
And she loved them with all her heart.
We were her world.
Her hands were soft, but strong.
Her advice was well-intentioned and to the point.
Her hair shone like brightly-colored rust.
Her eyes were like pools of melted sky.
She is loved.
She is missed.
But she is not forgotten.

In loving memory of Nancy H.C. Merrill, d. 3/8/1995.

BOOK REVIEW: "Patterns of Love"

Patterns of Love
By Robin Lee Hatcher
Original copyright 2001
Zondervan Publishing
Adult Fiction
1 Bookmark

Can you say predictable? This story is about a young Swedish immigrant, Inga Linberg, who volunteers to help a man that has been charged with raising his two orphan nieces. Inga is the new housekeeper/nanny, and a likable enough character, I suppose. But before she even moves into the home with the man, his ailing mother, and the two children, you know what’s going to happen.

This was one of those “yada yada yada and then they fell in love” stories. The characters go through all the typical struggles you would imagine on a dairy farm in the middle of Iowa in the late 1800s. Dirk Bridger, the tough and angry cow-milker who truly hates his job, one day softens and all of a sudden milking cows, taking care of his nieces and loving Inga are the only things that are important to him. Okay, so maybe that’s a little too exaggerated of a synopsis. There is stuff that happens in between, but it’s not really anything memorable or worth talking about.

I’m afraid I wouldn’t waste my time on this one if I were you.

BOOK REVIEW: "an egg on three sticks"

an egg on three sticks
by Jackie Moyer Fischer
Copyright 2004
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Griffin
Adult Fiction
3.5 Bookmarks

Yikes! If you’ve ever suffered from mental illness or know someone who has, this may not be the book for you. An Egg on Three Sticks is a haunting look at depression and the far-reaching damage it can cause to a family. This story is told from the viewpoint of Abby, a 13-year-old teenager, whose mother suffers from severe depression. Abby is real. She’s an angry teenager who lashes out at anyone who happens to be there. She is the head of the household when her mother goes away. She is rebellious and tough and sad and angry and scared and every other emotion that you can imagine in a girl whose mother is suddenly not Mother anymore. But Abby is vulnerable, in the most heart-warming way. She has needs that cannot be met. There is no one there to take care of her.

And yet Abby does her best to hold the family together. With a father who doesn’t really understand what’s going on and a younger sister who doesn’t have anyone else to turn to, Abby IS the family. She will make you laugh and make you cry. And when relief finally comes, your heart will ache for her.

I liked this book a lot, but it was difficult and painful to read. I don’t know, maybe it hit a little too close to home. If you like books that make you cry, give this one a try. I’m sure it will succeed.

BOOK REVIEW: "Maybe the Moon"

Maybe the Moon
By Armistead Maupin
Copyright 1992
HarperCollins Publishing
Adult Fiction
4 Bookmarks

So I could start this review with the typical synopsis; you know, “This novel is written in the first person by a 31-inch tall dwarf named Cady Roth. The story follows Cady’s struggles as an aspiring actress and entertainer in Hollywood. Her story is documented by the series of journals that Cady keeps and the remarkably entertaining entries that she makes therein. Cady is a lovable character that exudes cynicism and sarcasm, at the same time that she is hopeful and expectant.” Blah, blah, blah. But really, don’t you just want to know if it’s worth your time to read?

So here we go! To be honest, I really liked this book. It was one of those “don’t want to put it down” books. The characters really tore at my heartstrings and I felt their pain. Cady was brash and saucy throughout the book, which is admirable, but especially remarkable for a 31-inch tall woman. Cady’s cadre of friends who help her get through the day are comforting in their communication with her and the ease with which they help her with the mundane needs of a dwarf (i.e., being lifted in and out of cars, putting the phone on the floor where she can reach it, loaning her t-shirts she can belt and make a dress, etc.)

I really felt for Cady. Here she is, a girl who had once played a starring (although anonymous) role as the lovable Mr. Woods in what I would compare to probably an E.T.-like movie where the character is sometimes a robot, sometimes animated and sometimes a little person in costume. And now Cady is trying her darndest to get back into the spotlight. She can sing, she can act, but her agent ignores her and she is getting desperate.

Never once does Cady complain about the cards she was dealt at her birth. She is matter-of-fact about the disappearance of her father and the eventual death of her mother. She gets her rent paid, she keeps a smile on face, and she might even fall in love.

This is a great book to make you smile and feel good about your own life. Give it a try!