Thanksgiving? It was Mixed.

So how was my Thanksgiving, you ask.

It was really nice. The family was here. We reminisced about the past and tried to predict the future. The turkey was moist. I tried a new stuffing recipe that was a wild mix of ingredients, but it worked. Peace and harmony reigned.

That's not a lie, but it's not the whole truth either.

I don't know about your family, but mine is no Norman Rockwell painting. We are a bunch of strong willed, and sometimes confused individuals, whose views about the present and recollections about the past don't always jibe. I'd be inclined to keep that family business to myself, but I know that my experience is not that different from yours. Families that epitomize the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving are either extremely rare and fortunate, or they are just a figment of our collective imagination. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

For most of us, the good parts of Thanksgiving were mixed with some degree suffering. I have friends who were sad and bewildered to be out of their usual element this Thanksgiving. Others were furious to be stuck in the same lousy rut as always. I heard many stories of loneliness from clients separated by miles, death, or conflict from the ones they love. Some had no one to share the holiday. Many wished there were no holiday at all.

I believe we create much of our own Thanksgiving disappointment through unrealistic expectations. We expect the day to be special, our family to be better than it is, and all our feelings to be positive. We forget that life is an ambiguous and complex mix.

Just as we create our own disappointment, we can create our own joy. Let's consider changing our thinking to reflect reality:

• Our families aren't perfect. Neither are we.
  
• We can't have perfect love in our hearts. It's imperfect at best.
  
• Even the best relationships have ambivalent feelings within them.
  
• The people we love don't live forever, but can live in our hearts.
  
• Children grow up and move away. That's what we raised them to do.
  

So, how was my Thanksgiving? Mixed. As mixed as my stuffing recipe. Yours?

copyright 2007 starfishdoc

Seeking the Good, the Real, the True

I just Googled "under the weather" - for two reasons. First, because I've been sick all week (sorry I haven't written). Second, if I use a phrase, I want to speak with authority about its origins and uses.

Google returned a variety of sites claiming etymological expertise. Most say that "under the weather" is a nautical term describing how a sick sailor was kept below deck, away from (but literally "under") the weather. Sorry, but I can tell you this from experience: below deck on a boat is the very last place you want to be when you're sick!

So it got me to doubting the reliability of the sites. Lucky for me, D is an expert in sailor history. If the phrase is a nautical one, he will know it. What's more, he will go to his substantial library about sailoring, and hand me a primary source to prove it. (Ah yes, going to the source. Another lost art.)

Too sick to work, but well enough to surf, I thought I'd use this down time to do some research on blog-to-book publishing. I was quickly overwhelmed by the websites promising instant fame and fortune to any dumb ass who thinks she can write.

So I emailed KC. Because she's in the book biz, I knew she'd lead me to sources of reliable information on the Net. One of her recommendations was a blog dedicated to exposing publishing scams and helping would-be authors navigate the mine fields. Pay dirt.

In the absence of expert guidance, the Internet is flat, no one set of information appearing more valuable than another. KC's insider knowledge helped me to distinguish The Truly Valuable from The Totally Useless.

Readers, please tell me about your experiences when searching for experts and expertise. What methods do you use to separate wheat from chaff? How do you know valuable service when you see it? How do you evaluate web information?

I'm asking this because I'm wondering if, like the blog exposing scammers in the publishing industry, I should be offering you my take on some of the dime-a-dozen sites that claim to offer therapy/counseling/coaching, along with some tips about what to avoid. Your opinion?

While you're thinking, let me go ahead with my first tip.

Be wary of therapists/counselors/ coaches (hereafter known as tcc's) with too many letters after their names. People with the hard-earned credentials like PhD and MD seldom add strings of additional initials with commas in between. A long string indicates padding: trying to look impressive when there's little of substance there.

Copyright starfishdoc 2007

Mind Your G's and Q's

My second summer job as a teenager (my first being counter girl at Zaccagnini's Pastries), was clerk/typist for the mayor of my home town. He must have liked me, because he would have been crazy to hire me for my typing ability.

On my first day, he handed me a Dictaphone and told me to type a status report on the fire department. (For those of you who don't know what a Dictaphone is, consider being plugged into your iPod and having to type what you hear.) I had never used one, so whenever he paused on the tape, I threw in some punctuation. That's when he told me I was "comma happy." (I do love a good comma, but not as much as I love parentheses.)

Whenever someone in our town won an award or achieved something special, the mayor sent out a letter of recognition. The last sentence in all the letters was boilerplate. It read, "Congratulations, you are the pride of your community." Nice, right? With one tiny typo, I converted one such letter to, "Congratulations, you are the price of your community." Good thing the mayor never signed anything he himself hadn't proofread.

Recently, an avid reader of this blog wrote to tell me how she had misread my list of topics, and was very eager to read the posts that had to do with "guilting." I don't know if she was disappointed, but I know she must have been surprised when they turned out to be about "quilting."

But she sure got me to thinking. Just like love, guilting is a verb. Well, it's really not a verb, but should be. Here's my attempt at a definition. Guilting: the use of statements and behaviors to manipulate someone into thinking they have wronged you, and thus getting them to do what you want. Behaviors include crying, sulking, pouting (women, usually) anger and silent treatment (men mostly). May include crossed arms and foot-stamping, slamming doors and statements like, "You don't really love me," or "I thought you were my friend."

If you've never been, well, guilty of guilting someone, raise your hand. Those of you with your hand up may leave the room. Hmmm, I don't see any hands. So here's a mature and direct strategy to replace guilting.

1. Identify the need or desire you have.
2. Acknowledge it as a need or desire, not a god-given right.
3. Ask your partner/friend if they can indulge you in this need.
4. Find out what you can do for them in return.

Thanks, MG, for getting my wheels turning on this one. Shows you just how important my readers are.

And if I had continued to glaze donuts, where would we all be now?

Copyright starfishdoc 2007

Everyone Needs a George (or Two)

There are a couple of pocket doors in our house stuck from day one. Dysfunctional, you might say. We have entertained several theories about why they don't work. One was that they had fallen off their tracks. With that theory in place, we tried with a crowbar to raise them back into position. Didn't work. Bad theory, no solution.

Neither of us has a passion (nor an aptitude, obviously) for household fix-it projects. So the pocket door issue languished unresolved in the "not important/not urgent" category. That is, until we were two days away from having a houseful of guests.

Of course we've had housefuls of company before, but there were always some family members in the mix. So we did what you do with family: we stuck them in the dysfunctional room with the door that won't close and the closet that won't open. When they complained, we just said, "tough."

But now we were faced with house guests who were, well, "bona-fide." The pocket door issue became both important and urgent! There was only one thing to do. We had to call George.

George happens to be competent in several (hundred) areas we are clueless about. While we had wasted precious hours trying to diagnose the doors, George looked at them with expert eyes. He examined them from a few angles. He rubbed his chin. He said "hmmm" about three times. "These doors are too long," he declared. In fifteen minutes he had them shaved, reinstalled and working just fine.

Andrew Keen wrote a provocative book in which he laments the demise of our faith in the expert. He holds the Internet responsible. It has become way too easy for us to Google or Wiki something and think we've become instant experts. Everybody thinks they know everything.

I don't deny that there's plenty of information (some of it even accurate) available with just a click. But does it make any sense to think we are completely competent to synthesize, interpret and act on information in subject areas we have not taken the time to study in depth?

Experts see things we don't see. Experts see things differently. Experts carry tools we don't possess.

The smartest, most successful people are not people who know everything. Rather, they are people who can distinguish between their areas expertise and their areas of rank amateurism. To handle the latter, they hire the experts.

If you think you may have fallen off the wagon and become addicted to the idea that you know everything, I have the Three Step Progam for you.

1. Acknowledge that you have a pocket door problem.
2. Admit your powerlessness over the pocket door problem.
3. Call George.

Copyright starfishdoc 2007