You’ve heard it a million times: Don’t sweat the small stuff. That’s very easy to say, but sometimes the small stuff feels like big stuff. The key is to try to keep things in perspective. A traffic jam is small stuff. A traffic jam when you need to badly go tinkle and are at a standstill with no exit in sight is a bit more dire. A traffic jam when it snows, and you’re stuck in your car on the freeway for more than 24 hours and your children are at daycare, and you are a single mom with no relatives in town is no longer small stuff—enter some well-deserved sweat. See how perspective changes everything?

“You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.”
— Joyce Meyer

There is nothing quite as powerful as thinking positive, other than thinking negative. Both ways of thinking have an endgame in mind, which are as far apart from each other as night and day. In fact, one of them brightens everything up, while the other cloaks you in darkness. So, as the world turns and churns, I encourage you to think positive.

Have you been to the beach lately? As part of my “summering” that I promised to do in last month’s Publisher’s Note, I recently enjoyed a beautiful, relaxing day at Coligny Beach on Hilton Head Island.
Though the ocean delivered as promised—the gentle waves, the balmy breeze, the healing salt water—humanity flooded the shore amidst its own storm. The girls in particular.

We need to have a discussion. In fact, I have had many discussions since my sunny beach day about the giant elephant in the room—female bathing suits that show girls’ entire bums. That’s right, a thong right up the crackadoodle with both butt cheeks fully exposed to every person on the beach. We used to call this “mooning” and it was illegal. I don’t know what to call it now. Normal?

“Serve the dinner backwards, do anything—
but for goodness sake, do something weird.”
— Elsa Maxwell (1883-1963)

I’ve always thought it silly and pretentious to use a season as a verb, such as: “We’ll be wintering in Palm Beach”; or “We summer on the Cape every year.” Funny, I just noticed that it only works for those two seasons. One can’t exactly exclaim, “We’ll be falling along the Appalachian Trail”, and expect people not to worry or administer a breathalyzer. You don’t really want to spring anywhere either…there are products for that. Plus, it changes the entire connotation, draining with it all panache. My point to this grammar lesson is this: I’m giving myself permission to summer!

People allow themselves to get away with less than desirable behavior by stating it's “2024” like that gives the human race a hall pass.
What does a year have to do with being a good human, raising good humans, and behaving like a good human? Nothing, that’s what..

For those of you who discount social graces to the times we are in right now, I have to ask, why? It’s alright with you for people to be nonchalant, even rude, putting no effort into doing their part as decent citizens? When did standards get so low, so as not even to expect people to do the right thing?