What Happens After Your Kid Survives Cancer
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
When you’re pregnant, there is all this information that bombards you about how to be pregnant — what you should eat, how much weight you should gain, what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, how you should give birth, where you should give birth — there is a LOT of stuff people want you to know. From my recollection, about 98 percent of my focus when pregnant with my first child was on Creating The Ideal Birth Experience. This is amusing to anyone who has actually had a child, but it’s a rite of passage for first-time moms. Wow, there are a LOT of expectations. Anyway, precious little is ..read more
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Gifts and Gift Giving
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
On episode 51 of Question of the Day, James and Stephen discussed gifts. Now, I love to talk about gifts, particularly the gifts that I think people should buy for me. But today, let’s talk about one of the major weirdnesses for Americans (and I assume people from other countries as well) who come to live in Israel. If you ask a typical Israeli to talk about what scares him most, it’s not bombs or other terrorist attacks. It’s being invited to a wedding. In America, if someone invites you to a wedding, you check your calendar, you see if you are free, you check their registry, maybe you go i ..read more
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I Know You Are, But What Am I?
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
On episode 50 of Question of the Day, Stephen and James debate the definition of maturity. Stephen posits that maturity is being in a situation and handling it with poise. That is a pretty tough standard. I am frequently stuck waiting in line in grocery stores, and while I generally might appear to be handling the situation with poise, I typically compose passive aggressive tweets. But, you know, to all outward appearances, I am chill. I can’t remember, did I ever tell you about the time my kid had cancer? Maybe? Okay, well, when my kid had cancer and I would take him to pick up his ..read more
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Epistle: To Yoni, on the Occasion of Your Eleventh Birthday
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
Dear Yoni, It’s been a while since I’ve written you a birthday letter, because I suck. Sorry. You make your own magic. Before I had a lot of kids, I kind of thought that in families with a lot of kids, kids basically got ignored. I figured that parents just stopped making an effort or something, after a while. I don’t know. Then I had a bunch of kids, and I realized that love is not a pie that you cut pieces from. Rather, love is like.. well, not like a pie. More like Twitter. It expands to fill the space you allow it. The more you give, the more you have. You were born into a hous ..read more
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Anger, Marriage, Children, and School
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
If I had to sum up the actually useful information that I learned in school, the list would look like this: 1. Excellent handwriting and exceptional grammar, thanks to my sixth-grade teacher 2. Anger is a secondary emotion, thanks to my high school theatre director Everything else, as they say, is commentary. In my 41 years on this earth, no one — outside of a high school math teacher — has ever asked me anything that required, say trigonometry. I have never needed to know the chemical formula for anything. I don’t care when the Aztecs died or when they say the earth will end. Carrying arou ..read more
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Family Vacations
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Episode 48 of Question of the Day, QOD’s Family Vacation.  Some years ago, when I first read Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours (EXCELLENT book, and one I still highly recommend, along with everything else she writes), I remember reading her confession about not enjoying some of things that moms/parents are “supposed” to enjoy, and I remember feeling so FREED.  There are things I am delighted to do with my kids. Read a story? Awesome. Have a meal or a snack together? Dude, I love food. Curl up with me on the couch and talk about your da ..read more
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Reading is Definitely Fundamental
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
I wanted to write about an episode of QoD where James and Stephen talked about the way we use conversation and say things like, “Hi, how are you” when we don’t really care about the answer, but I can’t remember which episode it is and there are NO TRANSCRIPTS, and so I’m going to have to re-listen to stuff which means I have to walk and it’s cold outside now, so, no. So instead, I’ll write about Episode 22 of Question of the Day, called Is Reading Fundamental. When I saw the title of the episode, I had formed a very different idea of what it was going to be about. But because neither James n ..read more
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Why College Is Almost Irrelevant
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
A Question of the Day episode I recently listened to featured a questioner who felt that he had wasted his life (in his early 20s) because he hadn’t gone to college. He wanted to feel less like a loser. If you know me, you know that my primary claim to fame is that I dropped out of college TWICE. And NEVER GRADUATED. When my kids tell this to people, it’s, “Mommy never went to college.” Guy gets annoyed when they say this (and I can only imagine how my parents cry themselves to sleep every night), and says, “Mommy went to a LOT of college.” It’s true, I did go to a lot of college. The shor ..read more
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Imposing (Narrative) Structure on Chaos
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
I planned to write more about habits today, but then it got really nice in the middle of the day, and I went for a walk, and I found myself listening to Part I of the 3-part Freakonomics series on Bad Medicine like WHOA. Medicine, and bad medicine (shake it up) are topics about which I have a LOT to say. So, habits and Question of the Day will have to wait until next week. The focus of this episode was on the switch that’s really only happened in the last 25 years, from “eminence-based” medicine to evidence-based medicine. Stephen Dubner commented early in the episode that most of us want to ..read more
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I Can Get There From Anywhere
You Get What You Get - The soap opera that is my life
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3y ago
I really do recommend that you go back and listen to the archives of Question of the Day. It always makes me at least smile, and I usually laugh aloud at least once during the episode. On the episode I (re-)listened to today (seriously, guys, transcripts would have been a great thing…), James and Stephen talked about life hacks, and whether they had any real value. James talked about the whole concept of “life hacking” and how he found it frustrating that there are so many people who think that tiny tricks can do a lot to improve your life in a significant way. I agree. Sure, specific, small ..read more
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