OK, first of all I must tell you that my initial reaction to this question was TOTALLY that of a girl, meaning, “If I were going to gossip about someone who was committing one or the other of these faux pas, which one would get the most reaction out of my fellow magpies?”

And I must also tell you that, from my own personal experience, it’s pretty easy to get a reaction to a statement like, “Oh my gosh, can you BELIEVE that he just referred to his wife as ‘my servant’ in front of all their friends?!”*

But when you are on vacation at the beach and you flounce into your hotel room in regally high moral indignation and announce to your husband that in no way, under any circumstances whatsoever, will you condescend to eat at the “Western Sizzlin” because its name is composed entirely of adjectives and contains no proper nouns whatsoever (if you can even comprehend such an abominable travesty against grammar), well in that case you’re pretty much on your own. (Fortunately for him, he’d packed A Lot of tequila.)

But you see, this is where the danger lies-this is the top of a very slippery slope. Because just about everyone has at least some sense of what is and what isn’t appropriate behavior. But what no one is talking about are the incalculable examples of violence done EVERY DAY to English grammar.

Like the people who use “myself” as a subject and think that this makes them sound “extra specially edumacated”:

-”John and myself attended the meeting”. Really-”Myself attended the meeting”? Did you now? And did they then take the only sensible course of action and FIRE YOUR ASS so that all of the people formerly at the mercy of the barrage of your constant verbal and written assaults could finally be put out of their misery?

Or the people who use the subject “I” as the object of a preposition, and think they are being SO MUCH SMARTER than the rest of us peasants who couldn’t correctly conjugate a verb if it knocked us down in the street and then sat on our head:

-”They presented the report to Todd and I”. Really-”They presented the report to I“? And did it say, “Could you please learn a freakin’ grammar rule once in a while?!” Or at least sound out your sentences to see whether or not they make sense?

-Also bad: “They presented the report to Todd and myself.” Really? In that case, I have no choice but to smite you with my Condescending And Inappropriately Superior Attitude Of Someone Who Actually Knows How To Use Reflexive Pronouns. I’m sure you will now feel suitable chastened.

It can be very lonely at times, this walking the path of a Grammar Snob. But that is a price I’m willing to pay. Even if it occasionally means floating up from the brink of a nitrous-induced coma to inform my dentist (who incidentally is just about to poke me with The Smokin’ Hot Drill Of ‘Thank God For Novocaine Because Otherwise This Would Really Hurt’) that the saying actually describes “killing multiple birds with one stone”, not throwing multiple stones at one bird. (Because I may be Book Smart, but sometimes I’m Life Dumb.)

*This actually happened. (Not to me.)
**Man, can I work myself up into an absolute rant about nothing or what?! I’m good.

For me that would have to be the smell of pine-every time I smell that it catapults me directly to Christmas, and the special holiday traditions that my family has built up over the years.

And if I were going to sum up the essence evoked by my own family’s holiday rituals in one word, that word would definitely have to be…”speed”. Here’s what I mean.

Take, for example, the cherished tradition of the Christmas tree. Sure, there are many people who go out immediately after Thanksgiving, comparison shop to find The Perfect Tree, lovingly position it in the best spot in the house, and then create beautiful holiday memories of decorating the tree filled with homemade foods, holiday music, warmth, and laughter. Not us. We prefer the thrill of the hunt. When Christmas trees are readily available at every home improvement store, grocery store, drug store, and church parking lot, well then we’re just not interested. Where is the challenge in that? But you just try and find a viable tree on Christmas Eve afternoon; that’ll get your adrenaline pumping.

Then of course there’s the Christmas shopping, and I can think of no better example to illustrate this than that of my brother. Every year he rolls into town about two days before Christmas. Up until this point he has completed exactly 0% of his Christmas preparations. But is he worried? Absolutely not. Because we are speedy.

He just grabs my mom and any other random family members who happen to be milling around at that moment and off they go. His personal goal is to go to one store, purchase presents for the 9 family members with whom we celebrate Christmas, and complete all of his shopping and wrapping (thank goodness for charities who raise money by wrapping gifts for crazed shoppers like us) in less time than it took him the year before. And somehow he always does.

(I decided to go along on the shopping trip last year, and because this is my blog I feel that I can TOTALLY take credit for the fact that last year, he beat his record by 50%. It now stands at under 30 minutes.)

Finally it is time for us to decorate the tree that we have so lovingly chosen speedily salvaged from the Christmas tree lot guy as he was closing down his business for the year. And here’s where the real fun begins, because in our house there are no rules. This stems from my mom’s childhood experiences of having a parent who forced her and her siblings to hang the tinsel on the tree strand by tiny, slippery, individual strand. (Even writing that sentence makes my head hurt in the place where my migraines start.)

So now that she is a grownup and can have her own Christmas tree, she has declared that anything goes. Anyone can put anything they want on her tree. If you can find a way to get it onto an ornament hook, it’s going up on the tree. This results in a unique, eclectic decorating style that I like to refer to as “Visual Anarchy As Staged On A Christmas Tree”.

I remember one year in particular where, in addition to the ornaments, our tree featured construction paper garlands made by my brother in elementary school, red, gold, and white tinsel garlands, at least 2 packages of individual tinsel strands, one tree’s worth of multi-colored strands of lights that shone constantly, and one tree’s worth of blinking white strands of light hooked up to a variable-speed remote control. It was AWESOME! (Unless you are someone who prefers things like balance and visual harmony over absolute personal freedom. Then you probably wouldn’t like it very much. When I asked my engineer husband what he thought when he first experienced one of our Christmas trees he described it this way: “I felt the part of my head between my eyes and the rest of my brain shut down so I didn’t have to process what I was seeing.”)

Do we know how to do the holidays right or what?!

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I had to sit with this question for a couple of days, and then I ended up going back to my first, knee-jerk response which was, “I don’t.”

I have a very all-or-nothing personality, which was summed up perfectly once by a comment that my coach made to me.

“Jenny,” she said to me, “you do not have a dimmer switch. It’s like you’ll be sitting in a house, in the dark, with all the lights off. And then all of a sudden you’ll look around, notice that you’re in the dark, say, ‘Why the f*&# am I in the dark?!’, and then get up and flip on every single light in the entire house. So you’re either completely in the dark, or sitting there with all your lights ablaze. There’s no dimmer switch for you.”

That is so true. So to answer this question I will say that I don’t try to balance things, really. I’ll go all out on whatever catches my attention for a while-my blog, the house, Spanish lesson plans, etc. Then I’ll suddenly notice something else that isn’t getting done, drop whatever I’m working on, and focus on the new area full-throttle. I think the key for me is that I know this about myself, and I don’t judge it (so much ) anymore.

Something else that’s helped me is a new definition of balance that I learned from Peter Reding and Marcia Collins, founders of Coach For Life (the training program I went through to become a Certified Life Coach.) They said to imagine that you are standing on one leg, with the other leg lifted off the ground. You are balancing while you do that, obviously, but that balance is not a static, once-for-all, never-changing thing. It is constantly being adjusted, even if just in small ways, by your body. It’s organic, and flowing, and changes as it needs to. So that is the view I take of balance now.

The final thing that helps me is that I also have a very highly developed inner drama queen, as well as a great sense of humor. So when I do get completely frazzled I re-align myself by making up a highly entertaining, and completely improbably story about what’s going to happen to me (”…and I’m going to end up living on the street in a box, and then die all alone.”) Then I laugh at myself, and am able to get back to a place where I can better deal with my life. So, no matter what, I’m never bored.

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In my opinion, I think you can get in trouble if you go too far to the extreme in either direction. Here’s what I mean.

One day I was talking to a friend of mine who is very smart. During the conversation I mentioned to him that I consider myself to be kind of a “Renaissance Woman” in that I have a lot of different talents and interests. He replied that women didn’t actually do anything during the Renaissance. After gasping so hard that I nearly inhaled the contents of my entire office, I gently suggested that women might possibly have had more of a role in the shaping of our history than would be suggested by the traditional, “accepted” texts, and he went off on a rant against “revisionist” history, where clearly “revisionist” was a code word for “fascist, communist, anti-American, mother-hating, puppy-killing, Nazi brainwashing propaganda.”

So intelligence? Sure. But spouting remarks that will alienate half of the world’s population, especially when you are a single guy looking for a girlfriend? Not really that smart.

Of course, this can go the other way too.

One day my husband and I were having dinner at some friends’ house. These friends are both teachers, and the woman especially is a paragon of sensible, practical, down-to-earth thinking.

On this occasion she was telling us about her brother’s recent wedding. She began by describing how her brother called her on a Thursday to tell her that he was getting married that following Monday. So she and her mother decided to fly out and help with the preparations. After running around all weekend they finally made it to the day of the wedding, and she and her mom were with the bride-to-be as she was getting her hair done for the ceremony.

Our friend: “So, she finally found someone to do her hair. He was a little person. You know, that’s what you’re supposed to call midgets now.”
Us: “Huh. That’s different.”
Our friend: “Yeah, so as he was doing her hair and riding around on his scooter…”
Us: (interrupting with snorts of laughter)
Us: “What?! He was riding a scooter?!”
Our Friend: “Well, yeah, because he couldn’t walk. So, anyway, I had to be his assistant and hand him his tools because his partner had to go out.”
Us: (the snorts have become shouts now)
Us: “What?! He was a gay midget hairdresser?”
Our Friend: “Yeah. But his partner isn’t a midget. He’s a regular-sized person.”

At this point further conversation became impossible, because my husband was laughing so hard that he was crying, and I was laughing so hard that I fell off of their couch and onto their living room floor.

But believe it or not, that was not the funniest part of this story. The funniest part was the fact that our friend told us this story with absolutely no reaction whatsoever. She. Never. Laughed. Once. And she honestly did not understand why we were in hysterics. She told the story in a tone of voice that suggested that gay, scooter-riding, hair-dressing midgets are a time-honored, traditional part of everyone’s nuptial experience.

So I think that instead of it being an either/or situation, it’s better when it’s both/and.

My most memorable meal was one that I did not actually attend in person. But I still ended up with a great story.

Back in November of 1996, five months after my husband and I got married, our families decided to have Thanksgiving together honor our new union. At the last minute the two of us ended up not being able to go because I got sick. But our families had dinner together anyway.

Included in the invitation was my husband’s eighty-something-year-old grandmother, who when greeting my twenty-year-old brother (whom she had only seen once before, at our wedding, decked out in full wedding regalia) said, “Well hello there. I didn’t recognize you with all your clothes on!”

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I have the perfect story for this question, which you can read here in this post from last August. It is called, “Do You Think My In-Laws Are Trying To Tell Me Something?”
Here’s why I ask. My husband just called them because he just remembered that it was his dad’s birthday 2 days ago and we did not call or send a card and now we are totally on their *&%# list.

So he came out into my office after he got off the phone and he was wearing the face you’d expect on someone who has discovered that, even if you’ve been married for 10 years, and are a responsible, hard-working, law-abiding, home-owning grownup, you are never to old to be in big trouble with your parents.

Then he said, “My parents have a new pet.” So I thought that maybe he was looking down because their dog, Riley, had died.

But no. Riley is just fine. It was that he was responsible for breaking to me the news that, “They have adopted a snake.” (Snakes only being, to my mind, The Most Terrifying Things In Existence.)

Apparently they had some people working on their lawn, and these people brought them outside to show them the snake they’d found.

“We need to get rid of this snake,” said the lawn people. What an excellent response.

Other appropriate responses:

“Bring me the flame thrower!”

or, “Why the *%$@ don’t we have a flame thrower?!”

My father-in-law’s response: “Wait. Let me look that snake up on the Internet.”

Long story short, the snake is now living in a special snake spot in their backyard, almost directly touching the outside of the room that my husband and I stay in when we go to visit my in-laws. And I just can’t help wondering, is there a message in that for me?

A couple of weekends ago my husband and I went out for Chinese with a friend of ours. I was off in my own little world (as I frequently am), and eventually I started singing along with the Christmas muzak that was playing in the background.

“Uh, what are you doing, Jenny?” my husband asked me.

“I’m singing along with the Christmas music.”

“What music?”

“You know, the music.” I sang a few additional bars to demonstrate.

“I don’t hear anything.”

This was alarming for a number of reasons. First of all, I wasn’t just hearing a faint tune in my head. I was hearing completely-scored, full-orquestral arrangements. So if I was having delusions or hallucinations, they were pretty far advanced. Second, much of the music I was hearing prominently featured the pan flute, and I was very concerned that my hallucinations chose to express themselves through such an odd instrument.

I tried everything to get them to hear the music. I sang louder. I switched seats with them. I had them stand in different spots in the restaurant. Nothing.

Now I was really freaked out because, as inventive as I am, I could not come up with an explanation for this. Fortunately my husband noticed that I was fast becoming A Woman On The Edge, and before I could announce that I was leaving the restaurant and immediately checking myself into some kind of treatment facility, he let me know that they were just messing with me.

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In 1984, when I was in the sixth grade, I got the Chicken Pox. Back then, if mothers heard about a child who had the Chicken Pox, they would rush to bring their children over to the afflicted child’s house and expose them to this virus. A child with the Chicken Pox had a kind of weird, twisted, Simon Cowell-esque celebrity back then with other parents: “Oh, pick my child! Expose my child! Infect my child, please!”

So I missed two weeks of school, and when I finally went back I was covered with tiny red scabs, which of course my classmates never noticed, and certainly never used as an excuse to invent rumors of my contracting wacky and exotic diseases. Twelve and thirteen year olds are so sensitive and gracious in that way.

One day I was bored, and I decided to circle each and every scab with a ballpoint pen. That, of course, was the answer I was looking for, as inking up my scabs made them practically invisible to the naked eye (NOT!)

And to cap this all off, I vividly remember that as soon as I had finally recovered, an article appeared in the newspaper describing how researchers had finally discovered a vaccine for the very illness I had just suffered through. Twelve years old is so young to learn about the concept of irony, don’t you think?

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So this week I participated in the Friday’s Feast meme, which was a lot of fun, and tomorrow I’m planning on participating in Blog Fodder. But not only do these new memes offer me the opportunity for some high-quality obsessing over these brand-new participant lists, this Monday will only be the third week that Blog Fodder has been around. And they leave up all the previous topics. And there really aren’t strict rules about how you participate. Which means that I can go back to the very beginning and answer all the questions starting from Week One. Because having a perfectly complete and uninterrupted set of Blog Fodder posts of course matters a great deal to…um,…absolutely no one. But it sure does make my inner OCD girl happy. So here we go.

Blog Fodder #1: What Are Some Of Your Memorable Experiences At School?

I think the thing I remember most about being a freshman in college is just how Every Single Little Thing completely blew my mind. I remember standing on the quad one day looking at the bank that was on campus, and feeling my entire world view shatter around me as I realized, “Wow-I don’t have to use the bank my parents do just because they use it. I can choose my own bank.” It seriously had never occurred to me before that I could make my own decisions about these kinds of things.

I didn’t drink in college, and I didn’t need to because honestly, just contemplating the question of which detergent I was going to use to do my laundry would spiral me off into a full-blown existential crisis. “Whoa…Tide…trippy!”

Blog Fodder #2: Tell Us About Somebody Who Has Changed Your Life, Even If Only A Little.

Recently this would have to be my coach. I’ve worked with life coaches for about the past 4 1/2 years, and have been with my current coach for about the last 2 years. She is AWESOME. She’s very compassionate during those times when I’m freaking out, always reminding me of all the things I’ve come through and all the great work I’ve done.

She also gives me fabulous counsel, such as during the times when I fall into a depression:

“Gag yourself with duct tape if you have to, but DO NOT TALK TO OTHER PEOPLE. Because right now you have the capacity to totally destroy all your relationships by uttering a single word,” for example is something that she’s told me on more than one occasion.

She’s also very good at reminding me of things about myself which I’ve forgotten, like the fact that I always pass through about a 2-week period of insomnia when the school year ends and I’m done tutoring, or the fact that I’m very sensitive to the change of seasons:

“Yes, you’re feeling down now, as you always do at the beginning of winter. But in a few months it will be the springtime, and you will once again feel like ‘taking all your clothes off and running down the street naked’, just like you did last spring.”

(Oh, you wrote that down did you? Man, I’m really gonna have to start paying A Lot More Attention to the stuff I say to people.)