dry january

Congratulations to everyone who succeeded in their mission to participate in Dry January. Instead of being alcohol free, my Dry January was really a lack of creativity that led me to ignore my blog and spend a ridiculous amount of time watching all five seasons of “Six Feet Under.” While it was an entirely enjoyable pursuit, it also allowed me to avoid writing. When I was writing the blog in the fall from our “NY Experiment,” material and photos fell into my lap. I had more topics to write about than ever before. But since I have been back in the Bay Area suburbs, I have had a hard time finding things I wanted to write about.

Yesterday, I went to my first tennis clinic since being back in California. I walked into a group of three women, two of whom I had not met before. One of them immediately asked me where I normally play, which USTA teams I have been on and expressed surprise that our paths had not previously crossed. Let me translate this tennis posturing into words that everyone can understand. She was saying: “I don’t know you and I’m wondering if you are good enough to play in this clinic.” She should have known better than to size up another player by name, club, tennis bag or outfit. Seasoned players know that you cannot pre-determine how good someone is by how they look or even how they warm-up (For more tales of bad female interactions while playing tennis, please read “usta tennis: episode 1.”)  I responded to her attitude by taking her down with two swift moves: (1) I hugged the coach when he arrived because we are personal friends. He did not hug any of the other players (as I knew he wouldn’t) and (2) I hit the ball HARD and aced her twice, including on a second serve. As I kept replaying this interaction in my head for the next 24 hours, I felt entirely satisfied and victorious and then realized that my Dry January was over. I was ready to write the blog again.

Before I begin to tackle new topics in 2023, I want to provide all of my faithful readers a bit of backstory about how I began writing a blog. As a kid, I used to watch a lot of TV. Ok. As an adult I watch a lot of TV too. Anyways, I was a faithful fan of “60 Minutes” because my parents watched it and there was no option to change the channel. I might have been the only elementary school girl who set their sights on taking Andy Rooney’s job. I just felt like his time slot was unbelievable and the format was brilliant. But, I could do it better. The first time I was published was in high school. I wrote and co-edited my high school newspaper, The Courier. I won an award for an article I wrote about our first African American student body president. I still feel like my most interesting article was a feature on what it was like to be pregnant in high school. I am sure that my perspective on teen pregnancy was shallow and basic but it was a unique topic for a public high school paper in the late ‘80’s. 

Even though journalism was a big part of my high school experience, I did not attempt to write for the Daily Bruin at UCLA. Instead, I manipulated my way into co-writing the female perspective of a column in the Greek Connection called “Casual Observations” which was inspired by the SNL skit “Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy.” I went through my original copies of several columns in hopes of finding some gems that would be relevant today. I read most of them to my college-aged daughter while on FaceTime to see if they would resonate. Her immediate reaction was, “Mom! You were tweeting before there was Twitter!”  And, she told me that the following lines from our column about college life in the early 1990’s were still relevant and possibly funny: 

“If your boyfriend uses more hair products than you then it is OK if your butt is bigger than his.” 

“I will forever mourn the loss of my favorite scrunchie.”

“Space in a relationship is a myth.”

“If your friend has two personalities, one for when she’s only with women and one for when men are present, does she count as one friend or two?”

“Guys respect other guys who don’t shower.”

“The top 3 most overused words in college: rager, blowout and fire-up.”

“The ability to use delta notation is a good sign someone will succeed beyond college.”

“The hours between 4 pm and 7 pm are the least productive of the day.” 

It is possible that the same people who, at the time, told me they enjoyed reading “Casual Observations” are the same 14 people who now read this blog regularly.

My next journey into writing was self-published and distributed through the USPS. In our first year out of college, my roommates CJ, AB and I decided to write a letter to several of our friends who we had not had time to keep up with since graduating and starting jobs in SF. This effort was written prior to the existence of email so we actually printed and mailed them to about 20-30 people. The subject matter was a combination of an update on our lives and some Casual Observations about our apartment, jobs and personal maintenance. One of the best parts of the series is our list of “The Top 10 Reasons We Are Mature Women of the 90’s” (photo below) and “Top 5 Reasons Not to Have a Boyfriend” (photo below also). Based on my paper files, we wrote the letters for about 18 months until I moved back to LA to go to graduate school.

After a five year hiatus, we revived the letter writing but this time we rode the wave of the first internet bubble and distributed via email. We were now in our late 20’s and I was married and pregnant with my first child. One of my former roommates was engaged and the other was dating the guy she would eventually marry. Similar to what happens with this blog, I pressured my husband into contributing to the letters and, not surprisingly, he received most of the readers’ compliments. The tone of the re-boot is so much different than the original as we morphed from early 20s, single, clueless women trying to figure out wearing business attire and living in a city to adult-ish people with condos, kids and pets. My favorite line of the late 90’s series is “CJ is currently working through the blissful first six months of her marriage – a time my husband and I like to refer to as ‘the winter of our discontent.” We were so lovingly cynical and naive but, like our first round of “Dear Friends,”  we gave up on this effort within about 18 months.

My next writing gig was with the Golden Gate Mothers Group (GGMP). A friend of mine was the editor of the club newsletter and I was given the opportunity to write feature stories. My articles appeared alongside information about playgroups, preschool panels, meeting minutes, recipes and book recommendations. I wrote about trying to manage a purse and diaper bag and the quandary of whether to combine the two bags or not. I also discussed my desire to be an excellent role model for my toddler son by not swearing in front of him and modeling healthy eating habits and contemplated how to “win” the snack at pre-preschool by bringing something quasi healthy. 

I also authored a “Dear Dad” column where I would write fake letters to “Dear Dad” and my husband would answer them. The column was preceded by this disclaimer: “Our ‘Dear Dad’ is a father, husband and attorney living and working in the Bay Area. He holds no degrees related to family counseling or social work but enjoys dispensing advice to all who will listen and can often take seemingly complex emotional issues and boil them down to one word solutions. His advice is not guaranteed by this publication or any other corporation, entity or person.” After our first “Dear Dad” appeared in the April 2001 GGMG newsletter, we were “fired.” As I read back the column, I absolutely agree that our style was in direct conflict with the mission and vision of the GGMP.

I didn’t write regularly again for more than 20 years until I started this blog in fall 2019. I thought about writing all of the time. I even created a blog on a site that I can’t remember and gave it the title, “What Am I Doing With My Life?” After taking that first giant step, I never touched it again. It wasn’t until my son was in college and my daughter had her driver’s license that I finally prioritized writing something that anyone might read. I have now published 52 posts on “Do I have chalk on my face?” Looking back at my writing from the last thirty years makes it seems so obvious that I was eventually going to find a way to write in my own style and on my own terms. And strangely enough, I still write in exactly the same voice. The person that wrote Casual Observations in college is amazingly very much the same writer today. I can say that without a doubt because yesterday I was in the shower and casually observed, “There should be reading goggles specifically for use in the shower so you can tell the difference between shampoo and conditioner!” Brilliant!