On Vacation

Hi All.

I’ll be away on vacation in Berlin this week but look forward to catching up with you next week.

Auf Wiedersehen…Ich bin ein Berliner…and all that good stuff.

Have a great week!

 

Image: German Flag by Craig Is Shooting via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Friday Pix: Recommended Reading For The Weekend

Every Friday I point you to some recommended reading around the blogosphere:

1. In keeping with my ongoing need to keep you up to date on the most outlandish antics from this midterm election season, check out this video of Jimmy McMillan of “The Rent Is Too Damn High” party at the New York governor’s debate. Wowza. Even Andrew Cuomo is laughing… (P.S. Love the ‘stache…)

2. As always, I loved Howard Baldwin’s post Random Thoughts On Turning 55 over at Middle Age Cranky. (“When I am old, I shall look like I grew up in California.”)

3. At the other end of the age spectrum, here’s a Sesame Street Muppet with an afro singing the song “I Love My Hair” which a real life Dad wrote for his daughter so that she would…love her hair.

4. And speaking of children’s television, a friend of mine in Boston has been involved in this really cool on-line project designed to teach kids to recycle.

5. I’m always fascinated by people’s relationship to their work, so I really enjoyed this interview with Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles at the Huffington Post. (If you haven’t seen one of Charles’ video book reviews, it’s a must.)

6. If you want to smile, have a look at the Here Comes Another Bubble video over on A Modern Mother.

7. Finally, here’s my story from Politics Daily about quite possibly the bravest woman on earth:  a 20 year old university student who’s just become the Chief of Police in a Mexican drug zone.

*****

In case you missed the RealDelia reader survey I ran on Monday, you still have time to fill it out. Click here for details.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Prenups Made Legally Binding In UK

Paul McCartney must be green with envy. Like many wealthy British celebrities, bankers and heirs, McCartney didn’t have a pre-nuptial agreement (“prenup”) in place when he divorced Heather Mills in 2008 — to the tune of 24.3 million pounds ($39 million). He couldn’t. His native England didn’t allow them.

But that all looks set to change. On Wednesday, a landmark Supreme Court ruling recognized the legal standing of prenuptial agreements for the very first time in England and Wales. While we won’t know until 2012 whether such agreements will be enshrined in British law, this judgment now means that prenups will have decisive weight in divorce courts going forward.

The decision marks a radical shift in British law. A prenup is a contract that typically stipulates how property and other assets will be divided should a marriage end. Traditionally, prenups were seen as contrary to public policy in England and Wales on the basis that they might encourage couples to split up. From 2000 on, the norm was to divide all assets between the spouses on a 50-50 basis, although judges can use discretion in deciding how much to allocate to any one party.

Read the rest of this post at www.PoliticsDaily.com…

Image: McConnection – Year 9, number 31 Paul McCartney fanclub Netherlands by Antoon Foobar via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Tips For Adulthood: Five Ways To Keep Your Brain Active As You Age

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I had a senior moment the other day. I was talking to my daughter about my elementary school, and I started listing my teachers one by one. But when I got to fifth grade, I drew a complete blank. I could envision the lady perfectly – plump, jolly, liked to wear purple – and even remembered that her name began with an “F.” But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember her name.

I can be forgiven this lapse, of course. It was, after all, 35 years ago (cough.) But it was another sign that as we age, our memories aren’t quite what they once were.

In that spirit, here are five tips for keeping your brain active as you age:

1. Work. Pay no attention to all those French people behind the curtain, striking their hearts out because Nicolas Sarkozy is about to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. New research reported in the New York Times last week shows that postponing retirement is actually better for your brain. Coining the phrase “mental retirement” to capture what happens when your brain is no longer getting regular exercise, the study shows that retired people as a group tend to do less well on cognitive and memory tests than people who are still working.

2. Walk. But in case you’d still prefer to be living on the beach at 65 rather than toiling away in an office cubicle, be sure that you walk a lot in paradise. Another study out last week shows that walking at least six miles a week may be one thing people can do to keep their brains from shrinking and fight off dementia. Which is good news for me, even in my new-found hip, urban status as the owner of a collapsible bike. One thing that not owning a car really does is get you used to good, vigorous walks.

3. Be Social. Back when I wrote about five reasons to be optimistic about middle age, I referenced some new research showing that  – contrary to the long-held view that our brains get fixed in early childhood – circuits in the adult brain are, in fact, continually modified by experience. (See #1.) Turns out that one of the things that keeps the brain developing as we age is being social. In addition to getting out and meeting people, people who volunteer and help kids also seem to age better and help their brains.

4. Use the Internet. OK, this one is controversial, especially coming from someone who warned you not to get an e-reader lest it chip away at your capacity to engage in sustained, concentrated thought. But there are two sides to every story. And a lot of scientists – Harvard’s Steven Pinker, for one – think that far from damaging our brains as we age, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales. Colin Blakemore, a British neurobiologist concurs. As he notes – reacting to the prevailing “internet ruins our minds” thesis:  “At its best, the internet is no threat to our minds. It is another liberating extension of them, as significant as books, the abacus, the pocket calculator or the Sinclair Z80.” So by all means, grab that new Kindle, Grandma. And get a Twitter account while you’re at it..

5. Eat lots of fish. Many parents will be familiar with the importance of essential fatty acids (EFAs) for brain development in utero and in young children. (Neurotic parenting confession #346b: Until my son – who was born allergic to just about everything – was two, we regularly spiked his rice milk with flax seed oil for precisely this reason.) But it turns out that these so-called “good fats” are also increasingly seen to be of value in limiting cognitive decline during aging. Fish, for example, is a great source of EFAs. Flax-soaked salmon, anyone?

*****

On Monday, I was over on http://www.PoliticsDaily.com talking about reform of the British welfare system.

Image: thyme salmon with leek coulis by elana’s pantry via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

RealDelia Reader Survey

Hi folks.

I’m taking a break from my normal posting today to ask a big favor.

I’m in the process of re-designing this blog (stay tuned!) and as I go about doing that, I thought that it might be helpful to know a bit more about my readers.

Should I ever try to syndicate all or parts of this blog (for profit), I need to know a bit more about the demographics of my readers. And should I ever wish to run ads, I will also need to know a bit more about you.

So I’ve designed a survey to learn a few details about who’s reading this blog. A few points worth making up front:

*I’m running this survey through an on line company called Survey Monkey.

*This is completely anonymous survey and all data will be handled confidentially. No one will know who you are (even me!)

*This won’t take more than a few minutes of your time. (Promise!)

But it will be enormously helpful to me as I move forward with RealDelia.

I wish that I could give you a prize for doing this, but I will instead just thank you from the bottom of my heart. As a token of my appreciation, I will also bequeath you the virtual flower bouquet featured above for being such loyal and devoted readers of this blog.

Apparently the survey link was not working when I first posted but it should be working now. If you tried to do the survey and could not, kindly try again.

Please take a moment and Click here to take survey

Thanks!!!!

Image: Thank You For 44,000 Views This Year by Poppy Wright via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Friday Pix: Recommended Reading For The Weekend

Every Friday I point you towards some recommended reading around the blogosphere:

1. This is now a bit dated, but if you haven’t seen these two ads back to back, it’s a must. The first is Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell’s “I’m You” ad in which she dispels all those pesky rumors that she’s really a witch. The second is a You Tube parody of the O’Donnell ad which is just…well, priceless.

2. In a campaign season featuring the likes of those ads, it’s no wonder that my Politics Daily colleague Donna Trussell came up with this post to characterize America’s political “moment” right now, aptly entitled Witches and Whores and Sluts, Oh My!

3. I got a real kick out of the Funniest Notes To Thieves Ever Written over at The Huffington Post.

4.  And as long as we’re looking at lists, you won’t want to miss The World’s Eight Strangest Sex Remedies at the Global Post.

5. I’ve mentioned before how much I love Strangling My Muse, a blog designed to inspire creativity. Check out this Neruda writing prompt and tell me that you don’t just want to grab a pen and start writing!

6. Finally, here’s a beautiful video about dancing in the streets.

Have a great weekend!

Tips For Adulthood: Five Signs You’d Make A Lousy Housewife

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I have tremendous respect for women (and men) who choose to work inside the home. And yet, when it comes to myself, I’m fairly certain that – even if I wanted to – I could never make it as a housewife. (Or house husband, as the case may be.)

If you’ve ever wondered whether you were meant to work primarily inside or outside the home, here are five indicators that should influence your decision:

1. You need help operating basic appliances. I’m not talking about fancy, fuzzy-logic rice cookers or super-deluxe espresso machines (replete with matching grinders). I’m talking boilers. All summer long, my husband and I noticed that the heat would come on at seemingly odd times. We tried tinkering with the thermostat in the hallway, but that had no effect. But then the heat would go off again and we’d forget all about it. The other day, while a service repair man was at my flat fixing our washer/dryer, I asked him if he could take a look at our boiler to figure out what the problem was. He opened the cabinet, looked at the boiler for about three seconds, and then turned to me and said…“Um…Miss? See this large red button here that says ‘On‘?”

2. You can’t even read the symbols, let alone the instructions. Forget instruction manuals. I think we all know that I’m lousy with those. I’m talking about the little symbols they devise for appliances so that even someone who can’t read (for example) can somehow manage to use the oven. Someone, that is, who isn’t me. I’ve lived in my house for nearly six months and – much like the heating problem, but even more frequently – I’d notice that whenever I put something in the oven, it tended to burn. Then, one evening when I was hosting a dinner party (and burning some lasagna), a friend of mine looked at the oven settings and noticed that the little squiggly lines that emanated off of one of the settings were also present on the setting I was using. “Um, no offense, but I think you’re grilling the lasagna” she said politely. (“Grill” being English for “broil.”) And when she showed me the little symbols, it all made perfect sense. Ah, so you mean you want to “bake” without the squiggly lines…got it.

3. You need to psych yourself up for ironing. Just before school started this autumn, I realized that my son needed his school uniform labelled. And because – between all the sports gear and the regular uniform – he’s got quite a lengthy list of school attire, this was going to take some time. Truth be told, all you need to do is set up the iron and apply the labels. (OK, you also need to iron each one like three times so it’s a bit more involved than that.) But that’s really it. And yet, I must confess that I find ironing completely oppressive. In order to execute this task, I literally had to play loud music, lay out all the clothes in assembly line fashion next to the ironing board and then talk to myself as I ironed each successive item to get me through the ordeal.

4. You can’t even count the rooms in a house. I’m not a terribly visual person (as I think the previous entry attests.) My husband – who is – can corroborate this.  I once famously scoped out an apartment for us in Boston and came home extolling the virtues of our new “three bedroom,” only to have him arrive a short while later and inquire as to where the third bedroom was located. The answer was…nowhere. It’s O.K. I have other talents.

5. You’re a hopeless cook. I recently asked my 9-year-old what he wanted for dinner. “How about some international cuisine?” he answered. “Um,you mean like Chef Boyardee?”

Image: 69/365 housewife with nothing to do by katie cowden via flickr under a Creative Commons license.

How I Met My Husband

I think  Joan Wickersham is my muse.

Wickersham is an American writer – most famous for her memoir, The Suicide Index – who also writes regularly for The Boston Globe. An essay of hers about how married couples communicate sparked a post of my own entitled The Private Language of Marriage some months back. And now she’s published another essay about marriage – How We Met – in which she describes the universal fascination we all hold with the story about how couples meet.

In Wickersham’s own case, her initial meeting with her husband was a total dud. They met at a party; she was friendly, he was aloof. They didn’t speak again for 18 months. She also recounts the tales of other couples she knows, some of whom experienced the proverbial “love at first sight,” others who met via a personals ad (“I like to walk in the rain” apparently turned out to be a big draw.)

As Wickersham points out, the reason we’re all so fascinated with the “how we met” narrative is that it’s always about something deeper. These stories are, as she puts it, “fated yet random… Behind every “how we met’’ story is the unspoken question: What if we hadn’t?”

What if, indeed?

Like Wickersham, my husband and I also got off on the wrong foot. We first spoke during a graduate student reception at Stanford University in the autumn of 1993 where we were both pursuing our Ph.Ds in political science. It was one of those horrible affairs where the faculty mill about and speak with one another jovially, while the grad. students hover over in the corner by the food, stuffing as many cheese cubes into their mouths as can decently fit while downing the cheap red wine that’s on offer.

Despite having been at Stanford for over a year at that point, I didn’t actually know my husband, who was a couple of years ahead of me in the program. I was pretty much a hermit at that point in my life, rarely emerging out of the dungeon (yes, that’s what it was called) in the basement of the political science department where they stuck the first and second year students in one giant, communal “office.” (I use this term generously.)

But at this party – where I, too, undoubtedly came out of seclusion in order to gobble down some cheese cubes – I was first introduced to my husband via a mutual friend. He made a joke about something – I no longer remember what – which I took (mistakenly) to be misogynistic. I left that meeting with two thoughts about him: a. he’s cute and b. too bad he’s a jerk.

Fast forward a few weeks, to our second meeting. This time, it came at my initiative. I was putting together a dissertation committee and someone suggested that I consult with the “jerk” who was to become my husband, as he’d assembled a very diverse group of scholars for his own committee. I remember thinking “Ugh. That guy?” when his name came up. But work was work, and I decided to put my first impressions behind me. So I asked him if we could meet for coffee to talk dissertation committees.

Somehow, because of scheduling conflicts, coffee morphed into dinner. We met at an Italian restaurant in Palo Alto. We were in the middle of talking about god-knows-what scintillating aspect of political theory when he turned to me and said something about my eyes. Suddenly, I became aware that what I’d been thinking of as a business meeting was actually…a date.  “Oh my God! I’m on a date!” ran through my mind as I tucked into the lasagna. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What I learned from that date many moons ago is that you should always give people a second chance. The first time I met my husband, I thought he was a loser. That was just so wrong. (He was cute, however, so I got that part right.) I also learned that you always need to be open to suggestion in life. Because sometimes even when your head’s stuck in a book (or a dimly lit basement office, or an Italian restaurant menu), your future is sitting right before your eyes. You just need to open them long enough to see it.

And finally, I learned – over time – that the “What if we hadn’t met?” question is an unfathomable one for me. My husband – who is now also my best friend – technical advisor – father-to-my-kids – fellow consumer of DVD commentaries all rolled into one – might, for want a cheese cube, be just another stranger I once met at a party. As a die-hard control freak, it’s nice to know that once in a while, fate really does matter.

OK, your turn. How did you meet your husband/wife/partner (past or present) and what did you learn from that experience?

Image: paneer, cubed by chotda via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Friday Pix: Recommended Reading For The Weekend

Every Friday I point you to some recommended reading for the weekend.

1. I feel about Michael Kinsley the way I feel about Michael Lewis:  if he’s writing, I’m reading. Here’s Kinsley in his debut Politico column writing about that rare commodity in American politics and journalism: intellectual honesty.

2. I loved this touching essay about marriage, parenting and what we learn from our kids’ drawings by Cecilia (of the fabulous Only You blog), which was featured in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star’s Cribsheet column. We’ve all been there, I think.

3. For a beautiful visual history of modern art, have a look at the Modern Art Timeline. Way Cool.

4. Also in the department of visual – and funny – here’s a slide show of “Chinglish” (Chinese meets English) at The New York Times. I must say, it’s really hard to top “Fragrant, Hot Marxism.”

5. If you want another really good laugh, check out the “If You Do This In An Email, I Hate You” comic strip at The Oatmeal.com. (Hat Tip: ‘Cross The Pond)

6. Then be sure to go and read the entire entry – “Snakes In A Bar” – at Dating Experiences Of A Woman…In Hollywood. It brings whole new meaning to the concept “bad date.” (Hat tip: Communicatrix)

7. Finally – and definitely not for those who dislike profanity – here’s a mock Twitter Feed for Chicago Mayor Hopeful Rahm Emanuel called @MayorEmanuel. I think they’ve managed to nicely capture Rahm’s…um…voice.

Enjoy your weekend!

Divorce Hits Prime Time At HuffPo With Nora Ephron

Well, here’s a sign of the times. The Huffington Post is launching a new section devoted to divorce. It was conceived by writer/journalist/filmmaker Nora Ephron, who will also serve as founding editor.

In some ways, one’s tempted to ask: What took you so long? After all, as my colleague Bonnie Goldstein reported last week, marriage is at a historic low in the United States. And while U.S. divorce rates have declined slightly with respect to their all-time high in the early 1980s, they are still high by international standards. According to The National Marriage Project’s State of Our Unions 2007 report, for the average couple marrying for the first time, the lifetime probability of divorce or separation remains between 40 and 50 percent.

But, of course, it’s one thing to know that divorce is in the air and it’s another to say that out loud, as my colleague David Gibson noted last week with respect to divorce within Christian communities. Which is to say that when a mainstream publication like The Huffington Post makes divorce a special focus — on par with, say, “religion” and “politics” and “education” — that’s really saying something. (Full disclosure: I also write for the Huffington Post’s Living section.)

Read the rest of this post on www.PoliticsDaily.com…

Image: Redesign At The Huffington Post by jessabean