A few weeks ago, I found a blog post about a woman who did 300 sit-ups a day for 30 days and her abs looked totally different. I have no intention of doing 300 sit-ups every day, but there was a time when I could, and my core could use a little, well, tightening. So I wrote down the sets and thought I'd try doing them a few times a week to see what happened.

Hubris was mine. I was born with strong abdominal muscles. Even when I was completely out of shape as a child, I could always do more than the required amount of sit-ups in P.E. or for the Presidential Fitness Test. Sit-ups have always been my place to shine. No problem, I thought, to this 300 sit-ups business. I just need to get back in the groove.

I did the sets on Friday around noon. They were hard, I won't lie, but I was able to finish them and pick my ass off the floor afterward. Friday was totally normal.

Saturday, I woke up and was unable to lift my legs. Apparently, there is a muscle here:

I can't even tell you. It's like exactly where my legs connect to my torso. FIRE RAGING FIRE. Do my abs hurt? No. Do my upper thighs hurt? No. Hips? No. Butt? No. JUST WHATEVER THAT IS.

I went to bed last night in fear, because anyone who has ever worked out too hard knows the agony that is the TWO-DAY SORE. It's like your body saves up all the worst of it for the SECOND day after you overdo whatever it was you overdid. I woke up this morning and had to lift my legs with my arms to get out of bed, because there was no way I was going to flex whatever attaches my limbs to my body. I winced my way to the bathroom and found myself massaging analgesic cream into areas of my body I never thought I would and pounding Advil. About an hour ago I made Beloved go for a walk around the block with me, because even though I did not in any way wish to move, I know if you don't, the stiffness mixes with the TWO-DAY SORE and it's all downhill from there. I would like to be able to walk without looking like there is a pole up my butt by 2013.

So I can do my sit-ups again, because anything that brings the pain like that must work like gangbusters! Only this time, maybe I'll build up. Apparently, I'm not 17 anymore. Aging can suck it.

PS: I got the scientific drawing above from the Lloyd Release Procedure, which looks scary. I'm fairly certain I violated copyright law. I'm not exactly sure where to find safe anatomy images. I checked Wikimedia Commons and got nothing. Same with Flickr. Ideas?

My aunts always had real Christmas trees with ornaments that matched perfectly and ribbons tied to the boughs, at least they did in my memory. I remember going over to friends' houses and seeing trees with all white ornaments or themes that changed a bit every year. My parents indulged my desires with regard to the tree on certain things, but we never did have a real tree. I can't remember why. Probably because they're flammable and expensive and kind of a pain in the ass.

My first year in Kansas City, I lived alone, and I bought a houseplant and decorated that. When Beloved and I moved in together, we got a real tree once or twice, but I never did go crazy -- even that one year when we had tons of money, God bless the Internet bubble -- and buy all matching ornaments or a bunch of real ribbons to tie on the branches. We're never in Kansas City for Christmas, and it felt like a ton of effort for no real reason. It's not like anyone came over to our house.

Then the little angel was born, and we went back to decorating This Old House with gusto, hanging lighted wreathes above the gorgeous wood trim on the entry way (there were so many things wrong with that house, but the foyer, living and dining room were amazing) and hiding scented pine cones everywhere. We even had this crazy lighted Season's Greetings sign we hung on the Great Retaining Wall of 2004.

Then we realized little kids and breakable Christmas ornaments don't go together and stopped decorating the lower half of the artificial, pre-lit tree for about four years.

I've always taken after my grandmother in terms of my affection for grandeur. She could afford it, I can't, but I still love it most of the time. Or I thought I did. I asked for -- and received -- crystal drinking glasses for my wedding, but I've used them only a handful of times. I just started using the not-china-just-normal-but-reserved-for-special-occasions stoneware pretty white plates we kept in the cupboards for the past eleven years while we chipped up the normal stuff or used plastic plates from Target every night at dinner. I thought I wanted fancy stuff, but then realized I get scared to use it, afraid I'll break it. But why? I'm 38 years old and my daughter is old enough to run with scissors. If I'm not going to use it now, then when will I? When I'm too arthritic to wrap my paw around a wine glass?

I tell myself the reason I don't go whole-hog on a beautifully decorated tree is because nobody comes to our house at Christmastime. We don't have annual Christmas parties like some people do, and we still go to Iowa every year for Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

I think the truth is that I don't care that my ornaments are terribly pedestrian, and you can totally see the gaps in my low-rent artificial tree. The little angel likes the ornaments, and at this point, I care more about what she thinks than anything else. Christmas is about kids, and we decorate the house for her, mostly.

I wonder what will happen when she leaves the house -- will I eventually tie ribbons around the boughs of a real Christmas tree with matching ornaments while sipping champagne from my Waterford crystal wine glass? Will I ever get as fancy as my twelve-year-old self imagined I would be?

Occupational hazard: I read a zillion articles and posts and tweets and emails and pitches every day, and sometimes these things synthesize into unnecessary navel-gazing in the evening hours. This makes my head hurt.

Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action

Yesterday I read this New York Times article about the cost of raising a child. (Newflash: They're expensive!) The writer had already decided not to have kids, and she justified that decision by talking about financial responsibility. When she mentioned this to other mothers, they told her nothing really matters once you decide YOU WANNNNTT A BABBBBEEEEEEEEEE!

I tried to glean some insight from my discussions with women who arepersonal finance and parenting experts. I hoped they would help mereconcile the knowable and unknowable advantages and disadvantages ofhaving children. Instead I was assured that a cost-benefit analysis wasneither necessary nor helpful, and that one day I would feel the urge toprocreate, and so I would.

If you read the comment section, your eyes will bleed. People get really pumped about a complete stranger's decision to procreate -- or not.

False-consensus effect - the tendency of a person to overestimate how much other people agree with him or her.

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A few hours later, I was doing my #morningstumble on Twitter and I came across the Wikipedia list of cognitive biases. IT IS LONG. I stared at it, then I bookmarked it, then I came back to it and every political ad I've ever seen in my life flashed before my eyes.

Hostile media effect – the tendency to see a media report as being biased, owing to one's own strong partisan views.

I've read all the Malcolm Gladwell books and minored in human relations. My undergraduate degree is in communications. This is not to say I know anything at all about communicating or decision-making, but I like to study it, and the older I get, the more I'm inferring from myself and my surroundings: It is debatable whether or not it will help you to understand how other people make their decisions, but it is incredibly valuable to your mental health to understand and accept how YOU make decisions.

Curse of knowledge – when knowledge of a topic diminishes one's ability to think about it from a less-informed perspective.

Every super-stressful experience to date in my life has arisen from my belief that whatever decision I made at that moment was it, the end, no second chances. Until about age 35 I thought every decision I made -- from my choice of university to the number of children I would have to the house I would buy to the career trajectory I would take to the weight I was at in that moment was as important as the decision whether or not to push the red button and blow up the world.

Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events

And, shocker, I was wrong.

Now I think there are better decisions and less good decisions, but ultimately, life is a series of decisions and -- except in life-and-death matters, of which there are not that many unless you are a professional soldier -- the bad ones are only truly horrific if you don't change your tack after making them and head in a safer direction.

Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

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I also used to hem and haw for weeks and months over a decision, resting assured the minute I made it, I would never have to think about it again. Also not true.

Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown."

Just because you made a decision that didn't work out doesn't mean there isn't a chance to course-correct ... and just because you made a smart choice doesn't mean the universe won't reach down and throw you a disease/lay-off/car accident. There are no safe places or unsafe places, there are just places.

Just-world hypothesis –the tendency for people to want to believe that the world isfundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwiseinexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).

So now I try to think through all the possible outcomes of my decisions and then go with my gut, even when it isn't the most fiscally prudent way or the most societaly acceptable way or even the way that would make my family the happiest in every instance. Ultimately, we all have to live with our own decisions, and sometimes the decision that will bring you the most money means you won't have a kid or the decision that makes your daughter cry for joy makes you want to stick a fork in your eye every Saturday morning.

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I used to think decision-making was a skill and that I was good at this skill, because some things in my life turned out super-awesome. Then I thought I must be very bad at that skill, because of the eating disorder and the depression and the anxiety and the hurt feelings and stupid jobs and not-recession-proof houses. Then I looked at this list and realized I am neither good nor bad at decision-making: I am human.

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Why do all those commenters care whether or not that writer has children? Why do I care? I think we all care how other people make decisions because we need proof we're good at it, that we can gauge from our armchairs how the shit is going to go down.

Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.

The longer I stare at this list, the more I realize we are all just lucky we haven't all killed each other yet. And also that I really need to stop worrying about how I make my decisions, because they are never, ever, ever going to be completely rational. And I probably wouldn't want them to be. I understand how my heart pumps blood through my body, but even if I concentrate really hard, I can't stop pumping. Self-preservation vs. rational thinking -- that's the human condition smackdown, isn't it?

This morning I woke up thinking about falling in love. I'm not sure if it was the end notes of a dream or the cozy feeling of coming off three nights spent alone with Beloved and no little angel, but I woke up with that feeling in my throat of the first time someone says, "I think I love you."

A few minutes ago, I read Schmutzie's post on happiness, and I thought about waking up to thinking about love. My husband and I ran into a college kid on our recent trip, and the kid asked if we were married. "Almost twelve years," I said. And this kid, who up to this point had been bragging about getting 98 percent in a class without ever having cracked the book's spine and getting laid the night before glanced over with utter sincerity and said, "That's cool. That really makes me happy, that you guys have been together so long."

Well, son, I'm glad I restored your faith in humanity. Because let me tell you, being in love -- long-term love -- is awesome. It usually feels a little different than the falling-in-love, though, and that's a tough one to swallow. Falling in love lasts, what, a few months at best? Being in love -- now that's a different story. That can last forever.

There are ways to tap into that first-few-months feeling, though. I spent years thinking about that feeling while I was single and realized part of falling in love is getting to know a new person, but if I'm honest with myself, part of falling in love is finding a new audience for your tired old stories, a new person to feel new around. Part of falling in love is feeling interesting again.

Part of falling in love is falling in love with yourself.

Maybe that's part of why artists and performers and writers are so crazy about our work. Creating something new is like getting to tell your stories again, maybe even stories you just learned yesterday, stories you didn't even know you knew. Or maybe they are old stories but nobody yet has received them quite the way you were hoping for.

Falling in love, I think, has little to do with falling in love in the conventional sense.

Falling in love, I think, is being able to tap into the part of you that finds yourself still interesting after all these years.

Turn it up. Relax into it. Happy Thanksgiving.

One thing about social media: It teaches you you're not the only person with problems. My connection to hundreds if not thousands of other human beings each day has made me more grateful for the good things in my life and more tolerant for the bad. No, everyone else is not sitting around on unicorn-fur couches sipping ambrosia -- they have cancer and bankruptcy and also new babies and cute puppies and lottery winnings. We are all in it together, for good and for bad.

As Beloved's job situation stretches on, I've found myself in several doctor's offices making sure the thing I have now -- my health -- is intact. Last week I went to a dermatologist to get my first-ever full-body skin cancer check. Basal skin cancer seems to be all the rage in my hometown for the farming crew, and I let my fair-skinned self turn lobster red way more times than I should have in my youth. I also tanned before prom, just sayin'. Luckily this time I came out clean, and I made an appointment to get checked again around my birthday every year.

Today I'm going in for a well-woman appointment. I haven't had one in years. Unfortunately, I was inspired to do so after a dear friend lost her cousin to sudden and unexpected girl cancer. Like two weeks unexpected. Though I don't even know this woman, I'm taken aback by the speed in which she was taken down, and it scared me enough to immediately book a Pap smear. I tell you this so if you are a woman, you will be sure to get one, too. So many girl cancers can be treated if caught early.

I'm not perfect with my health -- none of us are. And I try not to think too hard about my health, because I have anxiety disorder and if I think too hard about all the crazy-ass things that could give me cancer or brain damage or whatever, I'll freak out. It's so much easier to avoid breaking a bone than getting a terminal disease. I have a close relative who is dying of something completely awful right now that scares the shit out of me.

I try not to think about that.

But there are some easy things that I can think about, and one of them is skin cancer checks and another is well woman checks.

And then I'll go back to my job and hope everything else in my life works out just fine.

It was 115 degrees five minutes ago.

I have a rotten jack-o-lantern sitting outside my front steps.

I have made exactly half of my Christmas presents already.

Time is moving too fast and too slow.

When I was a kid, there was a bench in my parents' house that was just long enough for a small child to lie down with her head touching one armrest and her feet touching the other. I loved that bench. I still love it -- my parents gave it to me when I moved out. Sometimes I go upstairs and sit on it and realize how totally uncomfortable it is, but I still love its swoopy wooden details. I don't have the house or the budget for the amount of swoopy wooden details I would buy if I could.

I was moving some things around a few days ago and put a little rectangular pillow on the sturdy, uncomfortable bench in our living room, the one that went so well with the Mission 1902 style of This Old House but not so much with the seventies vibe lingering in Chateau Travolta. I don't think anyone in the family has ever sat on it except to put on or take off shoes, but it holds all of our living room blankets under its seat, so it lives on in the corner of the room.

The day I put the pillow there, my daughter came home from school and saw it and immediately went over to lie down. Her head touched one armrest and her feet touched the other. She looked down, pulled a book out of her backpack and didn't move for the next hour.

Pretty cool.

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Speaking of things kids like, you can win a giant cardboard playhouse now through Nov. 1 at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Two weeks ago, my husband told me he'd lost his job in a clean, P&L-based cut. And suddenly, that thing I feared ever since we got married and bought a house and birthed another mouth to feed happened, and I wasn't sure if we could live on my salary or not.

Whether or not we should be able to is beside the question. Of course we should be able to. But we weren't. My husband and I earn within a small range of each other's salaries, and we've always been a two-income family. We've both been laid off or about to be laid off three or four times each -- I've been in Internet publishing since 1999, and he's been in sales-related jobs since 2007 -- but only once before was it quite like this, and that was almost twelve years ago, before the little angel, before the mortgage, back when we were 27 and could just stop drinking beer for a week and everything would be fine.

There are other things I'm afraid of -- cancer, other terminal illness, the death of loved ones, finding a possum in my basement, the usual things -- but sudden, unexpected job loss without a back-up plan is something I've been afraid of since I was a little girl and my mom stayed home with us, so in my mind if my dad lost his job, we would immediately starve to death, like within days.

It's been two weeks, and surprisingly, we haven't starved. We haven't even been hungry. And though I have been through the usual gamut of emotions starting with shock and ripping through anger and fear, they didn't last long. I'm not sure why, actually. I cried last night for a completely unrelated reason, but that's the first time I've cried for more than about five seconds in the entire two weeks.

I have no doubt he'll have a new job that he likes eventually. He could probably have one right this minute if he were ready to go out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I've begged him not to do that, to be thoughtful in his journey. We're not spring chickens anymore, and I know as well as anyone that being unhappy with your work will rot your guts and raise your blood pressure. We're at that age where it would be good not to have work stress operate on your innards any more than it has to.

I don't know how long it will take, though. I'm staring at the tattoo on my arm of the word "now" and trying to mind it. It doesn't matter how long it takes, because I can't know, and I can't do anything about it, and right now, right this minute, I'm tapping this away on my laptop and listening to Drops of Jupiter and wondering when the leaves will drop. The grass that was so dormant it hurt your feet a month or so ago is lush again, the only evidence of the worst drought in years left in the dead patches scattered here and there, the lawn's scars from the summer of 2012.

When I was twenty-seven and this happened (again in a crazy P&L, lost-client situation), I was terrified and angry and took it all out on him. Even though it wasn't his fault, I thought he should've seen it coming, should've known, should've warned me so I could prepare myself. Then time passed, and the year 2000 happened, when I had three jobs, and then I heard a few jobs ago that I was going to get canned, and then I went somewhere else and lost projects and contracts and all manner of things until I guess I came to the place in which I currently reside: the place that knows there is no safety in the world of work, but there is usually a new gig around somewhere. There is no soft place, there are only places. Which sounds horrific but I find extremely comforting. Because if there are no soft places, then there are no hard places, either.

There are just places.

There. I just touched my "now" again, because in five minutes I might not feel so chill about our situation. I'm minute-to-minute with my anxiety disorder, but we don't have to be in a hard situation for that to happen. My anxiety disorder doesn't give one shit whether we just won the lottery or whether we just got sued for $100,000. It's all, HEY, YO, YOU AWAKE? LET'S FREAK OUT.

My thirty-eight-year-old self wants to grab my twenty-seven-year-old self and tell her what's the what: Two months from now, you and Beloved will get married. He'll have a new job within a week. He'll change careers twice again. He'll end up in the exact same place in eleven years. But you, my friend, will have lost or left SIX JOBS in eleven years. The bubble will burst. The economy will get shredded. You'll buy a house. You will love the house. You will invest money in the house. You will bring a baby home to the house. You will lose money when you sell the house. You will buy another house. Your cat will die. You will love the house. Your replacement cat will die. You will remodel the house, slowly, room by room. You will get yet another cat. You will teach yourself to garden. And then, when you're tempted to bemoan the fact that sometimes it feels like you're right back where you were in this minute, right now, twenty-seven-year-old self, you will realize that you and Beloved stuck through it together, every minute of it, and that's all that matters.

We're all the heroes in our own stories, and every story needs obstacles or they're fucking boring.

That's what I think in this bit of now.

So buck up, Rita.

A few years ago, I first remember hearing it: the use of "earnest" as an insult.

ear·nest

¹    [ur-nist] Show IPA adjective

1. serious in intention, purpose, or effort; sincerely zealous: an earnest worker.

2. showing depth and sincerity of feeling: earnest words; an earnest entreaty.

3. seriously important; demanding or receiving serious attention.

I remember feeling shocked, then flashing to embarrassed, because I am quite often seriously zealous.

Then the emotion turned to anger, and I didn't like that feeling, so I put the entire issue aside.

Today I read the word "earnest" in its usual context, but I immediately remembered the whole earnest-as-an-insult thing and decided to focus on why it made me so mad, because it was a sort of irrational mad. Perhaps even an earnest anger.

Upon further contemplation, I realized a similar word for me is "hysterical." Immediate, irrational anger. There is nothing inherently wrong with that word.

hys·ter·i·cal

[hi-ster-i-kuhl] Show IPA adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or characterized by hysteria.

2. uncontrollably emotional.

3. irrational from fear, emotion, or an emotional shock.

4. causing hysteria.

5. suffering from or subject to hysteria

Except that both of them have at times been applied as insults in order to belittle someone who may have a legitimate cause or gripe. These two adjectives both imply passion, emotion -- the exact opposite of apathy.

ap·a·thy

[ap-uh-thee] Show IPA noun, plural ap·a·thies.

1. absence or suppression of passion, emotion, or excitement.

2. lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting.

I equate apathy with one of two things: teenagers or clinical depression.

When did it become cool for adults to pretend not to care about things that are totally worth caring about -- whether they are political causes or volunteering opportunities or their kids? When did it become awesome to publicly belittle someone who has put effort and enthusiasm into anything?

I'm losing my edge.

I like to poke fun as much as the next person, good natured fun. But somewhere along the line, I shed my desire to appear above the fray. I completely understand that I am not cooler than any other person on this planet, because I've given up on cool. Whether they annoy you or not, earnest people get things done. Hysterical people are often reacting to a very real injustice -- they are moved to get angry because someone's been mistreated and everyone's acting like it's no big thing.

Nobody would ever make art if they weren't earnest. It's too hard.

(definitions from Dictionary.com)