'Cause Beloved had his first freight-train experience last night. Pics on BlogHer -- he's okay, but the Corolla, is, um, not.

Late yesterday afternoon, I wrote a reaction to a recent Rolling Stone article about a school district that enacted a policy unofficially called the "No Homo Promo." It was meant to bar teachers and administrators from discussing homosexuality at all in the schools. It resulted in teachers and administrators ignoring bullying, which led to a suicide cluster in the district.

Here's an excerpt:

More than anything, kids need to know they are lovable and that they can trust the adults in charge of their lives to look out for their best interests. They are deserving of respect and the protection of adults just by existing. They don't have to do anything to earn it. It is their right as children to be protected until they are old enough to protect themselves. We as a society agree on that -- we have adifferent court system for kids, we have laws about sex and abuse and child labor. We as a society agree children are different than adults.

It's long, but if you're interested, read the rest on BlogHer!

Baby needs a new pair of shoes. In other words:

http://oascentral.blogher.org/RealMedia/ads/adstream_jx.ads/blogher.org/LWL_Aug11_Review_001/@x13

If you're not interested in this sponsored post, check out The Hospital for Puking Animals.

Question: What is your best tip for hosting a gathering, get-together or party that is enjoyable and stress-free for both the host and guests?

This is really a hard question, because some gatherings are stress-free for the host and some are stress-free for the guests, but seldom are parties stress-free for everyone, right?

Stress-Free for the Host

• Make everyone bring their own food and beverage.
• Host the event in your backyard.
• Rent a port-a-potty. Don't allow your guests to use the bathroom.
• Hire security to throw everyone out after two hours.
• Keep children enclosed in an inflatable fenced-in area.

Stress-Free for the Guests

• Design five menus, including gluten-free, peanut-free, fat-free and kid-friendly. Make enough for each guest to have one of everything and then give them a choice when they walk through the door.
• Pay a housecleaner to shine up your house before the party.
• Hire wait staff to make sure their glasses are kept full of high-end drinks all night.
• Hire taxis to drive anyone home who has overindulged in said high-end drinks.
• Have open starting and ending times to the party so that no matter what else your guests have to do that day, they can still make it.
• Move your house so it is exactly five minutes from everyone on your guest list.
• Hire a babysitter for all your guests with children to occupy their children at their own house while they come to your party. This does double-duty: the parents will relax and have fun and those without children won't be subjected to anyone's spawn.

So, tricky Life Well Lived editors, what the heck are you trying to do to me?

The Happy Medium

• If you live in a nice climate or it's at least a pleasant season, have the gathering outdoors. You'll worry less about red wine on your upholstery, and they won't sweat to death. 
• Allow your guests to use your bathroom, clean it ahead of time and make sure there's smelly spray in there or at least matches, for heaven's sake. 
• Let your guests bring their children but either a) hire a sitter to hang out and keep them occupied or b) have a ton of outdoor toys, sports equipment, water balloons, bubbles, what have you so the kids can play and the adults can talk and there needn't be a lot of overlap. We once rented a bouncy house for a party -- it was like $75 for four hours and worth every penny. 
• Provide the main course and a few kinds of drinks (lemonade, water, and if you're the alcoholic beverage type, a bit of beer and wine) and ask your guests to bring any special beverages for themselves or their kids that are desired.
• Specify start and end times on your invitation, especially if you have kids you need to get to bed.
• Send real invitations as well as an evite so it's not as easy for your guests to forget all about your party.
• Follow up with those who don't RSVP so you have a better idea of headcount.
• Don't allow your children to deliver the invitations (mine invited several people in the neighborhood I've never met to a party we hosted the day I got home from a business trip).
• Prepare as many finger foods as possible to minimize utensil needs.
• Have garbage bags or bins and recyling bins at your party location to minimize clean-up or trash blowing around your yard later.
• Be cognizant of food allergies and make sure there is an alternative if you know one of your guest has one or is vegetarian or vegan.
• Check out the much better and more sophisticated tips than mine by Get Buttoned Up at Life Well Lived.
• Enter to win a Kindle Fire, because even though it has nothing to do with throwing a party, who doesn't want a Kindle Fire?

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I had a post go up on BlogHer about the sources of stress. Not sources of stress like deadlines and traffic jams and being out of orange juice at 7 am, but sources of stress in your brainz. Here's an excerpt:

That said, I've spent most of my stress-fighting career thinking about how tohandle stress rather than what caused it in the first place. Things are rough all over, Ponyboy. And I've blamed myself a lot for not being tougher.

I recently read Stress Less (for Women) by Thea Singer, a book that appeared in the mail for review. One passage struck me in particular -- one that talked about stress research being flipped on its head when researchers stopped thinking about stress or age atrophying parts of the brain and instead studied whether people who stressed more started out less equipped to deal with the stress in the first place:

The vulnerability hypothesis of stress -- that is, that a smaller hypocampus, whether due to genes or early exposure to stress -- can predispose you to the damaging effects of stress, rendering you more vulnerable to age-related memory loss and disorders such as PTSD.

There was good news at the end! Read the rest on BlogHer!

PS: Last night the little angel asked for a drink of water while in the bathtub. I handed her the crappy hot pink water bottle we got with Culver's points. She took one drink and gagged. Then she said, "I don't know why, but yesterday I put Goldfish crackers in here." I opened it and there were bloated Goldfish floating in two inches of tepid tap water. And then I threw up in my mouth. 

Guess what? One of my New Year's resolutions is to make side money. Please to enjoy this sponsored post! I'll put up another one, too, don't worry. 

http://oascentral.blogher.org/RealMedia/ads/adstream_jx.ads/blogher.org/LWL_Aug11_Review_001/@x13

The question I'm supposed to answer is: How do you keep/maintain your New Year’s Resolutions?

I don't actually make New Year's Resolutions anymore because I feel too guilty when I break them. I can be a little OCD about goals, *cough*. However, I do find that I get crazymaking about organizing and fixing up my house in winter because I stare at the inside of it so much during the cold months. It gets dark early, and I don't want to go outside and do anything and the lawn is dead. Also, the little angel tends to trash the house more in the winter because I lock the door and won't let her in except to pee during summer weekends. (I'm only sort of kidding.)

I hate trashed rooms. I hate piles of itsy bitsy pieces. And worst of all? I hate it when my crying girl realizes she's lost an important part of her favorite toys, which are ALL OF THEM.

When my daughter and her friends spend a lot of time playing indoors, things get lost. My girl is pretty good at organizing things, but she has to be in the right frame of mind to do it. It's far easier to keep her on track if she has completely separate containers for things. In the past year, I've reorganized the clothes in her drawers twice, her bookshelves three times and her playroom twice. I've learned to only put one type of toy in the toybox, because as much as I love that toybox, it is like the bottom of a too-large purse -- it collects broken pieces of stuff we sold in a garage sale three years ago and everything gets coated in that grunge of broken pieces. So now I only put hard plastic toys in there. At least you can wipe them off.

We got separate clear plastic containers for like things:

• Matchbox cars and the little airplanes I always buy in airports
• Any small doll that remotely resembles a Polly Pocket
• Fake food/tea sets, etc.
• One with three drawers holds her American Girl shoes

I repurpose swag from blogging conferences or work events in any way possible.

• Sewing supplies in a swag tote
• Zhu Zhu pets in some little pop-up containers I got last year 
• Hexbugs in a little container that used to hold fancy chocolates
• Finger puppets in a box that contained a sinus cleaning tool
• A bag made out of a Hanes t-shirt holds Cabbage Patch clothes (it expands!)

Any time I get a cool container for any reason, I keep it and use it for little stuff:

• Harry and David boxes I got from a co-worker for her hair ties and jewelry
• Cute, sturdy shoebox I got containing a gift now holds Barbie clothes
• A white wicker basket I got with diapers in it at my baby shower now holds dry erase markers for her whiteboard
• A hamper that was too small for her jeggings now holds Barbie furniture
• A hatbox holds American Girl clothes in her closet
• An extra-large clear plastic wine bucket (the kind you'd use outside for a BBQ) holds her bath toys
• Her diaper basket holds magazines in the bathroom
• Glass jars from pasta hold art supplies downstairs, which are also contained in another unused dresser

Furniture can be used for other stuff:

• My daughter's changing table now functions as an additional toybox and holds up the hermit crab twins' aquarium.
• A dresser in the closet keeps Barbies, paper dolls and her collection of Animal Planet safari animals and their rescue center separate.
• An old bookcase holds office supplies in the basement.
• Another old bookcase holds laundry supplies in the laundry room.
• Our former microwave stand is now a table saw holder in the garage.

Sometimes I think I've become too obsessed. Then I look around at everything in its place and realize I know exactly where to find the XYZ when my girl tells me she needs it the next day at school. (Today is Hawaiian Day, I found out last night at dinner -- and Mommy, do I have a lei? She does, and I knew exactly where it was.)

Now, if only I could get that sort of handle on my laptop. I can't find ANYTHING in there.

---

My tips have focused on getting organized, but here's a list of tips for keeping pretty much any resolution on BlogHer -- check it out and comment if you want to share your own tips.

I love any contest involving giving away a Kindle Fire -- comment on this post about what you want to accomplish in 2012 and you'll be registered to win one!

http://oascentral.blogher.org/RealMedia/ads/adstream_jx.ads/blogher.org/LWL_Aug11_Review_001/@x13

As a writer and blogger, I should be against piracy and copyright violation, right? One would think ... but there's a lot more going on with SOPA than appears on the surface. 

And if you think it's no big deal because you didn't see it on TV this morning, think again: 

SOPA would give both the government and major corporations the power to shut down entire websites accused of copyright infringement with neither a trial nor a traditional court hearing. The legislation is aggressively backed by Hollywood movie studios and major record labels, along with several major news providers, including Fox News and NBC-Universal, which have largely shied away from coverage of the bill.

Wonder why big media (record companies, movie companies) is for SOPA while search engines, Twitter and YouTube are against it? The Stop Online Piracy Act sounds really good, right? Who doesn't want to squelch piracy? And I don't disagree that we should squelch it -- but this is so not the way to go about it. The U.S. government is talking about mucking around with the way the entire Internet works and holding social media sites such as YouTube personally responsible for any bit of perceived copyright violation anywhere on its site, meaning it can be blocked from you if some kid in Sri Lanka uploads a dance video with copyrighted music playing in the background. If any editor on Wikipedia mucks up and doesn't make a correct citation. Bye bye, Wikipedia.

If there's piracy or copyright violation, fine them. Don't censor them. Don't shut down the entire site over what could be an accidental oversight. Who do we think we are, China? I'm looking at you, Blunt and McCaskill. (Currently both senators are for PIPA, the Senate equivalent.) 

Guess who might like that to happen? Maybe companies that don't want the competition?

As a writer, I value building on others' work. Often I'm inspired by someone else's post, and quote a bit of it to riff on it. A fair use bit, as defined by the law. How do you riff a little on a video or song? How do you participate in culture when that participation could be deemed harmful enough to block a website for everyone before a trial even happens? Have we all gone insane? There is true piracy and there is misunderstanding the law, and this legislation doesn't give a shit which one you do -- you can have your DNS address delisted without a trial for suspicion of wrongdoing. 

And OH MY GOD HOW MANY TRIALS WILL THIS ADD? What about the people who can't afford to lawyer up? Bye bye, website.

And the scariest part is that the lawmakers voting on it don't even understand how the Internet works. 

If this freaks you the hell out, there's a list of things you can do and even more background up on BlogHer today, which is not blacked out because this legislation is so important to the community's livelihoods and more. Knowledge is power -- please speak your mind today.

Because I enjoy a little healthy debate (and also because I've been thinking about it a while), I posted yesterday on BlogHer about marital term limits. I actually don't care for that terminology, because it sounds like you're required to stop being married at some point, which was not what I was arguing for. If you want to be married, you wouldn't have to stop -- you just re-up. I actually like Mexico City's proposal (though two years seems a bit short):

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.

"The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends," said Leonel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill.

"You wouldn't have to go through the tortuous process of divorce," said Luna, from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has the most seats in the 66-member chamber.

It might seem odd that someone happily married after ten years is a fan of this idea. On Twitter last night I took a lot of heat for banging on "the sanctity of marriage." I don't see it that way at all -- the promise and commitment you make to your spouse can be spiritual, it can be religious, it can be personal -- but it needn't be legal. We all know plenty of people who are deeply in love and committed to each other for life but for whatever reason not legally married. The sanctity part has to do with the relationship, not the legal marriage. I believe in the sanctity of the relationship, not the sanctity of the legal marriage. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's.

Legal marriage is a legal contract and has nothing to do with love. Usually, they go hand-in-hand, but legal marriage as an institution is rooted in property ownership. In Missouri, where I live, it means this:

There are numerous legal benefits to marriage. There are both federal and state laws available only to married people. Other benefits include Social Security benefits, inheritance rights, property rights, the ability to sue third parties for the wrongful death of a spouse or loss of consortium, and the right to make medical decisions on a spouse's behalf.

There is nothing about love or sanctity or eternal commitment in the legal definition of marriage.

In my BlogHer series How to Get a Happier Marriage, I kept coming back to the concept of daily choice. Whether you're legally married or not, if you're in a healthy relationship, you're aware every day that you don't have to be there -- you're there because your life is better with that person than without him or her. You're there because you want to be. You're not enmeshed with the other person or controlled by him or her. I'm not saying it wouldn't be incredibly painful to leave, but if something happened to that person, you could go on putting one foot in front of another. You have to believe that if you don't want the other person to worry themselves to death over you. 

I think it's actually detrimental to love to think to yourself, well, we're married, so this other person has to put up with me no matter how I behave. I wrote in April 2010:

The fact is that I can't see the future. I learned a long time ago that you don't just say "I do" and it's done. I'm a different person than I was when I got married eight years ago, and so is my husband. We have to wake up every single morning and -- without so much as coffee -- choose each other again. And when I choose him, I'm not choosing the man I married when we were 28. I'm choosing the man he is now.

If you keep choosing that other person with your eyes wide open over years of good times and bad, that love deepens. While bagging on Twilight, I wrote:

Diana's romance illustrates what I know to be true about many happy couples -- they met when they were young. Maybe they even fell in love when they were young. But, as she writes, true love -- the kind that lasts fifty years -- is something that brews over time spent bailing each other out from crises, from facing real life and sometimes mundane challenges and achievements.

I realize my opinion in favor of marital term limits won't be a popular one, even with members of my family. I do hope it's clear that I'm not talking about spiritual or religious marriage -- I'm talking about the legal documents that make separating in the case of two people falling out of love something that requires lawyering up and involving the family court system. Falling out of love with someone is bad enough -- to have to be financially devastated and prolong the experience just adds legal insult to emotional injury.

I do think people should be very sure before they get married. I do think people should commit to working things out if at all possible. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. has the highest divorce rate out of us, Denmark, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

I have some other arguments for term limits in my BlogHer post. I hate to divide the conversation, so I'm going to close comments here and ask that if you'd like to respond that you do it there. 

I'm not anti-love. I'm not anti-commitment. I think it's incredibly romantic to choose the other person every day for the rest of your life, as I do every day with Beloved. I don't see how separating the legal from the spiritual hurts my bond with him in any way. I'm actually surprised people are unwilling to see the difference between the legal bond and the spiritual or romantic one. Am I insane?

This week I've been unsubscribing to almost everything that comes into my inbox. A few things I've felt horribly guilty about unscubscribing from -- causes I care about, political updates -- and some I've had to ask myself why the hell I've been deleting this for the past five years instead of just getting off the list. 

I remind myself I know where to find these things if I need them.

I keep waiting for the inbox to die down, if I'll be able to tell I eliminated things or if other things will just grow back to replace them, things from which I can't unsubscribe. People from whom I can't unsubscribe. (Now wouldn't THAT be great?)

I wonder if it will make me feel unimportant or lonely if the inbox isn't flooded. I try to remember the last time this happened. It's not that I am so important, you see, but more that I conduct so much of my life online and get automatically added to new product updates! and great deals! And I've since realized that I don't have any money for great deals, anyway, and my delete finger is sore from all that blah, blah, blah. All I want to do is go read a book, watch a movie, be entertained. I don't want to sort through catalogs or newspapers or coupons or email. I want to sit down and know I will be interested in that which presents itself before me. 

I'm having a day in which everything and nothing is interesting. My concentration lags and my eye keeps going to the window. It's Friday afternoon, and I have a lot to do, and I just don't want to.

I want to hear a story instead.

I think the faster I get through this mound of work, the faster I will get to my story.

Unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe.

My work Outlook has been a little paranoid lately. It's suddenly begun blocking my co-workers, insisting they have malicious intent when they're really just trying to tell me which posts are most popular. I sat it down, tried to reason with it.

"There's nothing wrong with Denise Tanton," I said. "She's a really, really nice person."

My Outlook shook its head and stalked away, muttering something about a Denise it knew in high school.

Then, yesterday morning, I emailed something from my gmail to my Outlook. Something work-related. Something from me.

Outlook gasped and sat up in bed, eyes wild, hair flying -- and blocked it.

"What are you doing?" I shouted, fed up.

"I'm protecting you from yourself," it said, then collapsed.

I had to reboot. It knows not what it does.