Probably due to my denial about the summer's end, I'm a little stunned that today is Laurel's first day of school (and other than some morning grumbling, it went off without a hitch...no tears at drop off!). I know many of you have already started the school year or are starting this week so I wanted to share a few of my favorite tips for making mornings easier, plus some excellent back posts to help with transitions. Because experience with Laurel has taught me that transition can be easy (last year) or challenging over many months (two years ago). Good luck everyone!

Here are five tips to making mornings easier:

1. Wake up 10 minutes earlier. Without fail, whenever we give ourselves 10 extra minutes of breathing room, mornings feel more calm.

2. Prep two days of lunches at a time. We find that lunch making is less painful in the mornings when some of the pieces are already in place a couple of days a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays I pack Laurel's fruit and vegetable containers and set aside snack options (e.g., yogurt, granola bars) for two days. I'll make the main course (e.g., sandwich, mac and cheese, etc.) fresh the morning of school depending on what Laurel is in the mood for.

3. For those with kids with long hair. Laurel has very long hair and it's prone to major tangling. And dealing with a super snarly head in the morning is time consuming and does not help morning grouchiness. I comb out her hair the night before (and sometimes braid the hair) to minimize morning tangles.

4. Lay out clothes the night before. This is an easy task that you can have your kids take care of. They'll love the autonomy and it will help avoid clothing battles in the morning. I also recommend being OK with whatever your kid picks (i.e., not worrying about things matching) so long as the clothing is weather appropriate. Laurel tends to pick combos of patterns and colors that I might not assemble but if the clothes make her happy and make for an easier transition, why pick a fight when it's really not necessary?

5. Remain calm. I feel as if I give this advice a lot when it comes to parenting but it never fails me! I find that if I get sucked into the drama and get cranky in response to Laurel's behavior, the bad mojo escalates, whereas when I can remain calm and redirect, we can diffuse the situation quickly.

Do you have other tips? I'd love to hear them in the comments below!

And here's some great back reading regarding back to school transitions:

Fall structure strategies

Easing back to school jitters

Kindergarten transition tips, part I

Kindergarten transition tips, part II

Back to school books

The keepsake item that helped Laurel make it through her first year of elementary school

Image credit: nuttakit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I've become convinced recently that Americans are too concerned with return on investment. Besieged as we are by whether or not our houses are growing more valuable, we put in nice landscaping five minutes before we sell. We ask ourselves whether we'll take this job or that by how it will impact our resumes. In some instances, we are afraid to be seen walking an ugly dog.

And where does it really get us?

Maybe it's capitalism. Maybe it's our Judeo-Christian background, as a culture, and our relentless obsession with the principal of hard work. But really, who goes home after a long day of being nice to other people and thinks, shit, what a waste of a day? I really shouldn't have smiled at that old lady. I really shouldn't have waved to that school bus. I'm a reject of a human being.

The truth is that in these uncertain economic times (Beloved's most hated expression), almost nothing is a guaranteed win. Your life could become a bad Alannis Morisette song at any moment, what with the spoons when you really need a fork and all that. You could do everything right, jog every day and eat healthy, organic foods and still drop over dead at 35 whilst hiking to the top of Mount Everest on a clear autumnal morning with the earth shimmering beneath you.

Return on investment is a privileged person's way of measuring energy in versus energy out.

I'm finding as I get older that the only things that matter to my state of happiness are the ones that make other people's lives better. I'm no Mother Theresa and my income tax statements reflect that. I try, I do, but I'm often influenced in my giving by whether or not I think it will bring me something in the end, whether that something is a feel-good moment or a deduction or some form of social currency. Is it possible to do something nice just to do it? Really? I think so, but it's most commonly not the reason we do it, because we've all bought in to the concept of ROI.

The only thing that keeps me from feeling as though I've fallen into the American ROI abyss is my cat. Petunia, while a shelter cat (six points for altruism) is the worst cat ever. I mean, sure, she's nice to me, but Beloved can barely pick her up, she swats at the little angel except on the best of days and my niece E., who is two, says what Petunia says is "HISS." She's a bitch of a muted calico domestic shorthair, and there's really no good reason in the world to keep her. She has zero ROI.

This cat of mine I cling to because she's evidence that I don't do everything for a reason.

I have long railed against the idea of quarterly reporting and continuous financial gains. I think paying too much attention to short-term goals results in corner-cutting and -- let's face it -- unethical and inhumane behaviors. Yet I find myself measuring myself against short-term goals all the time, whether they be in months or in years.

Where did we get this idea of ROI, and why have we, as a culture, bought into it so? Because truly, the more you have, the more you stand to lose. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, but it's true. So why not do things just because they are there, just because they are fun?

I'll tell you. It's because as long as everyone else is still subscribing to ROI, then you lose if you're just in it for the moment. We would all have to collectively decide to stop placing importance on income and social stature and agree to frolic in sunflower fields, and I have a feeling that as long as humans walk this earth, there will always be someone trying to convince you his sunflower field is way bigger and better and produces more seeds per acre than yours.

I haven't quite figured this problem of the human condition out yet. Perhaps another episode of LA Ink will help.

I hope you all had a fantastic holiday weekend! We've been busy with family travel and social engagements over the past several weeks, hence my spottiness here the last few weekends, but I'm hoping to get back on track now that the school year is upon us. I'm wishing all of you with school aged kiddos a super smooth transition back to school! Meanwhile, enjoy my top event picks this week, which include fun ideas for those who adore acrobatic spectacle, origami, fashion, craft, and cultural celebrations.

Image credit: Boston Arts Festival

The stack of magazines I'd dragged outside under the umbrella was formidable.

We fully intended to do more today. But when I got done with my workout and my husband and daughter returned from the grocery, there were three small children waiting under the tree, one of them wielding an umbrella. Ever since our neighborhood barbecue, the children of our street have been playing a bizarre game involving umbrellas as houses and curtain rods as swords every chance they get. This girl with a golf umbrella was a sign from the universe to abandon the plans for the Labor Day fest and just chill out.

So I did. I dragged my magazine pile outside and also the boombox I got as a senior in high school way back in 1992.

Three or four magazines in, I learned what Sarah Palin actually did do for the citizens of Alaska.

On the fifth, I learned that Amy Chua's publicist should have a nice fat promotion, because in the no-ink-is-bad-ink category, this author was getting more press than I've seen in years. At least half of one magazine was dedicated to whether or not she should be lauded or imprisoned. And article after article devoted itself to this generation of mothers and children -- how the mothers are too fixated on extreme parenting after becoming so well educated ourselves and how kids, dagnabbit, don't know how to play. They're so used to structured time and toys that talk that this poor, poor generation of Carly-loving zombie-heads is doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU, and maybe Amy Chua is right.

I looked up once while reading that article to make sure the child using a curtain rod as a sword didn't impale the other four on bikes festooned with my daughter's stuffed snakes as protection.They seemed to have negotiated fair use of a curtain rod, in fact deferring it to one another at certain points, so I returned to my reading.

Two more magazines later, I learned that the state of education in America is in a terribly state, largely because we won't fire any teachers in New York City. And how nobody can get into Harvard anymore because there are a certain number of seats that need to go to legacies and a certain number that need to go to under-represented minorities and the seats that are left require an IQ of eighty gazillion plus an aptitude for restructuring small countries and OHMYGODAMYCHUAWASRIGHT. Literally, I was shocked at how often since March Amy Chua was mentioned in the intellectual news media. I think she freaked out writers for these highbrow magazines more than she did anyone else in the country -- perhaps because the rest of the country (which I also learned in another article) isn't college-educated in the first place, with only 30% of American adults possessing a BA, let alone one from the Ivy Leagues. The gap, the middle class, is doomed. And also, apparently, the middle class doesn't read The Atlantic.

Existentially questioning subtext: Maybe we should all teach our kids the violin and withhold slumber parties, because oh my Lord, we are certainly going to hell in a Dora-driven handbasket.

I looked up at this point as a child I'd met two weeks before when her family moved in behind us handed me a hand-copied recipe for the chocolate chip cookies her mother had brought over an hour earlier. She left the cookies on the floaties in the middle of my yard, because they were homebase from the Pretty Pony squadron, who had now taken to scooters. Or something. This child was also covered in fairy glitter and face paint, which I fully admit to having given the lot of them.

I returned to my magazines. I'd plowed through about half of them, skipping any article dealing with Iraq or terrorism (so tired of it) and focusing mostly on the 2012 election, literature, education, parenting and the economy.

Literature is still the bright spot. And I can't believe I still haven't bought Mark Twain's autobiography. I was going to, and then I forgot, probably because I'm a distracted working mother 67% more likely to spend more time with my daughter than a mother in 1972 and therefore completely neglect my own marriage and personal time because I have, oh, a full-time job, which, according to another article, it is truly an anomoly that I was not attending to there under the umbrella because I should be chained to my smartphone at all times thanks to the economy.

I chucked that magazine onto the pile for recycling.

All in all, the children appeared at noon and ate the lunches their parents had packed them under the birdfeeder tree, then played until five pm when I kicked them out under extreme duress so we could eat an early dinner. I read thirteen magazines in five hours. And I learned a lot about the state of our union, about the state of myself. I value these long-form articles so much because they really get me to think about my own life and the state of Rita, and I do want to spend time pondering the economy and education and the arts as they pertain to my life, and if I had even one moment of concern that I was letting the kids play with pointy objects, it was allayed by the articles telling me that children these days? They don't know how to play. They've forgotten, or they never knew, or something.

It's not true.

They do need each other. They need small groups of kids with no game plan, and a lot of space, and an adult close enough to bail them out of a pinch but not so close as to interfere with the spat solving and game rules.

I don't know what to say about Obama or Sarah Palin or the state of the economy or of education, but I learned a lot today that I wouldn't have learned had I been checking my email or reading Twitter. In order for me to bring a 360-degree self to my work and my writing, I have to read, and often it's stuff that doesn't appear on a backlit screen. I have to read 8,000 words in order to fully process the issue. I have to spend six days with a person to know them, as the reporter doing the interview for a magazine did. I love you, old media, I do. When I read the article about Gawker headquarters and existing only for traffic and how there should be no verbs in the headlines and how we have to stop force-feeding stuff Americans don't want to read just because it's good for them, I was a little sad. I hope there is always an outlet for the kind of articles that stir my heart, the kind that are well written enough to demand my attention for five hours straight when I get the chance to read them. I may very well have to pay a lot of money to keep some of these magazines in circulation. I may, in fact, need to renew my subscriptions even though for some reason they keep sending me the magazines for free. 

I need to put my money where my mouth is, I see now. Because I feel smarter for having spent today doing what looked like absolutely nothing.

I truly still cannot wrap my head around the fact that it's September and Labor Day weekend is upon us. Yesterday I posted some happy summer images over at my personal blog and will continue to gaze at them through the fall (and, gulp, winter). Meanwhile, here are 7 fun picks for you -- have a fantastic holiday weekend!

1. Laurel has become obsessed with glass treasures. I think she'd love this family-friendly glassblowing event.

2. Labor Day festivities commence tomorrow in Newburyport.
3. Enjoy the sand between your toes at the last Surfside Live! event of the season.

4. For the schooner obsessed.

5. For the Renaissance obsessed.

6. It's going to be a craftastic weekend in Topsfield.

7. Yay for free jazz on Spectacle Island.

Image credit: Diablo Glass School

I interrupt a swiftly-turning-boring conversation about raccoons (you're right, I should just take the birdfeeders in, even though that means the racoon won, dammit) to turn to what blew up the Internet yesterday and how it relates to other conversations I've been involved in that are way, way more important than raccoons.

So yesterday there was an incident with a ridiculous JC Penney t-shirt about girls being too pretty to do their own homework and giving it to their brothers. Shannon did a great job covering it at BlogHer, and Liz Gumbinner -- who works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- said better than I could say -- because she works as an advertising exec on Madison Avenue -- what I believe about capitalism and also about racism and sexism. She wrote:

Messages are sexist because people are sexist.

Messages are sexist because people are lazy. They fall back on stereotypes because it’s easy to get a laugh, easy to get an idea approved, easy to move onto the next thing on your to-do list.

I know because I’ve done it.

Liz wasn't talking about racism, she was talking about sexism, but it strikes me that all isms are isms because they are buried so deeply in our unconscious that we don't even realize we are doing it.That's why it's so hard to eradicate. It's one thing if someone says something sexist or racist on purpose, but it's something entirely different and so much more dangerous if the person saying it doesn't even realize he or she is doing it. The power humans have to believe their truths is strong. We'll die for our truths. It's very difficult for us to change our truths. It takes generations of conversations.

Liz's comments about the t-shirts and how she has caught herself making sexist jokes struck a nerve with me, because it reminded me of something I commented on Kelly Wickham's race post a week or two ago about my own growth when it comes to my awareness of cultural attitudes about race. I wrote:

The defensiveness comes from not realizing it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to hurt someone with your thinking and actions and not realizing it doesn’t make you an evil person, but it does make you unaware. And when you’re unaware, you participate in institutional racism without realizing it. And when you do that, you teach others by your example that it’s okay.

I used to tell my daughter there was no color until I realized it was total bullshit. There are colors, we have history, and the world is not perfect yet nor will it probably ever be — which is why race is such a dominant theme in science fiction. She knew there were colors — she’s not blind. She doesn’t care, nor does she mention it in descriptions, which is more than I could say for myself until I started noticing I did it. I still catch myself doing it. Here’s an example.

Kelly describes herself as a tall woman with icy looking eyes.
We already know Kelly is black.

You just met Kelly. How do you describe her so someone can find her in the crowd?

a) Kelly is a tall woman with curly hair.
b) Kelly is a tall black woman with curly hair.

Now, you’re describing me so someone can find me in the crowd.

a) Rita is a blond woman with blue eyes.
b) Rita is a white woman with blond hair.

(I know for a fact there are women who are not white with blond hair.)

I almost never hear anyone describe a white woman as a white woman. I almost always hear anyone who’s not white described by their race.

This is institutional racism, making the “other” before we even meet someone. It’s not necessarily intentional, but look what we’ve just done with what to us is an innocent description. This is the level of blindness white people have, and it’s why we’re getting nowhere fast trying to change things.

I watched Battlestar Galactica a while back and was at first shocked that both men and women in exec roles were referred to as “sir.” I spent about three days thinking about it. Finally, I decided I loved it, because it took gender out of a title of respect so it could apply unilaterally without indicating gender. But it took me three days to figure it out because the idea that men are usually in the position of authority is so ingrained in my mental model that I had to question what the word “sir” really meant.

When you start thinking about race in that context, it becomes much easier — for me — to talk about it. Am I evil? No. Do I need to question how the world works? YES YES YES.

At my Own Your Beauty panel at BlogHer, several white women talked about becoming invisible after they passed a certain age. It was surprising to them when they realized ads were no longer being targeted to them, that they saw no one representing their age group for anything other than vitamins and denture cream. And it was so surprising to no longer be targeted because they had grown accustomed to being the norm, to being what everyone else is supposed to be like: white and young.

When you're in the majority, you don't see the isms.

When you're plugged into the matrix, all you see is the matrix.

We are plugged into sexism and racism so completely that we have no idea we're even participating in it.

Kelly wrote recently about a comment her secretary made to her about her hair looking more professional when she straightened it:

It was one comment from one person, but the damage that this way of thinking does to young girls who are constantly trying to look like they fit in with white hair styles betrayed to me what she really thought. I’m no less professional because of my hair, but if my secretary thought that (and felt comfortable enough to say it to me) then what about the parents of my students? I pray to God that they don’t see me as less accomplished or proficient or respected in my job just because of the natural way in which I wear my hair.

And yes. I totally DID just make that all about hair.

I see these things as being connected, because they are all unconscious manifestations of institutional sexism and racism that we have to fight to make ourselves aware of. We have to fight to see the racism and sexism in our own thinking, correct it, call it out, teach our kids it is wrong and have those conversations over and over for however many generations it takes to make a change, to remove male connotations from words that really mean respect and white connotations from what someone's hair should look like and stop our culture's ridiculous obsession with young white women.

It's hard to look at yourself and realize you're part of the problem. It makes you feel icky and guilty and sad -- I know -- I've been there. I got past it by realizing it wasn't conscious but that I could consciously make a decision to stop. I could unlearn my truths, change them for the better, and I could teach my new truths to my daughter.

We can change it, but we have to vote with our dollars. This is capitalism. We have to stop voting for politicians who ignore sexism and racism, we have to stop listening to radio shows that spew hate, we have to stop buying Rolling Stone or whatever magazine it is when some female celebrity is naked on the cover, we have to refuse to let our young girls wear anything broadcast across their butts, we have to demand to be taken seriously and we have to allow change to be reflected in our media, in our programming and most importantly, in our schools.

Because it's not okay.

Yesterday I finally got around to calling animal control on that varmint that destroyed my hummingbird feeder and is on its third regular birdfeeder.

"Yeah, they like those birdfeeders," said the bored woman who answered the phone.

"Can you loan me a live trap?"

"No, not for a birdfeeder. Now if he gets in your attic or something, that's different."

"Gotcha."

I hung up and moped a little. I have no intention of actually buying a raccoon trap. Last night I brought the birdfeeders inside for the night, though Beloved worries that means we'll get mice in the garage. I still haven't taken them back out there. I think the hummingbird feeder is cracked, which is too bad since I had four hummingbirds visiting it regularly -- four hummingbirds who are going to wonder why their favorite club suddenly pulled up stakes under the dark of night like a speakeasy.

All because of the bully in the neighborhood. That chittering, masked, stinky raccoon.

This is not over.

The raccoon that keeps knocking over my birdfeeders is in big trouble. Last night he knocked down my hummingbird feeder onto my newly pruned tomato plant and broke it.

"I'm calling animal control," I said to Beloved yesterday.

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't know. Maybe they'll let me borrow a live trap."

"Do they do that?"

"I don't know. I haven't called them yet."

I could tell Beloved thought this idea was dumb. However, the neighbors with the koi pond have animal control out here like three times a week.

I know what my father would do, but it's illegal within city limits. Plus, I don't know that tools.

But that raccoon has got to go. It's Caddyshack time.

This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.