I asked my 15-yr-old granddaughter what made somebody a social influencer. She said these are people who have the means to affect the way others think, dress and act. They use social media – mostly TikTok and Instagram – as their platform.

“What do they influence them to do?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. “Cooking, dancing, what to wear, or just hanging out with friends.”

I looked up a few of the most popular ones. Most promote themselves, but a few create videos about ways to live. Some were as useful as cotton candy while others had a bit of solid advice about living.

Folks, our generation and the ones before us, were robbed.

Most of us have family members who would’ve been famous if only we’d had a cell phone to capture their advice.

Growing up, our house was filled with noise and seven children with distinct personalities. We had enough adventures to fill hours of video – how to embrace being the middle child, where to hide money from siblings and how to survive an eccentric father.

My Aunt Bev and Uncle Jim were house flippers decades before Chip and Joanna Gaines. They didn’t pass a house being demolished that they didn’t come away with loads of items my aunt repurposed. They did so as a team and with lots of laughter.

The advice they could’ve filmed covered a variety of topics. Some could’ve been how to find valuable antiques in an off-the-beaten-path shop and others about how to rewire a house. They could’ve made a fortune.

My uncles could’ve entertained every outdoorsperson in the world with their fishing and hunting videos. The adventure they had looking for Jean Lafitte’s buried treasure would’ve gone viral overnight.

My cousin, Sylvia, is nine months older than me and had a fresh outlook on life as a teenager. She calmly and quietly worked for social change and always sought the good in people.

Sylvia is still the calmest person I know and lives the words she told us so many years ago – love unconditionally, embrace life and never miss a chance to celebrate. If she’d had a platform, she would’ve had a million followers.

Most moms back in the day could’ve easily hosted a YouTube channel. One fashion video would be entitled “you’re not going to wear that, are you?” The follow-up would be what to wear to a wedding, a funeral, a dance – all the places where we wonder what the words “casual chic” mean.

My mom loved telling me “All the kids are wearing this.” She’d be holding up something hideous.  Maybe if she’d had a platform, thousands would’ve thought her fashion choices were perfect and Mom would’ve been right – all the kids would’ve been wearing that.

If I would’ve had a cell phone and a platform years ago, I could’ve influenced mothers of boys. My parenting videos could include “this is what I found under my son’s bed this morning” and “let’s see how many orphaned socks we find in the couch cushions today.”

Other topics could’ve been prizes for contests boys love to compete in – who can belch the most times in a row and the number of times they can wear the same pair of socks without washing them.

I could’ve given advice to working moms on how to trick your child into believing the store-bought cupcakes you took up to his classroom were really home-made. Or how to get the Tooth Fairy off the hook when she forgets to put a few dollars under your child’s pillow.

Social influencers aren’t anything new. Their audience has simply gotten bigger. I’d pit aunts, uncles and parents with a sense of humor against any of these 20 somethings any day of the week.

Then we’d see who’d be living on Easy Street.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.             

Natalie was in a hurry. She was moving in two days, and she still had to pack up her belongings. That was too big a word for what she owned – stacks of worn romance paperbacks, a glass jar filled with small rocks she’d picked up on beaches over the years and T-shirts from every rock-and-roll concert she’d attended from the time she had a mouth full of braces and cheeks dotted with acne.

Natalie found someone in the grocery store wearing a red shirt and tapped him on the shoulder. The young man was wearing ear buds, oblivious to the sounds around him.

“Excuse me, do you have any extra boxes?” she asked him. He nodded and told her to check in the back through the folded doors by the milk cooler. “Just go on in. Nobody cares if you take boxes.”

Natalie pulled her backpack tighter and headed to the back of the store. She pushed through the double doors and saw boxes in a big container. Some had already been flattened while others were ripped or torn. Natalie started going through the boxes. She pushed the big boxes to the side. No way she’d be able to lift those once they were filled.

The perfect boxes, she decided, were the “Goldilocks boxes” – not too big, not too small. Natalie flattened all but one box and put the flattened ones in that box. She maneuvered out of the grocery store, careful not to knock over the cardboard display of Hostess Twinkies and not just because she didn’t want to pick them up. Those Hostess treats were irresistible and late-night snacking was just one of her many escape-from-reality tricks these days.

She got the boxes in the back seat of her Camry and then safely up the stairs to her apartment door. Natalie fished the house keys out of her backpack and let herself into the apartment. It was quiet. For the past year, she’d come home to the sound of her boyfriend, Josh, playing video games or Creedence Clearwater Revival playing almost full blast.

“Babe, there’s just no comparison,” Josh would say, pushing another Dorito in his mouth. “Just try and find a better song than ‘Fortunate Son.’ Did you know that’s an anti-war song?”

Of course she knew “Fortunate Son” was a rally against the Viet Nam war. She wondered if Josh knew anything about the politics of the 1960s. She sure did. Natalie’s father was an expert on the Viet Nam conflict, as he called it, and that conversation was a frequent topic at Sunday dinners. Some days she wanted to ask Josh if he knew the names Malcolm X, Medgar Evers or he’d ever read the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But who was she kidding? Both she and Josh had put each other in boxes months earlier. She was the sentimental person in the relationship – she kept movie stubs, ripped-in-half concert tickets and those T-shirts. Once Josh made her a bet – if she could show him a shirt from The Bangles or The Go-Gos, he’d clean the bathroom for six months. That was a bet she won fair and square. Josh was a dreamer but not about relationships or his purpose in life. He was determined to perfect a recipe for bathtub beer and learning how to count cards to win at blackjack in New Orleans. Las Vegas, he’d proclaim, was too jaded.

But now, the apartment was quiet, deathly quiet, and she had a job in front of her. The night she and Josh fought to the point where both were screaming and crying and then drained, Natalie knew their relationship was finished. They called it quits. Natalie said she’d stay in the apartment since she had a steady income as a public school teacher. Josh was an unemployed software developer. He said he was going to move back in with his parents and could be out in two weeks. At the time, Natalie was so angry, she told Josh he had until the end of the week to leave.

“Fine,” he’d told her. “I can make it even faster than that.”

For once, Josh was good to his word. The next day, when Natalie was teaching second graders, Josh recruited a couple of friends and cleaned everything he owned out of the apartment. Natalie came home to a garbage bag filled with trash outside the front door, a closet with empty hangers and the apartment key on the kitchen counter.

“He even took the extra toilet paper out of the cabinet,” Natalie told her co-teacher the next day.

Now it was her turn to pack. She decided she needed to find a one-bedroom place closer to school. It didn’t take her long to find a suitable apartment exactly where she needed it to be located. In a matter of hours, she’d signed sign a new lease. Natalie knew she’d learn to appreciate a place that was cheaper and didn’t have the wandering ghosts of Natalie and Josh haunting the rooms. But she’d dragged her feet leaving their apartment. Maybe she was hoping she and Josh could patch things up. Maybe, she told herself after finishing a carton of ice cream, she’d seen too many Disney movies.

But her back was up against the wall. The lease on this place was up in two days, and she’d put off packing long enough. It was time, as her mother would say, to roll up her sleeves and get crackin’.

Natalie dropped the boxes on the carpet and took off her jacket. She looked around and saw quite a few things Josh had overlooked.

“Guess he was in a hurry to get away from me,” she thought bitterly. She considered having a bonfire with the things he’d left behind, but that wasn’t her style. She’d figure out what to do with those odds and ends later.

Natalie rummaged around in the box pile and opened up one of the medium-sized boxes, taping the bottom shut. She started taking paperbacks off the bookshelf. There were at least a dozen books by Stephen King – she’d never own a St. Bernard, that was for sure – and a few romance paperbacks. When Josh saw those, he opened one up and started reading aloud.

“Horatio’s full lips met Darcy’s and the passion was instantaneous…” he began, and Natalie lunged across the couch and ripped the book from his hands, both of them laughing.

“Hey, a girl needs a little romance from time to time,” she’d told him. He’d leaned over and kissed her deeply and told her she wouldn’t need those books now that she was living with him.

When she put the romance books in the box, Darcy sarcastically thought not only did she need those books for the romance that was missing in her life, but she should’ve told him to take some as an instruction manual for how to handle a woman.

When the box was full, she closed the top – over, over, over, under, her father had taught her, and wrote “books” on top of the box. Funny how one brown rectangular object could hold so many memories, she thought. She pushed those thoughts aside and kept packing until she’d cleared the bookshelves.

She told herself not to think about what she was doing – just keep packing. After Natalie taped the bottom of one of the bigger boxes and flipped it over, that’s when she noticed what was stamped on the side of the box from the grocery store. It had contained Kleenex. And that’s when the tears hit Natalie. She hadn’t cried since she and Josh decided it was over. She hadn’t shed a tear when she came home and saw his apartment key on the counter. She’d remained dry eyed when she got a letter in the mail addressed to him. The tears didn’t start until she looked at that empty box that had contained Kleenex – a vital part of anyone’s break-up journey – and realized with a hard smack that Josh was gone. Really gone.

Without thinking, Natalie plopped down in the middle of the living room, put the empty Kleenex box over her head and cried hard tears, her body shaking from the sobbing. Finally, she stopped and took the box off her head and filled it with everything Josh had left in the apartment. He’d never notice she’d used the Kleenex box, but for once, Natalie didn’t care that the man she supposedly loved was as shallow as water in a small ditch. She would always know that was the last box of tissues she’d need where Josh was concerned.

And that made her feel like a fortunate son.

For many, ironing is an old skill, like churning butter or darning socks.

None of my sons, nieces or nephews own an iron or ironing board.

Why should they? Most of the clothes these days are permanent press or are supposed to look like we slept in them.

I usually don’t buy anything that needs ironing. If I can’t toss it in the dryer and hang it up wrinkle free, I don’t buy it.

Around the holidays, I needed two white pillowcases. I picked a package up at a home goods store, not looking closely at what kind of fabric the pillowcases were made from.

After I washed them, it was immediately obvious those pillowcases were 100 percent cotton. They came out of the dryer as wrinkled as raisins and would require ironing.

Maybe not, a little voice whispered. Who’d notice if the pillowcases were wrinkled? I could pass them off as vintage or “country chic.”

I held them up. It was obvious they were wrinkled, not something out of a fashion magazine.

I’d have to drag out the ironing board and the iron if I was going to put those on the guest bed. As I set up the ironing board, the loud squeaking sound brought me back to my childhood.

When I was a young girl, I often watched my grandmother Albedia ironing. She filled a glass Pepsi bottle with water and a watering attachment screwed on.

She’d sprinkle water over whatever she was ironing, add a bit of starch, and she transformed those wrinkled blobs into stiff-as-a-board shirts.

My mom would let me iron my dad’s linen handkerchiefs. Those were pretty easy, so we moved on to pillowcases. Once permanent press cases came on the market and my dad discovered Kleenex, we no longer had to iron.

Years later, my other grandmother offered to teach me how to iron more intricate items. She said I’d need to know how to iron if I was going to learn how to sew.

Since my mom had already showed me the basics, my grandmother started with shirts.  First the collar, she said, then the yoke, the sleeves and finally the body of the shirt.

As with most things I learned as a teenager, there were bumps along the road. One side of the sleeve would look smooth, but when I turned it over, there were wrinkles up and down the fabric.

She showed me the automatic water sprayer on the iron – what an improvement over that Pepsi bottle – and the wrinkles came right out.

When she taught me how to sew, I had to press open every seam. I didn’t understand why until I tried skipping that step. When the seam was puckered, I knew why she had me iron as I went.

A good lesson, she said. Take care of things as they happen because if you don’t, they show up anyway.

These days, I iron my husband’s flannel shirts. He takes care of clogged toilets, so I don’t mind ironing those shirts.

What I find is there’s a rhythm to ironing and satisfaction is watching the wrinkles disappear. Best of all, the end result is worth the effort.

Most of the chores we do require thought. I’ve yet to program the television’s remote control without paying strict attention. Ironing, on the other hand, allows my mind to wander.

Maybe the older generation was on to something. Perhaps the mindless chores give us time to think. I’ll never go so far as to churn my own butter, but ironing does give me time to ponder.

And that, like ironing, is an almost lost art.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

Something that should be enjoyable is a massage. I always imagined being in a warm room with dimmed lights and soft music playing in the background. A masseuse gently works the cricks and aches out of my joints.

So far, this has not been my experience. The room is softly lit and there’s usually some incense burning. But then the masseuse gets to work, pushing on muscles and joints. Having a linebacker pound on my back wasn’t what I envisioned last week.

“That’s a little hard,” I finally said. She apologized and started back softer, but in less than 15 seconds, she was putting her full weight into my shoulder blade.

She said I had a lot of kinks to work out and, as we all know, getting rid of those knots required a bit of work.

In other words, “suck it up, buttercup.”

That’s exactly the sentiment I have for quite a few beauty treatments I’ve undergone. First on the list of “no pain, no gain” is getting rid of unwanted hair.

One of the traits I inherited from my mom’s side of the family is healthy hair. That hair, unfortunately, also likes to grow on my upper lip and chin.

In order to not look like my hairy Uncle Mitch, I go to a hair salon to have these areas waxed.

Waxing is not for the faint of heart although you might believe it’s going to be painless.

You lie down on a soft table and instrumental music is playing in the background. A nice technician comes in and asks where you’d like the hair removed.

“My entire face,” is the answer I want to say, but I just generally point to my upper lip. The very nice lady clucks her tongue and rolls up her sleeves.

Then she tells me to close my eyes, and I can hear her assembling all the ingredients. Before I know it, she’s got a wooden tongue depressor and is applying warm wax above and below my eyebrows.

Then she takes a piece of cotton material, puts it over the hot wax and rubs back and forth.

That feels nice, but then comes the pain train.

In one quick movement, she rips the fabric off my face, taking with it the unwanted hair. At this point, my eyes water and I wish I could learn to accept my hairy heritage instead of having a wax treatment.

Then she moves on to the most painful of all, the upper lip. I’ve had a wisdom tooth removed with only a shot of Novocain. That is nothing compared to having my upper lip ripped smooth.

After that, waxing my chin is a walk in the park.

This is all for unwanted hair. The hair you do want to keep requires almost constant maintenance. Some women spend every Saturday in the beautician’s chair, having their hair processed, straightened, colored and conditioned.

The treatments have a strong chemical smell and you get to sit there with your head covered in goop for about an hour. Sometimes your scalp burns, but what really burns is how much just having your hair done costs. One cut, color and style can easily run $100.

Sure, you can try it yourself, but you might end up like my mom did – with lilac hair and a trim as even as a 50-year-old sidewalk.

We’re told the look isn’t complete without make-up. One bottle of foundation can cost anywhere from $15 to $45 and eye shadow is about the same price. Lipstick that lasts more than five minutes can run up to $37 for just one tube.

Then you have to take it all off at night with special cleansers and apply expensive cream to keep the wrinkles away.

These routines and prices aren’t for me. I’m more of a drugstore make-up gal. I only wear mascara if I’m going to a place where there are grownups. Mostly, I keep my fingers crossed my mom’s genes will take care of the crow’s feet and laugh lines.

So far, so good.

For all of you who love massages, all-day hair appointments and the latest make-up trends, indulge and enjoy. For those who are more like me, wear those Earth shoes with pride.

Mostly, embrace you, in all your wonderful, less-than-perfect and, in some cases, hairy glory.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

Rumination:  The process of continuously thinking about the same thoughts, which tend to be sad or dark. – Healthline.org

 

I’d had a bad day. More than that, I’d had a bad run of days. After the last stupid thing I did happened, I sat down and went over what was bothering me so much.

The answer was practically everything.

That’s because I was ruminating.

I wrote it – I’m a ruminator. I’m that person who keeps thinking about the same mistakes I’ve made over and over again. It’s not a fun place to be because any little thing that goes wrong suddenly becomes a bonfire.

The latest log on the fire was published in my column last week. I boasted I’d helped my grandson with his math homework of lowest common denominator.

I wrote in the column, no I bragged in the column, how I explained that 3/6 is actually 1/3. Thanks to a sharp reader, Janice, that statement is incorrect. When I got that email, my heart sank and I could feel myself wearing a dunce cap.

And so the boulder of self-doubt and self-recrimination started rolling down the hill.

Sometimes, that boulder only weighs 10 pounds. On those days, it’s fairly easy to sidestep the menacing boulder.

But when that rock is the size of an elephant with no signs of stopping – a huge error in print for thousands to see – those are the days I pull the blanket over my head, close my eyes and prepare for the impact.

After the humiliation stopped being so crippling, I looked for articles for ways to get past the “you suck” feeling.

Here’s a few tips I found online.

Call a friend or family member. Let’s face it – we’ve done that and our friends and family members are sick of hearing us whine.

We’re sick of hearing ourselves whine. And because we’re beating ourselves up anyway, we feel guilty if we don’t ask what’s going on in their life because otherwise we’re a drain on someone else’s happiness.

Doing chores is suggested. That works for about a minute, because while you’re doing the mindless task of loading the dishwasher or vacuuming, the “you suck” thoughts come bouncing back into your head.

Watching a movie can be therapeutic but as soon as the end credits roll and you turn off the TV or computer, those sneaky thoughts come racing right back.

It’s as if the whispers were lurking in the background, sharpening their claws, waiting. And here you thought you’d been distracted.

I’ve tried reading a book, but three pages in, I can’t remember what I read. I remember what I was upset about. Then the self-inflicted insults come hurling right back.

Getting out and doing something physical can work unless, like me, you’re out of shape. Then I start beating myself up for those extra pounds and the days I sat in front of the computer instead of walking or riding a bike.

Not only was I beating myself up for the dumb things I’d said or done, now I felt bad about how I looked.

I followed one piece of advice –take action by writing down the steps you need to take to feel better.

I did that last week. Then I misplaced the book I wrote those steps in. I cringe every time I think of someone finding that yellow notebook and wondering what kind of helpless whiner wrote that to-do list.

Meditation was the least helpful remedy on the list. At this point in my life, if I relax in one spot for more than two minutes, I fall fast asleep.

That “focus on nothing but breathing” doesn’t work when those negative thoughts are running a marathon in your head.

The only ways I’ve found to stop ruminating are apologizing and giving myself and the other person time. Sooner rather than later, I’ll do something dumb again and I’ll have to start the process all over again.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.