Thirty things I learned from self-help books.

1. Never take those pills and things from those greedy pill-pushing doctors again! Break the grip of dependence!
2. Take these herbs religiously every day or you will feel like crap.
3. You are as tough as nails, sister!
4. Formaldehyde in your nail polish will kill you.
5. We’re born doing everything perfectly until “civilization” screws us up.
6. Your breathing is all wrong!
7. Never be a follower! Stand up for yourself!
8. By following these role models.
9. The world is all brand-new today!
10. Follow this ancient wisdom.
11. Be gentle with yourself! You don't have to suffer!
12. Pain is just weakness leaving the body.
13. You are charming, beautiful, powerful, perfect.
14. And humble.
15. Traditions are wonderful and to be treasured.
16. Don't believe anything your ancestors would have given their lives defending.
17. You are a human being, not a human doing.
18. Do this stuff. 
19. You are responsible for your own happiness.
20. All those toxic people are responsible for your unhappiness.
21. You are perfect and wonderful just the way you are.
22. Now change!
23. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you.
24. Here’s how to look like a million bucks!
25. Your destiny is written.
26. Here’s how to grab control of your life. 
27. You can have bliss each and every day!
28. The path to wisdom comes through surviving misery.
29. You don’t need anything you don’t already have. 
30. Except this book and its sequels. 

Lawn gone.

Looking over old blog entries from two or three years ago, I realized how obsessed I used to be with the lawn. Every spring and summer it was:

• How can I stop it from being crappy? 
• Why is it so crappy? 
• Whom can I blame for my lawn's crappiness?
• Can I burn the lawn to ashes with kerosene and not take out the house?

Not so much anymore. It still irks me severely that, despite the weed & feed stuff that I put down every year, when August rolls around there's always more weeds than grass. Always.

Awesome.

But I've had to try to make peace with it. First, because I am not going to water the lawn every night. It is not going to happen. My dad did it on our tiny front lawn when I was a kid, but I have more property since I am not in the city and I am not going to spend money and water on this. As if I had the time.

Second, and more important, these last two summers I have had this huge dog.

You may have heard me mention him before.

Tralfaz is a big boy. He does not destroy the yard by digging; not his thing. And yet, with his acidic streams of gold and his legendarily large poops, the lad could knock out half a roll of sod's worth of grass in one day. The brown spots may lead to great green spots next year, but this year? Fertilizer burn.

So there's no point in getting myself in a pet over things I can't control, or could try to fix only with an enormous effort I do not wish to expend. I'd love the lawn to look like place where they slap green jackets on golfers, but it's never going to be that way.

And yes, I thought about paving the whole blasted thing and calling it a rock garden, but you need a lot of Roundup to keep the grass out. Grass only grows where you don't want it, you know. It's coy that way.

Hoping for a normalass.

I recently worked on a book in which the author kept quoting people, each of whom she referred to as a "badass." Could be anyone. Martin Luther King Jr.: Badass. Elizabeth I: Badass. Ben Franklin: Badass. John Lennon: Badass. Raoul Wallenberg: Badass. Mother Teresa: Badass. Liberace: Badass. Gandhi: Oh you better believe Badass.

It appears the author's criteria for bestowing badassery titles on people were these:

1) She saw a quote she liked on the Internet attributed to the person;

2) The person was interesting enough to make her want people to think she sat around reading thick books by or about them for inspiration;

3) She desired the reflected glory of having a colossal critical mass of badasshood in her book---if she can decide who is or is not a badass, well, that would make her one too, wouldn't it? Takes one to know one.

I suppose it ought to be obvious that none of the quotes had ever been checked. And as I have often mentioned, my years of fact-checking have taught me that the more frequently a quote appears on the Internet, the less likely it is of being attributed properly, and that likelihood approaches zero just by virtue of its being on the Internet.

You can quote me on that.

I can't even get mad anymore about writers who snag quotes off the Internet without verifying them. It's like getting mad at people who park poorly. You'd just be mad all the livelong day if you let yourself get bothered by it.

What I am bothered by is a grown woman who thinks it's cool to go around bestowing the badass title on people like some addlepated 12-year-old. I'm just imagining the look on Frederick William III's face on being told by the spunky young thing, "You're a real kingolicious badass, Freddy Wills!"

He was, but come on.

Are we ever going to behave like adults anymore, or is this going to be the kind of conversation I can look forward to the rest of my life?

Don't even answer that question.

I don't think that everyone she quotes deserves the title anyway; guys like Andrew Jackson or William Tecumseh Sherman, who would probably be condemned by her as killers and oppressors, are what I would think of as badasses. The fact is, your average badass usually garners wishes that he would walk into an open manhole by those around him. Badassishness may be something to aspire to, but usually because of dire circumstance (like war), or in sadder cases, by moral bankruptcy.

Personally, I'd rather be around some goodasses, or at least some normalasses. Is that so much to ask?

And no birds sing.

The robins I wrote about in June have abandoned the nest under the deck. I made sure they were gone for weeks before I got the ladder and removed the nest.

Looks like I was wrong about the little beak I saw when I thought the egg had hatched.

Never did.

The shell looked intact, but nothing has sat on that egg in at least a month. The little robin never hatched.

I'm kicking myself. I always take the dog around the back, and Mama Robin would fly off at our approach. Did we keep her off the egg too much? Was it too cold?

Probably not; probably just one of those things. Still, I feel bad about it.

Look, I'm not going to tie myself in knots. Life is hard, and sadly some animals never even get that far. It's too bad about what happened to Cecil the Lion, but it's over and I'm not going to wail and rend my garments, especially considering the kind of man-on-man butchery going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. The expressions of grief over a lion no one ever heard of before yesterday and no one will remember next year have gotten embarrassing. Cecil would have eaten me for lunch; I can't get too worked up. We've totally lost all perspective about animals.

Still, I wish the robin had made it.

There, I bled it again.

We had a blood drive recently, and as you know, Fred is always first in line to sign up to drop a pint. Is it because, like with Henry Higgins, the milk of human kindness runs by the quart in every Fred vein, and thus is so much more valuable for the blood bank?

Or is it for the free snacks?

The world may never know.

Actually I didn't drop a pint, exactly; they sold me on being an apheresis donor. In a normal donation they drain a pint of blood from you; in an apheresis donation, they pull out a bunch of blood, separate it into plasma, platelets, and leukocytes, keep what they want and pump the rest back into the donor. This was specifically an automated double red blood cell donation, It is basically twice as useful as a regular whole blood donation. It supposedly takes half an hour, or can take up to two hours, and it's a little weird. We're used to sending fluids out, but only taking them in orally. Maybe it was my imagination, but I felt a little like a bike inner tube during the pump-back-in phases.

"You see the little man in the upper right corner of the screen?" asked the phlebotomist, handing me a plastic bike handle wrapped in paper towels.

"Yeah."

"When the arrow is coming out of him, squeeze every five seconds. When the arrow is heading into him, stop squeezing."

"Like the world's worst video game."

"Yeah."

As I say, it was a bit strange, but I found myself less light-headed than I sometimes do from a whole blood donation, and I felt like I recovered faster. Time permitting, I would donate that way again.

I'd also note that this form of donation is more exclusive, which appeals to me; not just any mere slob can drop a double like that. The Red Cross says only type O, A-, or B- donors can donate with this method. So it's another opportunity to fluff up my ego thanks to something over which I have no control. We creative types always enjoy that.

Manly man in manly can.

"All right, which one of you guys left the seat down?"

Dirty deed.

Yes, it's a dirty deed, but someone has to do it.

Be glad I didn't post a picture of the toilet.

When I got married---really, as a condition of getting married---I had to promise that I would maintain the bathroom. My fiancee was willing to clean the entire rest of the house, but could not face the can. I agreed. (Subsequently the deal has fallen to pieces except for one part; guess which!)*

I don't mind doing the toilet, I really don't. It's not like cleaning the toilet in a public place, like the Sara D. Roosevelt park bathroom on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, whose fumes were so toxic they hospitalized a maintenance worker. No one uses the can here but us, and those I allow in the house, so it's not too horrible a job. Besides, when going after the inside of the bowl you have brushes and powerful chemicals on your side. It's the outside of the toilet that bothers me.

No, really; that's where all the hairs collect, and clumps of dust. The vacuum won't pull them off that damp, cold porcelain. You have to get down there and wipe them off, with rags or paper towels or wipes, and the hairs and stuff still cling like it's the last lifeboat off the Titanic. After all that, the sink and shower are a piece of cake.

I've long said that cleaning toilets is a good way to work on humility. People who want to big themselves up start by hiring someone to clean the house. But as long as I have the physical capability to clean myself, I don't mind. Besides, I won't steal from the valuable collection of Franklin Mint coins and Danbury Mint figurines I display in the can. Can't say the same for the help.

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*(Love you, honey!)