Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
QUESTION THIS
"YOU KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD DO?"
Least favorite question of all time:
“You know what you should do?”
It’s the question I am most often greeted with when my grown children and their growing children show up at my house. Sometimes there’s a list. With numbers.
They jump out of their various mini-vans and yelp, “You know what you should do first about that big mud hole in your driveway?”
Or . . .
“You know what you should do second after you fix that big mud hole in your driveway?”
Or it’s the same question with a technological twist . . .
“You know what you should do? You should be on Instagram. Are you?”
And then I have to ask questions of my own. “What’s Instagram?” or “What mud hole?” or “Why do I feed you people constantly?”
My grown children are full of great advice on what I should do. I suppose it’s payback for all the years I stood at their grubby childish elbows telling them how they should live their lives.
For example:
“You know what you should do?” I used to say. “You should shovel the garbage out of this bedroom of yours before I set it on fire or strip it down to a bare mattress on a bare floor and put you in solitary confinement. That’s what you should do.”
Recently, I’ve been working on marketing strategies to sell my latest book “Beyond the Strandline” which means that I’ve had to learn more about marketing than I care to know—now or ever. Slowly but surely, I’m learning the fine art of asking people for money. It’s not my favorite learning curve.
And if I had my way, I’d stand on street corners with boxes of books, handing them out for free, strangely, my one and only investor objects to this business model. So, I struggle with the algorithm of “hand me some cash and I’ll tell you a story.”
“You know what you should do,” my daughter said. “You should be on Instagram. That’s the cool new way of ‘getting your stuff out there,’ Mom.”
I groaned, loudly. “I don’t want to.”
“Sure. It’s easy,” she grabbed my phone. “What’s your I-Tunes password?”
And so the agony began. An hour later, after re-setting seven to one-hundred passwords, losing all my credit cards (inside my own house) and wrestling with a dozen or more blank screens, I am on Instagram.
I still don’t know what it is.
You know what I should do?
Hire an admin.
Unfortunately, administrative assistants want to be paid—with money.
Linda (Books 4-Sale) Zern
Friday, August 7, 2015
A CLASSIC - A BRIEF HISTORY OF BOOBS
My husband’s family was horrified when I decided to breastfeed our first baby. They insisted I remove myself from the public rooms, retreat to a bedroom, cover myself with a blanket, and nurse my baby in shame and private.
Which was rich coming from a family that regularly discussed—at the dinner table—the various uses of whipped cream in dating situations. Boobs covered in whipped cream, complete with a cherry on top, was considered wildly humorous. Breastfeeding was considered . . . well . . . icky.
It was confusing at best.
When I had our second baby, I said, “Nope. Not going to the bedroom of breastfeeding shame. If you want I’ll cover the baby’s head with whipped cream and call myself dessert. But that’s it. Now back down.”
They backed down.
Over the years I’ve tried to figure out the mixed messages that society expresses when it comes to female breasts. Sorry, I got nothing. Society is nuts.
However, here are a couple of random observations on the subject:
God gave women boobs and then said, “When you can get a guy to look you in the eye, even if it’s for thirty seconds, marry him.” NOTE: It’s still good advice.
National Geographic magazine did more for modern underwear makers, than any advertising agency on Madison Avenue ever thought of—ever.
Women in the 1970’s burned their bras to protest the repressive 1950’s when Madison Avenue had decided women’s breasts should be shaped like nuclear missile silos.
Then something called “Cooper’s Droop” was discovered. Women put their bras back on in the 1980’s and invented Victoria’s Secret.
The secret was that Victoria was a hooker.
Breastfeeding threats are the best threats on earth to control older children. When my kids gave me a hard time about pulling the plug on leaving the park, the swimming pool, or the Little League Field, I would simply shout, “Come get in this van in three minutes, or I will tell everyone at this park/pool/field that I breastfed you and for how long.” Enough said.
When I got married I was still wearing a training bra. No joke. It was true love on my husband’s part.
Once you get them trained, they’re kind of fun, because being a girl is fun.
Nothing has changed. GQ magazine this month, a men’s magazine for men, has a picture of a topless girl wearing a flower lei over her boobs—sort of. Men are dopey.
Feminists would have us believe that there is no biological difference between boys and girls. No seriously, I had a college professor tell me that. “If girls were treated like boys they’d be big and strong too.” I noticed that Dr. Kooper was wearing a bra, and I was pretty sure I could take her in an arm wrestling contest.
Boys of all ages find girl stuff fascinating or as my grandson Conner asked me one fine day, “YaYa, why you got so many booby bras?”
Or as my daughter (mother of four boys and one future bra wearer) said, “Oh no, I don’t go anywhere near the underwear aisle of the store, or all four of them will run through the bra section, fondling the merchandise, yelling, ‘Booby bras, booby bras,’ at the top of their lungs.”
Therefore we can conclude, who the heck knows? But as a friend of mine remarked, “Burn my bra? Bras are expensive.”
I know, right?
Linda (Hang Ten) Zern
Which was rich coming from a family that regularly discussed—at the dinner table—the various uses of whipped cream in dating situations. Boobs covered in whipped cream, complete with a cherry on top, was considered wildly humorous. Breastfeeding was considered . . . well . . . icky.
It was confusing at best.
When I had our second baby, I said, “Nope. Not going to the bedroom of breastfeeding shame. If you want I’ll cover the baby’s head with whipped cream and call myself dessert. But that’s it. Now back down.”
They backed down.
Over the years I’ve tried to figure out the mixed messages that society expresses when it comes to female breasts. Sorry, I got nothing. Society is nuts.
However, here are a couple of random observations on the subject:
God gave women boobs and then said, “When you can get a guy to look you in the eye, even if it’s for thirty seconds, marry him.” NOTE: It’s still good advice.
National Geographic magazine did more for modern underwear makers, than any advertising agency on Madison Avenue ever thought of—ever.
Women in the 1970’s burned their bras to protest the repressive 1950’s when Madison Avenue had decided women’s breasts should be shaped like nuclear missile silos.
Then something called “Cooper’s Droop” was discovered. Women put their bras back on in the 1980’s and invented Victoria’s Secret.
The secret was that Victoria was a hooker.
Breastfeeding threats are the best threats on earth to control older children. When my kids gave me a hard time about pulling the plug on leaving the park, the swimming pool, or the Little League Field, I would simply shout, “Come get in this van in three minutes, or I will tell everyone at this park/pool/field that I breastfed you and for how long.” Enough said.
When I got married I was still wearing a training bra. No joke. It was true love on my husband’s part.
Once you get them trained, they’re kind of fun, because being a girl is fun.
Nothing has changed. GQ magazine this month, a men’s magazine for men, has a picture of a topless girl wearing a flower lei over her boobs—sort of. Men are dopey.
Feminists would have us believe that there is no biological difference between boys and girls. No seriously, I had a college professor tell me that. “If girls were treated like boys they’d be big and strong too.” I noticed that Dr. Kooper was wearing a bra, and I was pretty sure I could take her in an arm wrestling contest.
Boys of all ages find girl stuff fascinating or as my grandson Conner asked me one fine day, “YaYa, why you got so many booby bras?”
Or as my daughter (mother of four boys and one future bra wearer) said, “Oh no, I don’t go anywhere near the underwear aisle of the store, or all four of them will run through the bra section, fondling the merchandise, yelling, ‘Booby bras, booby bras,’ at the top of their lungs.”
Therefore we can conclude, who the heck knows? But as a friend of mine remarked, “Burn my bra? Bras are expensive.”
I know, right?
Linda (Hang Ten) Zern
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