2016.

I’ve fallen into the common habit recently of denouncing 2016 as a complete and utter year from hell. In some ways, it has felt unusually confusing and hard to take. In other ways, the events of the year may simply be additional “rites of passage” that happen for everyone who lives into middle age, but just hadn’t happened yet for us, or me, i.e.:

• The election has activated me, and many others around me. Maybe every generation has at least one major event that spurs us out of complacency and into measurably increased civic duty, and this was Gen X’s.
• In my 40’s, I am increasingly clear about my personal values, and increasingly unwilling to compromise a future that doesn’t reflect those values. Staring down the next four years means standing up for my values in a more direct and transparent way that I’ve been used to.
• Gen X feels vital, healthy, fit, and alive, but Gen X's childhood pop culture icons are entering their twilight years. Although I’d like to say “no more torturing 80’s kids with their pop heroes’ deaths,” I am sure we have just entered this new territory (for us), and we will learn to cope better. (R.I.P. Prince Rogers Nelson)

Viewing the past 12 months from that perspective, I realize that we have never been better prepared to face these challenges and changes. We are smarter, sharper, faster, and wiser than we’ve ever been before. That’s not a dare to 2017 — it’s a welcome. 

We are ready.

Shouting.

Communicating progressive ideas to a resistant audience is an interesting thing to ponder. 

One on one, with someone I love, I must do a better job of listening. Asking. Being patient. Remembering that this conversation is one of many more I intend to have with this person, and I don’t have to “accomplish” anything in this one conversation except to listen and learn. Maybe, over time, this person will be ready to listen to me. And I will have had time to put more of my heart into fewer words. When we are all ready to listen to each other and learn, we will be able to move forward together in a civilized way.

In fact, I am not sure that I should do anything different one on one, even if talking with someone I don’t love, with whom I may never have another conversation in my life. Listen and learn. After all, if shouting at people on social media doesn’t change minds, why would that approach work face to face?

But nearly every other occasion seems ripe for shouting, for raising our voices as loud as we need to be heard. I’m dismayed by the toothless, ineffective, and uninspiring game of liberal establishment politics I’ve seen played on my behalf since 2000 or so. While citizen activists like us are volunteering, canvassing, organizing, and otherwise showing up, I expect those who represent me to figure out how to win the game at their level. And whether that game is called confrontation politics or obstructionist politics or resistance or progressiveness or whatever, I want my elected officials to play to win, or get out.

(These thoughts are loosely inspired by this essay on civility in a new presidential era.)

Unwanted Filter.

How was your Christmas? Ours was very low-key and laid back. No one told me that once a 12-year-old turns 13, sleep is more important than presents. And the teen woke up kind of cranky! At noon! It was like we had our own personal Grinch.

I’d started reading the Anna Kendrick memoir, Scrappy Little Nobody, on Christmas Eve. And despite carrying it around the house with me the next day, I had no desire to read it. That’s not like me — memoirs are my reading equivalent of a bag of Kettle brand salt and cracked black pepper chips: guilty pleasure, consumed in record time. She’s not a bad writer. There are some funny moments. Maybe my reading tastes are changing, and fun and frivolous tales of young privilege are simply not enjoyable to me anymore. 

But more likely, the past 6 weeks I've felt like I’m living the same life with a filter over it. A filter I'd never choose BTW, that never seems flattering on anyone else's Instagram pics, either — and I’m still living my life with this unwanted filter laid over it, and I keep messing with the RGB settings to try to get things to feel just right. Anna Kendrick’s book may have delighted me on Nov 7, but today, it is not reading right. So I’ll get back to Dark Money, which hits a little close to home and should be on all our required reading lists anyway.

Merry Christmas.

I came down with a cold! It's not the worst, but my energy level depletes quickly. Even my outrage is on hold for now.

With Christmas so close, I'll wish you all lovely holidays. Whatever holidays you celebrate, I still stand by your right to celebrate them in peace and with all the love in the world, and so should anyone who says they believe in freedom of religion.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. LOL

See you next week. xoxo

No One Is Coming To Save Us.

We’ll have to save ourselves.

BTW I have heard not heard back from the BLM Austin chapter, nor from Our Revolution. But I’ve been flexing my calling, emailing, letter writing, and blogging muscles — and I hope you have been, too. Because no one is coming to save us. And there is a lot of work to do.

I’m thinking back to my Tuesday driver last week, and his insistence on a long-winded narrative that had no factual basis. His ability to accept what he’d heard, without any proof, and repeat it back verbatim. A question that’s been on my mind for a long time now, that needs to be answered, is: How can facts win over a false narrative? Is that even possible, if facts and fantasies don’t exist in the same plane?

Early this year, I’d read about Derek Black (here’s a good article) , the hope / future / heir apparent of the white nationalist movement, until he went to college and learned that people who were different from him weren’t necessarily bad — in fact, those he got to know were decent, honest, kind, and trustworthy people. He risked being ostracized from his family to live in honor of a new, inclusive set of values, incompatible with white nationalism. 

I don’t know that any of Black’s college friends tried “fact”-ing him. They helped him experience for himself, rather than allow him to accept what he’s been told.

Not everyone who voted for the president-elect is as blatantly racist as Derek Black. But how can we can help people we care about, who voted for the president-elect, experience different slices of life (aka expand their experiences), so that they allow experience to challenge their fantasy?

Privilege And Immunity.

It occurred to me, during the George Zimmerman trial and after Tamir Rice was killed, that I had no idea if society saw my son as a white kid or a child of color. I decided to weave current events into his history studies, so that he had a modern context. I wanted him to understand injustice from the point of view of the oppressed, so that if he grew up to be seen as a white man with all attendant privileges, he would embrace his responsibility to lend his voice to important social causes and fight for those who would benefit from his privilege.

Attending high school as a brown adolescent from a middle-class working family in a diverse school community, I did not experience privilege. All my life I’ve naturally identified with the oppressed. But I guess I have made the most of my education and professional opportunities, and in early middle age, it would appear that I enjoy lots of privilege now. I know this because I realized after the election that if I do nothing different in my life in the next four years, if I don’t step up and speak out more about the incongruence between the values of our country and my values as an American, my family and I will still feel more insulated than average.

And because I will probably always empathize with the oppressed, standing on the sidelines is not good enough for me.

My working theory is that anyone who is not making changes in how they stand up and speak out feels immune to potential changes because of their privilege. 

In other words, if someone is not more active in their community every day since Nov 8, if they are not committed to engaging more actively as a citizen, if they are not ready to fight for the rights of the oppressed, they must feel like they don’t have anything to lose. (Or they genuinely have the luxury of privilege. For now.)

Does that seem harsh or oversimplified?

I can’t help but remember the Niemoller quote after World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Tonight there are rallies going on all over the country, as it is the day of the Electoral College vote. I encourage you to show up for one, and bring a friend who may need some peer pressure to get their head back in the game. We are just a month from inauguration and there’s a lot of work to do.

Listen To Learn.

In a class I used to teach, we discussed the (particularly American) tendency to listen to another speak just long enough to form our reply. Then we stop hearing the other person, even if they are still saying something, because we are working on what we will say next. It feels faster and more productive this way; if I don’t have an immediate response I’ll look dumb; yes yes yes, let’s just get back to the point I was trying to make.

We miss a lot when we don’t listen to learn. We miss everything else the other person is saying. We miss an opportunity to hear and connect with and be influenced by this person more fully.

During a ride back to my hotel from a holiday party the other night, I remembered this, and willed myself into silent, active listening.

The previous 20 minutes had been a textbook display of two people talking at each other, my driver unleashing a torrent of nonfactual propaganda, punctuated with my insistent questions, “Where did you learn this? What’s the source of these numbers? Who told you this? How do you know it’s true?”

His response, predictably: “Google it! It’s everywhere!”

Stop. Breathe. Listen.

He repeated nearly every urban legend, cautionary tale, nightmare, and flat-out lie generated this year. I was mildly belittled, condescended to, patronized, mansplained, and put in various boxes in which I don’t actually belong. I listened to his fairy tale dream of the world to come in the next presidential administration. “Just watch, Antoinette,” all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail.

After 25 minutes of listening to learn, Google Maps showed we were close to my hotel. I broke into the tirade, “Listen, I met you not even an hour ago. You seem like an incredibly nice person. I’m sorry that 2016 has been so tough for you, and I hope that the president-elect delivers on all the promises that will improve your life, and our country. But if he doesn’t, I just ask that you dig deeper, and fact check what you hear. Don’t just assume that something is true because Google shows you search results. Click through, see who is writing this stuff, and make sure they are not driven by political, corporate, or foreign interests.”

The next morning, he sent me a text:

Makes me laugh that he talked 80% of the time and perceives that we had a good conversation, but as always, I have hope. 

BTW this document called Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda was shared by reliable sources I know personally. I haven’t read the entire doc yet, but wanted to pass it on because it was recommended enthusiastically. Have a great weekend.

Listen.

"Listen" was my theme for 2016. A decent challenge for someone who’s used to talking a lot. And I’ve had a few recent opportunities to listen. Last night I spent 50 minutes in a car, with a driver who could recite every script he’d heard on an astounding number of fake news items -- but could not give me one solid source for anything he said. “Just Google it!” he said on repeat.

This morning, I rode with a different driver who called himself a “progressive libertarian” (and he seemed to be exactly that). When we talked about sources for unbiased news, he said he reads everything, even the stuff that he mocks and has no factual basis, just so that he has the most complete view of the news.

How much time does that take, anyway? That’s a lot of work. Ideally I’d find two or three sources that I could trust to do that work of scouring, reading, and curating, and reporting back what I need to know.

Another friend sent me the graphic below in response to yesterday’s post. Don’t know who created it, but I find myself questioning the bias of this person, too. Haha. EXCUSE ME WHILE I MAKE A POINTY TIN FOIL HAT

New News.

For years I snickered privately about the fantasy world that Fox News creates, inspired by but often not based on facts or reality. A massive serving of humble pie fell onto my head on Nov 8 when Hillary Clinton, overwhelmingly favored by every major news outlet I read, did not win the election.

Echo chamber much?

Yes, and I didn’t even realize it.

For the past 5 weeks, I’ve been asking myself:

• Where I am getting my news?
• Is that news based on fact, or a complete enough view of reality?
• Who can I trust to report the news to me?

My main source of election news was The New York Times. But there’s a lot of world outside of New York, and I see now the dearth of NYT reporting this year in those rust belt states that decided the election. For that and a couple other reasons, I canceled my NYT subscription.

Then I turned a critical eye to the news stories I saw on social media. Huffington Post articles felt insanely melodramatic in the immediate post-election days. I somehow wound up getting a daily email summary of Daily Kos headlines, and let me tell you! I’d click through to a story that was far less sinister than the overly sensationalized headline.

This task of finding the best news outlets for factual, big-picture-reality based news is harder than I thought it would be. I want objectivity, but if there is a human reporter involved, there will always be a subjective slant. I want a news source that is not beholden to corporate or political interests, but have no idea how such a source would receive adequate funding to do the in-depth investigative reporting I want (are there enough people like me who will patronize it?). And as I’m vetting news outlets, how much fact-checking can I reasonably do, as one individual citizen with a full-time job that is not in media or journalism, just to make informed opinions and decisions about the world? 

Where do you get your news? How well do you think they report news that is factual, objective, and comprehensive?

Sync.

Hey, guess what? The blog is now linked up to the Tiny Rebel Daily email list! So M-F I'll post to the blog, and if you’re subscribed to the Tiny Rebel Daily newsletter, you'll get the post emailed to you with the Tiny Rebel Daily header. Based on the test emails yesterday, it works but doesn’t look very pretty. I’ll sort that out in the next couple of weeks. For the time being though, if you are seeing this blog post via MailChimp email, you can now click through to the blog post and leave a comment!!! (If you are wondering what the Tiny Rebel Daily is, you can access and read the archives here.)

So how are your stepped-up civic efforts going? For those of you who were unsure where to contribute your time and talents, what have you decided? Tell me! And then I’ll stop bugging you. Probably. ;)

Here’s my update: This weekend, I found tons of information on Our Revolution’s current work, but had to submit a form to inquire about specific volunteer opportunities. I found less info online about Black Lives Matter’s Austin chapter, but likewise submitted a form there, and I included info from my volunteer profile that I wrote last week so that they can connect me with someone who needs the kind of help I can provide. And I have been reading some thought-provoking essays and commentary on language, facts, and media, like this op-ed about ordinary citizens vigilantly fact-checking in this new world of make-believe, and this powerful argument for precision in our words. It's inspiring my own thinking and writing, which I'll share in the coming weeks and hope you'll help me figure it out.

Staying open

I'm working hard to stay open to the onslaught of negative / crazy / crazy-making (and very real) news that surrounds us every day -- without losing myself in the mayhem.

I used to block it all out. I stopped reading the news in March 2002, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq. But that's not sustainable, so I had to find a balance between being aware and being overwhelmed. Thich Nhat Hanh's book Good Citizens was a great resource to me in finding that balance. That's the good news! I found some balance. But it's not a static thing, and sometimes I have to work harder to remember how my choices every day can help impact the world I want so much to live in (which doesn't seem to resemble much the actual world, TBH).

So right now, on the verge of feeling overwhelmed, I'm focusing on a little "spread happiness" campaign that keeps me sending notes to and sewing little gifts for people I'm thinking about. Creative, handmade, positive vibes... crafting a better world, one zipper pouch at a time. ;)

Gratitude From My Sick Bed

What started as a 3-day cold has given way to bronchitis, and perhaps a mocking hint of conjunctivitis yet to be... Each day, I test myself to see if I can taste more, or better, than the day before. A wave of symptoms seems to subside and a new one takes its place. And yet, I can't help but feel immensely grateful...

• It could be worse! But it isn't. I am grateful.
• This illness hit me during a 10-day stretch between work travel. The number of people affected is minimized. I am grateful.
• I haven't exercised in over a week, and I can tell my overall muscle tone is softer. But my deep inner abs? Strong as ever, and sore, thanks to two nights of coughing through the night! Who knew? I am grateful.
• I have successfully worked from bed for 3 days now, which means short trips to the kitchen, a few times a day, to stock up on snacks and water and throat lozenges. I work in short spurts, and read or surf FB and IG too much in between. Every day, I've been able to take a short nap when I feel tired. I am grateful.
• I am able to work from home. So many aren't. I am grateful.
• My family is picking up the slack. Laundry and dishes are getting done without me. Even the dog took a few shifts snuggling, catching up on last weekend's episodes of Girls and The Walking Dead with me. I am grateful.
• If I talk for more than a few minutes at a time, I devolve into a coughing fit. It has made me a better editor of my speech -- only saying what is absolutely necessary, nothing more. I am grateful.

Hope you've successfully avoided the cooties! I thought when March began that I didn't need to be as diligent about my Vitamin C AND I WAS WRONG! How humbling to be wrong. Lessons in humility are good. I am grateful.

The Art Of Explanation by Lee LeFever

“Explanations fail when we are unable to translate the language of our work to a possibly uninformed audience... A great idea, poorly explained, ceases to appear great, and the cost is tremendous.”

— Lee LeFever, The Art Of Explanation

As a public speaker / facilitator / instructor, I help people make positive change for their businesses and lives, and at the foundation of each presentation should always be an explanation (why, how, etc.). Marketers and public relations people persuade the public to buy their product or candidate, and underneath that message is hopefully a clear explanation. Anytime we walk into a meeting to share an idea, we can focus on the exciting application of the idea without giving an adequate explanation of the idea itself. In other words, most of us need help doing a better job of explaining. And that's where The Art Of Explanation by Lee LeFever steps in.

LeFever understands that there is a gap, which we can easily underestimate, between our specialized (and often highly technical) knowledge of our subject, and our audience's grasp. This "curse of knowledge" causes us to spend hours on a presentation, only to deliver it to a disconnected audience. He shares a few models and templates for constructing better explanations, which I found so helpful in articulating my own "elevator pitch" and "video script."

Want to see what I came up with after applying the template? Here are three versions of "what I do for a living":

• Twitter description (140 characters or less):
  I help busy professionals present like professional speakers.
   
• Elevator pitch (30-60 seconds long):
  The typical professional gives presentations often enough to develop crippling anxiety, but not often enough to present well every time. I help these professionals learn and practice a handful of fundamental skills to nail every presentation with clarity and confidence. Because we present casually through everyday interaction, these same presentation skills improve all verbal communication.
   
• Video script (3 minutes max):
  Meet Jane. She is a respected engineer who is asked, about twice a year, to accompany her firm's sales team to client presentations as a technical expert.
  
  Jane, who is friendly and approachable but shy, spends most days with her small team of engineers. She feels anxious about these client presentations because she is working with clients she’s never met before, and because so much time elapses between presentations that each one feels unfamiliar and risky.
  
  Jane tells a friend about her upcoming presentation, and her friend recommends a public speaking coach. Jane thinks coaches are just for athletes, or high-powered executives, but she calls anyway. The public speaking coach shows Jane that just a handful of skills underpin every successful presentation. Over several sessions, Jane learns the models and practices these skills until she feels prepared, confident, and even excited for her next client presentation!
  
  As an unexpected bonus, Jane starts to see her everyday interactions with her small engineering team differently. She applies the public speaking models and skills to informal interactions and finds that she communicates more clearly, and gets better results.
  
  Hooray for Jane!

If you have an important message to craft, and you'd like to explore ways to do it better, pick up this book and give it a try. I've already shared one of the templates with a small group of cohorts who are using it to improve how they communicate about their small businesses.

Here's my review of The Art Of Explanation by Lee LeFever, on GoodReads.

Conference Kit

My primary client is Keller Williams Realty, and their annual convention, called the Keller Williams Family Reunion, happens every February. This year I'll attend my 16th, and I've got my "conference essentials kit" down pat:

• It's always a good idea to bring lots of business cards, but hopefully yours, if they have a picture of you at all, have a more recent photo than one taken 11 years ago. (I just got new photos done a couple weeks ago, but I'll share more on that later.)
• I don't understand why, but folks find all kinds of reasons to justify not investing $10-25 on a good portable phone battery charger. It's a great tool to have, especially if you're also taking notes and photos of presentation slides on your phone.
• The outlet splitter could make you the most popular person in a breakout session room -- I know from first-hand experience.
• Most convention centers have big community water bottles, and flimsy plastic cups. Don't bother with them. Bring your own empty water bottle and fill up as you need to. Just test beforehand to make sure the bottle you bring has a tight seal. (Ask me how I know...)

I don't leave for another couple of days, so tell me -- am I missing anything? ;)

Mojo, Interrupted

Hey, guess how long it took me to sew this simple tote bag? THREE WEEKS!

Right after the new year, I bought an acrylic hexagon template from Stitch Lab. Using some random scraps from past quilting projects, I managed to eke out eight hexagons via English paper piecing, and sewed them in a honeycomb pattern. I pulled out all the leftover natural canvas in my sewing room and found a big square I could use as a pocket; a long, narrow rectangle I could use for straps; and about a yard of uncut canvas for the body. I love it when I don't have a plan and everything comes together anyway!

But about that plan... later that day, I got called for a last-minute work trip. It took me about 48 hours to work out the logistics and get packed.

The day I was to leave on the work trip, I decided to stitch the hexagons to the pocket. With project mojo flowing at an all-time high, I had to STOP this sewing project to get on the road. It was likely to be at least a week before I'd be home and get the sewing mojo flowing again.

I sewed the hexagons to the pocket on January 10. I finished the bag today, February 1. Three weeks!!! Three weeks to get my mojo flowing again for about an hour of solid sewing. I don't like these statistics. I was tempted to start a new sewing project before I'd finished the hexagon tote! Insane. One thing that seems to help me pick up a project where I left off is if I make all the little decisions ahead of time. In this case, I knew I'd make the straps instead of using cotton webbing, which seems silly but could have really held me up. Another thing that got me to the finish line was deciding I didn't want ONE MORE unfinished project laying around my sewing room.

It feels great to have completed this. I know I'll use a versatile, lightweight, big tote like this a lot. But I have so many other things I want to sew this year, and I can't get them all done with a 3-weeks-of-downtime-to-one-hour-of-sewing ratio!

How will I ever get my sewing mojo in line with the reality of my life???

Sometimes our dog is very cat-like, walking into the frames of photos when his help isn't needed, and other times unwilling to get in a photo when you want him.

Modern Love Podcast

My "learning style," if you believe in those, is primarily visual. Which makes podcasts, heaven for auditory learners, really tough for me. I fall asleep! I tune out! It can be a mess. 

I've been trying out different types of podcasts, at different times of the day, to see what sticks. At the moment, listening to a short podcast during my morning writing time has worked well, and when I saw that The New York Times' Modern Love column was getting its own podcast, I was elated. Modern Love has been proof of the power of a well-crafted essay, for all the naysayers who criticize essays for gratuitous navel-gazing. I've been challenged to think differently after reading some of these essays.

The essay featured during this week's podcast, called "Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math," written by Amy Seek, is poignant, and even more powerful as read by the actor Sarah Paulson.

Your Weekly Funny: Life Hack Overload

I read this a few weeks ago, when I felt bombarded by all the NEW YEAR LIFE HACK posts being shared on the social media circuits, and I felt understood and vindicated:

Sara Kloek's "95 Things I Should Do Every Day According To The Internet."

Enjoy!

On Goal Setting: Results vs. Process

I had a daily writing goal in 2015, and I hit it! I wrote 365 days last year. But this is my first post in three months, so clearly I had no blogging goal, haha. Maybe I need one! (Note to self…)

Late last year, I had a couple of epiphanies about goals. The first is that I’d become a one-year goal setting and goal achieving ninja. I’d successfully set and hit one-year goals for several years. BUT I was achieving a succession of one-year goals without any long-term plan. My friend Colette suggested a book called Five: Where Will You Be Five Years From Today? I completed all the exercises over three morning writing sessions and walked away with a concrete vision of what I want to see in five years. Big wake up call: my son will be in his final year of secondary school in five years. Better be sure I’m raising the man I want to see in 2021!

The second epiphany is that I’m in a good place overall, both personally and professionally, and it didn’t happen overnight. This has become a bit of an obsession. I traced back healthy eating, for instance. I am not claiming to be the cleanest eater in the world, but I bet I’m doing pretty good compared to the average American. It began in 2002, when I got pregnant. It was the first time in my life I remember questioning what I ate, considering that my personal nutritional choices would also affect the baby growing inside me. I cut out all caffeine during my pregnancy, and began eating organic produce. After my son was born and began eating solid foods, I bought organic for him and conventional for my husband and me, and asked myself one day, “Why would you want only the best for him, but not for yourself?” I am sure we spend far more than most 3-person households on food, and it’s about quality, not quantity. We forgo other luxuries because food quality is a high priority for us.

I’m happy we have healthy eating habits, and each year since 2002, we’ve made some adjustments that at the time didn’t seem major, but as an accumulation of habits, lead to really positive outcomes.

One memorable story I've heard about goal setting was from a teacher who insisted that a 25-pound weight loss goal he’d set in January, and had not happened yet by December 1 of that year, would not have happened had he not written it down. After Thanksgiving, he buckled down, disciplined himself for the following month, worked out like a fiend, and by December 31 he’d hit his goal.

Yay for him, but what I remember most is that the next year that weight came back! To my knowledge, the number on his scale has continued to go up and down over the years, because he has always focused solely on the result goal, and not on a process goal.

So I’ve been looking at goal setting very differently. Instead of focusing on an just an achievement, I’m mostly focusing on behaviors, habits, and rituals that can lead to an outcome I want.

Now that I’ve written that, it seems silly and self-explanatory. But business people can get carried away with end results ("Just bullet point it for me!"), totally ignoring the means. And the means are what lifestyle, and quality of life, are all about.

How are your 2016 goals coming along? Are you more of an end result goal setter, or a process goal setter, or both? 

Weekly Notes #4

• After last week's shooting at Umpqua Community College, this teacher wrote about the unbearable weight we put on too many people's shoulders when we refuse to engage in productive conversations about a really tough, emotional topic like gun control.
• The thought of spending hundreds of dollars on custom jeans is outrageous to me. But maybe it isn't just the jeans you're paying for -- it's the total experience.
• The New Yorker describes Sue Rahr's strategy called LEED, "listening and explaining with equity and dignity." sounds like an amazing policing strategy, and a really effective life strategy.
• Living wage? CNN Money profiles a month of earning and spending for a single working mom, earning minimum wage. It's reality and it's no good.
• After all this heavy stuff, I've got to share this excerpt from an interview of Karl Lagerfeld in British Vogue. Always reliable for a meme-ready quote, he says, "I am all fake but not remade."

The 10% Rule

I instituted "The 10% Rule" this year as a personal guideline for my reading: If I'm 10% into a book, and I don't like it, let it go.

At the end of last year, I saw that I'd finished and reviewed quite a few books that I didn't like! And most of the time, I had an inkling I wouldn't like these books early on. I just rationalized I should give each book more time to develop... so I'd keep reading... and before I knew it, I'd be halfway into the book. And then I'd feel I'd invested too much time to abandon it. Some friends and family members pointed out, after reading those reviews I'd written on Goodreads, that they don't typically finish ANY books they don't like.

What a novel idea!

So I tested my theory late last year. Could I tell by 10% completion whether I'd like a book or not? And the answer was YES. Thus, The 10% Rule.

I invoked it last week, for The Rosie Effect. Sorry to say that 38 pages in, this sequel had none of the magic of The Rosie Project. And I got to jump on Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari, a book club pick from September that came from the library after that meeting was long over. LOL More on that one later...