Time for a pity party!

I have a personal standard of being about four years behind most cultural trends. It's not a written policy or anything. It just happens that way.

I'm aware of the stuff that's sweeping the nation, as they say. I just don't always participate in it, at first.

Especially books and movies. Whenever I watch the Academy Awards ceremony, for example, I've rarely seen all of the movies up for the big awards. I'm lucky if I've seen one. However, I can usually tell you more than you wanted to know about the plot, who stars in them, and who was killed or hooked up or broke up during the filming of said blockbuster because I read a lot.

I live my life like the perfect reference librarian, full of secondary information I can readily pass along without actually going into the stacks.

No, I'm more like a walking, talking Bible concordance, full of helpful names and numbers but no fulfilling scriptures.

Anyway, now that I'm out of literary analogies, I can admit that I'm not sure what sucked all the joie de vivre out of me (twins). I can't think of many "Jill" things I'd be excited enough about to wait in line for. I've waited in line for plenty of kids stuff, but not by choice. I think the last thing I literally waited for in a long line with anticipation was a coveted spot in the summer session of preschool. So, yeah. That's how bad it is. Now you understand why I get so excited when a new FreeCreditReport.com commercial comes on.

To combat this slow ossification of my life, I suddenly decided to read a best-seller. At least, it was a best-seller about four years ago.

I chose Eat, Pray, Love because I happened to read that its author's second book was coming out, and I thought, "Wow, I never even read her first book." I also saw where Julia Roberts was playing the lead in the movie version of that first book, which means it will get a lot of press, so I thought I'd at least try to be ahead of the trend game this summer.

As I slogged through the book, I got more and more annoyed. It follows this woman's journey to find herself across Italy, India and Indonesia. I enjoyed the Italy section pretty well because I can identify with a European vacation where the focus is eating.

In India, I got bogged down by all the ... meditating. I guess that's what got to me. For one thing, this woman had just spent four months in Italy eating. She then traveled to India for rejuvenation. She challenged herself at a remote ashram by meditating for hours on end, all in pursuit of a quiet mind.

I just gave up. I had to quit reading the book because I could not empathize with this woman. I kept wanting to yell out, "You don't need to find yourself. You need to find something to do! Have a kid or two, and you'll find out who you are real quick!"

But I didn't. I don't recommend self-discovery as a reason to have children. I'm also fully aware that having children is not an option for many. I think that's my point. Our worlds are so different that the person I am right now could only survive in hers for as long as she could thrive in mine.

I can see why Oprah fawned over this book so much on her show. It is so something that Oprah would do. She's all about finding your best self and living your best life, which is more than I can live up to with so many other lives to worry about.

I've always been surprised that Oprah, a childless billionaire, has so much influence over mothers in this country.

I stopped watching Oprah the day she recommended a $40 bottle of hand soap for my guest bathroom. I think I fed the five of us for three days on $40 last weekend.

Reading this book reminded me of the last few months of my Glamour magazine subscription. I used to love Glamour so much that I grew up wanting to work there. I even wrote it down as my first choice when I applied for the ASME internship while I was in college. I ended up interning for Guideposts, which I think was a little bit of God's handiwork because I think He wanted me to go deeper.

Those last few times I read Glamour, I would flip past more articles than I would read. I was married by then, and I didn't want to read about dating issues. I was not employed at the time, so all the career advice bounced right off me. Even the fashion items didn't appeal, so I let the subscription lapse. I missed Glamour as much as I missed Tiger Beat.

I haven't missed Eat, Pray, Love yet, though I may check it out again just to say I finished what I started. But I'll probably wait until my mind quiets down. One of my sources of inspiration was up at 3 a.m. feeling pukey.

As for rejuvenation, a short nap next to a big dog does it for me.

I survived the white-out of January 7

This is how we spent the last winter "storm" that was forecast for my area a couple of weeks ago. Owen is seen here ready to get his massive tonsils removed.

Local meteorologists had been watching that storm make its way here for several days. Tim said it was a lot like when he was growing up here and someone would say, "It's snowing in Memphis," which meant for sure it would snow here.

I had so much warning that I was able to go to Kroger TWICE, for good measure, just in case we were snowed in with two hungry 13-year-olds and a recovering tonsillectomy patient.

The storm was supposed to hit during Owen's procedure, in fact. We did watch it start coming down from the surgery center window. Keeping tabs on the weather kept us busy in the waiting room. I kept waiting, though, for the flakes to get bigger and for the parking lot to turn white.

It never happened.

The great Snowstorm of January 7 was a no-show. All we could claim was a "dusting."

So today I see predictions of a winter storm warning at the end of this week. My preliminary check of weather dot com tells me Thursday will see a high of 44 with a "wintry mix." I don't plan to run to Kroger just yet. Unless it gets MUCH worse in Memphis.

I think this time I'll risk it.

A "laptop" sounds like such an innocent thing

My new laptop has aged me by about 20 years.

Maybe not literally, but when I try to use it, I feel like a grandma getting her first look at one of them newfangled telephone machines.

I'm always having to call over my kids and ask, "Now what's this here thang do?" "Wait, what was that you did?" "Hey, uh, where'd that thing I wrote go? It just disappeared!!"

I sound just like this 50-ish woman who was a grad student at Memphis State when I was in my, ahem, fifth year of college there (after my parents had given me three years to figure it out at UT). We were in a brand new class called Electronic Publishing, and Professor Art Terry was showing us a Mac with - gasp! - a program called Windows. We all sat agog as he showed us the mouse and used it to click on the drop-down menus. We couldn't wait to get out fingers on it, and at first the cursors flew wildly around the screens as if we were trying to steer a car with our elbows.

Most of us, when we didn't catch onto something right away, were too cool to say anything. Not Miss 50, though. She'd panic at the slightest blink on the screen and yell out stuff similar to what I posted above.

Of course, now I am closer to 50 than I am to 20, and I sometimes find myself sitting slack-jawed in front of this-here new computer.

For one thing, it has a shiny new version of Word, rather than the B.C. version I had been using. That's awesome, except that the icons are all in the wrong place, and I have to stop and think, "Where is that spell check icon? On my OLD computer, it was always right here where I could find it."

The worst thing you can do to an impatient person is make them have to stop and think about how to do something.

The laptop keyboard is my biggest nemesis right now. The delete button is in the wrong spot, "page up" and "page down" are switched, and "control" is right where my hand wants to reach to hit "shift." Instead of capitalizing something, I end up hitting Ctrl + T and opening a new tab or something equally jarring when I'm trying to be brilliant.

Don't even get me started on the touchpad.

My husband keeps telling me I could get a laptop keyboard, but that would not work very well when I'm using it in my Mister Chair.

To top it all off, I think this screen is telling me I need bifocals.

Gender confusion

For the first time ever, I walked into a store and mistook men's clothes for women's clothes.

Yes, it's true. I don't shop very often. But I didn't think I was that out of practice!

I had gone to my local Stein Mart to exchange something. As I walked over to the customer service counter, I thought they had rearranged the store and put women's clothes where the men's department used to be.

The corner display featured Lucky jeans and shirts with pretty embroidery on the cuffs and pastel paisley prints. I honestly did not realize they were for men.

I tried really hard to find a photo of the Malibu Cowboy shirts so I could post it here and say, "Am I right?!" "And you'd go, "Yep. I'd pick that for a woman." The best I could find was this Lucky Brand shirt that is quite representative of the shirts in question.

It's really no big deal, I know. Even though I live in a very creative town and see so-called "music-industry types" with chunky, highlighted haircuts and contrast-stitched jeans, I'm married to a man who thinks turquoise blue is a very flamboyant color. So there are men around here who get haircuts that cost more than mine and wear boots with heels higher than mine. I just never actually found myself this ... confused.

I need to get out more often.

The ties that bind

A friend of mine has been sharing via Facebook her experiences with her mom as her mother endures the final stages of bladder cancer.

As my friend catalogued a list of memories that flooded over her while sitting with her mother in the hospital, she wound up thinking about a time only a couple of weeks ago before the illness worsened, when she took her mother to get some groceries on a recent frigid evening. They got separated in the store, and she looked for her mom by walking aisle by aisle, just the way she used to when she was a little girl and her mom would let her look at magazines while she shopped.

My friend seemed surprised to relive that memory after so many years.

Naturally I thought of the times in my own childhood when I'd look for my parents aisle by aisle in a store, and how my panic would grow with each row I'd pass without seeing them.

Even if I stretched it as a teenager and have neglected it as I've become a mom, the connectivity between my parents and me perseveres.

Now that I have kids of my own, though, I experience it from both sides. Last Mother's Day my husband and I took the boys to Orlando. The entire time we were there, my whole purpose in life was to keep the five of us together as we navigated the theme parks. Of course, Walt Disney World and Seaworld were jam-packed with families, and I devoted all my energy to keeping a hold on that invisible rope that linked my kids and my husband to me. At nearly every transition, Tim and I would even say aloud to each other, "I've got Owen." or "Is Henry here?"

As long as we all were together, everything was fine.

Sometimes the twins would ride a huge coaster without us, but I always felt such relief when I'd see them ambling toward us afterward. It was the same relief I'd feel as a kid when I'd see my parents in the grocery aisle.

It was love.

I love Carrie Fisher

If it weren't for Star Wars, most people probably wouldn't think of Carrie Fisher very often. She did play that awesome wicked ex with a flame thrower in The Blues Brothers, but even that's not enough of a legacy to rest upon.

The thing is, Carrie Fisher is an insanely hilarious writer. And even when she's not trying, she says stuff like this:

"I'm not as cooperative as you might want a woman to be."

Which is pretty much the story of my existence.

It's just that I have watched A LOT of Star Wars in the past two years, since my youngest discovered it, and because of that I keep thinking about Carrie Fisher. When the first movie came out, in 1977, she was a pretty actress, but not a babe by today's standards. And thank goodness. She gives Princess Leia substance, and the more of her stuff I read, the more I understand how.

She also happened to utter my new personal mission statement:

"If my life were not funny, it would simply be true, and that is unacceptable."

Words to live by.

If the MPAA lived here

After watching the trailer for the new Jackie Chan movie, I realized that my house is usually rated PG, with "mild action violence and some rude humor."

One way to tell if someone loves you

Yesterday morning as I used the last bit of butter on Henry's toast, I noticed that my fancy Provence-style butter dish looked pretty glommed up with butter. I planned to wash it later that day after I dealt with all my kids' mouth issues, which can only be detailed in a later post.

My mom came over to watch the youngest boy, who was still recovering from giving up his tonsils and adenoids on what will probably be the only snow day we'll have all year. She ended up staying most of the day.

Later, as I prepped for dinner, I opened the butter dish to clean it and noticed that the lid didn't stick to the bottom as it had that morning. My mom had already taken care of it.

And she never said a word about it.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Bringing in the new is not always easy.

Bringing the family tree to life

Happy 2010! It's taken me a while to acknowledge the transition, but I guess I'll go along with it.

One reason I've been out of touch is because I spent so much time over the holiday in my alternate universe, tracing my family's history.

I am a proud participant in this old person's hobby, as one of my neighbors once called it. Maybe it used to be a geriatric pursuit because you needed a lot of time to research the documents involved. Now, though, online access makes it so easy that I end up spending a lot of doing it because I just can't quit.

My pursuit of my ancestors began in 2007 when my kids asked me a question and I didn't know the answer. We were on a Cub Scout outing, placing flags on graves at Stone River Battlefield in Murfreesboro in 2007. After reading name after name on the headstones, my boys asked if we had any relatives who had fought in the Civil War.

I didn't know, and that bothered me. My parents weren't sure, and I only have one living grandmother whose memory tends to be selective. So I did what I always do when I have a question: I turned to the Internet.

In just a little while, I found my great-grandfather's name on an original image of a 1910 census form, and I cried. Hey, I was surprised, too, but I felt overwhelmed when I saw evidence of a man I knew only from family stories. Here he was listed as a newly married 22-year-old with only one of his five children, my great aunt Allie.

I was addicted.

Since then, I've answered my kids' questions plus a whole lot more. We did, in fact, have several ancestors who fought in the Civil War, both in the infantry and the militia from Virginia through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. I found out from a long-lost cousin that one of my mom's great-grandfathers fought with Virginia at the Battle of Chickamauga, then walked to West Tennessee where he started farming.

I even found the above photo online of my great-great-great grandfather born in 1822.

Though my dad's side has been fairly simple to trace, my mom's side of the family, in fact, has been quite troublesome. I've traced my dad's side all the way to medieval Scotland. One of his ancestors came over on the Mayflower and holds the dubious honor of being the first person to be arrested in the new world. He apparently went all redneck and got into a fight with a man named Edward Lister. They were bound together by their hands and feet for two days with no food or water, then finally released.

My parents and I have laughed about this and bonded over our checkered past, though they may not laugh when they read it here.

It's funny what you'll remember, though, even when the past seems too cloudy to peer through. One reason my mom's side was so hard to trace is because her relatives all have the most common names in North America. Even with the Internet, it's maddening to sort through decades of documents to determine which James Mills is yours. How many James Johnsons do you think there were in antebellum Mississippi? Plenty. The same holds for William Baker and Charles Mason.

The breakthrough on my mom's side came as I was on the phone with her, discussing a Census form I'd found. As I started reading the names of the many children in one family, she suddenly remembered why old "Uncle Shack" had been called that. His mom's maiden name had been Shackleford. I found someone else's online family tree with another great-grandmother's missing maiden name: Lindsey. That opened a long line leading back to French Huguenots who settled in Abbeville, South Carolina. Fancy!

Fortunately the ladies on Mom's side had charming, memorable names like Almarinda and Arrietta. It's just unfortunate that most record keepers didn't care much about tracking maiden names back then.

So when Census time rolls around this year, don't turn your back on that person collecting your family info. You'll be helping your great-grandchildren connect to their past.

Or you could do it the easy way and keep your Facebook page up to date.

More cowbell, less snark

One of my favorite websites is Deadspin, which is a sports blog that discusses the kinds of sports stuff I like to bug Tim about when he's trying to watch the sports part of sports.

Today Deadspin posted about funny screen shots from last night's Fiesta Bowl, but their shot at the Boise State Blue Thunder marching band's "Cowbell Girl" may have taught them a lesson about premature condemnation.

Scroll down to Item Four.