Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

We all have our guilty pleasures. Some of us read trashy novels. Others play children’s video games when no one’s looking. One of my friends still enjoys eating pop tarts as a grown up.

Me? I watch the Oscars. And when I saw watch, I mean consume, absorb and otherwise tune out the world.

So even when it’s a year – like this one when, let’s face it – the Academy Awards were kind of meh, I still derive tons of pleasure from watching them.

This year had its own collection of classic moments. And so if, like me, you couldn’t watch the Oscars live, here are five things worth remembering:

1.Unforgettable Past Oscar Moments. Before we even hit the red carpet on Sunday, my eyes were glued to this fabulous montage of Oscar Fails over on Slate V. Narrated by someone pretending to be that omniscient voice that tells you the winner’s past Oscar history as s/he approaches the stage, this clip includes some of the greatest Oscar moments of all time, including David Niven’s terrific ad lib all those years ago.

2. Sasha Baron Cohen Drops His Ashes.  And speaking of the red carpet, if you haven’t yet seen Sasha Baron Cohen’s hilarious Oscar stunt before the ceremony got underway, it’s a must-view. To me, what’s particularly noteworthy about this video is not Baron Cohen, who is always larger than life and outrageous. It’s the two incredibly dimwitted E! commentators reacting to Ryan Seacrest. It’s times like these that it really hurts to be an American.

3. Angelina’s right leg. Much has been made of Angelina Jolie’s right leg, which made a prominent appearance at the awards ceremony, jutting out as it did – in all its slenderness – from her Versace dress.  But did you know that this leg also inspired a Twitter account? Yes, that’s right. Tweets from @AngiesRightLeg soared on Sunday night, especially following this reaction to Jolie’s limb from the Oscar-winning writers from The Descendants.

4. JLo’s NipSlip. Not to be out done, Jennifer Lopez’ wardrobe malfunction also inspired its own Twitter feed, @jlosnipple. But I’m with Big Little Wolf on this one: whatever we saw, J Lo looked fantastic – full-bodied and owning it -  unlike Angelina who – once full-bodied herself – has gotten painfully thin.

5. Jimmy Kimmel’s Movie: The Movie. For the past few years, late night host Jimmy Kimmel has had a great time spoofing the Oscars. This year, he made an 8-minute long fake movie trailer for his forthcoming hit: Movie: The Movie, starring everyone from Meryl Streep to Tom Hanks to Samuel L. Jackson to Tom Hanks (as a robot). Laugh out loud funny. The joke is always on us.

What am I missing?

Image: Oscar by lincolnblues via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I’ve always been fascinated by attempts to document personality types.

Part of that fascination surely stems from the fact that in another life, I’d be a psychotherapist.

And part of it  is that as I go about the networking process that is part and parcel of looking for a job, I’m coming into contact with all sorts of personality types along the way.

If you pay someone to advise you on changing careers these days, the very first thing they’ll likely do is administer a personality test to see what career paths you’re suited to. Personality tests are also increasingly part of the recruitment and promotions process at top firms.

I’ve had my own brush with them along the way, recounted in this post, about how – for better or for worse , my own essential personality “type” doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years. But I’m always excited to learn about new ways to parse personality.

So, how should we think about personality types?

1. Extrovert vs. Introvert. Extroversion/introversion is one of the four key dimensions of the famous Myers Briggs Type Indicator which remains the gold standard for many in assessing personality types. But until I stumbled upon this informative (and extremely funny) piece in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch entitled Caring For Your Introvert, I think I’d misunderstood the essential difference between the two. It’s not – as many people think – a distinction between shy and gregarious.  Introverts are not, in fact, necessarily shy if that means that they hate being around other people and/or other people make them anxious. It’s that their relative need to be around other people is much lower than that of the extrovert, who feeds off of constant interaction. For the introvert, as Rauch puts it (borrowing from Sartre), “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Whereas if you leave the extrovert alone for two minutes, “he will reach for his cellphone.” Love it!

2. Personality Style. I’m thinking here of the widely-used DISC personality assessment, which focuses a bit less on “type” than on “style.” DISC identifies  four key behavioral styles, which they label D (drive), I (insight), S (steadiness) and C (compliance). What I like about this way of thinking about personality (as opposed to the more nuanced but complicated Myers Briggs assessment) is that it gives you a sort of over-arching “flavor” for people you encounter, each of which has a set of prevailing traits, strengths and weaknesses. In my old job, for example, once I learned that as a (high!) D (dominant/forceful/task-oriented), I was sharing an office with a high S (reliable, dependable, process-oriented), so many things came to make sense and I could adjust my own interactions accordingly.

3. Birth Order. Another way to think about personality types is that of birth order. In brief, birth order suggests that where you fall in a family vis your siblings has a huge impact on how you behave. So, for example, the eldest (according to this theory) tends to be sharp, responsible and success-oriented, the youngest is more rebellious and risk-seeking and the middle child is an agreeable team-player. I know plenty of exceptions to this rule but as an arm-chair theory of personality types, I think it shows a lot of promise.

4. Manager vs. Maker. A useful dichotomy of personality within the workplace is the manager vs. the maker. On one side of this divide, you have a group of workers – usually managers – who divide their day into tiny bite-sized chunks and for whom meetings – even spontaneous ones – constitute the essence of their job. On the other side, you have “makers” – i.e. computer programmers, writers, artists – who need large blocks of time to carry out tasks and who find meetings onerous and inefficient because they cut into their productivity. I love this schema, because it cuts across professions to get to the core of what matters in a job: how you like to spend your day in terms of tasks.

5. Personality For Play. I learned about this personality matrix on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project blog. Gretchen borrows it from Stuart Brown, who’s written a book about the importance of play. Brown identifies seven key personality types for play, things like the joker, the collector, the explorer and the narrator. Again, no science here; pure observation. But I think there are some important insights to be gleaned for everyday interaction.

What about you? How do you sort people by type?

Image: Occasionally Slightly Louder by Von Krankipantzen via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

One of the hallmark features of adulthood is believing that you have the means to better yourself. As you step outside the comfort zone of the home in which you were raised, part and parcel of your newfound freedom and responsibility is harnessing that independence towards making something of yourself.

In the American context, at least, there’s the added belief that where you start doesn’t affect where you end up. Describing the putative American Dream, Horatio Alger wrote that we live in  “a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

In other words, people of my generation – and those before me – were all raised believing that, regardless of where we started, we could achieve a life for ourselves that was as good as – if not better than – that of our parents.

What a bummer to discover that this great national mythology that’s sustained us for so many generations may no longer be true. Indeed, a spate of recent studies suggests that Americans – unlike many of their European counterparts – are no longer upwardly mobile.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Social mobility is declining in the U.S. The basic data are startling. According to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths. Meanwhile, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. Pew further found that nearly one third of individuals raised in middle-class families couldn’t hold on to their status when they reached adulthood. Yikes.

2. Increased Income inequality is a major culprit. In a recent article in The Atlantic on this topic, Timothy Noah talks about one of the major causes of downward mobility in America: rising income inquality. Drawing on data by labor economist Alan Kreuger and others, Noah notes that during the American industrial revolution, growing income inequality was the price the United States paid for growing economic mobility. In the present era, in contrast, income inequality may be choking off opportunity. If you want to see this in comparative perspective, have a look at this graph of this so-called Great Gatsby Curve on Paul Krugman’s blog at The New York Times which shows quite clearly that the U.S. is both more unequal than other comparable developed countries (as measured by its Gini coefficient) and also has quite limited social mobility (as measured by income heritability). Kreuger further predicts that the persistence in the advantages and disadvantages of income passed from parents to children will rise by about a quarter for the next generation as a result of the rise in inequality that the U.S. has seen in the last twenty-five years. (The U.K. exhibits a similar trend.)

3. The Higher Education System is also to blame. Another culprit is America’s higher education system, which – despite efforts to broaden its applicant pool – remains highly exclusive. A Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges showed that of entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution, while sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. (Again, you see a similar trend in the U.K.) Another study showed that recruiters for the best firms in investment banking, law and consulting hire disproportionately from only five top schools. With a year’s worth of higher education clocking in at near $50,000, is this at all surprising?

4. Race and Gender matter too. The Pew Study on Economic Mobility also showed that a number of factors have impacted adults’ ability to earn a middle-class income like their parents. Among them are marital status, educational attainment, race and even gender. For instance, those who are divorced, widowed or separated are more likely to fall out of the middle class, and women face a greater likelihood than men. Also, Americans who don’t attend college are likely to face downward mobility, with African American men the most likely to drop out of the middle class.

5. Class tension is also on the rise. In light of all of the above, it should come as no surprise that class conflict is also on the rise. According to a different study by Pew, conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society.

Image: HIP_339628104.219198 by Steve Rhodes via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Shortly after my son was born 11 years ago, a friend of mine – the father of three much older kids – asked me how I was doing. At that point, I think we’d moved safely into that phase where I was no longer feeding my son every three seconds, he’d begun smiling at us, and my husband and I had more or less adjusted to this massive change in our lives.

“It’s such a great age,” I commented.

“They all are,” he replied.

It’s true, they *are* all great ages and I’m continually mystified by how exciting and interesting each phase of parenting is (even when I’m going through them for the second time with my daughter.)

But it’s also an ongoing challenge to parent and one always feels a bit behind the eight ball as you try desperately to figure out how best to react (or, indeed, whether to react at all) to our children’s behavior and emerging personalities.

To that end, this week I thought I’d share some new (but really) old parenting strategies that seem to prove their value again and again:

1.Incentives are better than punishments. When your kids misbehave – and particularly when they do the same annoying thing repeatedly – there’s a temptation to take something away from them: no television for a week, no play dates, no dessert. But rewards for good behavior are also much more effective than punishments for bad behavior, especially for younger children. In my own case, my daughter takes an inordinate amount of time to get dressed in the morning, producing frequent (and repetitive) conflicts. While my first instinct was to take away her computer time, I opted this week to try something new: if she can get dressed, brush hair and brush teeth each morning (and the reverse each evening) in under ten minutes, I’ll give her 50p a day. At the end of two weeks, if she does this consistently, she can buy a present for herself. (Bear in mind that she doesn’t have allowance right now.) I explained to her that we wouldn’t carry on buying gifts on a regular basis, but I’m hoping that by heaping praise on her in the next two weeks while we do this trial period, she’ll internalize the positive reinforcement and want to get dressed/undressed quickly, rather than only working for the extrinsic reward. So  far, so good.

2. Hitting doesn’t work. If you think that doesn’t bear repeating, think again. Here in the U.K. where I live, a Labour politician – who was, I kid you not, the former Education Minister – recently declared that if working class parents had more freedom to hit their children, we wouldn’t have had the riots that broke out here last summer. No sh$!. In a poll taken not so long ago, nearly one half of British parents surveyed said that they thought that teachers should be allowed to hit children to keep them in line. This, despite mounds of evidence showing that while spanking is very effective in the short run for altering a child’s behavior, in the long run it is completely counter-productive.

3. Understand where your kids are at, developmentally. Like many parents, I was absolutely fascinated by a recent article by Alison Gopnik  in The Wall Street Journal about the teenage mind. The upshot of the article is that teenagers are hitting puberty – and all the attendant hormonal, risk-taking changes in attitude this phase of life produces – much earlier than ever before, while becoming “adults” (in the sense of assuming responsibility for their own lives) ever later. The result is that their emotional development is out of sync  with their ability to exert judgment and self-control  in a way that it wasn’t even 20 years ago. Once I read this, I thought, Eureka! So that’s why my 11 year-old loves listening to Rap music but can’t be bothered to cut with a knife and fork properly.

4. Don’t micro-manage. I attended my son’s parent-teacher meetings earlier this week and was told by several of his teachers, independently, that they felt that while he had come into the school year a bit jumpy and unsettled, over the course of the year he had really calmed down. As a fellow manic, I can’t really criticize him too much on this score – the apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I couldn’t help but wonder if my own New Year’s resolution to chill out and try to control him less wasn’t helping, in part, to chill him out in other parts of his life. Coincidence? Maybe. But I’m going to press on with this resolution – despite temptations to “fall off the wagon” – and see if I keep observing positive change.

5. Keep reading  books by Faber and Mazlish. Believe it or not I do think that you can over-train yourself in the art of parenting. Some of it has to be instinctual – and based, crucially, on your particular child’s nature – or you’ll drive yourself insane. But I will put in a plug for two books by parenting experts Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish that I will stand by: How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, as well as their companion volume, Siblings Without Rivalry. I remember parenting blogger Lisa Belkin saying that for many years, she and her husband kept dog-eared copies of these books by their respective bedsides. Ditto.

What tried and true parenting strategies work for you?

*****

If you’re interested in hearing my views on why we should all – including Marco Rubio – be reading Fidel Castro’s new memoirs, head on over to The Washington Post’s She The People blog.

Image: Little Johnnie Totally Deserved It by feminaerecta via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Following the big splash around Jodi Kantor’s new book – The Obamas – where she provides an in-depth look into the First Family’s marriage, it seems like everyone has an opinion on Barack and Michelle’s relationship and what it has to say about the institution of marriage more broadly.

But apparently, not everyone’s on the marriage bandwagon.

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Institute, marriage is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere. Barely half of Americans over the age 18 are currently married, and the number of couples married in 2010 dropped five percent from 2009. This comes on the heels of a 20% drop in the overall number of married couples in the country since 1960.

These findings mirror those observed in the UK, where researchers found that only 48 percent of adults there were married.

So I thought it might be time – much as I did not so long ago with divorce – to pinpoint some smart posts out there being written about marriage:

1. All The Single Ladies – In addition to being the title of the runaway Beyoncé hit single, this is also the title of a provocative cover story in The Atlantic from November. In it, author Kate Bollick, traces the familiar evolution of marriage from an economic partnership (pre-20th century) to an idealized, romantic “coupledom”  in the 20th century. But she also points to a new trend – the rise of single, non-married women (the result, baldly stated, of an ever-shrinking pool of “marriageable” men.) Bollick makes an impassioned case for why this sociological trend may not actually be such a bad thing, and why it may suit women to seek out unconventional partnership arrangements that stray from the norm. As I watch friend after friend on the brink of separation and divorce, I’m having a hard time disagreeing with her, even as someone who tries very hard to stay married. Well worth a read, if you haven’t already.

2. Generosity is good for marriage – Or at least, so suggest the results of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project, which recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women. The survey found that men and women with the highest scores on the generosity scale were far more likely to report that they were “very happy” in their marriages. Apparently, even something as trivially small as making your partner coffee goes a long way towards keeping the flame alive. (For me it’s buttering his toast, as my husband would never dream of letting me near his coffee, but it’s the same idea.) And of course, that makes sense. Even when some of us may be inclined to give our partners the ‘death look’ when they fail to pick up after themselves (or in my case, profess not to remember how to turn on the dishwasher – yikes!), it’s important to remember that putting in that extra effort, even on something seemingly trivial, can make a difference.

3. Acceptance is also crucial. I remember when I was applying to my first set of jobs, straight out of graduate school, and one of my advisers sagely warned me: “All departments have their warts,”  which was his shorthand for “Nothing’s perfect.” He was referring to political science departments which might later employ me, but he may just as well have been speaking about future potential spouses. Elizabeth Weil has a great post on precisely this sort of acceptance in the most recent Modern Love column at The New York Times. Weil – for those who don’t remember – is the woman who went public on the cover of a New York Times Magazine a couple of years back about how she and her husband had undergone couples therapy to improve their marriage, even though nothing was really wrong. Now she’s back, explaining that what she learned from that experience is that the key to a successful long-term relationship is to accept that you will never entirely remove your partners warts (my term, not hers.) Yes, you’ll smooth some down, but they don’t go away. And for her, marriage is thus about learning to love your spouse very specifically, not despite – but because of  – his or her specific, individual flaws.

4. Nagging, however, is bad. There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal last week arguing that nagging is far more prevalent than adultery in modern marriages, and potentially at least as toxic. According to Howard Markman, a psychologist at The University of Denver, couples who became unhappy five years into their marriage had a roughly 20% increase in negative communication patterns consistent with nagging, and a 12% decrease in positive communication. Not surprisingly, nagging becomes particularly conducive to divorce when couples start fighting about the nagging itself. (Can’t imagine doing that. Ever.)

5. Silence can be golden. I was also quite taken with a post by Karin Kasdin on the New York Times Motherlode blog last summer about what it’s like when you grow old with someone and no longer have the multiple distractions at hand – especially with kids in tow – that force you to speak constantly to one another:  the day-to-day scheduling, the finances, the trip planning, etc. She remarked that one the surprising lessons of the empty-nest syndrome is that even while you might fear, as newlyweds, the day you no longer have something to say to one another, perhaps the best sign that your marriage is actually O.K. is when you can grow comfortable with the silence and realize that you won’t fall apart without the chatter.
Here’s to that.

Image: marriage by jcoterhals via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I’ve been thinking a lot about middle age of late, and what it is – exactly – that makes us more or less happy as we round this phase of life.

It might be that my 46th birthday looms on the horizon next week, which makes me feel like I’m already entering the second half of my existence. (For reasons I can’t explain, I have apparently decided that I’m going to live to 90.)

Or it might be that Blue Monday (the third Monday of January, purported to be the saddest day of the year) just passed. Fictitious or not – that milestone always prompts me to reassess my emotional state and decide if I’m happier or sadder than I was at this time last year.

To that end, I’ve taken a keen interest in recent research on emotional health in adulthood and what makes for happier grown ups:

1. Maternal Care – While the research is still confined to rats, it looks like maternal care influences brain chemistry into adulthood. Most of us would probably agree that this statement is likely true. But scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have demonstrated that intensive maternal care during infancy promotes the development of a specific hormone in the brain, which in turn controls the development of anxiety and stress responses. While the study still needs to be extended to humans, the preliminary results suggest that how much your mother dotes on you when you’re very young may be key to understanding things like post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders as you age. Ditto the adverse effects of maternal favoritism.

2. Religiosity – Another important factor in determining emotional well-being in adulthood is how religious you are. Modern happiness research leaves no doubt that religious people are happier than their contemporaries. This is something that has been born out both within societies and across them. Interestingly, however, American Jews scored the highest of any religious group on a “well-being” index within the United States, even though more than half of Jews are non-religious. So disregard all that kvetching and moaning; behind it all, Jews are actually feeling OK. (Perhaps that’s why I identify so much with them?)

3. Imaginary Friends – Oh! How excited I was to learn this:  a recent study out of NYU shows that having imaginary friends in childhood lays the groundwork for a more stable emotional adulthood. And that’s because through these imaginary friendships, what you’re actually doing is practicing how to express your emotions without fear of censorship or derision, all the while bolstering your creativity and verbal skills. As someone who grew up with a best friend called Con Brick Chair – and must listen endlessly to my own daughter chattering away in her imaginary play – I’m so pleased to hear that this behavior may actually be functional!

4. Early Sex – On the less encouraging end of things, research also suggests that early sex could trigger mood swings in adulthood. Again, the research has so far been conducted only on animals. But it implies that there may be an appropriate “age” to begin having sexual relationships, and that adolescents begin too young, this may have negative consequences for anxiety and depression later on. (Interestingly, being sexually active doesn’t seem to affect their school performance.) Something tells me that – if born out on real teens – these results might be of interest to politicians!

5. Choosing Happiness – I was delighted to happen upon a summary in the New York Times of a new book by Karl Pillemer called 30 Lessons For Living Well. In it, Dr. Pillemer – a human development scholar at Cornell University – interviewed more than 1,000 Americans from different economic, educational and occupational strata to get their personal views on what has made them happy throughout life, ranging from marriage to careers to aging itself. The article is fascinating on many counts, but one particular result stood out. Almost every single one of the interviewees concurred that happiness is a choice, not the result of how life treats you. So regardless of what happens to you early on in life, the consensus from those who’ve been there is that you are in charge of how you react towards those stimuli and for adopting a pro-active approach to being happy.

It’s nice to end on a positive note, no?

Image: Self Portrait by kasi metcalf via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Well, it’s that time of year again. The New Year rolls around and my inbox/RSS Feed/Facebook page is inundated with the resolutions of friends and strangers far and near: Lose five pounds! Run a marathon! Write that #$%@ novel!

I’m a big fan of making resolutions. (As those of us blessed with an overly health super-ego tend to be.) Not just because they impose self-discipline for things like leading a healthier lifestyle. But also because – if you choose your goals wisely – they can genuinely make you happier.

And apparently, I’m not alone. Research shows that 40-45% of adults make one or more resolutions each year.

The trick, of course, is following through. One study in the U.K. showed that as many as 78% of those who set resolutions for themselves in the New Year failed to stick with them.

Bummer.

I personally think that one way that you keep your resolutions alive is by saying them out loud. Because I firmly believe that if you tell other people what you’re shooting for, you’re more likely to commit to a goal.

(I’ve tested this strategy out. After announcing on this blog couple of years back that I was going to take Saturdays off for “me time,” people still chide me if they discover me lurking on Facebook or Twitter when I’m supposed to be resting. I love that they do this!)

In that spirit, I’m going to share my own resolutions for this year:

1. Get a job. Yup, that’s still top of the list. While my She The People gig at the Washington Post is fantastic, it’s just that: a gig. So I am still out there pounding the pavement: networking, sending in applications and combing job listings. I do, however, have a brand new (top secret!) strategy for my job hunt, which I’ll reveal when (God willing) the time comes. So that, at least, feels like a new wrinkle on an old-ish goal.

2. Be more romantic. While we were in Argentina, I couldn’t help but notice how affectionate, physically, Latins are with one another. It’s been so long since I lived in Latin America that I’d completely forgotten that aspect of life down there. The importance of things like hugging for marital success has long been documented. Seeing this on action in Argentina reminded me that even when you’ve been with your partner for awhile, you really need to fight the instinct to take him or her for granted. Which is why I’ve resolved to do more things one-on-one with my husband in the New Year, including the odd romantic getaway, when/as/if we can afford one. (See #1). I don’t know about you, but I want to die like this couple.

3. Ease up on my kids. Yeah, I know. I’ve said that one before too. I tend to be a bit of a control freak where my kids are concerned. Part of this is situational: I work at home so I have ample opportunity to “hover.” And part of it is just my make-up. But one of my close friends took me aside during our trip to Argentina and suggested – in the friendliest, I’ve-been-there sort of way – that I ease up a bit, particularly with my son. If I loosen the reins just a bit where he’s concerned, she convinced me – based on her own experience – that I’ll not only be doing him a favor (vis independence, less need to act out later on, etc. etc.) but myself as well. (It’s hard work trying to control other people’s lives!) She wasn’t the first person to suggest this; but somehow, coming from a close friend who herself has a tendency to helicopter parent, I actually listened. So far, so good on that one. (More to follow on this, rest assured.)

4. Eat less meat. You may wonder, after I waxed rhapsodic about the joys of eating Barbeque last week, how I could possibly now suggest that I would renounce eating meat? I’m not actually resolved to stop eating meat altogether. (Although part of me wishes that I could.) But yes, I’d like to move in the direction of becoming a Flexitarian – i.e. eating less meat without becoming a vegetarian – a new trend that’s gaining currency in the U.S. (Hey man, we all need a group!) I just think that I’d be happier and healthier consuming less flesh. (And perhaps if I substitute the word “flesh” for “meat” on a regular basis, I will become a vegetarian!)

5. Discover the United Kingdom. We’ve traveled a fair bit since moving to London five and a half years ago. But the vast majority of that travel has been outside the country. I’d like to change that. I feel like I really don’t know my adopted country nearly as well as I should and that there’s no time like the present to alter that. First stop? Wales. Because once you hear someone pronounce the name of the world’s longest railroad station, you, too, will think: I gotta meet those Welsh folks.

What are you resolved to do in 2012?

 Image: hugging by lanier67 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Well, I’m back from Argentina – the land that brought you Eva Peron,  the Tango, Gauchos and so much more. But before bombarding you with some of my choicer tales, both personal and political, from the journey, I thought I’d do more of a travel post to convince you why it might be worth your while to plan a trip there in the future, if you haven’t already been.

Because it’s truly a spectacular country and on this visit – unlike my previous trips there – I was actually able to get out of the capital city and see more of the countryside.

To wit, here are five reasons to visit Argentina:

1. The food. When I say “the food,” I really should calibrate this by saying “the meat.” It’s no secret that Argentine’s consume an inordinate amount of meat. (They have the highest per capital consumption of beef in the world.) It’s not at all unusual for them to have beef for lunch and dinner – sometimes even for breakfast too, for good measure! – and they have no concerns that this is at all unhealthy. So it was with some trepidation that I warned my husband – who fancies himself a Pollo-Vegetarian – that we would be consuming a lot of meat on our holiday and that there would be nowhere to hide. (Except pasta; because of their strong Italian heritage, Argentines also eat a lot of pasta.) But lo and behold! He loved it! Once our hosts started cranking up the asado (barbeque), he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Lamb, pig, cow – you name it. They really know how to prepare it in the most succulent ways imaginable. (Shame that my daughter announced mid-way through the first week that she was a vegetarian. I told her that little experiment in identity-formation would have to wait until January 1st.)

2. Tango. I’m sorry. I know that it may sound cheesy to some, but you simply cannot leave Argentina without seeing a Tango. You don’t need to go to one of the over-priced dinner-theatre “shows” in central Buenos Aires to do this. We saw our first Tango on a square in the middle of the Capital’s artsy San Telmo neighborhood one afternoon, and the second one performed by my friend’s 78-year-old parents in in her living room on Christmas Eve. There is something utterly captivating about the intricacy of the footwork, the dramatic flourish of the music and the smoldering, sexy undercurrent of the dance itself. Have a look.

3. Glaciers. After a week in Buenos Aires, we headed South to Patagonia. (While you’re there, get a hold of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Great travel partner.) I’ll be honest. I’d never given much thought to Patagonia before, beyond the odd nod to those super-cosy, colorful fleeces we all don. But Patagonia is also home to the most amazing Glacier National Park. I’d seen glaciers years ago in the United States and Canada, and I thought they were pretty cool. But those paled by comparison. The glaciers in Patagonia were unbelievable – each one had its own shape and character – personality almost- and extended on for miles. If you were lucky, you could witness a small piece crumble, break off and fall into the water – adding to the pool, which was truly spectacular.

4. Penguins. Even further South lies Tierra del Fuego, the self-described “end of the world.” We took a boat from the city of Ushuaia to check out some penguin colonies, along a route once traveled by Charles Darwin himself. (Thank goodness all that seventh grade social studies finally came in handy!) Particularly cool – if you ever make it this far South – is the Museo Akatushun on the Estancia Harberton, a working museum/laboratory on one of the little islands along the Beagle Channel where they dissect and display marine wildlife from the region. Check out the bone house – an olfactory wonder!

5. Psychoanalysis. I read somewhere not so long ago that Argentina has more psychologists per capita than any other country in the world. So when my good friend there suggested that I take my eleven year-old to see an analyst to deal with his asthma, I had to smile. My own view is that my kid probably needs a new inhaler rather than a shrink, but I love the fact that people there are so open to and open about therapy. God knows they could they use some of that up here in the U.K.

Image: Glacier Upsala by Médéric via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

For the last four days, I’ve been down for the count.  A horrible stomach virus swept through our household, claiming first my daughter, then my husband and myself (simultaneously) and then, finally, pulling my son down with us.

Unlike my daughter and my husband, who suffered a shorter, more violent episode of said bug – (and yes, I’ll spare you the gory details) – mine was of a more protracted nature. No vomiting. No extended stays in the bathroom. Instead, intense stomach cramps, chills and a low-grade fever. And an overwhelming sense of fatigue every time I stood up or tried to do anything other than drink Seven Up.

It doesn’t help that I saw Contagion last weekend – which is enough to make you think that every time you cough, you’re about to turn blue and start frothing at the mouth. (Other than that, I’d love to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, thank you very much.)

But I’m slowly emerging from the death throes of this thing. And as I do so, I realize that I learned a few things from this most recent brush with mortality:

1. Your kids are more independent than you realize. I wrote a post not long ago in which I vowed that in this new school year, I would do less for my kids. That resolution was partly driven by my own desire to be less of a control freak (hey, good luck with that!) and partly by the feeling that as they rounded the corner to eight and eleven respectively, my children ought to be taking more responsibility for themselves. And boy, lemme tell ya, there’ s nothing like having not one, but two (!) parents incapacitated to demonstrate what your kids are truly capable of. One day, my daughter (8) made lunch for my son (soon-to-be 11) and volunteered – without being asked – to sew a badge onto his football jersey. Meanwhile, my son, who’s favorite catch-phrase of the moment is “CBB” (which stands for “Can’t be bothered“) was suddenly jumping up to toast his own bread, take his own asthma medicine, get himself to football practice and back and – miraculously! – put himself to bed without listening to the iPod or reading a book. (I really *must* do this more often…)

2. Old movies really do rock. I wrote a post around this time last year when I was similarly afflicted by some hideous bug entitled Five Comfort Activities When You’re Sick. Right up there on that list was watching old movies. And you know what? It’s still there. This year, we cracked open some Sherlock Holmes. As we’d already made our way through all of the early versions of the series starring Basil Rathbone, we began to plumb the depths of the 1980s series starring Jeremy Brett and David Burke. Bliss!

3. Cars seem less of a luxury when you’re ill. Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while will know that I am fairly fervently anti-car, for health, environmental and aesthetic reasons. Nonetheless, I would by lying if I didn’t tell you that I miss driving when I’m ill. Because when you’re sick, there’s something really nice about being able to jump in the car in your PJ’s and zip down to the local corner store to pick up some Saltines (or rich tea biscuits, depending on the continent) and be back at your perch on the couch in five minutes flat. Because, seriously. Having to walk to the corner store when you’re under the weather? CBB, man. CBB.

4.  The homeless are deserving of our sympathies. There was a point, early on in this illness, when I was required to spend about six hours outside when I really wasn’t up to it. My daughter had a dress rehearsal for a play, followed immediately by a dance recital, and there was simply no way that I couldn’t accompany her. So during the two-hour rehearsal, I took myself down into the basement of a local theatre, lay down on a sofa in my gigantic ski parka, clutched my smart phone to my chest, and took a two-hour nap. Throughout the ensuing two hours, workers would periodically shuffle through the room and ask me to switch sofas or gently prod me in one direction or the other so that they could clean up or rearrange chairs. And I realized – in my half-awake, feverish state – that this is what it feels like to be homeless. And I felt – quite sincerely – a newfound sympathy for their plight.

5. I do too much. Period. Remember last week’s Yuletide post about my not-so-relaxed-downhill-slalom-course-into-the-holidays? Nothing like a stomach virus to force you to drop everything and sleep. Overnight, I began missing deadlines, canceling meetings, and turning off the answering machine to avoid the sound of the telephone. And you know what? It felt great. There’s a lesson in here, folks. For me, definitely. And for some of you as well, I suspect.

Happy Holidays. Be Happy. Be Healthy. Be Relaxed.

Sick as a Dog…by Chewy Hooey via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Well, tis’ the season and all that good stuff. But if you’re anything like me, you’re not exactly gliding into the festivities this year, a glass of eggnog in one hand, some gift wrap in the other and a sprig of holly dangling playfully from your neck.

Rather, you’ve got the disemboweled remains of your daughter’s reindeer christmas cracker in one hand, a to-do list in the other hand that’s so long, the paper has actually begun to curl and some masking tape stuck to the back of your hair which you haven’t washed since last Tuesday.

I just glanced down at my own to-do list – you know, the one that’s meant to get me through this week and next before my family takes off on a two-week trip to the end of the earth (literally) – and it read something like this:

Alongside the sort of monumental, life-changing, BLOCK PRINT, do-or-die tasks like:

*turn in job applications by designated deadlines

*decide whether or not to buy the exquisitely-located-but-slightly-too-expensive-and-slightly-too-small-flat, and

*have that discussion (again) with ten year-old about sex,

I’ve got an equally long list of imminent tasks like:

*sort out food for coffee morning AT MY HOUSE this Friday

*finish buying Xmas gifts for all friends in Argentina (and make sure that there are enough Hanukkah candles for home…where did I buy them again last year?) and

*clean up dog poop in foyer before coffee morning (and we all know how I feel about dog poop…)

In short:  I’m frazzled. And I bet you are as well. Here are five tips for remaining calm during the holidays:

1. Just say no. Gretchen Rubin had a great post over on The Happiness Project recently where she encouraged readers to think of themselves in the third person as a means of taking better care of their own needs. In her own case, for example, she pretended that she was answering phone calls for herself by saying things like “Gretchen gets frantic when she’s really hungry, so she can’t wait too long for dinner” or “Gretchen really feels the cold, so she can’t be outside for too long.” In my own case, I have a terrible tendency to over-schedule my weekends, which just leaves me feeling absolutely wiped out by Sunday night. So particularly during this overly-hectic holiday season, I’ve been trying to remind myself that “Delia needs to chill on the weekends now so that she has energy to enjoy the holidays when they actually arrive.” Externally, this has translated into my canceling some dinners, play dates and even holiday parties so that I can just relax.

2. Accept being invisible. This comes from communications guru Chris Brogran, who has recently made a conscious effort to become not only less busy, but less public in his professional life. Brogan’s basic point is that for many of us, much of our alleged “busyness” is really about responding to our underlying fear that if we aren’t perpetually “out there” getting noticed by others, we’ll no longer be relevant. But that’s not only exhausting, it’s also – ironically – counter-productive, because it draws us away from core focus. Brogan’s talking mainly about bloggers and other heavy consumers of social media, but his point applies equally well in real life, particularly during the holidays where there is such an over-abundance of social gatherings. You don’t need to go to every cocktail party or to be seen at every coffee morning.  You might find that once you show up at fewer holiday parties, far from detracting from your holiday happiness, you’re actually more chipper because you’re spread less thin and investing your time more in those areas that you care about most.

3. Triage. I once wrote a post about productivity in which I suggested that one way to get on top of your to-do list is to divide your list into long-term and short-term items. Each day, you tick off one item from the short-term list. Each week, you take a concrete step towards something on the long-term list. This has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas per se, except that if you’re like me (see above) you’re going to need some extra help “getting sorted” round about this time of year. Translated into my own current set of competing demands, then: dog sh$! now; sex talk later.

4. Do less for your kids. Sure, this is meant to be a season that’s all about giving. But chances are that if you’re a parent  – and particularly if you’re a working parent  – and super-especially if you’re a working mom kind of working parent – you’re already multi-tasking way more than everybody else out there anyway. And enjoying it less.  So by all means, assuming your kids are old enough, hand off as much to them as possible so that you can take care of all those extra items that have quietly found their way onto your to-do list of late. (Did I mention the Hanukkah candles?) Let your kids decorate the tree. Hang a wreath. Cook the latkes. Not a parent? Do less for your spouse or partner. But whoever you are, do more for someone else. It’s a great time of year to volunteer.

5. Do something for yourself. Again, this might seem like a counter-intuitive message for the holiday season. But if you’re feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, think about one simple thing that is entirely yours and which might – amid the chaos – stop time for an hour and help you to relax. It might be something as simple as getting a massage or taking a walk in the park. In my own case, I’ve been working hard over the past few months at making some new friends. So one morning this week – when I had so many deadlines pressing down upon me, I felt like I could barely breathe – I went for a quick coffee with a woman I’d met and we talked about a book we’d both read. So much fun. Afterwards, somehow everything else didn’t seem so onerous after all.

How about you? What do you do to stay calm during the holidays?

Image: Fuck the deliveries by Funky64 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.