Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance will officially be released by Seal Press on October 5th. 

What’s Beautiful You all about?  

Every day, American women and girls are besieged by images and messages that suggest their beauty is inadequate—inflicting immeasurable harm upon their confidence and sense of wellbeing. In Beautiful You, author Rosie Molinary passionately encourages women, whatever their size, shape, and color, to work toward feeling wonderful about themselves despite today’s media-saturated culture. 

Drawing on self-awareness, creativity, and mind-body connections, Beautiful You incorporates practical techniques into a 365-day action plan that empowers women to regain a healthy self-image, shore up self-confidence, reframe and break undermining habits of self-criticism, and champion their own emotional and physical wellbeing. Through accessible, doable daily actions, women of all ages are encouraged to manifest a healthy outlook on life—teaching them to live large, and starting them on the path to learning to love themselves and others. Molinary steers clear of the florid affirmations and daily meditations often utilized by books geared toward personal growth, and instead delivers a hip, modern guide of inspirational thought that keeps pace with the times.

Beautiful You is a practical, candid, and accessible handbook that will strike a chord with every woman who has ever faltered in her self-confidence or lost her personal brilliance—and it will make sure she never lets it happen again.

 But before BY hits bookstores, I am hoping you’ll join me for a Beautiful You Spike Day where we’ll celebrate sending the book into the sales stratosphere with a Buy One Get One giveaway for those who order the book ON Tuesday, September 28 (tomorrow!). 

Why does a Spike Day matter?  Because bookstores, web-sites, media sources pay attention to pre-publication sales.  It might mean that they recommend that book more frequently, they get more copies in the store, or they review it.  All these things give a book a boost and I think Beautiful You really deserves that attention. 

Here’s why:   Over the course of a year, Beautiful You teaches women what they need to champion and fully live their own lives, coaching themselves into the most extraordinary- and necessary- habit of treating their whole selves well.  It’s a great journey for one to take personally and also a great gift for friends.    

I am so incredibly proud of this book and also eager to get it into the hands of women of all ages who could benefit from more self-care and self-love.  I am also eager for it to spark conversations among women so that we can be honest about how we judge ourselves and begin to let those behaviors go. 

 Now, back to Spike Day:  All you need to do to be a part of Spike Day is order Beautiful You ON September 28^th from Amazon.com, Powells.com, BN.Com, Borders.com or another online market (like a local indie favorite) and then send me a copy of your receipt (minus the credit card information) at hijasamericanas@gmail.com along with the mailing address you want me to use to send a book to you.  What’s in it for you?  Another book! 

The first 75 people to send me receipts will receive a signed copy of Hijas Americanas or Voces Latinas (an anthology for young Latinas and Latinos that I am included in) or another Seal Press title (I have a limited quantity), or a signed copy of The Green Year by Jodi Helmer (if you have a preference, let me know which one you’d like and if I have copies left, I’ll hook you up).  Thank you so, so much for your support!

Bit # 1:  The other day, Happy was evaluated for Occupational Therapy.  I knew he had some tactile, auditory, and sensory seeking behaviors that were likely off the scale of normal and thought we would at least check to see if they were the sorts of things that register on the OT’s scale.  Anyway, the OT handed me this survey to fill out on Happy’s behaviors and one of the first questions was  Does your child like to put things in his mouth?  Um, that would be a yes.  Everything but food.  Food, not so much.  Eating is a drag for him but other stuff (and in the case of the photo above- fake food), all about it.  Yesterday, I discovered the buttons on my calculator had been chewed off.  Cannot blame Lola for that one.  She is not nearly so precise. 

Anyway, Happy technically qualifies for OT in the areas that I felt we were seeing some issues but the OT evaluator also felt like we were doing so many of the modifcations at home already that formal occupational therapy wouldn’t help us get much further.  Kudos to all the folks in our pre-adoption education who had us read as much as we could beforehand about working with children with different needs so that we could be better prepared when we came home.  Right now, our approach is to, as we transition, to let Happy know the next few steps that will happen. As we prepare for nap, I tell him that we are going to read, then change his diaper, and then go night-night and we repeat that several times throughout the reading, etc so he knows what is coming next and can prepare himself.  We give him time to become still in between activities.  For example, if we have dinner out– whether just as a family or with other people- we need to come home and have transition time before he can get into the bath without it being too hard for him.  So, we leave in time to build in that transition time at home.  We also try to do a fair amount of safe physical activity with him on our terms- maybe more than the average kid needs- so that he doesn’t have to go seeking them out on his terms which may be less safe.  So there is guided big jumping, pillow crashing, big bear hugs, Happy sandwiches, wheelbarrow walking, etc to help him get all that input he both wants and needs every day.  We also choose a preschool that has a fair amount of physical activity built into their days including gymnastics a couple times a week.  Each day it feels like we get one more piece of the parenting puzzle figured out and that’s feeling really good and productive right now.  Hooray!           

Bit # 2:  So, I’ve noticed this for about the last year with Happy and it still just cracks me up (and I don’t believe that I’ve told y’all this yet).  Every time Happy sees me after it’s been awhile (ie: when I pick him up from preschool or come home from working away from the house), he screams and then instantly says, “Milk.”  It totally cracks me up that he associates me with milk even though I didn’t breastfeed him and I don’t believe he was ever breastfed.  Milk=Mom, we even know that at our nontraditional family house!

And another observation:  When it comes to prayer, I tend to limit my personal prayers to one of two varieties- prayers for strength and prayers of thanks.  Outside of that, I have long, personally, felt that I don’t really have a right to ask for more than strength because as a person with faith and a deep spiritual root, I believe that my life is not accidental- so what has been handed to me has been handed to me for a reason- what I need is the strength or grace or etc to get through it, if that makes sense.  Anyway, that means I try to source out gratitude in my personal prayers or ask for the guidance and wisdom and perseverance and compassion and resolve that I need to make it through something.  I tend to be an all day long pray-er.  Meaning that when something strikes me is when I send up the prayer– at whatever time of day it is, wherever I am when I hear about what someone’s going through or read something in the news.  Anyway, I’ve noticed over the last year and a half that I have a new constant prayer.  It is not one that I am particularly proud of, but it is one that I know I used to say over 200 (I would chant it over and over again, I am not kidding) times a day when we were faced with the constant lack of sleep and that I now probably say 5-10 times a day as we’ve gotten down to just bad naps (and getting less bad every day, I might add) and more moderate nighttime sleep issues (and this is not a prayer that technically qualifies in my prayers for strength or prayers of thanks categories).  If you are looking in my window mid-afternoon or mid-evening, you can most definitely read the following on my lips, “Please, God, please let this baby sleep.”

Now, here is the Beautiful You story captured in video…

Want to know more about Beautiful You? 

Every day, American women and girls are besieged by images and messages that suggest their beauty is inadequate—inflicting immeasurable harm upon their confidence and sense of wellbeing. In Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance, author Rosie Molinary passionately encourages women, whatever their size, shape, and color, to work toward feeling wonderful about themselves despite today’s media-saturated culture.

Drawing on self-awareness, creativity, and mind-body connections, Beautiful You incorporates practical techniques into a 365-day action plan that empowers women to regain a healthy self-image, shore up self-confidence, reframe and break undermining habits of self-criticism, and champion their own emotional and physical wellbeing. Through accessible, doable daily actions, women of all ages are encouraged to manifest a healthy outlook on life—teaching them to live large, and starting them on the path to learning to love themselves and others. Molinary steers clear of the florid affirmations and daily meditations often utilized by books geared toward personal growth, and instead delivers a hip, modern guide of inspirational thought that keeps pace with the times.

Beautiful You is a practical, candid, and accessible handbook that will strike a chord with every woman who has ever faltered in her self-confidence or lost her personal brilliance—and it will make sure she never lets it happen again.

 Beautiful You launches October 5.

So, because you may not have heard (smile!), I thought I would let you know that  Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance will be released by Seal Press on October 5th. 

What’s Beautiful You all about?  

Every day, American women and girls are besieged by images and messages that suggest their beauty is inadequate—inflicting immeasurable harm upon their confidence and sense of wellbeing. In Beautiful You, author Rosie Molinary passionately encourages women, whatever their size, shape, and color, to work toward feeling wonderful about themselves despite today’s media-saturated culture. 

Drawing on self-awareness, creativity, and mind-body connections, Beautiful You incorporates practical techniques into a 365-day action plan that empowers women to regain a healthy self-image, shore up self-confidence, reframe and break undermining habits of self-criticism, and champion their own emotional and physical wellbeing. Through accessible, doable daily actions, women of all ages are encouraged to manifest a healthy outlook on life—teaching them to live large, and starting them on the path to learning to love themselves and others. Molinary steers clear of the florid affirmations and daily meditations often utilized by books geared toward personal growth, and instead delivers a hip, modern guide of inspirational thought that keeps pace with the times.

Beautiful You is a practical, candid, and accessible handbook that will strike a chord with every woman who has ever faltered in her self-confidence or lost her personal brilliance—and it will make sure she never lets it happen again.

 But before BY hits bookstores, I am hoping you’ll join me for a Beautiful You Spike Day where we’ll celebrate sending the book into the sales stratosphere with a Buy One Get One giveaway for those who order the book on Tuesday, September 28 (a week from today!). 

Why does a Spike Day matter?  Because bookstores, web-sites, media sources pay attention to pre-publication sales.  It might mean that they recommend that book more frequently, they get more copies in the store, or they review it.  All these things give a book a boost and I think Beautiful You really deserves that attention. 

Here’s why:   

Over the course of a year, Beautiful You teaches women what they need to champion and fully live their own lives, coaching themselves into the most extraordinary- and necessary- habit of treating their whole selves well.  It’s a great journey for one to take personally and also a great gift for friends.    

 And here’s what others have already said about it:

“As I read Rosie Molinary’s Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance, I found myself marking the pages that contained body image wisdom that really resonated with me. Guess what? By the time the book was finished, I’d marked more than half the pages! Molinary has done a fabulous job of offering practical and doable advice to help women see — and appreciate — themselves in a whole new way, and to realize that a healthy body image is about so much more than what we think we see in the mirror.”  — Dara Chadwick, Author, You’d Be So Pretty If: Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies — Even When We Don’t Love Our Own (Da Capo, 2009)

 ”Women are sick of the same tired, stale body image advice. Don’t tell us to ‘Slick on some sexy red lipstick’ or ‘Spend a day at the spa’ – we need real, functional tips that can help us break out of a bad body image day. Rosie Molinary answers our call in Beautiful You: Her ideas are inspired, creative, and totally doable, with many carrying a trickle-down effect to the younger generation of girls. With the first day of reading it, my copy was thoroughly dog-eared.” – Leslie Goldman, Author, Locker Room Diaries: The Naked Truth About Women, Body Image, and Re-imagining the “Perfect” Body (Da Capo, 2007)

I am so incredibly proud of this book and also eager to get it into the hands of women of all ages who could benefit from more self-care and self-love.  I am also eager for it to spark conversations among women so that we can be honest about how we judge ourselves and begin to let those behaviors go. 

 Now, back to Spike Day:  All you need to do to be a part of Spike Day is order Beautiful You on September 28^th from Amazon.com, Powells.com, BN.Com, Borders.com or another online market (like a local indie favorite) and then send me a copy of your receipt (minus the credit card information) at hijasamericanas@gmail.com along with the mailing address you want me to use to send a book to you.  What’s in it for you?  Another book! 

The first 75 people to send me receipts will receive a signed copy of Hijas Americanas or Voces Latinas (an anthology for young Latinas and Latinos that I am included in) or another Seal Press title (I have a limited quantity), or a signed copy of The Green Year by Jodi Helmer (if you have a preference, let me know which one you’d like and if I have copies left, I’ll hook you up).  Thank you so, so much for your support!

Giving Up Beauty

            “It is not a malignancy.”  He looked at his chart, nodding, not looking at me.  I stared at him, squinting, trying to comprehend what he meant with these words that could not have been intended for me. 

            I craned to see the chart, convinced that he must have the wrong one, reading me some other woman’s good news because I was only in for a follow-up to my breast reduction surgery.  My breasts were simply smaller, not broken, not tumorous, not possibly cancerous.  They were the breasts of a woman with no family history of breast cancer.  Clearly, there would be no malignancies, even if there was a reason to think that way.  But there was no reason.   

            My gown fell open, revealing a left breast at the end of its festering.  The vertical seam that connected where point A and point B came together to mark point C, where inches were snipped away in-between, had come undone weeks before this visit.  I discovered it one morning in the bathroom mirror as I put on deodorant.  In the humid haze of my bathroom, I caught sight of what my insides looked like. 

            That time at the doctor’s office, I expected more stitches, a zipping closed of this two inch by one inch gap.  He looked at it a moment, pinched it shut with his fingers and placed a steri-stripe over it.  I shuddered at the thought of pinching my own breast shut and securing it with tape each morning.  “You can use two if you like,” he added upon seeing my disturbed look, as if two instead of one would make this better. 

            Now, two weeks later, I had returned to his office, expecting just an examination of the caterpillar-sized scar that now crawled up my left breast.  The breast was red with tape burns and scabbing, and while it was the uglier of my two altered breasts, he glanced at my right breast furtively. 

            “You haven’t seen your lab results, yet, have you?”  He honed in on the blank look I was trying to mask.

            “The lab results– and it is standard practice to send things from surgery to biopsy– revealed a sizeable tumor removed from your right breast.  We examined it, though, and it’s not malignant.” 

            I nodded, thinking about these words.  Thinking about how a tumor could hide in a breast, thinking about how I might have reacted if he had told me I had a tumor and cancer in the same breath.  My breasts were examined a month before my surgery.  How could a tumor so large be missed?  Or did it grow exponentially in the weeks following my exam?  How much larger would it have grown before being detected?         

I stared down at these small breasts, perfect and round and scarred in ways that I could not have imagined a month ago.  And for the first time, I had no regrets.  If I were not already thankful for the new found freedom and subdued pain (and some days I was not), I had to be thankful for this discovery.  The reduction of what I formerly perceived as my womanhood revealed a dark spot that may not have been detected until it had grown too large to deny and morphed into something that could harm me.

            I did not go into surgery with relief.  Each day, I struggled to know how I felt.  In the immediate days preceding my surgery, I stutter-stepped towards the procedure when before I had gone robotically forward,checking things off to prepare for a new silhouette.  A week before the surgery, a collegiate friend called, one with whom I shared an undeniable attraction over the years we studied together.  He was coming to town and wanted to stay with me.  I choked and then replied that I couldn’t host him since I was going into surgery the day he arrived.  He asked if this was the surgery that I had always wanted.  He remembered what I hated most about my body, but it was an awkward moment because we both knew that it was part of my physical allure.  I hung up the phone, cold, uncertain that I could be beautiful without large breasts and unsure that I had ever been beautiful, even with them. 

            On the day of my surgery, I was matter-of-fact, official, as I hurried my parents to the surgery center.  In the prep room, I pulled on my gown and climbed into bed.  I talked with my nurse whose breasts had been reduced ten years earlier.  She was supportive and reassuring.  I fought the urge to ask, “But did anyone ever look at you again?  Were you able to be sexy without them?”  I wasn’t sure that I could be sexy without them. I did not know what I had in me because I had always had these breasts on me. 

            My surgeon arrived and swiftly began the pre-op procedures.  He diagrammed my breasts and chest in red and black permanent marker to insure that when everything was carved and sewn, I was even and congruent.  During this time, I realized the magnitude of what was before me; I saw just how much of my body would no longer be with me a few hours later. 

            The anesthesiologist came in to tell me that I had a great chance of surviving the surgery and detailed how he would cram a tube down my windpipe during surgery to monitor my breath.  It was too much, and I felt myself grow hot and weak. 

            “I am going to faint,” I whispered and lay down.  I awoke with a nurse fanning me, and my surgeon eating graham crackers. 

            “It goes on,” I told myself. “It’s all going to be just fine.” 

            My surgeon finished outlining my chest and gathered my entourage, two nurses and the anesthesiologist, and we started down the hall towards surgery.  I looked at them, heard them laugh and exchange minute details of their lives when my surgeon caught my eye. 

            “You will be beautiful,” he said.  “Just beautiful.” 

            We crashed through the doors of the operating room with incredible force, and the energy of the room immediately changed.  The pace was fast, hands everywhere on my body attaching different monitors.  I thought about what he had said and remembered how shamefaced I had been to walk through his waiting room.  I had not wanted people to think I was vain enough to go to a plastic surgeon’s office freely.  But here I was, now, terrified that in three hours I would no longer have an external indicator for beauty. 

            “Give it up,” I thought and faded into sleep.

            When I woke up, my chest was on fire, a white heat that I could not breathe through without wincing.  It was more pain than I had experienced in my life.  The nurse noticed me stir and came over to my bed. 

            “I’ll get your mother.” 

            But I was more than my mother could handle with a bandaged upper body and various tubes protruding from me as well as an oxygen mask covering my face.  She looked at me and fainted; and I wondered if it was, indeed, that bad.  That moment alerted me to what I already unconsciously knew: my reaction to this recovery would be the lead for how everyone else would react.  If I could not be beautiful, graceful might be within my reach.

            I had a week off from work to rest and recover.  I visited with friends and wrote.  I bandaged my chest and cleaned the wounds.  l bought fitted shirts for the first time.

            By the second week, I was walking more rapidly, trying to maintain some degree of fitness.  In the third week, I began to lift light weights.  A day later, I discovered that my breast had torn open, and a small part of my soul followed suit.

            Each morning, I gently pulled off the tape that was forcing the hole in my left breast shut and winced as it reopened the wound.  I washed it carefully, feeling slight weakness when I pinched it shut with one hand and taped it with the other.  One morning, it was especially painful and defeating. When my boyfriend visited, the defeat was etched on my face.             

“What’s wrong?”  He asked, and I told him.  He squinted at me and said, 

            “I don’t get this– it’s going to heal.  What’s the problem?” 

            I closed my eyes, wishing we had never begun this conversation, wanting to be alone and in pity without the need for guilt or shame. 

            “Look,” I replied, “I am just feeling a little scared, vain, and pathetic.  Can you give me that?” 

            He stared at me, astonished.

            “I can’t because you have never been any of those things.  It’s not like you, and it’s just a scar.”

            His words reminded me of a scar that I had on my knee, an inch by inch marking that had once been over three inches wide.  In my early twenties, I fell down my apartment stairs and refused to go to the emergency room for stitches.  I left my knee, a relatively public part of my anatomy, to heal as it would, and it answered with a closed knee cap but a wretched reminder of the fall.  I once dated a man who looked at that scar, traced its outermost limits and said “Scars show character.”  He won me in that moment, affirming what I had always believed: it is the difficult things that make you rich, give your life personality and flavor in ways that the easy things cannot evoke.  I went back to that phrase and thought of my left breast, a private place on my anatomy that very few would ever be able to critique.  Its greatest enemy was me.

            But in hating my left breast, in critiquing it for beauty, I never considered my right breast and what it might be hiding.  I did not think of what it contained behind its walls because it was the wall itself that most concerned me.  My right breast was beautiful, as my doctor insisted they would both be once they healed.  It did what was expected and healed with little effort.   But my right breast could have ultimately altered my world.  It was my right breast that, as I looked elsewhere, allowed the forces within to conspire against me. 

            I looked down at the left breast, red with blood and healing and force, and then at my right breast, small and perky.  In that moment I knew that it did not matter if any man ever catcalled again and if beautiful was a word I ever heard from anyone’s mouth to describe me.  I had two breasts and a life and a new start.  I stepped out of my gown, pulled on my white cotton bra, and glimpsed myself in the mirror of the examining room.  I stood straight and stared hard, assessing.  Finally, I found myself looking at scars and seeing healing where once I looked at fullness and could not see myself.

Isn’t she pretty?  And she is the most adorable shape– she’s probably 5.5 inches by 6.5 inches or so.  So this compact almost square little thing and I LOVE square. 

And, now that it is here, I am going to embark on the Beautiful You journey.  I put this book together very deliberately creating an every woman plan and about 300 of the things are things that I have done for myself in my quest for radical self-acceptance (which is how and why I came up with the idea) but I haven’t done all 365 (like draw a picture of myself) so I’m excited about going through this all very deliberately, just like anyone else who picks up the book.  I start on Monday with Day 1: Begin.  I’m hopeful that I can turn off my inner editor– the girl who will be frustrated that I said something this way when it could have been better said that way- and that I can just enjoy the journey.  And soon, when the book is out, and in people’s hands, I’m hopeful that we can all periodically share revelations here.

In other exciting news, we’re changing faces around here, soon!  For years, I’ve had a blog and a separate web-site and that is a whole lot for a not very technologically capable gal to keep up with so I am merging them.  Soon, hijasamericanas.wordpress.com will become www.rosiemolinary.com.  When that happens, you’ll land on the home page of www.rosiemolinary.com and will need to choose the blog tab to come here.  And please come here.  Because I’ll miss you if you don’t and because I’ll need a little squad of friends to get me through the next month of book promotion (the sometimes lonely world of book promotion, I might add).  For now, you don’t need to do anything.  When the change happens, you’ll enter in Hijas and it’ll redirect you immediately to www.rosiemolinary.com.  We’re hoping there’s not downtime between the transition but who knows for sure with technology so if you get the computer screen version of static, just try again later. 

Alright, happy weekend, friends.  Go out and drink in some sunshine (under a layer of sunscreen).

Earlier this year, I discovered Operation Beautiful and blogged about it here.  Earlier this summer, Operation Beautiful went from being a global project to also being a book.  Now, people everywhere can enjoy what the web-site has to offer and more in book size!  I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to meet Caitlyn Boyle, the author of Operation Beautiful: Transforming the Way You See Yourself One Post-It Note at a Time, when she so graciously came to speak to students in my body image class.  Caitlin is just as you imagine her– sunny, bright, refreshing– and so, knowing that y’all would love to know about Operation Beautiful and Caitlyn, I invited her to share some of her experience here.    

How did the Operation Beautiful project begin?     

I was having a very stressful day and wanted to do something nice for a stranger to lift my own spirits.  I wrote, “You are beautiful” on a Post-It and put it on a public bathroom mirror.  Then, I took a picture of the note and blogged about the experience at my personal blog, www.HealthyTippingPoint.com.  The concept quickly went viral, and the rest is beautiful history! 

When and why did you decide to translate that project into a book?  

The site was noticed by a literary agent two months after it was launched (the site started in June 2009).  I never thought one post-it would become a website and a book.  I think it’s the natural progression of the site though because the book gives more details on how to lead a truly positive and healthy life – the Operation Beautiful lifestyle, if you will! 

What was your favorite part of writing Operation Beautiful?   

It feels amazing to know that I am part of something so much bigger than myself.  The site wouldn’t exist without all these wonderful people who want to make the world a better place.  It’s awesome to be the one who gets to write about it everyday.

What would you say to encourage someone to try and live with more greater self-compassion?  

There is more goodness in the world than you know, and one small act can have a HUGE impact on another person.  There is no limit to the impact that your greatness can have.

Some issues we discuss on a regular basis on this blog are self-awareness and community engagement.  Given that, what community issues most speak to you?  There is a lot of negative messaging in our society.  The biggest mistake we make is beating ourselves up for not looking like models or celebrities.  99% of images in magazines are photoshopped in some way.  It’s time we stop emulating or striving for a type of perfection that doesn’t even exist in the real world.  It’s OK to look like a human!   If you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive, realistic thought. Consciously correct yourself if you engage in “Fat Talk.” Posting Operation Beautiful notes can also lift your spirits!                         

 And what do you most appreciate about yourself?     I really surprise myself with my drive and ambition.  I never knew I had this in me!  Running the site and writing the book has made me a more gracious, accepting person.  There are so many different, wonderful, and amazing women out there with great stories.  There is truly beauty in all of us.                                                                                                                                                              

What do you wish all women knew? I wish all women realized how infinitely powerful, wonderful, and beautiful they really are – inside and out.

You see, Happy was in the backseat complaining about NPR, imploring me to put on music.  This was exactly what I would be thinking when my dad would pick me up from my job at one of the mall’s department store (where I sold those triangle-labeled, zippered leg Guess jeans that were all the rage). 

And, so, just as we were coming around the curve next to the mall movie theatre (the same movie theatre where I had met my 8th grade boyfriend, unbeknownst to my parents, kissed him during that Cher movie Moon something, and then dashed across the street to the mall to feign that I had been there all along; only to later discover that in the dashing across the street, my glasses that I had been hiding bounced out of my sweater pocked and got run over by a car.  This story is the one I will tell Happy one day when I am stressing the value of not lying to your parents), I had this thought, “You are old when you listen to NPR and care about the yard.” 

Fast forward to today when my two year old is so over NPR that he’s hollering for music in the backseat, and my mind flashes back to my dad’s cherry red Mitsubishi Cordia and my teenage mind being bored beyond measure with the idea of an adulthood stuck caring about the news and the yard.  Twenty years later, I care deeply about the news and, yet, I can barely muster a look towards the yard.  I want to care about the yard.  It’s something I think I should care about.  I just can’t do it. 

Anyway, I posted on my Facebook wall about the NPR and the yard and getting old and all that and that sparked an interesting discussion that I thought I would bring here because it was so fun there.   So, here’s the question:

What did you think made one “old” when you were young?  And given your standards then, are you “old” now?