Best Friends, Occasional Enemies

by Lisa Scottoline; Francesca Serritella

  I am?

  Oh, right, I am.

  So why was I being so hard on myself?

  We’re often told that the problem with women is that we live in fairy tales—head in the clouds, nose in the air, dreaming of Prince Charming while overcharging our credit accounts. The adjective picky is exclusive to children who won’t eat and adult women.

  But I have never identified with that, and the majority of women in my life don’t fit that bill either.

  In my experience, it’s women who are the realists, the worriers.

  How many real women do you know who are too picky? For every one I know, I can think of ten who are not picky enough, who are too quick to settle for a man who doesn’t treat them right and too slow to get out of a relationship gone bad.

  Common wisdom says: keep your expectations low, and you’ll always be pleasantly surprised.

  But at what cost? What does a life of low expectations feel like?

  Surprisingly unpleasant.

  We miss out on the giddy fun of fantasy and the adrenaline jolt of new possibilities.

  I remember in high school when I could fixate on a random boy in class. My friends and I would discuss him endlessly and put his name into a game of MASH or Ouija board. I don’t remember if I ever told the guy how I felt; that was beside the point. The dreaming was the fun part.

  And no offense to high school boys, but most of the time, having the crush was better than having the boyfriend.

  As adults, we don’t often allow ourselves to get our hopes up about a new prospect, romantic or professional. In an attempt to guard against potential disappointment, we’ve made happiness the unexpected and pessimism the status quo.

  And are we safer for it? Stronger? Braver?

  Not really.

  I’m starting to think that if you try to steel yourself against every blow, your armor just weighs you down.

  And when does anticipating the worst slide into precipitating the worst?

  If we expect little, we ask for little. We aren’t as quick to notice when our low expectations have become simply low standards.

  I’m not saying we should be reckless, but there is a difference between being grounded and being pessimistic. I think we should seize happiness whenever we can get it. It’s our nourishment, our rocket fuel. It’s worth the risk.

  Joy matters.

  It’s not so much about trusting the world to take care of us, it’s about trusting ourselves to push through anyway. We must have faith in our ability to bounce back from disappointment and failure.

  Failure is an event, not a definition.

  We can put it behind us and be open to the next person or opportunity that gets our blood pumping.

  Disappointment does happen. But there’s no need to roll out the red carpet for it.

  So in 2011, I think we should give ourselves permission to fantasize, to get excited without apology. Let’s go ahead and get our hopes up for a change.

  Here, I’ll start: I’m going on record saying I am excited about a boy. And if you see me sometime in the next year, and you ask about him, I’ll tell you the unabashed truth. I can’t promise it will be good news, but I can promise you that no matter what, I’ll still be standing tall.

  And so will you.

  Because we can handle it when things go wrong.

  So let’s enjoy it, just in case they go right.

  Join Me

  By Lisa

  I’ve said that I don’t like the idea of New Year’s resolutions. They’re too negative. Why start out the year with a long list of things you do wrong?

  Especially when you’re so great.

  How do I know you’re great?

  You’re here, aren’t you?

  Bottom line, you and me, we’re great already.

  That’s why I make unResolutions. In an unResolution, I resolve, in the new year, to keep doing something that I like about myself. For example, I like that I kiss my dogs on the lips. And I resolve to keep doing it.

  Why?

  It’s fun, and it doesn’t hurt anybody except my dogs, who are permanently scarred.

  But they can’t hire a lawyer, so no worries.

  Now that we’ve established that I’m no fan of resolutions, you’ll understand why I feel cranky at the people who pressure you into making them. There’s even a website that will tell you to make a resolution and create a contract with yourself about it. You can choose from among the resolutions, which are “lose weight,” “quit smoking,” or “exercise regularly.” Or you can even make a “custom goal.”

  You can guess my “custom goal.”

  I typed in, “marry George Clooney.”

  The way the website works is that if you don’t keep your resolution, you break your contract with yourself. I don’t know if you have to sue yourself or not, but this may be where my dogs come in. If you can sue yourself, they can sue me, and we’re all in deep dog-doo.

  The website also tells you to create a penalty so you don’t break your resolution, i.e., it challenges you to “put your money where your mouth is.” It says that you should set a dollar amount, whereby you pay money if you break your resolution.

  Do you understand this? It means that you have to lose your own money if you decide to ditch George Clooney.

  That’s crazy. And if you ditch George Clooney, you not only lost your money, you lost your mind.

  According to the website, exactly 52,283 people have already made contracts, for a total amount of $5,479,151.

  Wow!

  That’s real dough. I’m pretty sure we could pay off the federal deficit with all the people who resolve they’re going to start working out, but don’t, like me. We’d have to pay off not only the gym membership we’re not using, we’d have to pay the website, too. We can feel bad about ourselves—twice!

  Happy New Year?

  And if you’re wondering what the website does with the money, it sends it to “a friend, a charity, or an AntiCharity, which is an organization you hate!”

  Consider the first option: that it sends the money to your friend. In my case, let’s say I make a contract to lose weight and the beneficiary is my Best Friend Franca. Then, if my resolution is that I will lose weight, which is my forever-resolution from the days when I used to make resolutions, and I don’t lose weight, Franca gets a hundred bucks.

  Huh?

  This means that Franca, my alleged best friend, would have to sit around and hope that I didn’t lose weight. She’d cash in only if I fail. Is this the kind of behavior we want to encourage in our BFFs? On the contrary, that’s the way to turn a friend into a frenemy.

  Also Franca would never do it. She would tell me I didn’t need to lose weight, no matter how chubby I was. In fact, she’d love me more, the more there was of me to love. That’s why she’s a true BFF and not a fake dumb website BFF.

  And consider the penalty money going to charity. If I didn’t lose weight and broke my contract with myself, my hundred bucks would go to an animal shelter. That’s a win-win, to me. Dogs get rescued, and I get chocolate cake.

  I guess that’s why they came up with the AntiCharity idea, where the money goes to an organization you hate. Let’s pick an organization that everyone hates, like the Ku Klux Klan. This way, if you don’t lose weight, you’re funding the KKK.

  Ya happy yet?

  Maybe I should start my own AntiCharity.

  You can join.

  We’ll call it People Organized Against Resolutions.

  That’ll fix ’em.

  Rewarding, or Why Free Is Dumber Than You Think

  By Lisa

  Here’s what I’m telling you. Beware of “rewards points.”

  What?

  Yes, that’s right. I said it, and if you remember, it wasn’t always thus. I used to be a big fan of rewards points.

  Let’s review.

  I remember the day I found out that my credit card was accumulating rewards points, because I felt like I had won the lottery.


  Okay, a really tiny lottery, but still, free is free, and I was excited. The way my credit card worked was that every time I used it, it accumulated points that enabled me to choose free stuff from a free catalog.

  Wow!

  I even wrote about how hard it was to pick stuff out of the free catalog, mainly because I was so dazzled by the free part that I thought I might faint.

  I’m not cheap, but free has a unique power, no? I couldn’t go wrong, if it didn’t cost me anything.

  Or so I thought.

  And since then, I’ve been all over the rewards thing. I’ve even spread the word. Daughter Francesca is about to get a new credit card, and I’ve advised her to make sure she gets one with rewards.

  Who doesn’t want to be rewarded?

  Lately, me.

  I came to this epiphany with my new spice rack. I saw it in the free catalog, and I forget how many points it cost, because it all came down to the same thing:

  It’s FREE!

  So I bought/ordered/willed it to exist in my house. And now, sitting atop my oven, is a too-cool-for-school spice rack from Dean & DeLuca. All of the spices are in glass test tubes with real corks, so they’re visible from the side and have nice colors. But the spices are things like lavender and Tellicherry peppercorns.

  Huh?

  I have no idea when lavender became a spice, but it does look pretty in its purple test tube. Too pretty to use, and anyway, what would I put lavender on?

  Marigolds?

  The rack also includes imported spices, like Greek oregano and French tarragon. Thank God. You wouldn’t want tarragon from anywhere else, would you? And I smelled the Greek oregano, which smells exactly like American oregano, which smells like a pizza parlor.

  So maybe that, I’ll use.

  Or eat out of the jar.

  But I’ve never used any of the spices in the rack, and the test tubes don’t say when they expire, so the bottom line is, the French tarragon should have stayed in Paris. It was a waste, even though it cost nothing.

  Paradoxical, no?

  The spice rack taught me that even though something is free, I might not want it. I don’t need it. I’m not going to use it. If I had really wanted the spice rack, I would have bought it, and the fact that I didn’t means I shouldn’t have it in my house.

  Even free.

  That was my life lesson.

  Let me interject to say that the problem may be endemic to spices. Even before the test-tube spice rack, I’d been known to buy spices that I’d never use. Mainly because I want to be the kind of person who cooks with green curry, I’d buy some and throw it out when it became a solid block of greenness. I’d make this same mistake around the holidays, when I’d pick up fresh jars of allspice, ground cloves, and cinnamon, which is the kind of thing I imagine the Cake Boss tosses into his shopping cart. But I never use it, and I’m no Cake Boss.

  Cake is the boss of me.

  Come to think of it, the real problem may be that I’m a stinky cook, as I barely use any spices at all, and in this regard, I’m my mother’s daughter. There was no spice rack in our house growing up, and only four spices: dried oregano, garlic salt, onion salt, and salt.

  Mother Mary cooked Italian, and salt.

  We didn’t even have pepper, because Mother Mary is enough pepper for anybody.

  And to this day, when she visits me and makes meatballs or tomato sauce, we first make a trip to the grocery store to buy her salts, with their preservatives included, the faker the better.

  And you know what?

  Her food tastes delicious.

  And I feel rewarded.

  Almost free.

  Can’t Start A Fire Without A …

  By Lisa

  You may have heard that I’m single, and I like being single, because after two marriages and two divorces, I’m finally the boss of me.

  What a great boss I am!

  And what a great employee!

  In both capacities, I’m easy and fun to work with. I never dock my pay and I always do my best. I give myself great performance reviews, and now I’m thinking about eliminating performance reviews altogether. Who’s to stop me?

  Nobody!

  Yay!

  And going along my merry single way, I’ve learned to do many of the tasks that Thing One and Thing Two used to do.

  There weren’t that many.

  And to tell the truth, there was something that both Thing One and Thing Two could do very well.

  Make a fire.

  Whether it was in the fireplace or the grill, they were good at fire.

  I’m not.

  I try not to think that this is gender-related, but men have made fire since caveman days, while women stayed inside, swept the cave, and plotted divorce.

  Anyway, since I’ve gotten single, I’ve cleaned gutters, taken out trash, painted walls and windowsills, and even hammered something.

  I’m pretty sure I did that, once.

  Or, again, to tell the truth, I’ve hired somebody to do all of the above. So I have all the same things I had before, except the fire part, which I have done without, to date.

  But now, ages later, I’m missing fire.

  Not the barbecue. I’m single enough without smelling like lighter fluid.

  But I do miss a fire in the fireplace. I liked having a homey family hearth, even though I’m a family of one.

  I count!

  That’s the trick to single living. Don’t do less for yourself just because you’re the only one around. Don’t discount yourself. It’s no way to live, with the idea that your wishes don’t matter.

  And this is true, whether you’re married or not.

  I think it happens a lot around the holidays. We go on discount, selling ourselves cheap, like a January white sale. It might happen because we do Norman Rockwell math, namely that ten people around the table = family.

  But family can be you, alone.

  After all, this is a country founded on the notion that one person matters. Think of one man, one vote. If you matter on Election Day, you matter the rest of the year. So make yourself a nice lasagna and pour yourself a glass of Chianti.

  You get the leftovers, too.

  Back to the story. I was missing a fire in the fireplace, but I’d never done it myself and I found it mystifying. Again, the caveman thing. Ooga booga. Fire is magic!

  But I decided to give it a whirl. I remembered something about kindling, so I went outside and picked up sticks, then I remembered something about rolled up newspapers, so I did that, too. Next, I found some old logs and stacked them up in some sensible manner. And thanks to Bruce Springsteen, I knew I needed a spark.

  Then I lit the mess.

  Well.

  You know the expression, where there’s smoke, there’s fire?

  It’s not true.

  I had smoke, but no fire. And furthermore, I had a family room full of thick gray clouds, smoke alarms blaring, dogs barking, cats scooting, then phones ringing, and burglar alarm people calling, which ended in me giving them my password.

  Which is HELP!

  I called Daughter Francesca and told her what happened, and she said: “I’ll be home next week. I’ll teach you how to make a fire. It can be done, and by a girl.”

  And one week later, she came home, piled the kindling, rolled the newspaper, stacked the logs, and made a perfect fire. The cats, dogs, and I stood in an awed and happy circle.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “You gotta warm the chimney first. Hold the roll of newspaper up, like this.” Francesca hoisted a flaming torch of newspaper, like the Statue of Liberty. “See? You can do this.”

  “Sure I can,” I said, inspired.

  I count!

  I vote!

  I’m American!

  So I can be the Statue of Liberty.

  She’s a girl, too.

  Cold Comfort

  By Francesca

  It’s cold in my apartment.

  No seriously, it’s re
ally cold, way colder than whatever you just imagined.

  Let me paint a picture. While I’m writing this, I’m bundled in three layers on top, a blanket on my lap, a hat, scarf, and fingerless gloves. I’m warming my hands by the glow of my laptop, like some sort of yuppie hobo.

  Carrie didn’t look like this on Sex and the City.

  Why is it so hard to heat 400 square feet?

  First off, the building’s radiant heat doesn’t kick in until the afternoon. I would complain about this, but I am so extraordinarily lucky to work at home every day, I accept the tradeoffs:

  Cold mornings, and I can’t steal toilet paper from myself. Sacrifices.

  Also, my apartment is as drafty as a barn. Why? Well, all the windows in my “newly renovated apartment” have sunk in their frames, so that a tiny sliver at the top opens directly out to the air, even when the window is shut. I used my Can-Do attitude to assess the problem. I figured out that, to fix it, I’d have to push the top window all the way up and somehow hold it there with a one-handed Spidey-suction grip, then with my other hand, press the bottom windowpane back down, and finally turn the lock to hold everything in place.

  Easy, right?

  But the window is very tall, so I had to stand in the windowsill. I was pushing up on the top with my nose pressed against the icy-cold glass, when I looked out and down to the alley six stories below. It occurred to me that the only thing between me and those ant-sized pigeons was an already-malfunctioning window.

  Can-Do attitudes go right out the window when you realize you Can-Die.

  So now I pull the shades all the way up and embrace denial.

  But I can’t blame it all on the building, I’m partially responsible for the chill in the air. How?

  I’m cheap.

  I could get a space heater, but do you know how much energy that sucks up? I’d like to say I’m opposed on behalf of the environment, but I’m mainly an advocate for the environment of my bank account.

  Numbers are dwindling. Extinction is a constant fear.

  Did I say cheap? I meant I’m a conservationist.