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Some things I've learned this Spring

Do not, no matter how unfairly you feel you've been treated, write a blog post about bad reviews you get on your self-published novel. You will be crucified. And it will hurt.

Don't sign your nine-year-old up for Little League unless you're cool with spending 3 to 5 cold evenings a week sitting on hard bleachers, eating beef jerky for dinner, and then having to wrangle a cranky family into bed way too late.

When it gets to the point that the bi-weekly arrival of your organic vegetable box starts to stress you out, just cancel it. You will feel immense relief.

If you see a relatively cheap ticket for a flight to Shanghai, buy it. It may be a long time before three figure fares come around again.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you can garden, because you can't. Nor do you really want to.

Going gluten free will overjoy your GI tract. All will be calm and quiet. But don't try to get away with eating fake bread and buns. They're gross. GF brownies, however, are your new best friends.

You probably would've been better off not buying those Insanity DVDs at the school auction.

Take your glasses to the grocery store. Your near vision is failing you terribly and ingredient labels look as legible as squashed spiders.

Laser hair removal in the bikini area hurts almost as much as a wax. The results are alarmingly neat, though, and it is worth it.

If you need a hug from your daughter on a school day, go ahead and stop in for one. She's thrilled when you show up, but she won't be forever.

No one says it better than Ira...

We are all made up of stardust

I ran across an NPR story earlier this week about a pastor who realized she was an athiest, but continued to "serve" as a minister. As each Sunday approached and she knew she'd have to give a sermon she didn't believe, she'd get stomachaches and headaches and endure all sorts of miserable physical manifestations.

Reading the story, I felt for her. I think we've all probably tried to pretend to be something we weren't and suffered as a result. (In my case, it was an brief engagement to an overbearing man that, after a few months, caused my gut to seize and pounds to slide away like melting wax.)

I also related to her doubts about her faith that morphed into full blown disbelief in any higher power.

Not that I've ever had faith in a God, per se. But I would say that, since college, when four family members died in a very short space of time, I've been on a sort of spiritual quest.

I don't believe there is any cause and effect in praying to an entity to save us money on car repairs or make a sick loved one healthy.

How can there be? Why would God save one privileged American while millions of others around the world starve? No, that's arrogance, in my opinion.

But I do believe in energy, positive and negative. The universe swirls with it, with us, and when we die, we become cosmic dust, are eventually incorporated into stars. Which is comforting in it's own way. Not as soothing, as, say, believing that we'll be enveloped into heaven where purring cats are everywhere and we can eat cake all day without getting fat. But, it helps.

My father-in-law was a methodist minister, and when he was alive, I asked him what he thought about God.

I never got a straight answer. When I questioned him about his beliefs regarding afterlife, this man educated at Yale seminary said, "How can heaven hold so many people?"

Even I know that, assuming heaven exists, there are no bodies there, only souls. Souls so slight they might shimmer like thin silver filaments. I found his answer odd. And could never get him to commit to saying that Yes, he believed in God.

His wife, my mother-in-law, was a little more forthcoming. Despite her overtly-religious Christmas cards and attendance of church every Sunday, she sent me a Word document outlining that she believes not in a white-bearded man, but that God equals Love.

Anyway, this pastor on NPR who has come out as an athiest, it struck me. That's all really. I feel badly for her that she felt she had to pretend for so long and now is unemployed. But I'm glad she's being true to herself.

Hopefully it'll cheer her a bit to know that someday she'll be part of a brightly burning celestial body.