What Tina Fey Can Teach Sarah Palin

I have found that one of the benefits of being over forty is that I do indeed know a few things. For instance, since turning forty almost two years ago I have finally figured out that if I am having a bad day, or two or three strung together, I just need to wait it out and chances are, I’ll feel better tomorrow or the next day.

Now, I realize this sounds obvious. I’m not talking about understanding this concept in general terms. I’m talking about understanding it in the middle of a really bad day. You know those days when both children exit the SUV with a pissed-off door slam? Those days you’re late for work and are so frazzled you accidentally shred an important document that you don’t possess in electronic form? Those days you think your work load is your biggest problem only to then receive a phone call from the school nurse that not one, but two, of your children are in her clinic puking? I’m talking about understanding and accepting this concept in the smack-dab middle of those kind of days. I’m not perfect with this yet, but I’m getting a whole lot better.

Which brings me to last week. Last week sucked. I really don’t know how to put any other label on it. It sucked. It sucked hard and it sucked long. After being off from school and work for almost two weeks, the kids and I had a really hard time getting back in our groove. Add to this my mother expressing her irritation over a ridiculously insignificant peanut butter sandwich and I was not at a good place. And then who, for the love of all things sacred, is back on my television? Yep. Sarah Palin.

Palin has recently given an interview to John Zeigler for his upcoming documentary entitled How Obama Got Elected. Apparently, Zeigler needs an entire documentary to understand how a widely appealing, gifted leader who ran an almost flawless campaign got elected President. I can see how this could be confusing to the Right Wing of the Republican Party after they got Bush elected twice, but seriously, with the state that the world is in right now, you need a documentary to understand the concept that we’ve realized we made a mistake with Bush?

Anyway, I digress. In the excerpts that I saw of the Zeigler interview, Palin quips that perhaps Katie Couric is not the center of the universe. Where I come from, we call that the pot calling the kettle black. Palin also takes credit for giving Tina Fey job security. What? Did I miss something? Was Fey unemployed prior to Palin’s arrival on the planet? No, I’m pretty sure Fey had already left SNL for 30 Rock before anyone in the lower forty-eight ever heard of Sarah Palin. Palin then proceeds to slam “anonymous internet bloggers” for all they have written about her. Now, I take personal offense at this. I am neither anonymous nor a blogger. I am a writer and I do so under my real name. Yes, I use the internet. I’m not sure why this is an issue for Palin. If I wrote for a newspaper or a magazine, she apparently would have zero chance of ever reading it. Oh yeah, right. She was just being “flippant” when she didn’t (couldn’t) answer the trick question about what newspapers or magazines she read to keep herself informed.

By Friday, I knew enough time had passed that surely things were about to look up. And then last night, right on schedule, bingo ... Tina Fey. Jaw dropped, I stood in the middle of my living room floor marveling at the brilliance of Fey’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Fey called Palin out and dressed her down without ever using her name. And therein lies the lesson for Palin. You don’t have to be happy if your critics are loud and unyielding, but if you don’t want to be perceived as bitter, you have to learn to embrace it, laugh about it, and use it. Fey understand this and we’ll be hearing from her for a long time. Palin doesn’t and she’s looking like less and less of a player in 2012 every time she opens her mouth.

The Write Question

What would you do if you knew you could not fail? I’ve heard this question before—at church, in an occasional motivational business seminar, on my Gmail quote of the day. I’ve never had an answer. I’ve never really understood the question.

I mean, I’m doing it ... my life, I mean. I’m doing my life. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m making the most of my business degree; I’m getting out of bed everyday and making sure my children are clothed, fed, and are dropped off and picked up on time. I’m checking their homework and making their lunches. I’m grocery shopping, taking care of the dry cleaning, balancing the checkbook, tithing, doing the laundry, shaving my legs, brushing my teeth, and coloring my hair. And then I do it the next day and the next day and the next. And most days I do more than not fail at these things. Most days, I do these things so well I don’t even have to think much about them. So it seems perfectly clear that I’m doing my life and I’m not failing at it.

But the question still nags. Why? Why does this question plague me so? I think because, for me, the question really should be what would I do if I knew I could succeed? Ahh, now we’re getting somewhere. The question is still not exactly right. Let’s tweak it a bit more. How about what would I do, that I’m not already doing, if I knew I could succeed? Okay, the question almost makes sense to me now. Let’s fine-tune it a tad bit more and see what happens. Let’s go with what would I love to do, that I’m not already doing, if I knew I could succeed? The answer: write.

I’ve almost always known the correct answers to the questions that my life has presented me. There has been one notable and very painful exception and it changed me forever. The circumstances surrounding the loss of my first son and the choices I made for him taught me more than I believe it to be possible to document in one lifetime. However, one of the most important lessons his loss taught me was about questions. I learned very delicately that if I am having difficulty answering a question, I am probably trying to answer the wrong question. And so it is with this question.

I have never been able to answer what I would do if I knew I could not fail, because I was doing exactly that at which I would not fail. I know this is a bit of mental u-turn, but stay with me. The distinction I’m trying to draw here is a critical one. The question my life is currently asking of me is what would I passionately, lovingly, surrender my life to if I would succeed beyond my wildest dreams. That question, I can answer, not because I have the right answer, but because it is the right question. The short answer is to write. The long answer with all the messy details of getting from point a to point b, I’ll figure out as I go. Sometimes the short answer is all you need in order to choose your path ... getting on the right path to begin with is the hard part.

Last week, the music blogger of the Dallas Observer made note of an article I wrote about my sister who plays flute in the rock band, The Polyphonic Spree. The blogger knows a lot about my sister, but had never known I existed until he read my article. In his blog from December 22, he described me by saying that I was a writer. A professional writer wrote in his widely read publication that I was a writer. And since that day more than a week ago, I’ve been trying to get the question right. Pete Freedman of the Dallas Observer had provided me with the answer. I just had to figure out what question went with the answer.

So in 2009, I will write. I will write on days I’m happy, days I’m not, and days I’m just generally irritated. I’ll write on days I can’t stop and on days it takes forever to get started. But now that I am a writer and have started down the writer’s path, the rest should be easy.

TarGucci

Stepford has a new Target that is one half-mile and five minutes from my driveway. And it’s not a regular Target either, it’s a TarGucci. This is very, very bad for me because, well … my name is Kristi and I’m a Target addict. Say it with me now, “Hello, Kristi.”

I seriously believe I could survive shopping no where else but TarGucci. Starbucks, check. Sushi, check. Shoes and clothing, check. Lip gloss, hair color, dental floss, tampons, check, check, check, and check. I’m trying hard here to figure out what I could possibly need that is not contained within the walls of my drug of choice. Nope, nothing is coming to me.

So yesterday, my eight-year-old daughter (the Christmas Elf) and I went to TarGucci under the disguise of grocery shopping for Christmas dinner. What we were really there for was to buy me some cute t-shirts and sweat pants to wear during the holidays. It was freezing in Stepford yesterday. No, really it was way past freezing. It was 27 degrees when the Christmas Elf and I hit the store, neither of us wearing a proper coat. It’s very hard in Texas to get in the habit of dressing appropriately for cold weather because it comes and goes so quickly. Twenty-four hours earlier, it had been seventy-two degrees.

Teeth chattering, the Christmas Elf and I hit Starbucks first. Hot chocolate for her, grande hazelnut latte with two equals for me. I never said Stepford was all bad. Then off to find the hip Ts I had seen a fellow Stepford Wife sporting the day before. I was quickly able to locate what I needed and was only slowed down by the Christmas Elf’s unfortunate mishap with her hot chocolate. I didn’t see exactly what happened, but my impression was that she squeezed a bit too tightly on the cup, ejecting the lid, which startled her into dropping the entire cup on the floor. The hot chocolate exploded. It’s crazy how a small cup of liquid looks like gallons when its spread across TarGucci’s floor. We quickly moved to the Christmas Elf’s section to buy new tights.

And there in the girl’s section we hit a snag. On an end cap there was a display of little girl t-shirts. They were knock offs of the classic I Heart NY Ts. Except these didn’t say “I Love NY.” One said, “I Love Fashion.” Another, “I Love Candy.” However, the one the Christmas Elf set her little beating heart on said “I Love New Stuff.” She whipped a sized-medium off the rack and held it close to her body as if it were life itself.

I said, flatly, “Uh, no.”

I was thinking, “Hell no, over my dead body no, no f’ing way no.”

She said, “Why?”

I said, “Because, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to walk around in a T-shirt that says you love new stuff.”

I get the irony here … I know, really I do, I know I was in TarGucci getting my fix of new stuff because I’m addicted to new stuff, because, well, I LOVE new stuff.

She said, “But Mom, it’s the truth. I really do love new stuff.”

Good Lord, not only am I two bricks short of being a fully-loaded Stepford Wife, but I’m looking down at one in training.

I said, taking a deep breath, “I know you do. I do too. But it’s kind of boastful and braggy to wear it written on a t-shirt.”

She said, “Because if someone couldn’t ever afford new stuff, my t-shirt might hurt their feelings?”

I said, “Yes, honey, something like that.”

So we left TarGucci with the “I Love Candy” t-shirt. Last night as I was tucking her into bed she said, “Mom, do you know what my favorite thing is about Christmas?” I said, “What?” And, once again, without knowing it, this beautiful child validated me as a mom by saying, “It’s not the presents. It’s my family. I love my family.”

And her family loves her, too.