Tag: Tuesday Takeaway

Next week, Americans all over the country will be celebrating Thanksgiving — that time of the year we can all put our differences aside, appreciate all the many things we’ve been blessed with, and eat all sorts of incredible coma-inducing food.   This week, though, we here at LBW recommend throwing a Friendsgiving party first . If you haven’t jumped on board this new trend it yet, we highly recommend it. Friendsgiving can best be described as an opportunity to hang out with amazing friends and have amazing food.  Anything else beyond that… Well, that’s just gravy.

Here is a quick roundup of some ideas to help you make the most of your first (or next) Friendsgiving party.

• Make it a potluck – Invite your friends and encourage everyone to bring a dish… and if came directly from the grocery store and the sticker is still on it, well that’s just fine.  Friendsgiving should be more casual than the real Turkey day anyway.

• Test new recipes – Think of this as your opening act for Thanksgiving.  Curious if cranberry sauce and taco meat would make a great side? Now’s your time to find out.

• Play boardgames – Here are five of our favorite games you should probably have on your shelf right now.

• Create a makeshift photobooth – Use these apps to turn your Android or Apple phone / tablet into a photobooth in 5 minutes flat.

• Design your own signature Thanksgiving cocktail (or steal one from the Interwebs) – like these, these and these.

• Make an overstuffed playlist –  Here are three songs to get you started – Adam Sandler’s ‘Turkey Song‘, Weird Al’s ‘Eat It‘, and a Meghan Trainor parody about being ‘All About the Baste.’

• Make your own boardgame –  We’re thinking Mousetrap meets Pictionary… or take a page from Marshall Eriksen to create something like this.

• (Attempt to) Play True American – Because after all: it’s 50% Candyland.

• Go around the room and share your gratitude list – There is so much to be thankful for. Take a few moments to vocalize it with the people who care about you most.

However you decide to celebrate this Friendsgiving Season, our hope is that you do it with people who make you happy and make you want to be the best version of yourself.  Happy Friendsgiving!

 

This post is part of Life Between Weekends’ Tuesday Takeaway series. Every Tuesday, we’ll share the most compelling insight we’ve gleaned from a book, movie, tour, documentary or article.

By and large, magazines are still sold by their front pages. The face that graces the cover can make or break sales, which is why most of the time, every glossy you see will feature a celebrity striking a power pose.

This month, Relevant took a very different — and refreshing — approach. The cover features a small child with an amputated arm, staring directly at the camera under the headline “The New Face of Martyrdom.” It’s a story on Boko Haram, the Islamic Extremist group that’s been killing Christians — and any Muslims that the group decides hasn’t been living in line with its principles. The feature sheds light on the group’s devastating impact on Nigeria, specifically, but also looks at Boko Haram’s overall devastation –it’s estimated that the group’s killed 10,000 people in 2014 alone.

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At the beginning of the year, when I launched this blog, I set some wildly ambitious (and, okay, maybe unrealistic) goals for myself, and I encouraged anyone who’s reading to do the same.

Yup, I get all rah-rah, “let’s do this!” about benchmarking my future and planning things out. Maybe it has to do with an inner need to control everything. Maybe it’s just the surest way I’ve found to lead a life that makes me happy. Whatever the reason, I totally get into writing to-do lists and crossing items off of it, so here we are.

It makes sense that I spent nearly three years working at Oprah.com now, doesn’t it?

Anyway, looking at my list, I’ll be perfectly honest: There’s a very, very slim chance I’ll achieve them all by the time the ball drops on Dec. 31st. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop fighting for them.

A friend said his company strives for employees to reach 2/3s of their goals by the end of the year. They’ve done enough to make progress and be successful, but the part left unaccomplished is important too — it means you didn’t go too easy on yourself. At least that’s what I’m reminding myself as the year winds down.

All this to say: How are your goals coming along, if you wrote any? If not, why not create some for the last two months of the year?

 

 

This post is part of Life Between Weekends’ Tuesday Takeaway series. Every Tuesday, we’ll share the most compelling insight we’ve gleaned from a book, movie, tour, documentary or article to inspire you during the workday.

Top Photo: Nitish Meena/Unsplash

As a writer, I’ve always believed that words are powerful, but I’ve never taken them too seriously. In college, I was the one not-so-subtly rolling my eyes when people complained that first-year students should be called “freshpeople*,” not “freshmen.” There is a point where we become too PC, and we’re so careful about phrasing every word so carefully that the words themselves become a distraction, tearing you away from the heart of the conversation.

However, there are some cases where a shift in word choice can have a powerful effect on the way we view ourselves and the world, opening us up to a new way of thinking. When Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business and former director of U.S. Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, told Glamour she thought we needed to start referring to “working parents” and particularly, “working fathers,” I had to stop and re-read her sentence. She made a compelling point: “Working mom” was such a commonplace term, but when does anybody refer to a man as a “working dad?” He’s just a man.

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The entire time I read The Grapes of Wrath, it felt more like I was slogging through it. I re-read certain passages over and over, because my eyes glazed over the text and I realized I’d skimmed an entire page without comprehending a word. The book’s structure — Describe the landscape in one chapter, move along the plot in the next, repeat — drove me insane. I’d hit these pages that crackled with life, with characters so vivid I felt like I knew them, and I’d fly through pages, only to feel stymied in quicksand the moment the story turned to focusing on the dust gathering on a step next to a tumbleweed.

My inner book-nerd ached that I couldn’t get into John Steinbeck’s story. It won a Pulitzer AND a National Book Award, and it was heavily cited when Steinbeck won the Nobel Peace Prize in the ’60s! Have I no taste? (Don’t answer that.)

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Sometimes we all fall short of the mark. We shoot for a huge, life-altering goal, we map out every detail, we jot down benchmarks to get us there…and we come nowhere close to it.

We want to disappear, to push it out of our heads and forget we ever even tried, to magically prevent people from ever bringing it up. And yet, none of those things are possible.

Adam Jeske has been there. In the September/October issue of Relevant, the writer talks about heading on big missions trips with his wife, only to return home three times over nine years. Each time, he felt like a failure. He didn’t create the next charity: water or Pencils of Promise or TOMS. He just worked on various projects, without a huge win or success to show for it.

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A week ago, I picked up a copy of Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, and just about every chapter has a “Daaaang, Brene” moment. As in, “Daaaang, Brene, that insight cut me to my core,” or “Daaang, Brene, I’ve never looked at it that way.” I’m not one to dog-ear or underline parts of books (I’m all about a pristine, bookshelf-copy version, even though very few people other than me ever read said tomes), but this book? I can’t help it. I want to scribble notes all across the margins and underline certain parts until my pen rips through the page.

I don’t get that way about a nonfiction book very often.

I’ve been reading the book in chunks, simply because almost every chapter ends with work for me to do; not because it’s a guidebook, with exercises or homework at the end (it isn’t), but because it really gets me thinking, and I feel like I have so much to process with each passage.

Since I’m still working through Rising Strong, today’s Tuesday Takeaway doesn’t even come from the book. It’s an insight gleaned from Brown’s interview with Texas Monthly, which initially got me fired up about the new release.

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Years after its release, people are still quoting Mean Girls, and not just because the one-liners are off-the-charts amazing (though, let’s be honest, they are).

Recently, I was told that the most powerful comedy is the kind that’s used to skewer underlying truths in our everyday lies and point out the absurdities within them. That’s exactly what Mean Girls does. Tina Fey wrote the movie based on the nonfiction book, Queen Bees and Wannabees, taking the lessons learned about bullying and social status from the book and skewering it on the Big Screen. The movie raised a bunch of questions amid the laughs, namely: Why?

Why do Mean Girls exist?

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I’ve got a confession for you.  Sometimes, when I am spending time with my wife or hanging out with friends, something happens to me.  It’s subtle at first, like a quiet whisper, and I’ll try to ignore it.  Then, like a symphony that crescendos to a fortissimo, it captures my attention firmly in its grasp.  A thought pops to mind, then another.  And before I can reunite with the world I’m in, my mind begins racing about the next great training topic or important task I should tackle the next day.  I become excited about the idea and yet anxious that if I don’t act quickly on the thought, I might somehow lose it forever.  And that’s when I feel the tug between two worlds: I don’t want to let go of this new idea for fear that it might never come back to me, and yet I know that I shouldn’t hold so tightly to this thought that I mentally depart from my current company.

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As a new school year kicks into gear and the lazy days of summer start to slip away, it’s easy to go from feeling refreshed and ready to take on new projects to obsessively worrying (read: panicking) about doing it all. That’s always been me, and it was especially true during my junior and senior years of college, when I over-planned and overextended myself in every area of my life.

It wasn’t until a college professor introduced me to one little phrase that helped me let go — and no, it has nothing to do with Frozen:

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