Facebook makes me crazy. Every day I am shocked by the ignorant, narcissistic, and just plain bizarre things that people post about themselves there. (I know, that doesn’t mean much coming from someone who has posted all manner of personal tidbits on this blog in the past.)

The internet has created a brave new world of oversharing, privacy invasion, and communication. We are in uncharted waters. No generation before us has had the opportunity to share their innermost secrets with millions of people all over the globe.

I was having a conversation with my publisher about this today. She and I share quite a few personality similarities—mainly, our hermit-like tendencies. We were discussing how much was too much to share online. Where do you draw the line?

Why even bother with sharing things online in the first place? Isn’t it an exhausting waste of time? Why add your one tiny voice to the sea of millions?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and this is what I’ve concluded:

I don’t want to know that you are driving to WalMart right now. I don’t want to know that you are a better seamstress, baker, or Christian than me. I don’t want to know about your personal bodily functions or see pictures of you half-dressed (no matter how much you’ve been working out).

But I do want to invade your privacy. I want to know what information you have that can help me. Maybe you’ve already survived life with young kids and you can tell me how you made it through. (Because some days, I wonder how I will ever make it through the day. . . much less years.)

Maybe you’ve already tackled homeschooling. Or you’ve learned how to choose your battles, how to be content where you are, how to be an encouraging spouse. Maybe, just maybe, you’ve found the magic system to keeping the dishes done or overcoming writer’s block, or how to practice holistic/natural medicine rather than visiting the doctor.

I think that sometimes we (I) tend to demonize the internet and technology in general. Yet the truth is that we have a truly powerful gift. I think if we are sharing of ourselves online to lift up and encourage others, then we are within the bounds of what is morally and socially responsible. When we cross over into the murky waters of indulgent personal sharing and talking just for the sake of hearing ourselves talk, well. . .  then we’ve crossed the line.

But the fact is there are lots isolated and overwhelmed folks out there. When we are in the bright times of life, we often forget what the valley looked like. We forget how one encouraging word or helpful tip made all the difference to getting through that day or week! (I know for me that talking to a woman who has been through divorce, single motherhood, and remarriage is like water for a parched soul. To know that others have survived is a huge blessing!)

I’ve been thinking about what I have to offer in my tiny little space of the internet, and I guess I can (hopefully) at some point encourage single mothers, particularly those who want to homeschool and survive without government assistance. I can also encourage people who are interested in living debt-free, eating naturally, raising free-range kids, gardening, home churches, etc. Even though I often struggle with my self-esteem, the fact is that I do have a lot of things to offer, and I know that you do, too!

It’s my hope that none of us will use privacy as a mask to hide behind. Let’s not keep the gifts and talents God has given us under wraps just because the internet is a scary and strange place. The truth is that the internet is a platform, just like any other tool. Think about how the writers of yore would have jumped at the chance to have their work reproduced by any means at all—but were instead stuck with robed monks hand copying manuscripts by candlelight.

We’ve come a long way and we should take advantage of it!

Some friends made this soup for me a few months ago and I loved it. (This is saying something since my appetite is incredibly sporadic these days.) It is now my go-to Autumn Weekend Soup. (You know this kind of soup, right? The one you make on Friday afternoon, then eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner until it runs out?)

1 pound sweet Italian sausage
1 large onion, chopped
2 large garlic cloves, sliced
5 cups beef broth
2 cups chopped tomatoes (You can use fresh or canned, but it’s also a great use for dried tomatoes if you dried any this year!)
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce (I don’t really like tomato-based soup, but this one is just right, even with the tomato sauce! Trust me!)
1 large zucchini, sliced
1 large carrot, thinly sliced
1 medium-sized green bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 handful chopped fresh basil (or 2 tablespoons dried)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano (or 1 tablespoon dried)
8 to 10 ounces purchased fresh (or frozen) cheese tortellini
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Well, my food photography leaves something to be desired, but I promise the soup is remarkably yummier than it looks!

1.) Remove the Italian sausage from casings. (There are lots of ways to do this, I suppose, but I use a paring knife to gently cut the casing down the length of the sausage before removing it. There are lots of funny jokes that run through my head as I’m doing this… but I’ll spare you.)

2.) Sauté Italian sausage in your favorite soup pot over medium-high heat until cooked through, crumbling with back of spoon, about 10 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer sausage to large bowl.

3.) Add onion and garlic to drippings and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes. Return sausage to pan. Add stock, tomatoes, tomato sauce, zucchini, carrot, bell pepper, wine, basil and oregano. Simmer until vegetables are tender, about 40 minutes.

4.) Add tortellini to soup and cook until tender, about 8 minutes. (A little bit longer if you’re using frozen.) Season soup to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish with Parmesan and serve.

Adapted from Epicurious

I keep finding myself in the curious position lately of trying to explain to people why I don’t really blog anymore. I keep making up more and increasingly elaborate excuses theories about what prompted me to take down my blog and then why my attempt to start over now hasn’t really been happening. 

I’ve been trying to distill it down to the One Thing that it holding me back. Is it insecurity? Laziness?  Self-doubt? Good, old-fashioned writer’s block?

I’ve been thinking a lot about it and this is what I’ve figured out:

I’ve been letting my past define me.

The truth is that I live in the past. Starting with my divorce and the spiral of events that followed, the entire timeline keeps playing in my head like a movie I can’t escape. I’m still reliving two years ago. I am thinking about last year. I’m stuck at six months back.

I’m letting past rejection control who I am NOW. The fact is that even though the bulk of the people in my life genuinely love me, I’m clinging for dear life (death?) to the ones who have made it clear that I am Not Enough. It makes no sense—out of the dozens of people who love me, why are the ones who don’t have the loudest voices in my head?

Why is it if someone tells us they love us 5,000 times, do we remember most clearly the one argument where they said they weren’t so sure? Why do we let the one bitter person in our lives spoil so much of our time and energy? Why do I allow the opinions and actions of others to dictate my opinion of myself in the first place?

The thing is, I AM TOTALLY SICK OF LIVING IN THE PAST. I want to write about now. . . even if perhaps I don’t feel as witty or clever as I once did. I need to start owning the positive things that I know about myself and accepting the encouraging voices around me. I’ve got to quit paying heed to the voice of self-doubt in my head.

I refuse to let my past define me. I hope that you will, too! Quit looking back and start looking forward. Forgive yourself. Let go. Be free.

Let’s raise a toast (with our ice cold glasses of Pepsi-Cola) to the good things we have now, and to the blank canvas of a beautiful future!

When you get divorced, people immediately start treating you like you have never been married before. They say bizarre things like, “Honey, you might as well enjoy yourself, because once you get married, you’ll really be tied down.”

I guess I get what they’re saying but they forget two things:

(1) I was married for five years, so I do at least have a cursory knowledge of what married life is like.

(2) I have two small children, so I wouldn’t exactly say I’m foot-loose and fancy-free. (Actually, my personality has prevented me from being foot-loose and/or fancy-free my entire life. Stick in the mud is more like it… but that’s a topic for another post.)

I’ve spent two years trying to take advantage of the so-called “freedom” that divorce brings and quite honesty, I am not sold on it. I’ve found that doing a bunch of cool stuff is actually terribly depressing when you have no one to share it with and/or discuss it with afterwards.

Still, I keep trying, because I am not one for giving up. I’ve also been working hard on mastering the art of cheap travel. (Because I am, after all, a starving artist. I wish that I could camp for even cheaper travel, but I don’t feel safe camping alone with the boys.) Several times this year, I’ve saved huge on hotel rooms from Priceline Name Your Own Price. (Admittedly, I feel super awkward staying at really nice hotels in my 13 year old car with peeling paint and major accident damage on nearly every side. Particularly when you pull up to unload your luggage and the limo behind you has to wait for the baggage guys to unload your weird hodgepodge of cheap luggage.)

This week, we had the good fortune of staying in a room with a fridge.

So I took my Crockpot.

Oh, yes, this is cheap at a new level. Let me just say, my primary motivator in this case wasn’t necessarily frugality. I get physically ill when I go out of town from eating a bunch of fast food and restaurant junk. Usually by the time I return home, I am dying for home cooked food. Plus, wrestling my kids in a restaurant is not exactly the most fun time for them or me.

I have to say I loved it. It was awesome after a long day of trekking around the science center or zoo to come back to the room and have hot and delicious dinner waiting. (No, for the record, I wasn’t embarrassed that the smell of my pork roast was wafting out into the hallway… much.)

I read recently about people who use foil packets to cook multiple dishes in their slow cooker at once, which was kind of genius. I utilized this method to throw some dinner rolls in to heat up about an hour or so before we were ready to eat.

Overall, I was incredibly pleased with the slow cooker results. Of course, it put my geek-brain into overdrive planning our next trip. I’m wondering if I can put breakfast in the night before so we can wake up to a decent breakfast. Could I find room in my car for the bread machine? Could I plug the crockpot into my car and have hot dinner ready by the time we arrived at our destination after a long drive?

(Is this crazy talk? Do I need to see a therapist? Probably, yes…)

For the two of you that are currently reading the resurrection of my blog: do you have cheap travel tips? I’d love to hear them.

I was born a writer. I can’t prove it, of course, but I think I may have been born with a pen in one hand and a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style in the other. Please note that I didn’t say I was born a good writer. I was just born with an innate desire to write things down.

For example, while other little girls were presumably playing with Barbies, I was typing out ridiculous stories on the word processor my parents used for filling out IRS forms for their business. Next came a real computer with Word Perfect (oh, Word Perfect!) and templates (oh, templates!) that I could use to format all manner of newspapers for imaginary towns and brochures for imaginary businesses. (It is somewhat embarrassing to type this. It’s a miracle I made it out of school with any friends at all, isn’t it?)

I quit blogging for a huge variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I was having a major identity crisis. I didn’t like where my blog was going—something like a 24 hour self-pity-wallow-fest of emotional vomit. Also, I couldn’t stand the thought of letting another person into my life ever. I hated the emotional vulnerability of putting even the smallest part of yourself out there for the world to see. (Honest writing is really a form of  nudism, except putting your emotional self out there is in reality way more intense than your physical self.) Faced with the reality of public writing being difficult, I did what all great achievers do, I quit.

No, I couldn’t take a break or wait until I was in a better frame of mind or use logical, clear thought processes. I hate that I inherited my all-or-nothing personality from a very long line of all-or-nothing folks. It would be nice, on occasion, to do things halfway. I almost never do things halfway.

Until now. I’ve decided to very very very very slowly, quietly, and calmly take a very, very, very, very small step into blogging again. Do we even have to call it that—blogging? I kind of hate that word because you hear it a million times a day and everyone is doing it and I’m not really into doing the trendy thing. (You would know this is true if you had seen the inside of my closet.) Instead, let’s just say this is a place where I write things online. A public forum for my thoughts. A place where I can be the writer that I am.

I will not post every day. Heck, I may not even post every month! I may just write recipes and about boring things that you don’t care about, like the hilarious things my kids do that are waaaaaayyyyyy funnier than anything your kids do. You may say, “Where is the drama? Where is the controversy? Where are the arguments about theology in the comment section?”

Perhaps with time I will get back to the drama. But for now, I’m starting with a clean slate (no old posts going up). I am hoping that I will be a calmer, more mature, less emotional version of myself. (Read: I hope my true personality doesn’t always shine through!)

So, this is me, dipping my toes back in the world of writing, and one can only hope, living.

“I have a friend who is having a concert, you should check it out. They are just so amazing.”

Have you ever had a friend say that to you? Does it fill you with the same sense of dread that it does me? It seems like the more someone raves about a musician they know, the worse they actually are when you hear them for yourself. Even better, you don’t want to crush your friend, so you have to pretend that you actually had a decent time. You try to enjoy their “unique blend of punk rock and acoustic country” or “off.the.hook.hip.hop” while secretly checking Facebook on your iPhone. (Because it’s actually more enjoyable to read that your third cousin whom you’ve never met is making waffles for dinner rather than actually listen to the music.) What’s worse is that their lack of musical talent also means an inability to run sound equipment, so there is a lot of interference, the vocals sound muddy, and there is guaranteed to be at least one high pitch squealing sound that leaves your ears ringing for days.

Ah, the joys of local musicians. Perhaps I’m the only one who has such bad friend-of-a-friend band experiences. When my friend Ryan invited me to a concert for Stephen Gordon, a guy who is almost-local (just a few hours away), I tried to be optimistic. I trust Ryan’s judgement, and he did throw around some heavy words like brilliant.

I listened to Stephen’s music before the show and was generally pleased. His new record is So Young Now and features some great songwriting. I looked at his website and felt like I knew what to expect. Singer/songwriter stuff is probably my favorite segment of music.

This was a house concert, which I have to say made me feel like I am pretty cool and have awesome friends.Yeah, I’m totally going to a house concert. Because we are just artsy and hip like that. (Oh, and I really didn’t freak out over the prospect that I might have to parallel park to see this show. In my defense, I have bizarre concert experiences that have resulted in speeding tickets, my car getting towed, and getting lost in the ghetto and running out of gas.)

If there’s one word that I could use to describe Stephen’s show, it would be authentic. There was no trying to be something he wasn’t. No excessive hipster costuming. (Thank God!) None of that holier-than-thou-because-I’m-a-musician junk. In fact, even though I had seen his picture on the website, I wasn’t entirely sure it was him before he started to play. He seemed normal and unassuming and just like another one of the guys, not like the star of the show that we were all there to see. I love that quality in any person of talent.

For this particular show, it was just him and his guitar (which is actually my favorite way to see an artist). I guess he does shows with a full band, but I think I would have not enjoyed that as much. The small crowd and intimate setting was well-suited to his musical style. He said he takes a lot of inspiration from Neil Young, and you can definitely pick that up when you hear him.

I have to say that Ryan was probably right. Brilliant isn’t a word that I use often, but this was the first concert I’ve been to in a while where I felt sort of thoroughly swept away by the music. The simplicity, the authenticity, and his great lyrics all came together for a really great experience.

My only advice is to buy his record. Savor his songwriting. Love his voice. Appreciate his music. And, whatever you do, go see him live immediately.

—Jamie, who is listening to “Moments Move On” from So Young Now at this very moment

Stephen’s website: http://www.stephengordonmusic.com/

Buy So Young Now on iTunes

Stephen on Facebook

Stephen on Twitter