Watch Yourself. That is all.

WATCH YOURSELF.

My father used to shout this out when I was small and in danger of hurting myself, usually while doing something dumb, like running into the street after a ball.

My mother however used to say this to me, in a slow, low voice, accompanied by piercing eyes, when I was a teenager and in danger of being hurt emotionally, by my own headlong rush into territory I didn't yet understand, or by a careless boy, let's say.

About six years ago, when I was working on a magazine article with a life coach, she advised me: "Watch yourself," but she meant it in a different way altogether. She wanted me to observe myself carefully, as if from a distance, so that I could develop a keener awareness of my actions in areas of my life I wanted to change. 

I've been thinking lately about these two words, for reasons too complicated to address right here, right now.

But mostly, I keep coming back to the idea of observation, truly watching myself, and how important it is, and how frequently I don't do it. Watch yourself.  Doesn't it seem like good advice, no matter what  one is doing, working on, worried about?   

I'm sure I could think of a half dozen ways I could tie this into writing. But I won't. I think it stands on its own. And sometimes, that's enough.

17 (or 19) Words for 2011

I don't recall where I got this list, but I've been carrying it in my wallet for years. The idea is, when faced with difficult circumstances, one of these 17 actions is likely to be the key to moving ahead. It may not be particularly writer-oriented, but I've found it useful in both professional and personal situations. I'm passing it along in the hope it may help you in some way in your 2011 writing life:

17 Words


Accept
Act
Believe
Care
Change
Choose
Focus
Forgive
Listen
Persist
Pray
Prepare
Relax
Risk
Smile
Trust
Wait


Since getting the original list, I've penciled in two additional words of my own: Rest and Ask.
From the original list, I often find Listen, Persist and Wait to be the most effective.


Have any words to add?

Brackets for Beginners (Off Topic for a Monday)

It's Monday and I'm off to a particularly slow start, just now reading the morning paper -- yes, a paper paper. Oh, I do read plenty of news online. But I start the day with the New York Times: crossword puzzle and then Arts, next the editorial and OpEd pages, then the special sections – Tuesday/Science, Wednesday/Dining, etc. – and finally, business and then the front national/international news section. I put the Sports section aside for my teenage son. Usually.

Today, however, I am going through the sports pages, doing a kind of homework, trying to learn something intelligent to say the teenager later. Having decided the other day that it's easier (or at least quieter) not to fight it, I've bought into The Bracket, and agreed that even in a household where television is normally banned in favor of homework on Monday through Thursday, college basketball may rule, at least for two weeks or so. I graduated from Syracuse University at a time when the Orange were a dominant NCAA team. I lived across the street from the legendary and decrepit Manley Field House. I was at the first game ever played in Carrier Dome. So you might think I know a thing or two about college hoops. You would be wrong.

But just to prove that I'm not hopeless, I asked the teenager over the weekend to explain this Bracket business to me, which created so much excitement in our house ("Mom's going to make a Bracket!"), that he flew up to my office to make copies of the Sports Illustrated fill-in-the-blank insert for all four of us. These are now posted around the kitchen in various stages of inked-in, crossed-out completion.

After listening to my son's careful and lively 20-minute explanation – the boy wants to be a sportscaster, after all – I knew what seemed like everything I needed to know in order to fill in my Bracket. Everything except which teams are good picks. But hey, if as my son said, the SI editors had already got it wrong ("busted their bracket"), I was game. So I grabbed a pen and got to work.

That is, I went down the list and picked out teams like so: I'll take Louisville (because of the Kentucky Derby), and Dayton (because we used to eat at the Dayton Inn in Clifton when I was a kid), Xavier because I like the way the word looks and sounds, Gonzaga because any team with that name needs any and all help, USC because I lived in Southern California for a while, and Perdue because I once had a crush on a Perdue-bound prep school boy, and Duke because well, doesn't the name Duke just make you think, winner?

Of course, Syracuse too. So what if it took me 20-plus years to take an interest in "my" team? It's also taken me a while also to understand that learning new meanings for some old words (like bracket) and relaxing a relatively new rule (no TV on school nights) in favor of some old-fashioned sports-craziness, can keep a teenager engaged and force a mom outside of her comfort zone to such an extent that she is seriously contemplating if it would be completely wrong to make a new copy of her Bracket and started over without telling the teenager.

And, it's taken me six paragraphs to figure out that today's post has absolutely nothing to do with writing or reading or the literary life. Sue me.