Summer 1999
On reducing road rage:

My husband and I had just picked up some sweet iced tea and hush puppies at a fast food restaurant.
As we stopped at a red light, a car pulled up beside us with a boom box deluxe, vibrating decibels across the intersection and beyond.
Hubby: "Where's a hand grenade when you need one?"
Me: "We could lob over some hush puppies."

May 1999|
Stop the violins

If life is a symphony, many of us are not musicians. It's not a matter of if anymore, it's a matter of when violence will affect you or someone you know. I'm not personally acquainted with anyone at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, but the shootings in April, and following discussions, have caused me to re-evaluate how I raise my daughter.

Wrong choices lead to violence. It is the ultimate expression of anger, rejection, and unresolved pain. Perhaps some Ohio psychologists are on the path to healing as they discuss the alienation teens experience.

Colorado's state flower is the Rocky Mountain columbine. This member of the buttercup family is a perennial, and produces flowers with petals that extend backwards to form a hollow tube. The flowers can be blue, purple, pink, or white. To honor those injured and killed at the high school, I am planting some columbines in my yard.

Tips for angry teens:
>>Friends don't let friends punch and drive.
>>Plant a flower. Choose a dry patch of earth for a more aggressive dig.
>>Have a cottonball fight.
>>Hands only: rip apart a pillow--no scissors or knives!
>>Hands only: write a flaming e-mail, print it, and shred it. Shift delete the e-mail.
>>Throw butter.

More tips.

April 1999
Live a Rainbow

To many, Spring brings an urge to dig in the dirt. In recent years, I have joined this group, eagerly watching plants grow, and flower, and grow.

Red earth is a signature of the South. I happen to like its color--it contrasts well with row after row of fluffy white cotton. But you can bet I don't like the trail it leaves--red on my shoes, on my jeans, on my skin.

It all came together when we recently moved to a Southern town--an opportunity to create a new flower garden, and we are surrounded by cotton fields and red earth.

I'll admit to feeling twinges of transferred anger (frustrations from the move) as I watch the rain dance with the earth on our new-construction lot. One day, I became inspired. My child watched in glee as I transformed her window seat into a sample of her universe: a blue water basin, a strip of red clay soil, a green matting of grass, a burst of yellow sun, then blue sky forever.

When I created the soil strip, I started with a base of pure red. Then I merged it with a brown. The red symbolized anger; the brown symbolized my history. In mixing the two, I realized a move to a new place creates a merging of the old and the new. Neither one is lost, and they merge to create a new reality.

My next step is to add the trees, and flowers, and birds, and all those elements that create joy.

This month, I offer coloring, or painting, as methods to find a fresh angle on your anger. Both are inexpensive ways to express your feelings. No need to buy special canvas--the walls, the car, your clothes, the furniture--all await a transformation. And go ahead, break a few crayons.

Rough sketch cartoons to color:
Turtle
Bear
Frosty

Mo' better pics

March 1999
Miz Choco's Sweet Revenge

For all those who want to smash their screen every time they receive yet another recycled file of forwarded spam, here's one where no one will take the cookie but you.

I have received this forwarded recipe perhaps from every e-mail friend (?) with whom I've chatted. After receiving it from my best friend on a day when I was angry with the world, I decided to actually try the recipe. The cookies are good, but I'll refer all judgment of Neiman-Marcus to Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune, who gives excellent advice to news readers of all ages.

Miz Choco and her daughter did lunch at a Neiman-Marcus store in Dallas. After munching fresh greens, they ordered Neiman-Marcus cookies for dessert.

Miz Choco asked the waitress for the cookie recipe, was told it was "two fifty," and approved the addition to her credit card. When Miz Choco received her monthly credit card statement, she discovered the recipe cost two hundred and fifty dollars.

Neiman-Marcus would not refund the money, since Miz Choco (and probably her daughter, and many friends of a friend, by this time) had seen the recipe. To quote Miz Choco:
"Okay, you folks got my $250, and now I'm going to have $250.00 worth of fun."

(Neiman-Marcus was unavailable for comment.)

Miz Choco promptly sent the story and recipe to all the world, via e-mail, via a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, and most of Jerry Seinfeld's friends.

Although I would question Miz Choco's definition of "fun," I do admire her creative solution to the rage she must have felt . . .

Neiman-Marcus Cookies
(this recipe may be halved--that's what I did, and I even "blender-ized" the oatmeal. Perhaps that is the secret for which Miz Choco paid dearly. However, no way does it make 112 cookies, or 56 . . .)

2 cups butter
4 cups flour
2 teaspoons soda
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal
24 ounces chocolate chips
2 cups brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 8-ounce Hershey(r) bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)

Measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey(r) bar, and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.