Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

Life's too short to play it safe

Share your stories of working with an editor

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I’m sitting at my desk, wolfing down my oatmeal with sliced banana and tasteless, Costco strawberries, before I shower, drive to Peet’s coffee and then fight the 405 freeway to Venice Beach.
I have a 10:30 a.m., appointment with my editor and cannot wait for feedback on my entire manuscript. Remember, I had to shut off my blog for a month to finish my revisions.
No time for more at this point, I’m running late, however,I’d love to hear your experiences of working with an editor, either freelance or at a publishing house.

Would you like to live to be 100? Here are some secrets of Centenarians

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 Esther Tuttle 100 years old today.

I have always had a fascination with people older than myself, and a yearning to learn from their “wisdom.”
Perhaps being an only child, and often surrounded by my parents’ friends and older relatives, made me realize that I could learn from listening and maybe bypass certain “mistakes,” by following their advice.

Here are three reasons why I believe we should listen to, and respect older people:

  • You never know what snippet of information can make a difference in your own life.
  • An older person with wisdom can often soothe your fears and worries about how you are handling issues in your own life.
  • Older people often offer the same secrets. We all know we might benefit from following their advice, but don’t always listen.

After watching Secrets of Centenarians, you find some common threads.

Esther Tuttle now 100, is amazing. Listen to her beautiful clear voice. She says, “It’s partly genes, and also being conscious of your body.” Esther explains your body is your instrument, and stresses the importance of yoga, stretching and walking. Also, we need to eat and drink in moderation. Esther still drinks today and claims that, “Moderation is a wonderful thing.”

Mae Anderman 103, agrees that genes play a role, and that keeping your mind alert, and having family helps. She also says many people today are anxious and ambitious, and that people have changed and become more “brash, and much less friendly.” She states there’s no use in saying, “I should have or could have. That doesn’t matter.” Also the future will take care of itself. Live in the present.

Travilla Deming 100, says her secret to living long is, “Don’t emphasize anything that is evil or bad. Get rid of it or rise above it.”

The following New York Times article, claims that: Genes do play a role in longevity, although Esther Tuttle’s parents died at 42 and 50.

According to Dr. Nir Barzilai, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, “Centenarians are 20 times as likely as the average person to have a long-lived relative.”

A Swedish study of identical twins separated at birth and reared apart concluded that only about 20 to 30 percent of longevity is genetically determined. Lifestyle seems to be the more dominant factor. If true, then this gives hope that we can live longer and healthier lives by taking care of ourselves.

I want to thank Marla Miller, founder of Marketing the Muse, for posting this on her Facebook page, which prompted my post.

Do you have any words of wisdom, or stories from an elderly person you’d like to share?

Waiting for Superman: a documentary about the state of our education.

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 waiting for superman

 

“Even if you don’t have kids, you should care about public education,” says Lesley Chilcott, producer of Waiting for “Superman.” “If we want to solve global warming, poverty, health care and the economy, we need to have an educated society. Education is ground zero for tackling all these issues.”

Photo (cc) via Flickr user Editor B.
Tuesday was a miserable, wet day in southern California. I felt guilty about taking the afternoon off to go to the movies and justified it as follows: I want to learn more about what’s going on with education in the U.S. and why so many schools are failing. Education needs to be reformed, the standards are deteriorating, and I worry about the future of our kids. Even Bill Gates said there won’t be enough educated young people in the U.S. in 2020, to fill the
job openings.
Waiting for Superman  is a movie, not about Superman, but about the state of our education here in the U.S.

Without getting into a political debate, which is not the point I’m trying to make here, I’d like to share five points that shocked me while watching this movie. You may already be aware of all of this, but I wasn’t.
 

  • U.S. students ranked approximately 24th out of 29th in math and science in the developed world.
  • There have been no improvements in raising overall standards in reading and math over the last ten years. Almost every state is failing to reach minimum standards.
  • Children are placed on a “track system,” the lower track or the upper track, and generally this will follow the student throughout their schooling, from Kindergarten until 12th grade. Lower track kids don’t get the best teachers. Who decides on the track? Well that is left up to the viewer to determine.
  •  Apparently teachers were offered an alternative: get paid up to $122,000/year and give up the “tenure” system, whereby teachers who are lazy, not teaching properly, or are simply not getting the job done, can be laid off. They refused to vote. (This is in the movie, not something I read or heard.)
  •  A student had a hidden camera in his back-pack to film a “lazy” teacher on the tenure system, who read the newspaper and didn’t teach, and the high school kids were playing games and doing whatever they wanted. (I remember one of my sons telling me that his 10th grade teacher was showing videos and making them color in maps, almost every day, instead of teaching. She was getting ready to retire and was so fed up with her job, she didn’t care.) 

There are so many points covered other than what I brought up, as we follow the lives of inner city kids around the U.S. and how many can only attend their “failing” inner city schools.

Those who struggle to get into the “better” schools try the lottery system. One little Hispanic girl, Daisy, wanted to become a vet. She worked so hard every day and unfortunately, her name was not called out during the lottery, so she had to stay in her “failing” school. 

I could feel the frustration of parents trying so hard to give their children a better education, and who are “stuck” in a school where the standards are ridiculously poor. I hope you take the time to watch this movie. As with any documentary, facts may be distorted, however, there is a real crisis in the U.S. educational system today.

I’d like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the GREAT teachers.

Message from Davis Guggenheim, Director of Waiting for Superman: “We are never going to have great schools without great teachers.

Please see the film. Any thoughts?

You’ve got to find what you love

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Alfie is seventy-two-years old and decides to leave his wife of forty years, and have a good time. He meets a twenty-something call girl, and dates her. So why not a Ferrari instead of a call girl? you may ask, well, Anthony Hopkins who plays the character Alfie, in the movie,You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, says, “Everyone makes mistakes in life and this guy made a big mistake. It cost him his marriage and probably his life. Fear rules so many of our lives, and in our lives we try to accumulate and gather as much as we can because at the back of our mind,the end is in sight.”

(If you wish to listen to the interview, please click the link)

 

Furthermore, Hopkins states the moral of, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the latest Woody Allen film is probably,”Carpe diem.”
Anthony Hopkins says, “We live and then we die, so what’s the big deal. Don’t analyze it. I gave up trying to figure it out years ago.” He then quotes a riddle from Yeats and interprets as, “Don’t try to find meaning in life, because you won’t. There may be a meaning, and there may not be one, none of us know, it’s all a mystery, and it’s all a dream.”
I find wisdom in his words, and a sense of relief, that sometimes, when life becomes overwhelming, we create problems that have not yet occurred, and may never happen, so why do we waste time worrying?
Another story taken from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, during his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, also ties in with what Anthony Hopkins says. Jobs talks about death, since doctors initially told him he had three to six months left to live. This changed the way he thought about his life.
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
I hope you’re already living the life you love to the fullest. I know some people are struggling, however, we need to stop letting different kinds of fear rule our lives.

Have you found what you love?

What stress can do to teenagers

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Craig, a sixteen-year-old hears the voices of his parents and his sister say, “Don’t do it,” and wakes up in a sweat.

His parents love him. They’re nice people, so what’s the problem? Stress. He doesn’t want to disappoint his family, especially not his dad.
This is his life, and one Sunday morning at 5 a.m., he wakes up from his recurring nightmare, shaking.  He’s standing on the metal railing, getting ready to jump off a bridge, and this time, he doesn’t wake up before the jump, he wakes up as he’s falling.While his family is still asleep, Craig gets dressed and walks to a hospital. He tells the receptionist, “I want to commit suicide.” She hands him a clipboard and says, “Fill this out,” and laughs at something her friend says on the phone.

Craig is admitted to the adult psychiatric ward, and is placed in a room with a middle-aged Egyptian man, who does nothing but sleep all day. He decides he made a mistake and wants to be released. He cannot. He is forced to stay for a minimum of five days. Everyone is much older, except for one teenage girl who cuts herself.
His parents show up, and his mother is happy he admitted himself. They bring some clothes and toiletries and leave him there. What happens during the five days is amazing. Craig rediscovers his love and talent for drawing. He also finds out he’s a great rock singer when forced to sing.

He bonds with a man in the ward, who has an eight-year-old daughter. They play basketball, and he gives Craig the positive attention and advice that he is not receiving from his own father. Through this, Craig also changes people in the psychiatric ward, and when he leaves after five days, he’s a different person. He’s learned to become a kid with a passion for life.

To some of you, this may sound like a Hollywood movie, and yes, “It’s Kind of a Funny Story.”

In an article on teenagers and stress, I found the following as major causes of stress:

  • high expectations placed upon them by
  • parents and teachers
  • participating in extracurricular activities
  • being over-scheduled

Now I know Craig is a bright sixteen-year-old with goals, and there are also many examples of teenagers without goals, however, have things changed that much? Are there more young people stressing out today? Is it harder to be a teenager today than when you grew up?

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