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The population estimates from the US Census Bureau (www.census.gov):

282,909,885 people, of which
138,396,524 are male
144,513,361 are female
72,707,840 are under 18 years old, and
33,896,172 are 65 years old and over

Keep these figures in mind, especially when watching a panicky news broadcast about things like a mosquito-born virus which has made 126 people sick.

282,909,885 people the USA, and 126 people get sick. You do the math. The chances of it affecting you - even in the 65 and older population - would be so close to zero that it might as well be zero.

Dumping

Dumping someone sucks almost as much as it does getting dumped.  If you’re a kind and compassionate person, it hurts you almost as much as it does the person you’re breaking it off with.  Because of this, many of us stay with someone longer than we’d like — often years.

Here’s the thing.  You’re not really doing that person a favor.  Staying in your relationship merely to keep him or her happy, in the long run, is only going to hurt them more.  The longer you are together, the more attached to you they become, and the longer it will take them to get over the trauma and move on with their life.

So you find yourself having doubts.  He or she seems serious about you.  Maybe marriage has been discussed.  You may have even thought it a good idea.  Then something happens, and you wonder if you’re making a mistake.

Stop immediately.  Think it through.  Discuss it with trusted friends or family.  If you have sane parents (lucky you!) discuss it with them — they’ve been through it.  Maybe bring it up with a counselor or psychologist, if you have that resource.

Can you see yourself with this person five years from now?  Can you see yourself having children with him or her?  Do you think you’ll be happy?

No?

Stop the relationship immediately.  Don’t let it linger. You owe it to him or her, as much as you do to yourself.  The sooner you break it off, the sooner they’ll get over it, and the quicker they’ll get back into their search for their own special person.

There is no easy way to break it off.  Being you’ve read this far, you obviously care enough about this person to want to let them down easy.  Unfortunately the chances are if he or she is already attached to you, there is no way to let them down easy.  Research (and my own personal experience) shows the best way to do it is suddenly and absolutely.

Think of it like peeling off an adhesive bandage that’s stuck tight and is going to hurt when you remove it.  Peeling it slowly may hurt a bit less, but it still hurts and you’re prolonging the pain.  Pull it off quickly and it hurts a bit more up front, but then at least it’s over with, the pain fades faster, and you can then move on to other things.

There’s no real way to say what would work best in your situation, but generally speaking you should consider writing it out in a letter.  Outline in simple terms why you want to break it off, and explain it’s just as much for their sake as it is for your own, and that there’s no room for negotiations.

Hand the letter to them and stand there while it’s read.  Say you’re sorry.  Fend off any attempts to change your mind.  They’re going to go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.  No telling how long this will take (weeks if not months) but right up front you’ll be dealing with their denial, and possibly the anger and bargaining.

If you’re the tender-hearted sort (being that you’re bothering to read this, you probably are) this is where you’ll be in the most danger of caving in.  If so, you need to make a quick escape.  Either that, or opt to do the less honorable thing and don’t deliver the letter in person.

Here is where I’m going to disagree with most of the “expert” advice out there on this subject.  The goal is to break off the relationship, right?  You’re doing it as much for him or her as you are for yourself, right?  So what is the point of doing the “honorable” thing of actually facing the person as you’re breaking off the relationship if that gives them more a chance of overcoming your resolve?

Really, think about it, the more a jerk you are about it, the more likely you are to succeed. The better you succeed the better for you both.  I’m not saying you should be mean to them or damage their self-esteem.  I’m saying you should consider handling it in such a way that they (and their friends) may label you as a coward.

Consider this scenario:  you try to break it off in person.  She cries, and you can’t stand seeing her cry.  So you cave in, and try to make it work.  Months later you come to the same conclusion, and so try it again, this time by simply leaving a letter.  She shows up on your doorstep, sobbing, miserable, and you cave in again.  Finally much later you still come to the same conclusion and in desperation break off the relationship in a much-less-than-honorable way.  End result: you’ve wasted a good chunk of her life (and yours) because of misplaced good intentions.

What would have been a better way? Buy a plane ticket, change the locks on your doors, change your phone number, and then slide a compassionate but final goodbye letter under her door before leaving town for a week or two.  This would give her time to go through the denial and be deep into the anger by the time you return.  If she’s successfully transferred into the anger stage, she won’t want to see you again.  Later, during the bargaining phase, you will have some distance and hopefully built up your resolve enough to resist it.

Is this cowardly?  Maybe.  Is it the right way to do it?  Probably not.  Is it the best thing for the both of you?  That’s up to you, but I’ve made my argument.  If you’re strong enough to not give in on the first time, then wonderful.  If you are, though, why are you reading this article?  Just go do it.

There’s nothing wrong with being tender-hearted.  It means you’re compassionate.  Unfortunately there are times when you have to save yourself from your own compassion, and this is one of those times.

It sucks when you have to hurt someone.  Just like it sucks when you get hurt.  But you have to be true to yourself, and that’s the final word.

Been Dumped

So you find yourself on the other side of this.

Let yourself grieve.  It’s going to have to come out, so you might as well get it all out at once.  You have to go through those stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. 

Accept that it happened.  That person, for some reason or another, decided that you two were not a good match after all.  Unless there’s a major misunderstanding involved, you just have to trust that person is right.  For a permanent relationship to work, you both have to know it’s right, not just one of you.  So, it was not meant to be. 

Even if it feels like it, this is not the end of the world.  It is a bitter thing to do — accepting that there must be life after this person.  But there is.

You need to resolve immediately to move on.

Lean on your friends for a while.  Not too much, but enough to help you cope.  If you find you’re overwhelming your friends, talk to a therapist (they’re paid to listen). 

Avoid alcohol.  It makes everything worse.  Trust me on this.

You may find you’ve lost interest in everything.  You may also find that since you’ve displaced all your original dreams with the ones you shared with this person, you end up with none.  This can be the hardest part.  If you can’t resurrect your old dreams, start casting about for new ones.

Resolve to continue moving on.  You’ve already tried telling yourself to do it immediately.  Keep telling yourself that.

Also keep in mind that the past does not exist.  No time machine will ever take you back.  The past is gone.  You have only now, and you have to stay in the here and now.  The things you do now will shape your future.  You have to start now in making your future brighter.

That being said, you’re probably in a state of mind where you don’t care at all about the future.  You don’t care at all about anything.  So, start searching for things you enjoy doing, even small things — and as long as they’re not harmful, then revel in doing them.  Do things that give you pleasure. 

Stop dwelling on what happened.  Dwell instead on now, and what you’re going to do tomorrow.

Continue moving on.  Put yourself out there.  It doesn’t matter that your confidence is shattered … fake it.  Everyone else is faking it too.

Move slowly with your next relationship, unless you find someone who is temporary and agrees to be temporary.  If you find that person, get wild with them.  Be safe, but have fun.

Whenever a horrid upwelling of sadness hits you — and it will — immediately remind yourself that it will soon pass.  You’re going to get through this okay.  You will reach a point where you can look back on this with relief that it’s over.  Every day moves you closer to that point.

Continue to not dwell on the past.  Continue to move forward.

You’re going to be okay.

Trust me, you will.

Last year a lovely and talented writer named Jennifer turned me on to Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Thank you Jennifer.

Thank you.

I’ve had this book for months and I haven’t even finished it. I can only read about two pages before I suddenly have to put the book down, rush over to my desk, and write something.

This book is so unique you can judge it by weight. It’s light, yet it holds more inspiration per ounce than anything I have ever hefted before in my life. It’s like condensed inspiration, slowly and lovingly rendered down to almost pure form.

I know I’ve touted this book before, maybe here, definitely elsewhere, but even if I’m repeating myself it deserves to be repeated. I sometimes wish I’d discovered this twenty years ago, but no. Things happen for a reason. The universe has a timing all its own. Something brought Jennifer and I together one morning at a Starbucks, and I think her gift to me was to tell me about this book. So the book came into my life at a time where I can really appreciate it, and savor it, and let it inspire me one page at a time.

I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who writes. Not just novels, but poetry, business reports, sales receipts, shopping lists … even if you don’t write at all. It teaches you in a very Zen way to appreciate life as it happens.

It’s a writer’s job to notice things. Moments. Instances. If you notice them, you appreciate them. Then you can write about them.

But the real gift here is that you learn to notice them.

Thank you again, Jennifer.

And thank you Natalie Goldberg.

Serves three, or one bachelor for three days.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups water
• 1 TBS margarine
• 3/4 cup frozen onion/pepper mix
• Wal-Mart Great Value Chicken Stuffing Mix
• Wal-Mart Great Value Chicken Flavor Pasta & Sauce
• Idahoan Four Cheese Mashed Potatoes

Bring water and margarine to a boil in medium saucepan.

Add package of Chicken Flavor Pasta & Sauce.

Add the frozen onion/pepper mix because, oh, what the heck. Onions and peppers are good.

Continue boiling over medium heat for seven minutes, stirring occasionally and wondering if it is supported to look so soupy.

Realize you used a 2 cup measure instead of a 1 cup measure, which means there is twice the water that’s supported to be in there.

Panic and search the cupboard for more pasta.

Finding none, throw in the stuffing mix, because — what the heck — it’s been in the cupboard for at least two years now.

Determine that it still looks too soupy to eat, so search for something else you can throw in to soak up the water.

Discover the package of Idahoan Four Cheese Mashed Potatoes and wonder how long that’s been up there.

Stir in the entire package.

Describe over the phone how disgusting it looks to your fiancée. Wince as she laughs hysterically at you.

Take it off the heat and let it congeal as you look up the phone number of the local pizza delivery place.

Right before you dial the pizza number, you take an experimental taste.

Surprise! It’s delicious!

Wash it down with a bottle of Lagunitas Hairy Eyeball Ale.

Life is good.

Let me tell you from personal experience, eBay can save your butt. A few years ago I found myself out of work and not able to make house or car payments, so in desperation I pulled out my flatbed scanner and some old postcards, scanned the postcards, and put them up for auction on eBay. I was hoping to make at least $300. To my surprise, I raked in far more than that — enough money to keep my house out of foreclosure, and saved my car from the repo man.

The best things to sell on eBay are items that you already own, because — obviously — that will give you the highest profit margin. Everyone has stuff in boxes, somewhere, that they haven’t looked at in years. The question is, can you live without it? And will someone else want it? If it’s small, lightweight, and collectible, the answer is probably YES.

Small and lightweight are logical factors. Most items sold via eBay will have to go through the mail. The buyer will have to add the shipping costs in with what they’re willing to pay you, and the higher the shipping, the less they will be willing to bid. Vintage items such as old postcards, vinyl records, and books are highly portable. Another factor is, how sturdy is the item? If it’s fragile, it will cost more to ship because you’ll have to package it better. The bottom line is, it’s easier to sell a book than a set of china on eBay. Save the old china for a garage sale, or Craigslist.com.

The other key is demand. Is your stack of items rather rare? Is there a hardcore group of people out there obsessively collecting them? If the answer is yes, then you may be sitting on a gold mine you didn’t even know you had.

Personally, I had three gold mines: antique postcards, old vinyl records in pristine condition, and old hardbound books by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. I’d been collecting Dick’s works for 20 years, and several of the books netted hundreds of dollars a piece. I was sad to see them go, but then again, they helped keep a roof over my head and a car in the garage for nearly 7 months.

Other items that seem to sell well are antique clocks, watches, memorabilia, jewelry, toys, and/or just about anything that’s portable and collectable. Also, oddly enough, clothes sell very well on eBay, especially things like Levi jeans. I know someone in California who brings in a good extra income just by picking up old clothes at garage sales and selling them on eBay.

So, ask yourself, what gold mine do you have hidden in the back of your closet?

There are only a few books I can point to and say, “That changed my life.” David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the latest. It’s a very Zen and common sense approach to increasing your productivity and lowering your stress levels, and it has helped me tremendously.

The secret is to organize in a simple way, and empty your mind of all the things you need to do by putting them down on paper or PDA. The point is to have an uncluttered mind so that when you turn your attention to something, you can turn your entire attention to it. The system you set up enables you to not worry about forgetting this or that important thing, which really does lower your stress levels.

It’s made me realize, once again, that the simplest answers to problems are the best and often the most profound.

The book has spawned an entire subculture and influenced numerous websites, my favorite of which is Lifehacker, which I read daily. Lifehacker feeds you a continuous stream of tips to help “hack” your life and make it better, embracing the concept of Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD is how Lifehacker refers to it). They, in turn, pull from a whole group of other sites that are dedicated to the same thing.

If you’re stumbling through life juggling 40 things in your head, and keep forgetting half of them, and never seem to have the time to do any of it — and stressing out because of that — then I highly recommend taking a close look at GTD. It worked for me

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.

“In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up. “Yeah, right.”

- From our big dusty archive of funny email
(Authors Unknown)

It’s a very good thing to have dreams and aspirations. The problem is, which ones do you chase? Which ones do you lock in as a goal, and work toward? For some people this is a no-brainer, but for others — especially creative types who have a very large range of interests — choosing can be difficult. So difficult, in fact, that you end up making no choice at all.

Another pitfall is choosing to pursue something that, in the end, you lose interest in. The time in your life is finite, and it’s a shame to waste that time and energy chasing something that turns out to be a whim. That’s why it’s best to take some time up front, studying, to discover what it is you really want out of life, before you dedicate a lot more time working toward it.

It’s like that Talking Heads song Seen and Not Seen, where the guy spends years slowly changing the shape of his own face to an ideal, which — halfway through — he decides isn’t what he really wants.

Here’s what I did, and it worked for me. Maybe it will work for you as well.

Spend a couple weeks making a list of the things you really want out of life. Don’t be afraid to think big. What is it you really want?

Don’t worry about listing them in order, and if you think of something else later, you can add it in at any time.

My [highly edited] personal example:

• See New Zealand
• Get a really good camera
• Write for a living
• Become a gourmet chef
• Paint pictures
• Pursue photography
• Own a Starbucks
• Live in a beach house
• Own a Bookstore
• Learn computer programming
• Learn database programming

Make sure you don’t lose this list. I kept mine on my Palm Pilot, because I carried it with me everywhere. You can keep it on your computer, in a blog, or in a notebook you know you won’t lose. It doesn’t matter where, just as long as it’s accessible and safe.

Now, over the course of the next 6 months to a year (or even longer if you’d like), go down this list and rate your desire for each one on a scale from zero to ten, using decimals if you so choose. Do it at least once a month. When you’re done, you’ll have a list of numbers beside each:

• See New Zealand - 8.2/3.2/5.6/9/8.8/6.3/6.6/7/8/10
• Get a really good camera - 8.1/9/9.3/4/5/6/3/6.6/8/10
• Write for a living - 7.4/9.3/8/9/7/6/9/10/9/10
• Become a gourmet chef - 7.2/2.1/3/4/3.4/4.3/8.2/4/5.3/4
• Paint pictures - 6.7/8/4.4/3/0/2/4.4/3/6.7/0
• Pursue professional photography - 6.5/9.9/8/2/0/2/3
• Own a Starbucks - 4.8/0/1/0/0
• Live in a beach house - 9.5/8.2/9.8/8/9/8/7/8/10
• Own a Bookstore - 4.1/0/3/0/2.7/2
• Learn computer programming - 1/1/0/2/4/0/0
• Learn database programming - 1/3.4/0/1/2.3/4/1.1/1

You can see immediately the goals I’ve consistently craved over time are things like a beach house and a really cool camera (I’m leaning toward either a Nikon or Canon digital SLR). One of the things obviously a whim was my desire to open a Starbucks of my very own.

Now, average each one up and sort them highest to lowest:

• Write for a living - 8.5 Average
• Live in a beach house - 8.4 Average
• See New Zealand - 7.3 Average
• Get a really good camera - 6.9 Average
• Become a gourmet chef - 4.5 Average
• Pursue professional photography - 4.5 Average
• Paint pictures - 3.8 Average
• Own a Bookstore - 2.0 Average
• Learn database programming - 1.8 Average
• Own a Starbucks - 1.2 Average
• Learn computer programming - 1.1 Average

And there you go. You have a well researched list of what you want out of life. Concentrate on the top of the list, and forget about everything averaging below a seven in your ratings.

I did this about three years ago. I’ve achieved the top item on the list, and am now working toward the others. (Being that the camera was so close to being a seven, it’s still on my list of goals, but it’s a lower priority.)

Now, right in the middle of all this, you may stumble into something else that fires your rockets. Add it in. Pursue it a bit. Study it as well.

The most important thing is to make sure you enjoy it, and keep enjoying it. It could turn out that something on your list (that you’ve wanted for over a year) will suddenly drop off after you’ve started pursing it. Maybe something you pursued while you were making your list takes its place.

It’s okay. If you feel a passion for something, and the passion doesn’t fade, you may not even need to make a list or study your long term desires.

If that happens, then I am happy for you! Go for it!

If not, then at least you have a solid place to start. And everything you do, learn from it. If you can do that, then nothing is wasted, and you’re living your life to its fullest.

This very interesting article on Nature.com tells the tale of Luci Mori studying the area around his home in Sorbolo, Italy, using Google Earth. Noticing something odd in a field, he zooms in and discovers an unknown Roman ruin!

That’s right, folks, a guy surfing the Internet made an important archeological discovery.

As Indiana Jones said, “Seventy percent of all archeology is done in the library.” Well, now it’s going to be done on Google.

If you are curious about where a famous person is buried, or which famous people are buried in your local cemetery, there’s an online place called “Find A Grave” where you can find out: www.findagrave.com

You can search by person, by location, and by claim to fame. There are numerous other options, including the ability to search for your own ancestors, making this a virtual Google of the dead.

Best of all, it’s free.

If you spend too much time there, though, it starts to get creepy. Maybe that’s just me.