The day started a little weird: I went to Starbucks, which was packed. The giant handicapped table near the power outlets had one guy at it. So I said, “Can I sit here?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, and he moved his stuff out of the way so I would have more space.

I put my coffee down and started unpacking my things to get working.

“What kind of coffee did you order?” he asked, pulling my cup of coffee away.

“What?” I said. I reached for my coffee.

“What did you order? I need to get you another one. I wasn’t paying attention and I drank your coffee.”

To the best of my knowledge, since I began hanging out in cafes in 1986, that’s the first time that’s ever happened.

“Grande Americano, no room,” I said.

A few minutes later he came back with my new coffee (undrunk, I hoped) and a table nearby opened up, so I moved to it.

And then no writing occurred.

(Shortly thereafter, an actual handicapped person came in and asked if they could have that table, so that guy ended up moving to the table next to mine.)

How could that be? On Sunday, when I’d had some writing time, I’d written lots. I’d left myself a cliffhanger. I knew what the next scene had to be.

Nothing happened. I wrote one sentence, practically hacking the words out of stone. The next sentence was hiding, somewhere, afraid to come out.

Oh no.

At 12:30 I finally decided I would go to the gym, work out, get the blood flowing… I checked my phone.

Four calls from Sophia. I hadn’t heard my phone once. Stupid Starbucks music system.

She wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go home. So instead of going to the gym, I went to the school, picked her up, took her home. She went upstairs to lie down. I opened my computer.

Couldn’t write.

Tried playing Tropico 3.

Hated every scenario I tried.

Read a friend’s story to send some feedback. Thought perhaps this might not be the best day for that, because nothing else seemed to be happening. Sent it anyhow.

Sophia came down an hour later to get some lunch.

One of Darin’s great gifts (or strengths, or abilities, or whatever) is that he can concentrate through anything. I can’t. I know I should work on that. But if one of the kids is home, around for any reason, only half of my concentration is present. (And it hadn’t exactly shown up earlier in the day, anyhow.)

I finally called it a day at about 3:30 or 4. I played some Civilization IV. The civ I built annoyed me and I quit the game.

Some days it just doesn’t pay to get started.

• Super what? No, I’m not going to be all self-congratulatory. I hate it when people are all “Modern culture’s got nothin’ on me, man.” I honestly have zero interest in professional football and it really wouldn’t occur to me to spend 4 hours watching a commercial fest interspersed with bits of a football game. I used to watch baseball, but that ended in 1993.
• I ran on Thursday. I ran this morning. I didn’t run far, but given that I think I may have run twice in all of January, I’m feeling pretty good about it. You don’t have to plan out your exercise regime for the rest of your life. Just for today.
• I’m starting BJ Fogg’s Tiny Little Habits program tomorrow. When he sent out the materials on how it works, I said, “Ohhhh.” Yeah, duh. Anyhow, I picked a few things to work on. I’ll report back later this week as to the program’s effectiveness.
• Man, if you want to get a lot of hits on your blog, just talk about ebooks versus physical books. Also: the curly hair method.
• I drove to Union Square yesterday to have lunch with a friend. Getting into San Francisco is a pain in the ass. Getting out of San Francisco requires wiliness and stealth and maybe rocket launchers. If you’re leaving from Union Square garage, what in the best way to get out of the city? It took me about 25 minutes to get to the freeway on-ramp on 4th Street and I was a nervous wreck by the time I got there.
• Turns out everyone else in town decided this Starbucks was a good place to spend time during the game as well.
• This Nissan travel mug is basically the greatest travel mug ever.
• I didn’t have my phone with me today. It’s amazing how naked and out of touch I feel now without it. My phone, my self.

One thing I really needed to figure out was what to do about my laundry room.

Pre-remodel, all I’d had was a hallway for the washer and dryer, which meant I usually ended up doing the laundry in the dining room. Which we therefore rarely used because there was always a huge pile of laundry on the table. I also had a gigantic clothes rack installed in the corner of the dining room for all of the air-dry stuff: my workout clothes, my unmentionables, my sweaters… Basically, our dining room was the laundry.

After the remodel, enough space was added to make the laundry room an actual room, with cabinets and things.

My new laundry room, complete with laundry

And the best part is the one that most people don’t even notice.

Go ahead, look for it….

No, not the Amazon box. That needs to go out the side door to the recycling bin. Ignore the box.

No, not the huge quantity of cabinets that I haven’t even filled up yet. I know, right? How is that possible? I have no idea. I’m not trying especially hard to fill them; I figure that will just come with time.

Oh, all right, here it is:

The clothes rack

I did lots of research, trying to find a)an indoor clothes drying rack that b)could handle lots of laundry and c)would get the hell out of the way when not being used. Lots of people have walked through my laundry room only to have me point out the rack and then they say, “Whoa! I noticed your piles of laundry and your empty Amazon boxes, but I did not notice that.”

I eventually ended up on a Swiss site, because I couldn’t find anything domestically made that fit my requirements. I almost went for a British kitchen rack, but I decided the sleeker Swiss German model fit our needs better. I can’t find the exact model we got online, but I’m pretty sure it was a Stewi.

This thing is awesome, particularly as 92% of my clothing now requires air-drying.

It works like this: you lower the rack from the ceiling using a very high-tech “twine” system.

The rack, lowered

Then you open the wings.

Prepared for flight

Then you load it up, however you like, either with things hanging on one of the rungs, or laying flat out over several, and retract the whole thing up to the ceiling.

I will have clean clothes again soon

I am very fond of my Miele washer and dryer, and the long counter over there on the left-hand side, currently loaded with many baskets’ worth of laundry is quite nice too. But this drying rack is DA BOMB.

One of the important soundbites I took away from that day was to forget the old mantra, “Look where you’re going.” That’s stupid. That’s how people drive off of cliffs. They see the cliff, they drive off of it. No, the thing they said was “Look where you want to go.” If you want to stay on the road, focus on the road. After you’ve driven for a while, you don’t have to instruct your hands on how to turn the wheel (remember how tiring that part of driving was?) and you’ve got a relationship with your feet on how heavy to ride the pedals. No, your job is to point the car correctly. Your autonomic functioning takes over after that.

Doing those “gratitude journals” and stuff sounded so hokey to me when I first heard of them. Let me rephrase: I absolutely love hokey stuff, but not when it substitutes for, y’know, actual work. So often things like gratitude journals are described as being modern versions of magic spells: do this and this and this, and you get X, Y, and Z in return. Suh-weet deal.

But, when I thought about it, I decided that a gratitude journal wasn’t supposed to take the place of anything else. Focusing on things I was grateful for — whether inside or outside of myself — is always good. I force myself to look at the good things in life, because like so many other people if I don’t work hard at it, I ruminate over the bad things that happen.

You know, the old hokey saying “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Note the similarity there to “Look where you want to go.”

I’ve mentioned in an entry a while back that I like the Happy Tapper’s Gratitude Journal for iPhone app. (There’s an iPad version too.) These apps are good-looking, they’re cute, they’re fun. They make it Not Hard to write down your 5 things every day.

After a while of doing this, your brain gets very good at picking out the good things about the day. You focus not on what makes you upset or angry, but what makes you happy, what gives you energy or peace or joy.

And doing this is especially good during the times you’re angry and you want to knock someone’s block off.

Which happens to be where I am right now. Seriously. I’ve been seriously rethinking my values and what kind of person I want to be, because someone I know seems to have done something bad to me, and I’m wondering how to respond.

While I was thinking about this situation, I saw the following quote (while I’m putting up quotes and epigrams) from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to be the kind of person who looks forward, who doesn’t let the turkeys get her down, and who doesn’t use her blog to really hurt someone back. Because I know full well that I could. I have a very high Google ranking. I could really do some damage, simply by putting something here, even if no one ever reads it.

It was kind of scary to realize that I was the kind of person who’d ever consider doing that.

I’m not going to focus on bad things. I’m going to go find ten things in my life today that I’m grateful for, that make me happy, that make me feel alive, and reset my brain.

The cool thing is, I can even think of one thing I’m grateful about in regards to this situation (that I’m being deliberately oblique about), and I’m not being snarky at all. You really can retrain your brain.

One day, you suddenly realize you are running out of time.

Another Saturday has gone by. Another birthday (your own or your kid’s) is coming around. You realize you’ve lived more than half your life, because you double your age and you realize it’s unlikely you’re going to live to see 2x. If you’re a woman, you reach the age where people — people under 30, especially — no longer see you standing there, their eyes go straight past you like you’re a ghost. You start making a list of all the things you’d like to do once in your life and you see in black and white you’re unlikely to get all of them done. If you want to get any of them done, you’d better get cracking.

That’s a great exercise, by the way: make a list of 100 things you want to do at some point in your life. “Oh, that’s easy,” you say. “I can come up with two thousand things I want to do.” I recommend doing this exercise anyhow. The first 20 come pretty easily. Then you have to start thinking about it. One by one, you begin to remember what it was you wanted to do, what secret dreams you had, what things you wanted to experience before you died.

Recently someone I know got sick. First there was one health problem, and that exposed another health problem, which exposed three more… The last time I saw this person, I realized there aren’t going to be that many more times I see them. It’s eye-opening, watching someone go through this process. What’s worse is, they keep talking about the stuff they’re going to do, and that’s all it’s ever been: talk. You can’t put stuff off to the future indefinitely, and one day you are going to run out of road.

You don’t have time.

Right now I have 30 minutes before my next appointment of the day. What can I do in 30 minutes? I ask myself. I’ve gotten into the unfortunate habit of saying, “I must have at least an hour to write!” So I have the mental mindset I can’t get anything done in only 30 minutes.

Except I am working on changing this mindset, because there are things I want to do, big and small, and I need to use what I’ve got to accomplish them. I can get a lot done in 30 minutes, even if it’s just writing today’s post. Or I could read some more of my current book. Or I can work on my list of things I want to do in my life, carve out just a little tiny bit of what I want to do. I no longer have the time to waste.

“Do you like mysteries?” she asked. “I just read a good one.”

I concentrated on getting my credit card information into the machine and checking that the machine hadn’t been fitted with a skimmer. When I finished signing my name, I looked back at the woman who was talking: she had her Kindle out and was glancing through her most recently read titles. I guess the cashier was an old friend.

“Have you read A Song of Fire and Ice?” the woman asked. “It takes place in olden times, you know, with knights and horses and spooky things. I think they made a movie out of it.”

It’s a moment like that when I remember we all live in different universes.

Holy moly, I thought, how could you not know that the book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire? That isn’t the name of any of the books at all. It doesn’t take place in “olden times,” it takes place in a fantasy kingdom that never existed. The author is George RR Martin and it wasn’t made into a movie, it was made into one of the biggest television events of last year, a series on HBO?

I haven’t read any of the books (Darin has; he gave up on book 3, as has every single person he’s talked to, so I don’t know who all has been buying Book 4, let alone Book 5, which apparently was the best-selling fiction book of all last year), but I know all of these things. I know Sean Bean starred in the HBO series, and the series kept in The Major Twist that everyone expected them to get rid of (since, you know, they had Sean Bean). I know George RR Martin has a really big beard. I know the series is partially inspired by the Wars of the Roses, but once you have actual dragons in your book, you’ve gone rather further afield than just your inspiration.

People don’t know stuff.

They don’t have to. They still enjoy the world. The world still spins.

Most people haven’t even heard of any of these books or TV series and they’re still pretty knowledgeable about stuff. My dental hygienist bored me to tears while I was in the chair the other day going on and on about the football playoffs, and yet these things she was telling me were extremely important to her view of the universe.

It’s cool when you understand enough about the world that you can explain it to someone else. It’s frustrating as hell when there are things I don’t understand and can’t seem to grok for the life of me, no matter how hard I try. Generally, if I’m interested enough in something, I like learning all about it, and then I tell other people about it.

Sometimes it stuns me when I run across someone who’s enthusiastic about something (as this woman clearly was about A Game of Thrones, which was the top book in her Kindle) and yet doesn’t know very much about it. I wonder sometimes how many times I talk about something called A Song of Fire and Ice and the person next to me rolls their eyes and goes about their business.

Being able to fall asleep isn’t even the worst part of sleep, for me. Because eventually I always pass out. No, the problem with me is that I don’t stay asleep. I often wake up two or three times a night to use the bathroom. For a while I was fully awake at 3:33 in the morning — why that time? Was it significant? Was there something noise happening in the house that woke me up at 3:33? (Seriously, I even checked our watering system to see if it was coming on then.)

I worked on the problem with needing to pee: I stopped drinking anything after dinner. No comforting cup of Good Earth tea. As little water as I could stand. I noticed I slept poorly on nights after I had chocolate ice cream, so no chocolate ice cream after 6pm (which generally means…no chocolate ice cream).

Still kept waking up.

I started taking melatonin, which was popular for a while as the sleep aid that helped reset your internal clock. Except I noticed that it gave me a hangover. I’d fall asleep right away, with almost 99% certainty, and I’d sleep at least 6 hours straight, but in the morning I’d wake up still tired, my head pounding, not feeling as though I’d been asleep at all. I went from a 5mg dose to a 1mg dose. 1mg a)did put me to sleep and b)gave me a hangover.

I stopped using it. You’re not supposed to use it for very long anyhow — just enough to set your Circadian rhythms.

When you can’t sleep you’ll try everything.

On some web page I read about or maybe just on the shelf next to the melatonin I saw this product called GABA Calm. A sublingual tablet that would help you fall asleep.

And it worked. On nights when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would use one GABA Calm and with probably 85% accuracy I would be asleep within minutes. I would stay asleep for at least 6 hours straight. When I woke up in the morning, I could remember my dreams and my head felt fine.

Of course, the Wikipedia page about GABA (the main ingredient) says that the claims that GABA enhances calmness are probably false, because there’s no evidence that GABA crosses the blood-brain barrier. Well, okay, maybe these are extraordinarily effective placebos.

Who cares? I was sleeping six hours without interruption. Trust me, that was huge.

When I was taking antidepressants (having since stopped, because of a regular exercise program — don’t try this at home, talk to your doctor first), one that he wanted to try was called gabapentin, because it’s often prescribed off-label for anxiety disorders. Apparently it gets prescribed for a whole bunch of stuff:

Gabapentin is used primarily for the treatment of seizures, neuropathic pain, and hot flashes. There are, however, concerns regarding the quality of the research on its use to treat migraines, bipolar disorders, and pain.

Well, I don’t have any menopausal symptoms yet, so I don’t know if it helps with that, personally. I never noticed gabapentin having an effect on my mood (exercise worked much more regularly for me), but WOW did it knock me out. I had a crazy amount of dreams every night, extraordinarily vivid, and I woke up feeling almost refreshed. Which was awesome!

Then taking two pills at night started leaving me a little groggy, so I moved down to one pill.

Which now leaves me groggy and feeling slightly hungover in the morning…but I do sleep 8 straight hours if I take it. If I don’t take it…chances are I won’t sleep any more than 2-3 hours straight.

I refill my prescription for gabapentin whenever I run low, but I don’t take it every night any more. If I’m still awake at 1am, I take one.

I’ve gotten hardcore on anything that might be keeping me awake: I stopped drinking anything caffeinated after 12noon (since adjusted to 3pm, which seems to be my upper boundary for effects). I exercise frequently, but not even running a marathon is a sure thing for knocking me out, so who knows. I read boring books until I feel my eyelids start to droop.

I have considered going to the Stanford sleep clinic to see if there’s something else going on.

Because I’m not living next to train tracks again, no matter how poorly I sleep.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

Then Darin said, “Oh, um, there’s a WebKit conference on Monday and Tuesday of that week.”

Anaheim it is, then.

We decided to drive down late Tuesday night (after Darin’s conference let out) and then spend several days puttering around Disneyland and California Adventure. We took the kids here two years ago, and we figured they’d enjoy it even more this time. I really think they did. They still enjoy being there (some of their friends are already bored with it), and they were willing to try new stuff now.

Some random observations from this visit, in no particular order:

Disneyland

• My 10-year-old daughter enjoys going on rollercoaster rides as much as or more than my 10-year-old self did. Of course, one problem is: I am no longer 10-years-old, and they are not nearly as much fun. I still go on them with her though.
• Sophia would go on Space Mountain non-stop, if given the choice and the ability. I’m assuming that on our next visit to a Magic Kingdom she will have both, as she will be old enough to skedaddle and do whatever the hell she likes, parents or no parents.
• My 7-almost-8-year-old son would like all rollercoasters to cease existence as of right now, thankyouverymuch. So I don’t think his older sister will be dragging him along with her in the future.
• Captain EO is hilarious, and not in a good way. It is SO Eighties that at one point a monster morphs into a dancer with a gelled-up pouf and the audience laughed. We finally see the evil queen morph into Anjelica Huston…and immediately Michael Jackson’s head fills the frame, as though we can’t possibly focus on someone else for even a second. And the song redefines forgettable.
• Sophia said, “I couldn’t tell if Captain EO was a boy or a girl.” So many things I left unsaid at that point.
• Darin managed to deduce that the voice of the pilot for Star Tours is Paul Reubens, and the Internet backs him up. Therefore this information is TRUE.
• The kids cannot get enough of Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. Some things never change. It is still funny to hear the voice of Tony the Tiger in both places.
• My kids have no idea who Tony the Tiger is. Go me!
• Two years ago, at the Haunted Mansion, Simon looked at the paintings in the spooky hallway (the ones that change from things like a beautiful lady to a cat lady when the lighting flashes) and said, “Projection.” In his 5-year-old voice, with a little boy lisp, it came out, “Pwojeckshun,” and it was hilarious. He is, of course, right. Which is kind of amazing for a 5-year-old in the first place.
• The part of the Haunted Mansion that features married couples where apparently the wives murdered the husbands: guys, violence isn’t any funnier directed toward men. In fact, it’s DISTURBING. (Oh, I see from Wikipedia I was right: I didn’t remember this bit from my childhood, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention two years ago, and it is in fact new.)
• Also a big fave: It’s a Small World! The classics, they never stop. Kind of hilarious that a bunch of dolls singing the same song over and over again would be so attractive, but it really is.

California Adventure

• Soarin’ Over California at California Adventure should be titled, “Stuff you will never have in Kansas, no matter how much Amazon Prime you have.” If you’re visiting California Adventure run, do not walk, to this attraction first.
• The Aladdin stage show is really good. I was expecting some kind of halfassed song and dance thing with a fog machine, and it’s practically a Broadway musical with special effects.
• The “Turtle Talk with Crush!” animation show is hilarious. There’s a large screen, and Crush from “Finding Nemo” swims by to talk to everyone. Then he picks out people in the audience to talk to and ask questions of. The animation is seamless—I have no idea how Crush moves and appears to be looking at various people—and the actor doing it was very talented.
• Lots of vegetarian options for meals here, btw. (Dunno about vegan, but vegetarian definitely.) Also: lots of places to get an alcoholic drink, in case you can’t get through your day without a cocktail. So if you’re finishing your day at Disneyland, bummed that for another year running you haven’t gotten into Club 33 and you really need to tie one on, hie thee across the plaza to California Adventure and drink up.

Other

• I know it’s beaten into them. I know they’re trained to do this and it’s a manipulation technique and I’m being played. But oh my GOD was every single staff member I dealt with at our hotel wonderful and cheerful. Before the trip I called to tell them that we were going to be arriving hella late, and the young man I talked to was just so happy to answer my questions and put lots of notes about my requests in my file! And every time I called the front desk the operators were so thrilled to be helping me! The technique seriously works: I felt really good about staying there! I can think of so many businesses that could take a fucking page from the Disney indoctrination technique.
• The Grand Californian (where we stayed) is really a good hotel. (Well, except for the toilet in our room, which kept malfunctioning. But I assume that wasn’t a feature.) The design is great, the distance to the parks and to Downtown Disney is excellent, and the way that so many rooms have a queen plus bunk beds just screams, “We know who our clientele are and what they want!”
• We were in the park early one morning and I saw a Disney cast member (not “employee”! that’s “cast member” to you!) walking by in costume holding a Starbucks cup. If she’d been texting on an iPhone she could have hit the Corporate Hegemony Trifecta.
• If you live in Southern California and are like, “WTF? Darin and Diane didn’t let us know they were coming?” please to take comfort in the fact that we didn’t tell anyone. We spent the entire time just as a foursome, and it worked out really, really well (better than I expected, if I may be so honest). We spent all day every day together, except for when one of us took the kids to the pool and the other one stayed in the room.
• The Napa Rose restaurant is really good. Ate there twice. I recommend the starters over the entrees, but then again, I was completely full on two starters.
• The Steakhouse 55 restaurant at the Disneyland Hotel is okay. I think the praise it’s gotten is a little overblown, or maybe people are just so happy to find a place that’s halfway decent around here.
• The Blue Bayou at Pirates was pretty good, though expensive. You have to ask to sit by the bayou though! Epic fail on our part.
• Man, has the Disneyland Hotel changed since the first time I stayed there. The first time, when I flew out from the East Coast with my family (I was probably…8?), there was one hotel. The second time, when I was 10 or 11, there were two hotels and a big lagoon where we had paddle boats. Now it’s a gigantic conference center with three towers and no paddle boats. Plus all of these other hotels (including the Grand Californian, where we stayed.) And Downtown Disney. And…well, it’s just quite impressive what they’ve done with the place.

And now the question I’ll leave you with: after you visit all of the continents (including Antartica) in It’s A Small World, you visit an area where we get a repeat of a number of the dolls…only this time, everyone’s wearing all white. Does the last section represent the Afterlife?

And that advice is: STOP THE DRAMA.

Stop the histrionics. Stop seeking approval or acceptance or admiration by dialing all of your emotions and experiences up to 11. Start looking at your life as though you have a modicum of control over it, because you DO. You CAN choose how you respond to things, both emotionally and physically. You are the one who will decide what you do right now.

Having drama in your life is having heightened emotions. It’s about how something sounds rather than the truth of what is.

A lot of us, particularly when we’re younger, are addicted to the dramatics of a situation. We confuse feeling emotion about a situation—“He done me wrong!” “She talked about me behind my back!” “She stole my shoes!”—for the relative importance of the situation. We run to our friends and want their commiseration or even their admiration for how totally crazy our lives are.

We all have the friends who have crazy crap happen to them left and right, and we think, “How come their lives are so much more dramatic than mine is?” Because they’re CHOOSING to be that way. It makes them feel alive, like they’re the star of their own story. When in reality…they’re allowing themselves to be buffeted by external events. Past the age of 25, it’s not cute any more. Get a grip on reality, accept that you’re in charge, and act accordingly.

When I was in college, I got involved with this guy I’ve charitably described as a “sociopath.” Using words like that is being dramatic about it. At the time I got a lot of mileage out of feeling used and abused, out of the drama of how he was going to treat me this week, out of the choices of how I was going to live my life because of this one guy. I made him the bad guy and me the victim.

Whereas if I were going to cut the drama and really engage in what what happening, I would allow myself to feel sad that I had spent so much time with this guy, I would feel compassion for myself that I allowed him to make me feel like dirt, and I would say, “You know, I don’t need this kind of person in my life.” No late-night crying with friends, no histrionics. Move on. I would take control and realize that it really is better to be alone than in bad company, and then I would see that I had opened up space in my life to have better company.

Take this test: Pick a situation you feel highly emotional about right now and you want to call all of your friends about. Here’s what I want you to tell your friend: “Okay, I’m going to tell you about something that happened. Here’s what I want you to do: nothing. Don’t respond in any way. Don’t agree with me, don’t comment on what this other person did, just listen to me.”

If your reaction to that scenario is, “Why would I tell someone about this if they weren’t going to side with me and tell me that I’m the victim here?” then you’re still caught up in the drama.

Here’s another test: do you use exaggerated comparatives to describe your situation? That is, is it the “worst” thing he’s done, the “scariest” thing that’s ever happened, the “best” relationship you can imagine having, so you have to hold on to it, at all costs?

(A friend–who lived a fairly dramatic life himself–once coined, “It was the WORST thing that’s EVER happened to ANYONE in the history of Western Civilization!” He was kidding. I think.)

If you’re using these kinds of terms to describe the situation, you’re being dramatic. You’re more involved with having a good story than you are with what’s actually going on.

STOP. Take a few minutes to sit quietly. Relate the facts of the situation: not “My boyfriend humiliated me in front of every single important person in my life!” but “Bob said some really mean things about me in front of lots of my friends.” Then ask yourself how you truly feel about this situation, here and now, not acting out in front of anyone. Now ask, What are you going to do about it?

There is nothing wrong with feeling emotion about a situation. If your friends from college turn out to be bad, unstable roommates (as happened to me), feel sad because your friendship wasn’t what it was…and then make plans to move elsewhere. No need for drama. Take control.

And looking back at it… I’m sure I was no prize as a roommate either.

The more you harness your own energy and spend it on the important stuff in your life rather than making every little upset its own vortex, the easier it gets, and the more powerful you get. If someone tries to drag you into their drama, you say, “This is not for me,” and you leave them to it.

It can be scary though. If you give up having drama in your life and choose to face your emotions and your reactions head on, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to be the one in charge. You have no one to blame, because if a friend goes nutso on you, you can’t run around and say, “Gaaaaah! What do I do?” You can’t have screaming arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong. You get to decide how you’re going to handle it, without making a good story out of it.

You’re also going to lose friends. Friends who put up with your dramatics so they can touch the electric wire of crazy emotions. Friends who are used to dumping their drama on you. Once you start responding to their stories with, “Wow, you seem really upset about that. What are you going to do about it?” you’ve just punctured their drama. You’re not their audience any more. They’re going to go elsewhere.

Trust me. Finding other adults who can deal with their own emotions and lives like, well, adults, is a real treat.