When my husband and I married, it was at an unusual time in both our lives. We were both out of work and on food stamps. We did not spend thousands of dollars on our wedding, as everyone on TV seems to do. Back then, weddings did not have themes, though they did have color palettes. Ours was off-white, rose, and rust. (The off-white was so that no one would snicker.) Back in the day, gentleman were able to wear tuxes of colors other than black, and such were available at tuxedo shops. As you can see from the photo, Dan wore a rust-colored tux with a ruffled shirt and a matching tie. He looked like a riverboat gambler, but he did fit in with the color scheme.

We married in August, so my dress was a leftover from prom season. (Not my prom, you understand. I didn’t go to that. It was just a prom dress that didn’t sell.) It had long sleeves, but they were made of lace, so I thought there was a chance I wouldn’t roast to death. Defying tradition, I brought Dan along to help pick it out. There was a dress I liked better, actually. It was low cut, but the minister was going to stand a step above us, and Dan didn’t think his view down my cleavage would set the proper tone for the ceremony.

I refused to wear a traditional veil, just a circlet of flowers in my hair with some lace trailing down the back a ways, since I didn’t like the traditional symbolism. I didn’t have my father give me away either. I was giving myself away, as it were, and I thought that I could find the way from the back of the church to the front all by myself.

I did have my hair, makeup, and nails “done.” I still remember that the color of the nail polish was called “pepperoni,” which was a dreadful name, but fit in with the rust in the palette. I also remember the frantic calls to the tux shop afterward, where I learned that Dan had not yet picked up his tux. He didn’t have a good track record of showing up on time for other people’s weddings, so it made me nervous. He did show up at the appropriate time, though with his tie askew.

And the boots? They were a pair of off-white cowboy boots that I just happened to have and that matched the dress. They showed up well in the garter pictures, though people were unlikely to notice. I was wearing the garter several inches above my knee. If I couldn’t have a low neckline, at least I could have fun with the garter tradition.

Our reception was a potluck held at a friend’s house, which they were kind enough to let us use. We had had many fabulous parties there over the years, so the vibe was just right.

Our wedding cake was a spice cake with off-white buttercream and rust-colored flowers on it. (That was what we bought with our food stamps.) The top tier rested on three upside-down borrowed champagne glasses (martini glasses, really, as flutes hadn’t been invented yet.) At some point during or after the festivities, one of the glasses was broken, but I was able to replace it exactly, in time to return to the owner, my matron of honor. (She never reads Facebook, so I’m safe. But I digress.)

The only other untoward moment occurred as Dan and I left the church. I heard his mother screaming. Fortunately, she was not screaming in horror at me, or the fact that her darling son was married. No, it was because the pastor from Dan’s church back in Pennsylvania had driven all the way to Ohio to attend. He had just shown up a little late. There’s a picture of me somewhere, exiting the church and looking confused. 

Our honeymoon consisted of a night in a local no-tell motel, since we didn’t want to drive far after partying so heary. They gave us a bottle of champagne, I assume because they had never had a married (to each other) couple stay there before. The next day, we were off for a whirlwind honeymoon of camping, sleeping in a treehouse, whitewater rafting, and a visit to the Philly Folk Festival, where we had met.

Our wedding may not have been technically traditional, but it worked its magic nonetheless. We have stayed married for over 35 years.

Re-writing – also known as content editing – is a necessity at some stage of preparing your manuscript. However, there are pitfalls.

Suppose you are writing a novel, and one day it comes to you – the exquisite bit of detail that will make a scene pop or reveal something important about your protagonist’s inner life. You go to your manuscript and insert it just where you think it will do the most good. Then you read a little further and find that your perfect addition was already added one or two drafts ago. Yes, you had a brilliant thought, but you had it before, and yes, you knew where to put it, but with a few paragraph’s difference. Then you have the option of deciding which is the better place for that exquisite piece of prose to go, but it’s still kind of demoralizing.

Or – as just happened to me – you get a great idea for a blog post. You even start drafting it. But something niggles at the back of your brain. It all sounds very familiar. So, you go back to your file of posts and discover that you wrote almost exactly the same post, using almost exactly the same language, two years before. It was good enough that it doesn’t need rewriting, and you’re not so desperate that you re-post previous writing when ideas are thin on the ground. What do you do then?

Obviously, as I have done, you take the situation as a jumping-off point for a new post about re-writing that covers different territory than the old post. And you check your files again to make sure that this one is not a rewrite as well. It may even be a good idea to read over at least the titles on your old blog posts before you begin a new one.

Or you set out in a different direction entirely, one you’ve never explored before. Never write about politics? This may be the time to start. Start a short story instead of a blog post. Begin plotting the sequel to the novel that you’ve been sending around to agents, on the theory that agents and editors love series rather than stand-alone novels. Or try poetry, which you haven’t written since college. Think of it as a way to flex your writing muscles and blow the cobwebs off your brain.

You can also engage in prewriting (which, unfortunately, resembles lying on the couch and staring off into space). Toss ideas around in your head. Brainstorm, without analyzing whether your ideas are spectacular or not. You can even jot down a few of the ones that strike you as most fruitful, but really the exercise is just to get your brain moving. Re-read favorite books and pay attention to why you love them and how the authors made you love them.

Writing prompts and contests are also ways to get your creative juices flowing. Many writing websites feature assorted prompts. Or a question asked or situation described on Facebook may cause you to think, “What would I do in that situation?” or “Gee, that answer stank. Here’s what I would say.” A short story contest might give a list of possible topics. For example, I saw a story contest that proposed a topic of “Write about a new technology that changes a person’s life for good or ill.” I got a story out of it and an honorable mention.

And don’t be afraid if your new idea isn’t something earthshaking or written for the ages. Remember that William Carlos Williams wrote about plums in the icebox and Pablo Neruda wrote “Ode to My Socks.” Both of these are considered classic poems today.

You can also get ideas from the best. What if you had written “Ode to My Socks”? How would it go? What would it reveal? What if you took the premise of Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” and ran with it? What alternate ending could you invent? At this point, it doesn’t matter if what you write isn’t better than Neruda or Asimov. It’s enough that you’re stretching your brain and your creativity.

Whether you write about something familiar that you may have overlooked, try a new style or genre, or just play with words until some of them magically come together, you are performing exercises in writing. And that’s a good thing.

What to get my husband for Christmas (and birthdays) is always a problem. Specifically, he always tells me what he wants, leaving me in a trap. If I get him what he says he wants, I’m disappointed because I didn’t surprise him. If I get him something else, he’s disappointed because he didn’t get what he wanted. You see my dilemma.

This year I went a little crazy, hoping that one of the things I got him would be something he liked, or at least was surprised by. It helps that one of the symptoms of my bipolar disorder is hypomania, which often leads to binge shopping. This time, I thought, I would use my symptom for good.

The first thing I got Dan was one of those home DNA test kits. He had once expressed interest in them, and a friend suggested it, so I went for it. (It was on sale for half price.) I gave it to him early, because it arrived in a box that was clearly and colorfully labeled as such and there was no hiding it, as he brings in the mail. I hoped that the results would be back by Christmas and we could surprise and appall his mom by telling her that Dan had some unsuitable ancestors, such as Neanderthals, in his family background.

So far, though, he hasn’t spit in the little tube and mailed it back. I do not think this is because he does not like to spit, although really he doesn’t do it all that much, except at the dentist. I suspect that he secretly doesn’t care where his ancestors came from, and appalling his mother isn’t enough of an enticement to make him go through the strenuous exercise of spitting. If he doesn’t get with the program, I may have to collect his drool while he’s sleeping.

I also ordered him a print he wanted to replace because the original was destroyed in our tornado. (I call it “our” tornado because, while it affected many other families (fortunately, no one was killed), it was the only one we had ever had (and we thought it was more than sufficient)). But I digress.

The print was a semi-famous one of Morris the Cat, of cat-food commercial fame. If that seems an odd thing to have in one’s collection, I think so too, but there you have it. He loved that thing as only someone who loves large orange cats can. I went on eBay, found someone who had a copy in good condition, made a bid, and got it. The sturdily wrapped package arrived promptly and is stored beside my desk, where it waits enticingly for later in the month.

But I didn’t stop there. I saw one of those online come-ons for a service that would convert a photo of your pet into a piece of artwork. I sent them a picture of his gray tiger, Toby, and was very pleased with the results. Another package beside my desk. Then I ordered one of our calico, Dushenka, too, so she wouldn’t feel left out. Yet another package. At this point, Dan was getting anxious. “How much stuff did you buy for me?” he asked.

I wasn’t done yet. I found another online service that would take any photo and encase it in lucite. I sent them a photo of Jasper, a cat of ours who had passed away and Dan mourned extravagantly. I actually gave him this early, too, because it was just a small trinket and would fit nicely in his curio cabinet.

I’m pretty sure he’ll be surprised, if only by the volume of presents and the theme of “Cats We Have Known” (or sort-of knew, in the case of Morris).

Now I have to think about his birthday in April and see if I have another fit of binge-shopping. Or maybe just get him the Dremel tool he really wants.

I recently interviewed Harvard professor Dr. Michael Rich (M.D.), founder and leader of the Center of Media and Child Health. Here’s what he told me about young people and social media.

What are some of the problems children have with social media?

One of the big problems kids have is they lose track of time. Of course, the games and social media have that built-in – want to disconnect you from time, because time with your eyeballs is their currency. We also have to add that kids’ brains are still maturing and their pre-frontal cortex, where impulse control, future thinking, and all that executive function lie, is not going to be online until their mid to late 20s.

Also, I think we lost a lot when “friend” became a verb. We friend people willy-nilly and rack up the score, but they’re not the kind of friends that you can cry to in the middle of the night or who you could reach out for a shoulder to lay your head on.

Why do you say “problematic interactive media use” instead of “gaming addiction”?

Gaming is just one of four manifestations we’re seeing of what we’re calling “problematic interactive media use.” That includes games, which is predominately boys, or most prevalent in boys, although we have a fair number of girls; followed by social media, more prevalent in girls; pornography, evenly balanced between the boys and girls; and “information binging” – following the endless rabbit holes of Wikipedia, etc. There are many ways you can get lost in the web essentially eternally. 

Part of the reason we call it problematic interactive media use is it’s not an addiction. It’s overuse of a necessary resource. In the 21st-century the online space, the active media space, is necessary to function at school, function at work, etc. What continues with many of the advocacy groups out there is a call to cut down on screen time, get rid of these devices, block this, do that, rather than taking a step back and saying this is the world we must live in.

How should we approach interactive media use with children?

Instead of looking at these devices as vectors of harm or help, let’s look at these devices as creating an environment we’re living in. Instead of trying to avoid it, how can we use good, unbiased science to understand how to live with it and help our children be healthier, happier, more productive, and kinder to each other?

I think that what we really need to do is approach this much the way we approach nutrition or injury prevention, which is: What are the facts? What are the risk-benefit ratios, and how does it fit into my life? How can I optimize the benefit and minimize the risk?

Are the problems increasing?

I don’t think that the problem is greater than it was before. I think people are noticing it more, in part because the parents are at home with the kids all day. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and amplified that process immensely, particularly for children, but for all of us who stay at home for long periods of time, and in some cases fighting over bandwidth.

Kids on average are getting 11 hours and 45 minutes of screen content every day and those were data generated before the pandemic. People are desperate to ask what the ideal screen time limits should be for kids. I’ve been saying for years screen time limits are obsolete.

Why do you say that?

What the research shows and clinical experience shows is the best way to approach this is to sit down with your child, really of any age, even as young as five, and think of their 24-hour day as an empty glass that you fill up with this many hours of sleep, a family meal at least once a day (probably the most protective thing you can do for a child’s mental health, as well as their nutrition), put aside time for homework, put aside time for some physical activity, and then see what time is left.

What you’re doing in that case is engaging the young person in making the schedule, giving them some ownership of that schedule. Second, you are being mindful about the finite amount of things that they want to do and allowing them to prioritize and then to manage their time – and God knows we could all do better with time management. This is a way of building those habits early.

What about social media and relationships online?

I think social media can be a great practice area for relationships, a place where you can start to tentatively let people know that you’re interested in them either as a friend or as a romantic partner, try things out, stumble and fall a little bit. But it also is a place where people on either side of that communication can misinterpret something that may have been sent as a flirty tease, but they could take it in a hurtful way.

These principles apply to all of us, though I think kids are in some ways the “canary in the coal mine,” in that they are early adopters of technology. They are facile with technology and are much more adept with it than their parents. Often, are they are going to run into these issues more quickly.

Any final thoughts?

Young people go online in hopes that it will build community, they’ll make connections with people. Because they feel anxious in an in-person social situation, they go to social media to take baby steps, to try to connect with people. 

I think that in our quest for and achievement of near-infinite connectivity, we’ve lost our connectedness in a deep and meaningful way, the way we are connected with family and with close friends. That kind of connectedness is sustaining and meaningful. I think the most important thing is to use social media so that we can be real with each other.