Living Out Loud volume 12: To all the girls/guys I've loved before

My mother was at the house the other day relating some story of the early days of parenthood with my oldest brother Doug and something annoying that her ex-husband Lee had done. I interrupted to ask her, "did Lee have any good qualities?" I think the question caught her off guard. "Good qualities?" she said incredulously. "Yeah. You had to have married him for some reason. No one held a gun to your head." She laughed a little in surprise and relented, "well he had a few I guess, but not when it came to parenting" and continued on her story, undeterred. It got me to thinking that just because people end a relationship, it doesn't make either party 100% horrible. Sure, there usually is a person who did something a little bit more obnoxious or even reprehensible than the other, but very rarely is a person all bad.

Rich has a saying I'm fond of that "there are very few Hitlers in the world." There are very few people who are completely evil or worthless. There are a lot more people who try to do the right thing and occasionally make really poor decisions. A friend of mine used to call one of her ex-boyfriends her "favorite mistake", as the Sheryl Crow song describes. She recognized that they were horrible for each other but could still remember fondly some good memories they had.

This brings me to the theme for this month's Living Out Loud project. Tell me something nice about one or more of your exes. Maybe they wooed you with their love of music (and later turned you off with their inattention to hygiene or paying bills on time). Maybe they were good at organizing events (even if that meant they would flip out if something went outside that plan). This is your opportunity to focus on the good without getting into all the reasons he or she is an ex versus a current. They couldn't have been all bad, and if they were you might need to create a search committee to approve any future relationships you enter.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each issue above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, January 3rd (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Interestingly, when I pitched this idea to Rich the other day he didn't like it. "What if someone read it?" Hearing that only further convinced me it should be our theme this month. Isn't that sort of the whole point of living out loud? So as we close out of first year of this project, I encourage you to go out on a limb and say something nice. It's all part of the holiday spirit and turning over new leaves in the new year.

Recap of 11th Living Out Loud project: Tis the gift to be simple

It's 19 days before Christmas and I haven't bought a single gift. Rich has bought two on my Amazon Prime account, but those don't count. As someone on Facebook remarked the other day, "you mean they sell Christmas presents before the 24th?" So I thought this would be a good topic to bring up as we all struggle with the idea of what "perfect" things to get each other. I've been treated yet again to a great selection of Living Out Loud entries this month of everyone's thoughts on the matter. I admit to spending these last moments before the 5pm deadline reading everyone else's entries and marveling at how great they were while lamenting that my own entry could not compare. I hope you enjoy them all as much as I did. Gina's Gifts This pleases me to no end that my compilation CD means so much to Gina. I'm always happy to find someone else who gets as excited about music as I do and after our chat I knew she would understand. Obviously, she understands more than I ever could have known.

Janet's Holiday Happiness When I read "You need a ride, you listen to Christmas carols" I literally laughed out loud. Janet shows how all those Christmas items taking over and turning it into HallowGivingsMas might not all be about commercialism. I should be a little less last minute and bah humbug and do a little more humming myself.

Deb's Tis better to give Deb's entry is one I could have written as well. I suck at receiving gifts and spend way more effort on the giving. Sometimes I wonder if people really know what I want or who I am. Rich says I think to much about these things. And I would totally love power tools wrapped up with a bow.

SuziCate's Please Don't Let It Be Underwater! All her examples are great, but the gifts from her husband are winners! Rich and I were discussing a driveway as our Christmas present this year (I have driveway envy with all our neighbors getting new ones), but I like the idea of having a little something you weren't expecting from someone you love.

Megan's Mix Tapes Again, music is something near and dear to me so it's great to hear about all the heartfelt items Megan has received over the years. My brother is not the romantic type so I could imagine his gifts would be similar but just as personal.

Kim's Two Gifts That Kind of Broke Me I had forgotten about both of these gifts from all those years ago but hearing about them brought it all back. More and more I lean towards the idea of no gift giving that she and Jack have but I'm not sure Rich would stand for it. And the line that cracked me up the most was "Also, we lived in a giant, unassailable castle of dorkitude." because I can hear Kim's voice saying that much like Morgan Freeman might discuss penguins.

And my own Trying to change someone else's tune

I had such a hard time picking a winner this month that we had to go out for Mexican food before I could decide. The chicken enchiladas inspired me to pick Kim as our winner. Her entry had a unique voice that really entertained me while staying true to the spirit of sharing on the Internet. Since there were several entries this month with the theme of music and Kim is a music lover herself, I'm making her prize a $25 gift card to Amazon.com so she can purchase DRM free music for her collection.

Everyone kicked ass this month and you should all pat yourselves on the back for your writing. Really this project is the best present I could receive for the holidays. You all inspire me.

I already know the theme for the next Living Out Loud and it's a tough one, but I know you can rise to the challenge. Details will be posted soon. Let's finish out the year strong! Go team!

Trying to change someone else's tune

My father has been in a bit of a funk lately. Life in general has been overwhelming for him and the weather combined with the holidays always tends to add to that funk. It's particularly frustrating because Christmas has always been something my family rallies for in spite of any other set backs. A week or so before my due date, I told Rich, "this is exciting! It's like Christmas only we don't know when it's going to come!" He said that he thought labor would be a little more painful than Christmas but I told him he obviously doesn't see the lengths my family has gone to for the holidays in the past. Labor might seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

As we kids became adults, it became harder for my parents to rally to the Christmas spirit. They would always fret over the gift to give all of us, but never really mastered the art of receiving gifts from us. As kids we never gave gifts to our parents. My family is not the sentimental type, ignoring anniversaries and birthdays on all counts unless some outside party made a big deal of it. So my parents managed to avoid all those "soap on a rope" type gifts from their children. It never seemed odd to me.

Once I became an adult, though, I wanted to get them something. Long ago, Jeremy and I were in Wal-Mart in Christiansburg a few weeks before Christmas and I noticed a SONY boom box. My father has always been a music lover. He bought turntables and amplifiers in Hong Kong during his tour in Vietnam while at the same time refusing to spend the extra 10 cents to ride above deck on the boat ride across the city. He had his priorities. Had he been born in another era, he could have been that guy in High Fidelity. So after much hemming and hawing, we bought the boom box with money we only kind of had at the time. It was $99. I've spent that much on sushi dinners nowadays but at the time it was a hell of a lot of money.

Daddy had been buying CDs of his favorite music at various hock shops around town without actually owning a CD player of any kind. He had already amassed quite a collection of untapped classics by that December when he opened his gift. My father doesn't make a big show of things. I think he said something like "ah wow" but in an understated tone - no exclamation point at the end of the sentence. My mother later told me that his first concern upon opening it was that it was too expensive of a gift for me to buy him and they should offer to pay for part of it.

Once he opened it, though, and started assessing its features he became completely enamored. For a little boom box, it puts out a pretty good volume. It has equalizer settings on the front versus those standard Rock/Blues/Classical settings others offer. It was compact so it could fit on a shelf in their crowded house. And it opened up a whole new world of music for him again.

That Christmas I had the special treat of getting my father a gift that literally changed his life. Daddy now probably has a music collection that far surpasses the albums of his youth and may even rival my own collection as far as volume if not artists themselves. All of them were purchased at hock shops or discount stores. I'm not sure he's paid over $5 for a CD. Each CD has a post-it note on it with is favorite track numbers listed to make it easier for him to program. I can't tell you how many times I have walked in their house to hear Phantom of the Opera at volume 11 blasting from the top of those filing cabinets in the family room. I would have never even guessed my father liked Phantom of the Opera.

The gift we couldn't afford back then was worth every penny.

Unfortunately, that was 1998 or so and I don't think we've found another great gift like that since. My father is having a hard time. We don't tend to use the word depression in our family, but if it walks like a duck and mopes like a duck and wrings its little wings like a duck, it might just be depressed. I wish there were some sort of gift I could find for him this year - another item that Rich and I wouldn't quite be able to afford but would buy all the same that might bring him out of this darkness. I wish it could be another TV moment where he'd open the box and there would be that glow coming from it like in jewelry commercials.

But it's less than three weeks from Christmas and nothing's coming to mind. I'm not sure the magic answer would come from a store anyways. Maybe a winning lottery ticket and a Xanax would fit in a jewelry box and I'd just add in a tea light to get that glowing effect when he opened it.