Living Out Loud volume 20: You won't read this anywhere ...

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Rich and I have joked about making a list somewhere of all the things my father doesn't like. That list would be very long, but the recent examples I can think of are Canola oil, luan plywood and Cox communications. Each of those could be a blog post (or several) of its own which is one of the many reasons I need to make my father a blog so that he can tell the World and not just us. A kind of old man therapy, if you will. I've also noticed a trend lately in truisms these days. There's a very entertaining site called 1001 rules for my unborn son with such gems as "388. If you don’t know what a knob does, don’t fool with it." and "311. Don’t date your bartender." That combined with the Twitter turned book turned TV show with William Shatner called Sh*t My Dad Says made me realize that we all have rules or beliefs that we need to pass onto others.

My father is often known to start a sentence with "you won't read this anywhere but ..." He can't actually say it now without grinning because it's all just some inside joke. But the nugget of wisdom has to be shared!

So that's what I want you to do for this month's Living Out Loud project. Tell us some of your rules. Maybe it's how the toilet paper goes on the roll. Maybe it's something about finding the perfect mate. Maybe it's some lesson that involves hiring J. Walter Weatherman to teach your children a lesson about leaving notes. It could be one really important rule or a list of guidelines for living. But the best part is they're your rules.

Details include:

  • Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt 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, September 5th (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.

We'll all just keep doing the things we shouldn't do unless you give us a list of rules to not do them!