Laura Zera's Guest Post: If Sharing is Caring, then Giving is Living

I think I've mentioned how I'm sometimes thankful that certain amazing, generous, incredible people have just up and appeared in my life and thanks to twitter I've somehow been surrounded by a whole lot more of them. Laura Zera is one of those amazing people. She's incredibly funny and personable on twitter, her website has now become a daily addiction for me and I also just recently bought Write for the Fight. She is also incredibly dedicated and passionate about this world we live in. Her guest post today is an insightful plea for why we should keep giving, not to just George Mark House, but to our favorite charities and organizations and explains the philanthropic spirit better than I ever could. Thanks again Laura.

(Also, remember, all you have to do to get my blog for a day is be the first to tweet or blog about George Mark House for the week and send me a link! Next week is wide open!)

Laura Zera's Biography

Laura Zera has lived and worked in Cameroon, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and the United States. Her first book, Tro-tros and Potholes chronicles her solo adventures through five countries of West Africa. She's currently working on a memoir about being raised by a schizophrenic mother and is a contributor to Booktrope's 2012 anthology Write for the Fight: A Collection of Seasonal Essays, a fundraiser for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Laura has volunteered for more than 10 organizations in her lifetime, and has donated dollars to many more, so she expects to still be stuffing Ben & Jerry's down her piehold when she's 110.

If Sharing is Caring, then Giving is Living

Don’t let the title of this post fool you; I am going to try to make it through the whole piece without talking like Yoda. Try. Ever since I finished with my Wayne’s World phrase phase, I’ve been floundering…

First off, thank you to Tylia for letting me run amok on her site today. She’s been using her blog as a platform for good and coming up with creative ways to get the word out about George Mark Children’s House in northern California, a non-profit that specializes in pediatric palliative care. 

Originally, I was going to write a mental health piece, as that’s one of the core themes of my current work in progress, Crazy for You, and something I blog about quite often on my own site. But the more I read through Tylia’s blog posts, the more that giving stood out as a unifying theme.

Sometimes, believe it or not, giving can be a bad thing. You’ll not be thought of with any particular fondness if you’re remembered as the giver of hickeys, noogies, wedgies, or STDs. For the most part, though, giving is an act that makes all involved parties feel really, really swell. In fact, Stephen Post’s book Why Good Things Happen to Good People cites a 50-year study showing that people who are giving during their high school years have better physical and mental health throughout their lives. Other studies show that giving when you’re older leads to a longer life.

Giving doesn’t just make you feel good in the moment; it actually has long-term health benefits!

Non-profit organizations are a great way to give, through time or money, because they are vital to our society. They fill gaps in services that have been left by corporations and government, plus, they fill those gaps with a whole lot of heart. In other words, we’d be both sad and royally screwed without them. Agreed, all the TV commercials, direct mail campaigns and phone solicitations for donations can be annoying and overwhelming, but for the most part, non-profits are the real deal, so don’t let your favorite cause or charity get left in the cold because of ‘ask saturation.’

You don’t have to be wealthy to give, or always have to give big. Trust me, even a small amount creates a lot of happiness. I remember when I worked in a non-profit back about seven years ago, and how excited all of the staff got (there were six of us) whenever a donation came in the mail. One of our favorites was from an elderly gentleman without a lot of means who used to send us ten dollars a month. It would totally make our day.

One of the great ‘giving vehicles’ that is often overlooked or forgotten is the bequest—giving or leaving personal property through your will. Wow, talk about leaving a meaningful legacy. And here’s one that will have triple happiness impact: make a surprise donation in honor of a friend to an organization that’s meaningful to them.

If the idea of a financial contribution makes you itchy, then consider donating your time. It still holds all the ‘feel good’ aspects of giving money, AND you have the added benefit of gaining new friends and, quite possibly, new job skills. Finally, if time is also tight, then how about your blood? Don’t let the tax collector and your ex-spouse be the only ones who draw down on it. Note: if you have ever lived in Cameroon, then you will be on a permanent donor ban list, as I’ve found out. If not, then you’re golden!

You know, it’s crazy, but I feel better just from *writing* this blog post. I think giving really does a body good. And now I’m going to go give my stomach some ice cream.

Stephanie Lucianovic's Guest Post!

I hate raisins. I hate raisins with a blinding passion that SF Giants fans like me usually reserve only for the Dodgers. I just can not abide the raisin. Raisins in cookies are a waste of a perfectly good cookie. Chocolate-covered raisins should be added to the Geneva Convention as a crime against humanity. And don’t even get me started about the atrocity that is Raisin Bran. The only thing I hate just slightly more are prunes *shudder* but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Thankfully I’m not alone in my hatred for the Damien of the grape-product family. Stephanie Lucianovic is the writer of the delightful GrubReport. She’s also a writer whom I’ve followed for, well it will show both our ages if I admit how long. She also shares my loathing of the wrinkly little bastards and, as the winner of my first ever #WW Challenge, was kind enough to share her thoughts on my blog. Her new book Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand why we Hate Foods we Hate is on Amazon and hopefully at a book retailer near you! Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. 

Hate in a Time of Raisin

By Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic

Tylia kindly asked if I would write a guest post in support of George Mark Children's House, a place that no parent wants to ever spend too much time thinking about, but one that every parent is grateful exists. Deep down in the marrow of our souls, we are grateful. My following post on raisin hate might be lighthearted, but that doesn't mean I didn't cry hard as I read Tylia's posts about her beautiful son Ukiah and what George Mark Children's House meant for her family during their desperately hard times and what it continues to mean for them and all families. They need and deserve our support.

"[Raisins] are disgusting little bits of wizened chewiness that came into being only because Friar Tuck was too drunk to remember to pick all the grapes in a timely fashion." That's a quote from my book, Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater's Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate. I may be a former picky eater turned career food lover, but there are still some things I can't abide, and raisins top the list.

I don't know when and where raisins ran afoul of me because I ate them as a kid and I even sort of liked them, especially when my mom stuck those tiny red snack boxes from Sun-Maid in my lunch. (Mind you, I dreaded getting those snack boxes at Halloween, but somehow they were more welcome in my lunch as an occasional addition.) As a pre-teen I went to a canoe camp in the Minnesota Boundary Waters where a daily handful of raisins was prescribed for our trail lunches. The non-perishable dehydrated grapes were there to keep us "regular," and once again, I had no problem eating them. I'm sure it was because a certain level of starvation set in after a morning of portaging and sweaty palm attempts to steer a big aluminum canoe with weak sauce J-strokes. In those situations, you snarf down any form of sustenance that hits your collapsible metal mess kit cup.

We don't need our food to look like Insects! Yeesh!

Of course I crunched through my fair share of that the popular children's snack, Ants on a Log, which, while not my favorite pairing with my late-afternoon 3-2-1 Contact, [Ed. Note 3-2-1 Contact, that takes me back! Those were the days weren't they?] was fun to make and eat. (I wonder if it will gross anyone out to know that we vastly preferred the cream cheese version over the peanut butter one...which is apparently called "Ants on a Snowy Log." You know what? That's just a touch too much descriptive detail for me. You mention snow on a log and then I start to think about lichen on a log and the creatures that you find inside logs and how the ants on all these logs are sitting on fallen logs, which are dead, decaying, softening, ripening, and I'm out!) Strangely enough, while I've never forgotten about Ants on a Log, until a fellow raisin hater likened their presence in rice pudding to bugs, I never truly thought of raisins as insectile before. Unfortunately, now I can't stop thinking of them as fat black flies crouching in my food. You know the kind of flies I mean, right? They're the ones that buzz louder than an electric razor, and summer heat makes these flies drowsy, so when they bump, sun-drunk, into windows, they make a loud juicy sound. Like someone launched a particularly large and wet spitball against the glass.

That's what I think of raisins in my food, because while I may have enjoyed snacking on them at some point, I have never, ever liked raisins in things. I loathe them in oatmeal, despise them in carrot cake, abhor them in apple pie, and resent the hell out of them in cookies.

But if black/purple raisins are ants or drunk flies, golden raisins are lumps of earwax. Those anemic little turds stage a sneak attack in what appears to be a rare raisin-free oatmeal cookie. The worst of it is you don't realize that your oatmeal cookie has been compromised until you've taken a large, raisin-riddled ecstatic bite and chew into that weird, sudden sweetness. This then leads to spending an inordinate amount of time breaking the oatmeal apart and excising the golden raisins away from the parts of the cookie you want to eat. Golden raisins turn dessert into dissection class.

It looks like you baked a million ants! Gross!

I'll end my treatise of raisin hate with a literary reference. When I first read Langston Hughes' "A Dream Deferred," in my mind it was always a raisin that festered like a sore, ran, and then dried up (all crustifed) in the sun. (Sorry, I have one more thing to add because I just learned about RAISIN PIE THIS IS A REAL THING THAT EXISTS AND IS A PIE MADE ENTIRELY OF RAISINS!)

[Ed. Note: Ew! Raisin Pie! God no! Geneva! Convention! That's a Hate Crime!]

Thanks again Stephanie! That was insightful and gross and now I will never stop thinking of raisins as juicy fly bodies (as if I needed a reason. Heh!).