10 Rules for Life

Today I'm going to grace you with the accumulated wisdom of my 55 years. You'll thank me later.

1. Never wear clothes that fit tighter than your own skin. Once you start to get baggy, your clothes should, too.

2. If you don’t have curtains on you front door, don’t wander around your foyer in your underwear.

3. Never sip hot beverages through a straw.
Corollary #1: Never chew aluminum foil.
Corollary #2: Never outline a quarter with a pencil and then roll the quarter down the bridge of your nose.

4. If you’re not handing out candy, don’t decorate your house for Halloween. This is the definition of being a jerk. Don’t do it.

5. You’re only the center of your own universe. No matter how spectacularly important you feel inside your own head, you don’t have the right to:
o Get into the express lane with a full cart of groceries
o Make left-hand turns from the curb lane
o Expect people to know what you’re thinking (if God had meant us to read each other’s minds, he would have put digital readouts on our foreheads).

6. Never take a bar bet from a drunk. If the guy that’s always parked on the third stool from the end says he can tie a cigarette into a knot without breaking it, he probably can. This one can be generalized into: know when you’re out of your league.

7. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So even if Mr. Wonderful is Prince Charming, Sir Lancelot and Bill Gates all rolled into one, if he has 12 exes, understand that you’re about to round out a baker’s dozen.

8. People’s default behavior, despite their best intentions and years of expensive therapy, reflects the values with which they were raised. So if you don’t like your in-laws, be aware that at some point you’re going to stumble across attitudes from your honey that you’re not going to much care for, either.

9. Wherever you go, there you are. After my first divorce, it was frustrating to encounter many of the same issues with my new husband, who seemed so different from spouse number one. When the very same issues showed up a third time, however, my inner logic was merciless in pointing out that the constant in these equations was me.

10. Never buy into to rules for living based on someone else’s mistakes. The idiocies you commit will be uniquely your own.

As a bonus, I challenge any of my readers who are up for it to create a similar posts of life lessons. Just think how much wiser we'll all be after we read them!