What Girls Get Wrong

I have pet birds. Cockatiels, to be precise. And if you happen to have any sort of pet, bird or otherwise, you know it can be a love-hate relationship at times. Don't be fooled, he's not as innocent as he looks. Birds are flighty. The smallest little thing (such as leaning back in a creaky chair) can send them swirling around the room. Birds are noisy. They'll chatter and shriek and squawk no matter how you plead, beg, threaten (just kidding, or am I?) or otherwise talk to or not talk to them. Birds need constant care and attention. They squawk and shriek for you to notice them, feed them, talk to them, just to be in the same room as them. Birds aren't very smart. Mine flew away from me once just because I was wearing nail polish (ahhhhh! attack of the killer colored finger nails!!!). Time and time again, when I have them out of their cages to play, I have to bring them back to their play-stand after a frightened flight around the room, repeatedly having to say ...

Let me tell you about the day, a couple of weeks ago, when I failed. Miserably failed. Failed so greatly, so completely, that if they gave out awards for failing, I'd have won grand grand grand ultra-grand prize hands down. If failing was a martial art, I'd be the master sensei of failure, on the level of failing Ooguay from Kung Fu Panda was with kung fu. I wrote the book The Zen of Failing .* I submitted a form wrong for my internship. Yeah, I'm being ridiculous (I get like that a lot). But I know I can't be the only one who does this. We beat ourselves up over the smallest thing, over and over and over. We make a tiny, teeny, ant-sized mistake (like forgetting someone's name), and we act like it's the apocalypse of failure, and we can never come back from it. And while I'm not saying we shouldn't be sorry, that mistakes are cool, we often lose sight of the fact that it's not the end of the world. And that's the case even for si...