#1: The Best Workday is Sunday

Get a little done on Sunday, have a little fun on Friday. Write an email on Sunday, watch a YouTube video on Thursday.

#2: A Note To My Remaining Students

#3: “Your chocolate chip cookies are better than you mother’s.”

After twelve years of marriage, seventeen years together, my husband says to me, “Your chocolate chip cookies are better than you mother’s.” It’s an otherwise standard evening: we’re in the kitchen after dinner, I’m at the sink rinsing dough from the bowl of the stnad mixer, he’s about to collect our four-year-old for his bath.

To understand the gravity of his pronouncement is to know that my mother is in fact famous for her chocolate chip cookies–famous, at least, in a certain set that includes my father, their various neighbors, plumbers who need extra motivation to finish a project, every friend of my youth, my own son. She bakes them to make the house smell good when my sister is coming to visit or when a realtor is coming through with prospective buyers. She wields them as if they possess a kind of supernatural healing power, an ability to relieve back surgery pain or the fallout of childbirth or broken-heartedness.

Case in point: At eighteen, a freshman in college, I went to Philadelphia to visit friends. They introduced me around the gathering of new acquaintances in their form common room, and while I didn’t expect these people to say, “oh, yes, hello, we’ve heard so much about you,” I also didn’t expect it when they actually said, “oh, yes, hello, we’ve heard so much about your mother–the one with the cookies.”

The truth is, I bake chocolate chip cookies from the same recipe as my mother; the one on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse bag, with only slight modifications. And yet, my mother’s are on another plane: fluffier, richer, more substantial. It seems not a coincidence, then, that the only person ever to insist that mine are superior to hers is the person I married.

He is flush with boyishness now, sneaking another cookie. “Objectively better,” he says, before walking out of the kitchen to get our kid in the bath.

These are the thins that aren’t marriage exactly–aren’t part of the big agreement we made when we got married, aren’t any of the millions of small negotiations and commitments we continue to make as we stay married. They are something else, some kind of supportive tissue, as if the marriage is the primitive, rudimentary joint of bone to bone, and then these moments are the tendons, lithe fibers, holding it all together, allowing it all to move. — by Kelsey Motes-Conners

#1: Dunning-Kruger effect

Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.

#2: The Secret To a Fight-Free Relationship

“They noticed that by waiting, they could avoid the pain and gamesmanship of impulsive arguments; in the midst of a fight, they were too preoccupied with “winning” to attempt to solve problems. For Cutler, the distance often brought clarity. By the time she had read through the paper in her desk drawer to prepare for an upcoming contract talk, she would deem some of the entries too trivial to raise.”

#3: Masters of Love

A very interesting article, factual article, that proves that kindness is really the foundation for a long-lasting relationship

#4: Confidence swimming pool

This post really warmed my heart. If only we could cheer for each other like this, with no envy, no hidden-agenda, no ulterior motives… what a different world would this be.

#1: Modern Love: An Anxious Person Tries to Be Chill

“Henry didn’t need things to be dramatic to feel alive because he paid attention to the small details that make life feel miraculous. His capacity for delight, his seemingly boundless sense of wonder, was one of the first things I loved about him. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

#2: Being Brave Is…

Brave is matching your insides and outsides.
If one wants to ride and does, that’s brave.
If one does not want to ride and doesn’t- that’s brave.
Actions are not inherently brave- the honoring of the inner compass instead of the outer expectation is the braveness.
Brave cannot be judged by the crowd. Sometimes we are the only one who knows we’ve been brave.
And that is enough.
That is everything.

#3: “Wishes for sons” by Lucille Clifton

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

#4: “My dad… he always cared”

Just a good ‘ol pieces of heart warming news. There are people who care.