I have to hand it to author Jenna McCarthy, the scribe behind If It Was Easy, They’d Cal the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon. She’s not only hilarious (check out the funny trailer for her book ), but she’s also brave and wise.

The hilarious Jenna McCarthy mentioning my book in her TED talk!

How do I know this? Because she recently gave a speech about “How to Live Happily Ever After” for a TED conference in front of a packed house (brave) that was full of smart and surprising advice (wise) on how to be happily married. And even wiser? Well, in talking about how to find the right partner to marry, she featured my book cover for Meeting Your Half-Orange in her speech! (Pay attention at the 9:20 mark).

I’ve picked up a few tips from Jenna’s speech, which is why I’m going to buy my husband some really fattening cookies today. Watch her talk and you’ll learn why that’s just one of a few fabulous ideas for living happily ever after. Here’s the video—find a free 11 minutes (oh, let’s be honest, now is just perfect) and enjoy!

Big love,

This past week, on our visit to Florida, my husband and I stopped by our favorite barbecue joint outside of Fort Lauderdale called Georgia Pig. It’s a 50-year-old dive in Davie, Florida with a pork sandwich that’s smokey and moist with some crunchy bits on a soft bun. Man, it’s so good, it makes me instantly happy.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see they have their own formula for happy on an old sign posted inside the restaurant. Here, on the back of Georgia Pig’s business card, is that simple formula:

The Georgia Pig recipe for happiness.

Use as necessary for a full, happy, tasty good life. Oink.

Big love,

I don’t know why I got such a kick out of this, but it made me laugh. Out loud? I don’t remember. Check out this cartoon by Drew found at Left-Handed Toons by Right-Handed People:

Ha ha ha! A scarf, meanwhile, is all I can knit (not from noodles, but still). If you ever want something knitted from me, I can either make you a little scarf or a long scarf or a really, really long scarf, and that’s about it. Hope you like scarves.

Big love,

While driving through New Orleans on a recent visit, my friends and I passed this amazing wall that offered the line “Before I Die…” and blanks for the locals to fill in.

It turns out, the wall was made by a NOLA artist named Candy Chang, and she’s passing along the “Before I Die” project, which is now popping up in cities all over the world, from San Diego and Portsmouth in America to Lisbon in Portugal and Queretaro in Mexico. I think it’s an amazing idea. I mean, I don’t mean to be riffing on theme here, as you may recall my post about what happened when I my own obituary (sorta). But I love the reminder this “Before I Die” art gives us to check in and see if we’re on the right path in life.

These are some of the things people wrote on the wall in the time after the piece went up:

And so I ask you today...what would you write on the wall?

Give it a good few minutes, really.

Because getting the life we want for ourselves isn’t as simple as flippantly “wishing” for it. We have to want it. We have to say we want it. We have to talk about it and pray about it and write about it. And if we do that writing on a twelve-foot billboard on the street, all the better! Life is about putting your dreams out there and standing proud behind them. I’m going to do that over here in my house. Write my list. Maybe you could do the same.

Write what you want to be, who you want to help, who you want to say “I love you” to, and where you want to travel. It’s like the Lottery: You can’t win if you don’t play, right?

Give yourself some big dreams, write ’em down and—because we don’t actually know how long we have to make it happen in our lifetimes—let’s go on and get crackin’…

Big love,

A friend showed me this image the other day and it made me laugh out loud:

But when I was done laughing, I did think to myself: Man, how many times do we feel like it’s a bad sign and do it anyway? You know…

We notice a red flag on a date (he got up four times to whisper into his phone in the corner!) and yet we keep dating them until the flag is the size of a highway billboard.

We don’t get a good feeling from the doctor (she didn’t even say hello!) but we go back to her anyway and aren’t that surprised when she prescribes the wrong medication.

We hear the car making a strange noise but he says to ignore it (is that “check engine” light really always on?) and then kick ourselves when the car overheats six miles from town.

The point is, life is giving us signs all the time. They’re not signs on the side of the road—they’re signs within us, physiological reactions to what we may not even realize we’re noticing. Our minds have spent a lifetime learning on our behalf, so we owe ourselves the respect to listen our gut! The more we pay attention to our gut instincts, follow our hearts and read the signs, the happier we’ll be.

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This is How Much Feelings Matter

Big love,