Yesterday was my last full day taking care of Brody before I head back to Chicago.  I can't believe how fast the last 4 months have gone, and I didn't realize how much I was going to miss the little man until it sunk in today just how much is going to change.  First of all, I'm going to miss him simply because he's Brody - lately he has been the happiest, most smiley baby in the world, which is just so much fun - and even when he's not, how can you be mad at something that cute?

But, I realized it's not just Brody I'm going to miss, it's all those other things that go along with Brody - things that have become second nature and that I'm going to have to immediately nip in the bud, because without a baby with you, they are absolutely socially unacceptable.  

I've gone ahead and made a list for myself, titled Behaviors That Are No Longer Acceptable In Public, and the list is as follows:

• Baby Noises: I took a cue from Jess on this one, who has just completed her Masters in this very field and tells me that imitating a baby's sounds makes them feel like you're communicating with them.  Until that point, my conversations with Brody had been playing out in a very adult-like manner, which I suspected made him feel very grown up and important, especially when I asked for his input on important matters, like whether or not he thought I should create a strong online marketing component for my book, and what he thought was the best way to go about that.  Many a feeding was spent with my face very close to his as I explained to him the difference between decent people and not-so-decent people, and just how I thought he should treat a lady when he grew up.  I'd hold him on my lap while we watched America's Most Wanted and Intervention, pointing out exactly what he should try and avoid later in life, and why.  I think he was very receptive, and if his first words are "Crack-Cocaine," or "Say NO to drugs and YES to chores," I think we've found our culprit.  Lately, though, I've been letting Brody take the lead on our conversations, and I simply imitate what he says to me.  His sounds go back and forth between what I've labeled: "Jungle Monkey," "Whimpering Dog," "Native American War-cry," and "Ahhh-geeee," which sounds just like it's spelled.  I shout these right back at him - and have recently gotten pretty casual about the venues in which I choose to do so.  It started at the supermarket, when he'd stare at me from the cart and we'd converse.  This brought some pretty interesting looks our way, but everyone could see the baby and therefore it wasn't all bad.  Lately, though, I've been continuing our conversations in the car, which leads inevitably to my pulling up at a drive-through Starbucks window while emitting a Xena Warrior Princess cry to, as it would appear to the cashier, myself.  Not only will this need to cease and desist immediately, but the habit as a whole of imitating other people's sounds will need to be nixed.  Jess brought this to my attention the other day and I agreed that it was something I'll need to monitor closely, as I can just see myself standing on the El and, when the person next to me yawns loudly, sticking my face in his and yawning loudly right back.

There's really not enough news on the marketing front to make an interesting "Marketing-Day-____" post.  I don't know the reason behind having nothing of marketing interest to blog about, except maybe the fact that I haven't started marketing my book yet.  

So, in the meantime, I think I'll write about someone who could probably stand to work on marketing himself a little bit better.  I don't know his name, I don't know where he's from, but I do know that, at least in the encounter I had with him, he needed to be taken down a few notches.

The debacle started at O'Hare International Airport, a place where I'm sure several such encounters happen on a daily basis.  My family and I arrived at our gate, heading for Seattle, and took four of the only seats available.  It didn't take long for us to realize that these seats were directly next to the man who turned out to be perhaps the most obnoxious person I've ever encountered.

My first clue is that he was on his cell phone in the middle of one of the most crowded venues imaginable.  My second was that he was either using his outdoor voice, or had gone deaf singing along to one too many boy bands and therefore had no awareness of his volume.  I had no idea what the girl (I'm assuming it's a girl) on the other end was saying, but the one side of it that I could hear went a little like this:

"Yeah, I'm jumping on another plane.  I know, I know, my schedule's a little different then yours.  I'm always jet-setting somewhere new and exciting.

Well you should have told me that then!  So we'll go to Norway, instead.  Yeah, no problem, we'll just hop on a plane and we'll be there tomorrow.  That's fine.  No, don't worry, I'll pick it up.  I promise.  Yeah, of course, it's only Norway.

Or you know, instead of Norway, lets head to Alaska.  If we go at the end of the summer, it's light all day long.  Yeah, and we could see the Northern Lights.  I see them pretty much all the time, so I think they're kind of dumb, but you'd probably find them interesting still.

At about this point, he stopped calling them the Northern lights and launched into their formal name:

"Well, then we won't go see them.  We don't even need to go see them, I'll just buy them.  I'll buy you the Aurora Borealis."   

I wanted to punch him in the mustache.

I actually don't remember if he even had a mustache, but I'd like to think he does - it sounds like something a mustache would do.  I also picture him with hair plugs, a bad spray tan, and boat shoes with no socks and/or black socks and sandals.  I've also recreated his dialogue below, with, in bold, the things I would have liked to say to him, if I was a little meaner and a lot more gutsy:

"Yeah, I'm jumping on another plane.  I know, I know, my schedule's a little different then yours.  I'm always jet-setting somewhere new and exciting.

Well, of course you are.  You're obviously the man for the job, the face of the company, and the type of person I'd personally choose to send somewhere to represent me or my business.   

Well you should have told me that then!  So we'll go to Norway, instead.  Yeah, no problem, we'll just hop on a plane and we'll be there tomorrow.  That's fine.  No, don't worry, I'll pick it up.  I promise.  Yeah, of course, it's only Norway.

Sure you will.  No biggie, I'm sure a last minute, spontaneous flight to Europe wouldn't be a financial strain, not for a man of such great wealth as you obviously are. 

Or you know, instead of Norway, lets head to Alaska.  If we go at the end of the summer, it's light all day long.  Yeah, and we could see the Northern Lights.  I see them pretty much all the time, so I think they're kind of dumb, but you'd probably find them interesting still.

That's an interesting concept - going to Alaska when it's light all day to try and catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights.  And yeah, the Northern Lights are really boring, I'm sick of looking at them too.  Especially because we see so much of them in Chicago...

"Well, then we won't go see them.  We don't even need to go see them, I'll just buy them.  I'll buy you the Aurora Borealis."   

That one I couldn't even find a comment on - this was the point I started fantasizing about punching him in the mustache.  Basically, his one-way dialogue sounded to me like the conversational, long-winded equivalent of simply saying, "I'm kind of a big deal.  People know me."

I lost track of him after he cut in front of us in line to assure he'd board the aircraft ahead of the disabled and those traveling with small children, still on his phone all the while.  But, I like to picture that his next twenty minutes included at least one episode of the flight attendant literally ripping his cell from his hand when he refused to snap it shut as we began to taxi from our gate, and then again as we took off, resulting finally in him requesting he be allowed to continue his call from the cockpit, that the pilots could wait.

If it didn't happen that way, I wonder how he signed off with the woman he was clearly trying to impress.  Perhaps something like:

"Well, I don't want to disrupt the first class cabin I'm sitting in, by talking on my iPhone here.  Yeah, it's an iPhone.  The 3GS, actually.  That's right, with the 3-Megapixel Camera.  I've got all the applications on here - because of my iPhone I was able to check in early and print out my boarding passes before I got to the airport.  iPhone is basically the technological version of myself."

Actually, that part I would have agreed with him on - he is the human iPhone - a little obnoxious, a lot pretentious, and full of unnecessary information.

Yesterday while working through my marketing plan, an interesting suggestion came up.  The idea was thrown out there that perhaps I should read a chapter of my book aloud, on camera, and then post the video for everyone to see. 

The man who suggested it is a marketing genius - so I know he knows what he's talking about - I just suddenly began to question how well he knew me.

As a general rule, I do not do well on tape.

And God knows I've tried.  

It started when I was little, and my sister and I would tape "The News."  Actually, I think my sister would do most of the taping - as even then, I froze up, knowing that the sound of my voice on that cassette was not going to be pretty.  I should add here that there was something very wrong with Meghan and I at that age...

We've both mentioned to each other our surprise over the fact that no teacher, principal or authority ever called home to express their concern about our living environment.  It seems that every assignment we turned in dealt with death, divorce, or loss of limb(s).  I think it's because, unlike other small children of that age, our favorite movie was Dances with Wolves and we spent a great deal of time researching Civil War battles and details for family trips, and thus were exposed to a veritable grab-bag of death, destruction, and racial issues, from a very early age.

Looking through old files a few months ago, we came across a story my sister had written early in elementary school, and if I remember correctly, it went a little something like this:

"Timmy stood in the front yard, all alone and scared, crying.  He could hear yelling from inside his house, and he knew that it meant his parents were getting a divorce.  He knew it was his fault.  It's your fault your mother and I are getting divorced, his father had told him last night.  Why don't you love me anymore? Timmy had asked, sobbing now, but his father hadn't answered, just taken another sip of the drink in his hand...the drink that always made him angry."

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.  We wove tales of such despair that it truly is a wonder social services never showed up.  Once in 4th grade I wrote a story about a boy who volunteered to line up in front a firing squad, because the rest of his family had died in the Holocaust and he wanted to join them.  This is what I chose to read aloud at a Veterans Day celebration at school, and I'm sure the veteran grandparents of my friends particularly enjoyed hearing that heartwarming story.

The irony is I was a happy kid - we both were - and we came from probably the happiest home imaginable.  Still, I wasn't at all surprised when, last time I was home, I found one all of our old cassette tapes and stumbled across the following "news" story: 

"This is ____ with tonight's traffic report.  I am sorry to report that a tragedy has occurred.  The Jones family was driving home from the swimming pool when an earthquake happened, and I'm sad to report that a boulder fell onto the road they were driving on, knocking their car off a cliff."

This was delivered by a sweet little 9-year-old voice, which softly added "The lone survivor was the Jones's dog, Fluffy, who was last seen wandering down the highway, crying for his owners.  If you have seen Fluffy, please contact the Jones's uncle, who is in a wheelchair, and who is also blind."

The funny part is that, in the background you could hear soft classical music and the sounds of an otherwise happy suburban neighborhood.  I don't know if this was a recording that featured my sister and I or a friend (that I surprisingly had, even through such events) - but it was my first clue that nothing good comes out of me being on tape - or around anyone that was.

But it's not just my words on tape that turned out negative - it was also my general appearance and overall demeanor. 

When I was six, stumped on ideas of what to do for our grandparents for Christmas, someone decided it would be a good idea to tape us going about our everyday activities.  Then someone decided that our everyday activities consisted of four basic elements: Music, singing, gymnastics and dance.  

The music portion was first, and it was a disaster - Meghan played the flute and I played the piano. If I were my grandparents I would have turned it off long before the second round of A Tisket a Tasket - had they not, they would have quickly come upon me attemptng Jolly Old St. Nicholas on the piano, wearing a stoic expression that would earn me the nickname "The Russian Gymnast" for most of my young life. 

Next we sang a beautiful rendition of America The Beautiful - for some reason with English accents - both of which only showed up when we got to the line "And crown thy good with brotherhood" and every 'O' took on a distinct "WHO" sound.  

The gymnastics was, I'm sure, just what they'd been hoping to get for Christmas - a cartwheel, a bridge, and a back walk-over that never quite made it over ... and then there was the dancing.  

Meghan and I took turns spinning around the living room like we'd just been given some very questionable mushrooms and were  chasing invisible flying kittens while expressing ourselves artistically.  Meghan took it a step further with hand gestures rivaled only by professional mimes, while I continuously spun in and out of view in the background.  Unless "Dance" is synonymous with "seizure," there was no dancing of any kind going on there.

Years after that, I was again in front of the camera for a video I filmed with some friends - one of which participated in a skit about her own funeral before we all pitched in for an incredibly politically incorrect spoof on a School for the Mute.  

It is my sincere hope that no one ever gets their hands on these videos - and also that I never need to be featured in one again.  The irony is not lost on me that the subject matter of Hearts Wide Open is some of the very subject matter that our childhood stories centered around - it's just that every time I'm on camera, I feel incredibly uncomfortable - I feel like there are a million eyes on me, a million people waiting for me to screw up, and a million people waiting to pounce on me when I do.  In short, I feel a lot like this zebra:

That said, I will be taking applications from anyone interested in the role of reading a chapter aloud on film.  Accents are preferable but not mandatory (a line that would also be in my online dating profile if I were to spend time creating one.)

"Hearts Wide Open is a wonderful account of family, love, loss, and finding strength through faith.  M. Blair Milne has showcased outstanding writing in this easy-to-read novel.  The excerpt is only through the first 18 pages, but I already feel invested in the characters and the story.  I cannot wait to purchase this and finish reading this masterpiece.  I truly believe Milne is the female version of Nicholas Sparks.  A MUST READ!!"

"Hearts Wide Open immediately thrusts you into the lives of a loving family struggling to cope with life's problems.  I love the details used to describe each character and already have a sense of each person within the first 20 pages.  The flashback was so interesting and made the characters even more real and relateable.  This is definitely a book I can see myself not being able to put down and finishing within a few days."

 "Suspenseful and detailed plot with well-developed and relatable characters.  I'm sucked in and want to read more!  I like the movement from one character's POV to the next - the style caters to my ADD - The author has a clear gift for storytelling.

"I think that it's a captivating story, featuring very likable characters.  I like her use of foreshadowing and I'm looking forward to hearing how the story turns out."

 "I loved it!!! Great Story!"

"Excellent...drew me right in...intriguing characters!