Grammar Tip

As an interjection, aha expresses surprise. Aha! There you are! Aha is a plain old regular word, so no initial cap unless it’s the first word of a sentence. Sometimes we have a revelatory surprise, or what Oprah and many others call an aha moment.

A-ha is the name of a pop band from the 1980s, always capitalized and with a hyphen because that’s the way they spelled their proper name. A-ha had a hit with Take on Me. (I didn’t understand the title then and I still don’t know what it means, but it sure is a peppy little song.)

We heard some great songs in the summer of 1985, like Sussudio by Phil Collins (again, what does this mean?) and Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. We had your name-brand Whitney Houston and Madonna tunes, your Huey Lewis and the News, Wham! and—pause for Rob Lowe moment—St. Elmo’s Fire. Oh, and Aretha Franklin’s Freeway of Love had us all wanting to drive a pink Cadillac.

So much fun.

Podcast Rec

That time I met Glennon Doyle at a book signing in 2017. (Typo alert: singing or signing? Spellchecker will let you get away with either placement of the precious G.)

As of May 2021, Glennon and her sister have a new podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and such. The title is also one of the best sentences ever. We can do hard things. With or without a smile, composure, dignity, deep breathing, etcsometimes we just have to, and there are many ways to do so.

Life Tip

Have you created your own personal user guide? Individual operator manual? Notes on how you work from the inside out? I heard about this fascinating concept recently and read Melody Warnick’s fabulous article on Medium, How to Write Your Own User Manual.

I tutor a high-school student on Friday afternoons and told her about it. Last week she said she wanted to make one. I bounced around a couple of different sites to find some specific questions each of us could answer. Thank you, Zoom, for the “share screen” feature and allowing me to enable it forever and always. OK, here are two questions we answered:

When do you want people to approach you, and how?

“Never, and not,” she said. I laughed.

How can people help you?

I said, “Duh, read my mind.”

She shook her head, knowing even as a teenager that this probably wouldn’t work very well?

Writing your own user guide is helpful for all kinds of relationships, even of the solo variety. Me, myself and I aren’t always on the same page, right?