“Are you on Foursquare? Do you use Foursquare? Why don’t you use Foursquare more?”

So this year I made it my goal to use Foursquare more.

Where did I go this weekend?

I’m glad you asked.

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When I cross over into a new decade of my life, I do a personal assessment:

• Have I accomplished all I thought I would by this age?
• Am I where I thought I would be – or should be?
• Where do I want to be at the end of this coming decade?

Since I began doing this exercise in my 30^th year of life and have done so when I turned 40 and then again this past year when I turned 50, it has led to tremendous changes in my life.

It led to a promotion in the first case, to me changing careers in the next decade and moved me to run for Congress in this past year.

Pretty major life-changing events.

Now that I am three decades past my 20-year-old self, and presumably 30 years smarter, more seasoned and better ready to take on my next 30 years, here is what I would tell that younger version of who I am today. Consider it overall advice that would never steer my 20-year-old self – or any 20-year-old for that matter – wrong:

1. Do what you love. If you’re not doing what you love, keep searching for whatever that may be.
2. And do it with people you admire, enjoy being around, can learn from and who respect you.
3. Be appreciative. None of us, not a single one of us, anywhere, anyhow get anywhere without the help of others.
4. Be there. In the moment. Pay attention to the one you’re with. To do otherwise, is rude (and –bonus advice — don’t ever be rude.)
5. No matter where you are or who you are with, you are no better, nor any worse, than anyone else. Don’t act like you are. Be nice to everyone around you. Say their name when you see them. Smile when you see them. It’s not that hard, and it will help lead toward your success. Really.
6. Say yes to opportunities that scare you. It’s another way of saying take risks in your career and in your life – all that are legal, ethical and have the potential of making you better. This is a tough one, but it can make all the difference in your life.
7. Don’t be so darn self-conscious. Sure, others may judge you. But if you want to say something nice to someone, but wonder how they’ll take it, say it anyway.

OK, this list of seven could include so many others. The typical be honest, work hard etc. But at age 20, you should already know about all of those. They go without saying.

Now, go live your next decade, and the one after that and after that and after that by following this note and in a way that you will love life, love yourself, love those around you… and all the while be doing something great.

Cheri Bustos of East Moline, Illinois, is a former reporter, investigative journalist, newspaper editor, health care executive and is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in the 17^th District of Illinois. She is married and has three sons, a grandson and two dogs. 

Not really MY twenties but more what it means to be in your twenties and what this decade is really all about.

I started working on my book again which is what prompted all of this reflecting on my twenties stuff. It seems that every time I decide there is no way I am going to write a book EVER. I find myself hunched over my computer pouring my stories out. Go figure?

I used to think that your twenties were about having fun. I mean, what is this decade for if it isn’t about dancing on tables and making a fool of yourself? And then I realized that your twenties might actually be about learning.

One time a good friend told me that you should think of ever job opportunity as a free education. You should consider what the position will teach you and who you will be learning from. I kind of blew that advice off at the time but now I realize that not only was she right but that the same principal might just apply to life.

Think of every life experience as a free education. What will you learn? Who are you learning from?

It isn’t as much fun to think of life that way. Mostly because I think I have spent the past four years taking the same three classes over again. Just when I think I have found the answer I realize the semester is over and I am back at zero.

I am taking this metaphor too far, aren’t I?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I got to meet one of my favorite writers. She and her daughter are writing a book about twenty-something’s, focusing on the many decisions that must be made during this decade. She has a fascinating view on twenty-somethings that you can read more about here.

They are trying to get a sense of how Milennials experience their twenties by sending out a questionnaire asking for details about your life, how you know you’re an adult, and what your plans are for the future. If you are interested you can email them at cusp.the.book@gmail.com and they will send you the questionnaire.

(responses can be anonymous)

Thanks to Duncan Hines for sponsoring my writing. There’s no limit to the baking possibilities, so grab your favorite Duncan Hines mix and Comstock or Wilderness fruit fillings and Bake On! www.duncanhines.com.

The most interesting thing about being in your twenties is how quickly things change. At age twenty you are in college and probably eating greasy pizza on a dorm room floor. By then end of your twenties you probably have a career and possibly a husband and maybe even a couple of children. (aka you are a grown-up)

Currently I am right in the middle.

In the past year I have watched friends get married, have babies, buy houses, have second babies, get engaged, move across the country and make terrible and wonderful decisions. Everyone seems to be settling down and “girls night out” seems less important to everyone involved.

It used to be essential that you had plans every Friday and every Saturday.

Making plans for the weekend mattered. A lot.

Now, I find myself calling a friend because I realize I have forty-five minutes of free-time after my trip to the grocery store. So we sit on couches and catch up while the frozen food in my car becomes less frozen. We are usually wearing pajamas and my hair is thrown up on top of my head but it doesn’t really matter.

That is what I have learned in my twenty-fourth year.

It doesnt really matter what you are doing with your friends, it is the time that you spend together. The understanding that they are there for you no matter what.

I am afraid as time starts moving faster and our days get even busier that we might lose these moments.

A while back I went to Camp Mighty and heard Evany talk about building a better life. She said that if you surround yourself with awesome people then there will always be awesome things to do. So that is my goal this year and my challenge for you–surround yourself with awesome people, prepare yourself for awesome moments and fill your life with the things that matter.

Call your best friend on the way to the grocery store. Bake cupcakes and invite your neighbors over. Create a party in your living room just because you can.

Girls night in doesn’t have to be about planning the perfect party. It doesn’t have to be about playing Boggle and making elegant desserts. Girls night in can consist of sweatpants, ponytails and cupcakes and it still won’t lose its magic.

Remember to check out Duncan Hines’ website www.duncanhines.com to find some great recipes for your holiday get-together! I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective.

You see I couldn’t just have normal friends like the rest of the world I had to make friends that graduated college and then took off across the country to spend a year building compost bins and working with children. It is friends like these that don’t have access to Facebook everyday, can’t check email and are too busy to sit on the phone with me for hours at a time catching up.

So what’s a girl to do?

She is to send snail mail that’s what! (much more efficient than smoke signals) I have fallen in LOVE with picking out funny cards and small things to send. When I was at BlogHer this year I saw that Hallmark had a suite and I heard through the grapevine that you could mail cards DIRECTLY. FROM. THERE. I couldn’t think of a better idea and hiked over there to send a few cards to a few of my favorite friends.

There was one card in particular that I decided was the COOLEST CARD IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. (pardon the terrible pictures)

The front looked like this:

When you opened the card once it said “…my Refrigerator Misses Your Pictures! Want to color this one and send it back to me?”  and when you opened the card a little more there was a big coloring page. Fun!

You see, the friend that I mentioned above? The one that has disconnected herself from all technology? She was an art major and she once turned a My Little Pony coloring book into a rainbow extravaganza. I was so excited! I filled out the card and shipped it off and then this week?

I got this:

All. Colored. In.

I wish that I had a better picture so that you could see the amazing details she added into this card. What is the point of this story? The point is that a simple card  made my entire day. That for a moment this weekend I got a surprise. It wasn’t just about the card but about the feeling of getting something un-expected from someone you love.

I want to thank Hallmark for making my Saturday.

In celebration of happy surprises I want to surprise one of you! So leave a comment and I will choose one or three or five of you and mail you a card of your own. Because sometimes it is those little surprises that matter the most.

Dear FTC, Hallmark did not compensate me for this post. If fact, they might not even know I wrote it.

When I was a teenager I imagined how great it would be to be thirty. I sold Avon and collected anti-wrinkle creams like most teenagers collected issues of Seventeen magazine. I imagined growing old and being fancy.

So I finished highschool and had a baby and finished college and got a job and bought a house and now I am everything I wanted to be in high-school.

Except not fancy. Or old.

Ok, so maybe I am nothing I wanted to be in high-school but the point is I have built a life.

I wake up in the morning and make coffee and wake my child. I serve him breakfast and scream at him fifteen times because WHY AREN’T YOU DRESSED YET.I ship him off to school and I do work that I love and I pick him up and we eat dinner and play games and bath and bed and IS THIS SENTENCE ENDING YET.

We have routine and stability and comfort and it is driving me crazy.

I expected adulthood to be exciting. Like there would be a moment of WHOA I am an adult. But mostly it is just me trying to figure out when the last time I showered was and watching more episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians than I’d like to admit.

So I have spent the past two weeks trying to figure out if stability was supposed to feel so itchy. If it was supposed to make you want to pack up all of your belongings and move somewhere new, or hop in your car and road trip for a week, or buy a new wardrobe, or…or…

Twenty-Four is weird.

Me: I went to parent teacher conferences and they played a revised version of Born This Way.

Paige: You Win.

Me: We both win.

This time, however, that assumption was false.

To make the following  conversation easier to follow please note that any sentence surrounded by this: {} means that I was only thinking those things. [I am not that rude. SHEESH]

Dude: Make sure that you catch the 4:25 or 4:40 train tonight.

Me: How do you know which train I am taking…

Dude: You are going to the suburbs aren’t you?

Me: Yeah…but aren’t there a lot of suburbs?…

Dude: Well which one are you headed to?

Me: Naperville.

Dude: Yeah, that is what I figured. Part of my job is meeting people and judging things about them.

Me: Do I look like I am from Naperville? Because, I don’t live there…

Dude: Oh, I know. I could tell. I figured you were staying there because its a pretty open place.

{WTF?}

Dude: Where do you live?

Me: A small town..rural part of Illinois

Dude: Yeah, I know the country pretty well from traveling all over the world.

{Omg. Here we go…}

Dude: blah blah blah something about living in London and Turkey and somewhere else and a mention of hating the United States

{Please kill me now}

Me: That’s awesome. What do you do for a living?

Dude: blah blah blah something about a big company his family owns and he runs yadda yadda yadda and fancy dinners and spa packages for his clients wives…

Me: Awesome. (clearly un-impressed) Do you get any service in here?

Dude: Yeah, I have great service. Who is your carrier? Sprint?

Me: Verizon. I have one bar. But I am not trying to text I am on Twitter.

Dude: (clearly disgusted) I just don’t get that Twitter stuff, it is so self involved. People are just talking about getting in the shower and going places and then check it constantly to see if anyone gives a shit.

Me: Not everyone is like that on there.

Dude: I worry about the way the world works, you know? The other day I was driving and this guy was driving towards me and almost hit me. I could see his face glowing from the reflection of his phone so I stopped him and pulled him out of his car. I took his phone out of his hand and crushed it on the ground. I told him to be careful because next time that could be his face.

{seriously? SERIOUSLY? Why is the universe doing this to me?!)

Me: Oh…

Dude: Yeah, I am not a cop but my uncles are both firemen and my grandfather was the Chief of Police in Chicago. I know I shouldn’t.. but I make it my job to police a little bit. I just want to make this place a little more safe.

Me: (to the waitress) Can I close my tab now?

Dude: Yeah, I mean I get all of this social media stuff. I have to start accounts for the corporations I run.

{Oh..you run corporations now? You are so fancy}

Dude: I just don’t really see the return from it. I mean we are shelling out $200k per account we set up and I don’t see that big of a return.

{If you are shelling $200k to set up your Twitter account you are clearly a moron}

Dude: I mean I think we have seen 30 people from social media referrals. But still…30 people times $30k per person. That maybe pays for all of the electricity for our buildings.

{If you are making $900k from an account you spent $200k on I would say that is a pretty good ROI. Except that you are a moron.}

Me: It was nice meeting you! Have a good one.

Not one bit of this was made up.

Also? This stuff happens to me all of the time.

Also? This all happened in a matter of 15 minutes.

One of the days that I was on vacation Aiden would be going to his dads. Which meant I would be home alone with no work to do for an entire day! My original plan was to work on some personal projects I had put on hold.

But then I …uh…got distracted..

I ended up on the recliner chair at my best friends house eating icecream and playing video games. Yes, I am twelve. Get over it. We wanted to do something new and exciting  since this was a rare occasion. We couldn’t choose what to do so around 3:00 in the afternoon we decided to go tubing. We had five people wanting to go and two tubes. We headed to Walmart and then Farm King and then the Dollar Store and finally to Menards. All of the tubes in all of the stores were sold out.

There were no tubes to be found. Luckily, we found a pool float that would work just fine. It looked like this:

We packed up our gear and headed to the river.

By this time it was 4:00 but it was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and we couldn’t imagine a better time to float down the river.

We parked my car at the beginning of the river and another car at the end of the river and got into the water. And by got in the water I mean we climbed down a rock wall that was under a bridge into the river while balancing our floats. (and coolers) The wall looked like this:

Kinda…

Mind you this is my first time tubing and I am not a big fan of nature. In any sense.

So I climbed into the river on my lovely float and ignored the 3 million minnows swimming around me and I decided to suck it up and enjoy the ride. The great thing about this river is it was really shallow (i.e. safe) and the not so great thing about this river is that it moved as slow as an eighty-year old man in a hoveround.

We floated down the river…and floated…and floated….and fell off of my float in the river and then floated some more. And soon the sun was going down and it was chilly and we were tired of floating but the end of the river was nowhere in sight. So we kept going and right around 7:00 at night we were at the end and climbing up another rock wall to our car.

We quickly packed everything up and dragged ourselves to the car to get all cozied in.

This is when my friend realized that they had left their keys in. my. car.

At the other end of the river.

So we started walking down the gravel road in nothing but a swimming suit and swimming shoes at 7:30 at night.

One of my friends began jogging.

He jogged and jogged and jogged the THREE MILES back to my car. (while the rest of us waddled slowly behind him)

We finally were headed home around 8:30 at night; cold, wet and tired.

I am so happy vacation is over.

It is a little late now but maybe you can try these next year?

1. Buy yourself some candy.

Some people try to just ignore that Valentines Day is happening.  I find that impossible due to all of the chocolate being presented. Your co-worker has chocolate on their desk. Someone posts a picture on their blog of a big bowl of Reese’s. Your best friend is preparing chocolate covered strawberries for her honey. Rather than begging for candy from friends or staring in envy, go buy yourself some chocolate. I mean really…you are already alone on Valentines Day do you REALLY want to be the lonely girl begging for candy?

2. Get a massage

Maybe you don’t have someone to snuggle up with on the couch tonight but that doesn’t mean you can’t have someone to rub up on you. (see what I did there?) Make an appointment at your local salon and bask in all things Valentines.

3. Make Up Plans

Nothing get more tiring than letting everyone you know that you will be spending the day of love cuddled up alone with a pint of icecream. So what can you do? Lie. Make your life sound exciting and adventurous. Go as big as you would like in the story. Sometimes my stories get so big it is obvious I will most likely be hovering over some icecream and watching re-runs of Weeds. But it is still pretty fun while it lasts.

4. Offer to babysit

I didn’t really have to offer as my child is already sitting here waiting for supper. You remember how fun Valentines Day was when you were a kid? Glitter and pink crafts for all. Sugar cookies to make and fun kiddie movies to watch.

5. Tell everyone about it

Let everyone know about your extravagant massages, chocolates, and fun craft night with the kids. Next year you might end up turning Valentines Day into girls night. WIN!