Normal Is Just a Setting on the Dryer: And Other Lessons from the Real Real World

By Adair Lara and Roxanna Bikadorof

When the self-help books just aren’t helping, it’s time to call in the experts: real people . . .

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara polled her readers for life lessons learned through experience, receiving thousands of heartfelt and irreverent responses. The best are compiled here in more than two hundred bits of priceless counsel, accompanied by witty, whimsical illustrations by award-winning artist Roxanna Bikadoroff.

This handy little volume is filled with humor, unconventional insights, and the kind of common wisdom that will always bear repeating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452126661

Book preview

The only really good advice that I remember my mother ever gave me was,

Go! You might meet somebody!

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Never buy shoes or a hat by mail order.

Drink wine, save old love letters, listen to vintage Van Morrison …

However,

do not blast Morrison’s music and make short order of a bottle of wine while reading those old love letters, or you’ll find yourself thinking now would be the perfect time to make a long-distance phone call to their author.

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Waiting a year to start college so I could help sail a boat to Europe with seven other friends would have been the better choice.

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Forget marketing and calculus.

Now that I know better, I’m going back to school to take the right stuff: astronomy, geology, Russian, French cooking, and the art of massage.

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Forgive yourself the big