My Blah Blah Blog

I just don’t get why Sarah Palin is taking so much heat for writing those notes on her hand before that tea party convention. As an avid palm writer myself, I totally get where she’s coming from. I mean, after the age of fifty, who can remember anything without a little support?

I find it very useful in family discussions to have a few notes handy (if you’ll pardon the excellent pun). Like, the other night, when Tom discovered the Manolo shoebox and we had a lively debate about whether a woman really needs to own five different styles of black pumps, I was really glad I’d jotted down a few talking points on my hand before things heated up.

When my daughter brought home the Honda with a very impressive scrape across two doors, I was pleased that, in the resulting exchange between us, I’d had the foresight to jot down some notes on the cost of scrape revision and the wisdom of driving carefully. I felt I was able to put a sizeable dent (haha!) in her defense (“the stupid post just appeared out of nowhere!”), and I felt good about that even after I paid the $1800.

I also use palm jots as a handy reminder system when I am multi-tasking at home. If I leave my office to go to the bedroom, say, to get my headscratcher, I make a note on my palm as to why I am going to the bedroom, otherwise, when I arrive there, I will often have forgotten what my mission was and I will have to return to my office and wait until that information resurfaces. Or if I make a phone call, I will write down the name of the person I’m calling before I dial, so when they answer, I will not have forgotten and need to ask them who they are.

Palm writing of course, is not always reliable. Knowing I would otherwise forget it, I wrote a recipe on my hand that I found in a magazine at the dentist’s office. The office has an intimidating sign up, forbidding the ripping of pages from magazines, but I had no scratch paper and I was desperate for an easy dessert recipe. I went home and, forgetting the precious information I had on my hand, washed my hair, thereby obliterating it. (The recipe, not the hair.) So, while it’s a great tool for remembering what you don’t want to forget, you can’t forget that you are trying to remember something, or else you’ll wash your hair and screw everything up.

Anyway, like I said, after fifty, most people are memory-challenged, so, I say go with palm-writing or any other tools that help, even if you are Sarah Palin, trying to remember to call Obama “a charismatic guy with a tele-prompter…..Oh, hey, wait a minute, I just read the notes on my hand: Sarah Palin is only 46! So what’s her excuse?

P.S. for that recipe to that easy dessert I made (flourless chocolate cake), click here.