My sister finally gave in and joined Facebook this week, or, as she succinctly put it, "I'm drinking the Kool-Aid." Tasteless Jim Jones reference notwithstanding, I was crazily excited to have my sister on Facebook—which is a little bit ridiculous, really, since we talk on the phone every day. But now I could talk to her online, too! And put up photos of shamrock shakes and tag her in them! Oh, the possibilities were endless!
I spent two hours walking Kim through her first tentative Facebook steps. She navigated her way through the privacy settings, discovered how to leave her wall and successfully return to it later, and even gave the search bar a shot.
"I can't find O____ B_____," she complained, trying to look up an old friend from high school as I sat with the phone propped up to my ear, tagging photos of her.
"Don't worry about it, she just found you," I said, watching as O.B. 'liked' the picture of Kim I'd just put up and left a comment. Within moments, Kim had a friend request.
"That's a little scary," she admitted. And it is. Which is why I'm offering these tips to my sister and the other 36 people in the world who are just now joining the Facebook nation:

1.  Remember that creepy guy from high school, the one who wore plastic vampire fangs to class and stared at you all day? Yup, he's on Facebook too, and he's about to send you a friend request so that he can finally confess to you that he was in love with you 30 years ago and that you are still just as beautiful today. Feel free to ignore his friend request.

2.  Remember your younger cousin, the one who set off firecrackers in the chicken coop and it caught on fire? He hasn't changed. Ignore his friend request, too.

3.  People will tag random pictures of you. They do not care if you were thirty pounds heavier in that photo or had just had your hair done like Gene Simmons of KISS for a costume party. They also don't care if your mother is on Facebook and will not find it as hilarious as your friends do to tag you in a picture of a bong shaped like Elvis's head. You do have the power to un-tag yourself in those photos. Do it.

4.  Good news!  Your mother is not on Facebook. Yet.

5.  Some of your Facebook friends are quite vocal about their political views or feelings on social issues affecting our nation. Some of these people are, in fact, crazier than fruit bats. Choose your battles wisely. Sometimes it's better to just bite your fingers instead of commenting.

6.  Yes, if you post something on someone's page, all of their friends can read it. So if you want to tell your friend Jeanie that you still regret not marrying John Taylor of Duran Duran, send her a private message instead of posting it on her wall where your husband might see it.

7. Of course Duran Duran has their own Facebook page! You can only 'like' it once, though.

8. Don't keep updating your status every five minutes. Honestly, nobody cares if you just found a great deal on toilet paper at Target. (Wait. How great of a deal was it?) Also, why do you want creepy vampire fang guy to know where you are at all times?

Facebook can be a little scary for newbies. Personally, I'm thrilled to have my sister on there with me, mostly because my cousin Lori keeps ignoring my Farmville requests, and I want someone to play with me. Plus, it's better that she figures Facebook out now ... before her children do!

I have watched General Hospital for most of my life.  It started back in 1982, when my sister would watch it while babysitting me after school.  Through the years, it’s been like an old friend – sometimes, the show makes me laugh, sometimes, it makes me cry, but mostly, it makes me wonder how to tell this old friend that I’ve grown up and it hasn’t and we don’t really need to be friends any more. 

In all fairness, GH has taught me a few things about life. For instance:

1. As long as you dress like a Vogue model and have fabulous hair, you’re ready for anything. Honestly, I’ve seen these women survive train wrecks, hotel fires, murder sprees, and car crashes (sooo many car crashes) with their perfect coifs and Jimmy Choos intact.  So now, when I’m preparing for a hiking trip or a kayak ride, I like to run right out and get a hot oil treatment and new heels.
   
2. Life is easier if you have a cool name.  This has been proven time and time again on GH.  “Frisco” was a secret agent married to a Mayan princess. “Decker” was a sexy grifter who drove a Harley. “Mikkos” was a fabulously rich super-villain who put North America in deep freeze in the middle of July.  The people with ‘normal’ names, like Benny, Tony, Casey, and Jesse?  Dead, dead, space alien, and dead.  I fully understand that “Stacey” is not nearly as cool as “Frisco.”  It is, however, awfully close to “Casey,” which means I might turn out to be from outer space.  Really, I need to dump this show.          
   
3. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like giving your fiancée a lug nut for an engagement ring/buying your girlfriend a duck/raping a teenager on a dance floor.  I wish I was making this crap up. And did that rape lead to a socially responsible, sensitive handling of a victim’s emotional turmoil and eventual victory in court of her attacker?  Heck no. That rape scene led to the most popular couple on daytime television.
   
4. People won’t think you’re a tramp if you have four children by four different men, even if the guy you’re married to isn’t the father of any of them.  See, this was an eye-opener to me. Because that sounds kind of slutty to me.  But Elizabeth Webber is considered a saint – a saint! – on this stupid show. (For those of you who watch GH, here is the scorecard: Cameron—father is Zander; Jake—father is Jason; miscarried child—father is Jax; Aidan—father presumed to be Nicolas, Lucky’s brother.  Once this broke up Elizabeth and Lucky for good (I wish!) the father turned out to be Lucky.  To me, that sounds like a slut.)
   
5. There’s always a new crisis waiting around the corner.  Sure, their crises are a little different than mine—psychopaths kidnapping the local mob boss’s children, forged paternity tests, serial killers stalking the local mob boss’s right hand man.  My biggest challenges tend to be keeping the house clean, finding time to write, and not eating an entire chocolate mousse cake all by myself even though I really want to.  But then again, I’m not married to the local mob boss.  I suppose if I was, it would spice up my life a little bit.

 
So you can see, there are some benefits to watching soap operas.  For instance, I get to release a lot of anger calling Elizabeth names every time she comes on the screen. And…um…

All right.  I’ll admit it.  It is definitely time for me to break up with General Hospital.

I will. I swear.

Tomorrow.

We have a tradition in my family.  Every year on Good Friday, we all pile in to our cars and head over to Mom’s house to make koulourakia, a Greek Easter cookie.  It tends to be a little dry, and if you leave it exposed to the air for more than 30 seconds, it turns hard as a rock, but hey, tradition is important.

Okay, maybe tradition isn’t that important.  My mother, over the years, has made a few alterations to the recipe.  The year she dumped cocoa powder into the mixing bowl, for instance, while heralded among my immediate family as genius, earned scorn and general disdain from my great-aunts.  They believed that if it didn’t taste like sawdust and you couldn’t crack a tooth on it, it wasn't really koulourakia.  (Their sister, my grandmother, didn’t have a problem with the chocolate koulourakia.  She was also known as something of a gourmand in our family, and knew progress when she tasted it.)

This year, it was Mom, Dad, my Aunt Joanne, my sister Kim, my two nephews, and I  all gathered around the kitchen table to roll out the dough.  Mom always has high hopes that everyone will help mix up the dough, and every year, it’s her and her sister Joanne in the kitchen stirring and measuring while the rest of us pig out on peanut butter eggs and peeps in front of the television.  Eventually, Mom will announce that the dough is ready to be shaped into cookies, and we’ll scramble to the table to create our masterpieces.  See, I’ve mentioned that Mom is Greek.  My father, however, is Italian.  We Italians, of course, are great artists.

Koulourakia is traditionally shaped with a loop at the top, the two ends twisting together to form a plump stem (see picture below).  But after you roll out three or four of those, however, it gets kind of boring. That’s when we let our creative juices flow.

My nephews started creating remarkable works of art like a basketball, a burrito, poo (wait – that might have been me), and what appeared to be a likeness of President Obama.  Me, I like to dabble in animal portraits.  I fashioned a bunny rabbit, a rattlesnake (let’s face it – snakes are the easiest thing to roll out of dough, but I’ll admit, the rattles were tricky) and a giant chocolate tick.  I made the tick for my Dad since they tend to crawl from miles around just for a chance to chomp in to him.  See?  I’m always thinking of others.

The dough went fast, and soon we had tray upon tray of warm cookies.  The second part of this tradition was upon us.  We all proceeded to stuff our faces until we were sick.  Our Good Friday celebration was complete.  

The boys suckered - whoops! - convinced Auntie Joanne to play broom ball with them, while my sister and I passed out on the couch, fully ensconced in sugar overload.  Dad settled in to the recliner to pop ticks off his leg, and Mom was left to clean up the mess – egg shells in the sink, sesame seeds under the table, and a glob of chocolate cookie dough that had somehow magically gotten stuck to the ceiling.  (It was Kim.)  (Keep in mind, when I was a kid, I used to write “Kim was here” on the walls thinking that my mother would actually believe it.  I spent a lot of time in ‘time out’.)  My knee is still weak, so Mom made Kim stand on a chair and scrape the dough off the ceiling (snicker!)

Eventually, Kim loaded the kids in the car, and Auntie Joanne selected some cookies to bring to my Great-Aunt Demi for Greek Easter.  Won’t she be surprised to see the koulourakia President Obama that the boys made for her? You bet she will.

Some people like to spend Good Friday doing last minute egg shopping, while others spend it in religious reverence.  In our family, we eat.

Happy Easter, everyone!