My sister took me to task. "You know I was not being mean about your dress, don't you?"

She meant the dress that she had said made me look like a car wash -- the part of the car wash where the flappy things slap the car dry. My dress looked a lot like that, especially if I spun around. I thought this was hilarious and mentioned it in a column.

"Of course I knew you weren't being mean!" I told her.

It was not my intention to be so amusing, wearing the car wash dress. From a certain angle, it looks pretty stylish. It was some designer's idea of a good look, and because I wear a smaller size, I can usually fit into these ill-conceived but affordable cast-offs I find on the internet. Not all of them work out. But I am delighted when I can cause some unexpected merriment simply by showing up in an $11 used dress.

My sister ought to know this. She should know that, at 62, I am not angling for some best-dressed list. I am all about having fun with clothes, trying weird and different things, and a lot of those things absolutely are not going to work out. That is fine with me. I still have the car wash dress. Unlike an actual car wash, it is black, so I could wear it to a funeral sometime when I felt a little levity might be welcomed at the end of the service.

My family has a fine tradition of teasing. I know some people find this hard to believe, and I know some people tease cruelly. That is not what I mean at all. The teasing in my family has always been delivered with a heavy dose of love. Since I was a small child, I have known that the person who got teased was loved and the more people teased, the more love there was.

My dad and his sister were terrible to each other. My father always gave my aunt the meanest birthday cards, until one year she said, "Just once, I'd like a nice birthday card!"

The next year, my father went on a mission to find the most maudlin, absurdly sentimental, "To My Beloved Sister" birthday cards he could find. We found three, doused them in perfume, and presented them to her. (My dad also made her a rather nice set of candleholders in his woodshop that year, as I recall.)

They both laughed so hard they had to wipe away tears. She never asked for another nice card. So when my sister tells me I look like a car wash, it makes my day. I feel seen. I feel loved.

Being able to tell someone they look like a car wash means you know them well. She knows I have an oversized interest in buying dresses -- too many dresses -- for cheap on the internet. She knows I am not terribly self-conscious. (OK, I'm a bit of a ham.) Most of all, she knows that I know she loves me. She has supported me through every crazy and life-disturbing decision and event -- through career changes, through a divorce, through moves across the country. There has never been a moment of my life when I have doubted that my sister would be there for me.

And so she gets to tease me.

I am definitely keeping the car wash dress. And it's not the last crazy dress I will buy. I figure it's my duty to give my sister something new to laugh about.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

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This year had a lot of ups and downs for me.

This past spring, I felt about as low as I have felt about my writing since I started. My book was going nowhere. There seemed to be nothing I could do to better its chances of being sold. I was unsure if anything I was writing was any good.

Then something happened. And that something was nothing at all.

There's a story Stephen King tells about his first novel, "Carrie," my more frightening namesake. The novel, to hear him tell it, was in the wastebasket. (This was in the days when documents were made of real paper and went into actual wastebaskets.) His wife, Tabitha, pulled the pages out, brushed off the cigarette ashes, and read them. She thought they were good. She encouraged him to continue. He did, and the rest is history.

I love this story because nothing happened. Tabitha believed in him. He decided not to quit. This is not the stuff of a screenplay -- certainly nothing as exciting as Stephen King would write. But I love the story because I believe this is how most of the big miracles happen. In my case, I just moped around for a few days and finally realized that, if I was going to feel any different, I would have to do something different. And so I did.

I started planning a show for the first time in four years. I made plans to perform in front of people -- not because it was the most practical course of action for a writer to take, but because it made me happy, and it connected me and my writing to other people. For the first time, I almost forgot I had a book being shopped around. As soon as I started making plans, everything changed.

I realized I loved the new book I was working on and dove into revisions. I was able to finish the book after that. I had been worried I would have less energy to devote to projects if I picked up another one. Instead, I had much more energy than before. I had just been a little stuck.

And, somewhere in the middle of all that, my book sold.

In a movie, there would have been a miraculous phone call that turned everything around.

"Hello, Carrie? We're interested in buying your book!" the caller would have said in the movie version of my life. This is not what happened. I was already unstuck when the good news arrived.

This is the lesson I'd like to take into the new year.

It's easy to get a little stuck. There are things that will genuinely slow me down and hamper my success and, as optimistic as I am, I'm not blind to these obstacles. More will come in the future. I know this.

But, somehow, I need to find a way to get unstuck.

Sometimes it's as simple as messing with my routine: Go out for a coffee once in a while, take a walk in the morning, call a friend I haven't talked to in a while. It doesn't really matter. That is the point. It doesn't matter what I do, as long as I get unstuck. The hardest thing is to recognize that I am stuck and realize I don't have to be.

I can't fix everything at once. I might spin my wheels for a while. But, with any luck, someone like Tabitha will give my rear bumper a push when I need it, and I can get myself moving again.

Happy New Year,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

"It's not what you eat between Christmas and New Year's that counts, it's what you eat between New Year's and Christmas."

I've had this mantra in my head because my husband, Peter, and I have been trying to keep our weight in check. Peter is doing it for sensible reasons. His cholesterol and blood pressure have been high. He worries he might be at risk for a stroke. Peter was a skinny kid, a skinny teenager and a skinny adult. Discovering in his 60s that he was, in fact, capable of gaining weight came as a great surprise -- and disappointment.

In response, Peter has been terrifically disciplined and has avoided sweets for more than two months. He has gotten a lot slimmer. I have gotten slimmer, too. But I have no sensible protocol. I just skip meals. I have low cholesterol and low blood pressure, but it really irks me when my clothes don't fit, and I found a lot of them didn't. So Peter and I both went on our individual versions of a diet.

Peter's sensible portion control method is very slow and reliable. My method of "just don't eat until I'm ready to fall over" is probably not as medically sound, but also works. We both lost a bit of weight, and we both feel better -- Peter because of his blood pressure, me because of my vanity.

Peter and I share the same scale. He weighs himself first and, when I get up a bit later, I weigh myself. Sometimes we compare notes. Sometimes we commiserate. Just as I am waking, I hear Peter utter a sigh of semi-satisfaction, or mutter something dark about the fickleness of numbers, and I'll know if he had a good or bad day with our mutual acquaintance, the scale.

But now is the season that everyone frets about, and there are going to be days when eating too much is pretty much inevitable.

"Oh, no," I announced to Peter one morning after a particularly decadent dinner. "I don't think I want to see the scale today!"

Peter replied, "Even the scale deserves a day off."

We both glanced at our little digital nemesis with a mixture of emotions, none of them good. I thought leaving the poor thing alone sounded like wise advice. I like to think I took pity on the scale. It can't be a very fun job having one grumpy person after another standing on you and grumbling -- as if the perfectly accurate information you are relaying is somehow your fault.

And sometimes, a little denial can go a long way. I have found that my weight fluctuates wildly from one day to the next. I started weighing myself in kilograms for a while, just because the numbers represented larger chunks of weight. I couldn't get worked up about a pound or two, but after a couple of kilograms, I thought it made sense to take notice.

In the U.K., many folks still use stones as a measurement of weight and, while I'm not a fan of getting too much information, this seems like taking it a little too far. A stone is equal to 14 pounds. Ignoring the situation until I had added on the equivalent of a retaining wall seems like more deliberate denial than even I could manage.

But it is the season for big meals and cheese and crackers and cookies and rice pudding, and I honestly can't see myself missing any of it. I know Peter will keep being disciplined and avoiding sweets.

I'm thinking avoiding the scale sounds easier.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION