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I wish I could claim this brilliant idea for a list, but I’m stealing it out of Nora Ephron’s brilliantly funny memoir, I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK.  You know who she is, don’t you?  She wrote the screenplay for WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE.  She’s a person so innately funny that I fell in love with her the moment I picked this book up.  I was probably already in love with her just because of that hilarious orgasm scene in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.  The way you can tell how much I love her?  I’m writing in her voice, not mine.  Here’s a picture of her; if you ever see her on the street please tell her how much I’d love to invite her to dinner.

Anyway, in the midst of this brilliant book, she includes a list.  WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN.

I may love Nora Ephron, and wish that we could be best of friends, but it was relieving to discover that I knew some of the things she only wishes she knew.  For example, she says:

You can’t be friends with people who call after 11 pm.

I knew that from the cradle.  And:

The plane is not going to crash.

Luckily for me, I’ve always instinctively believed that.

Keep a journal, she says.  My mother always said that, so I know it must be true.  Not that I have time to keep one.  Here’s one my mother didn’t teach me, and I learned on my own:  ”There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch.”

So I guess there are some things on this list that I had to learn, right along with Nora.

Buy, don’t rent.

That’s a good one.  She’s right.  Block everyone on your instant mail. I learned that fast—in about two days—but those days were lost to me forever due to things popping up all over my screen.  People who work in office seem to have far more time for chatting than do people who sit at home and worry about deadlines. 

“If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.” Yeah.  Why did I have to make so many mistakes on the way to learning that one?

And finally there are some things on this list that I didn’t know and am thinking about.  She may be right.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

I never had the first four, but I’ll take this on faith.

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

I’m not forty-five yet, but I can’t remember through back through the thicket of complaints all the way to what I thought at thirty-five, so it doesn’t matter.

The empty nest is overrated, she says.

But did she think that when she had a first grader?  My daughter came home today and I asked her how it went, which is code for: did you get sent to the principal’s office today?  And: how many Time Outs?  She thought about it a while.  “It was good,” she said.  “French?” I asked anxiously (her French teacher is actually from France, where I guess kids are very quiet).  “No French today,” she said cheerfully. “Music?” (her music teacher is turning grayer by the moment.) “Oh, that was great,” she said.  A moment passed.  “Of course, I did have my batons taken away, but that’s nothing.  I never get to keep my batons.”

I didn’t ask why.  But I think this is one place where Nora Ephron may have gone wrong.  There are days when the empty nest sounds very good to me.  It would mean that my daughter was either gainfully employed or in college.

So here’s a challenge:  Tell us one thing that YOU WISH YOU’D KNOWN.  And then tell us one thing that people assume—a cliche—that you’ve found NOT TO BE TRUE.