The following post kicks off an interview series in which women interview their mothers, and ask what life was like when they were their age. Full credit for this idea goes to Bud Caddell. The very first post? An interview with my mother, who talks about her life at the age of 33. [caption id="attachment_802" align="alignnone" ...
I was informed once that I couldn't properly understand the movie Swingers because I'm not a man. For those who haven't seen Swingers, it's set in Los Angeles, and follows the lives of young, out-of-work ...
My high school sweetheart ended up attending the same college as I did. We both knew it was a bad idea (we had widely different interests), but ah, young love, right? It didn't take long before he transferred to a different school … overseas. We knew it was over once he left the States, though we still ...
In middle school, I had a best friend who my mother deemed a bad influence. Twenty years later, I take this to mean that I behaved more like an immature teenage brat while cohorting with this friend. My mom ...
From The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (which I find myself re-reading and re-reading for fuller comprehension): We learn, very thoroughly though far less explicitly, to identify ourselves with an equally conventional view of "myself." For ...
I've been keeping a journal off and on ever since I was about 12 years old. The earliest journals, written in hand, survive. During high school, for a brief period, I switched to disk, and promptly lost every disk by the time I graduated. So I got smarter, and started a habit of only ...
From The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: It was a basic Confucian principle that "it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great." For this reason, "humanness" or "human-heartedness" was always felt to be superior ...
From "Letting Go" by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker (August 2, 2010): Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. … Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to ...
In early 2007 I had the following dream: I went to Hell—without a fight. I walked down a long and dark corridor with many others, with my (then) husband next to me. Suddenly the corridor opened up onto a square of a city. It looked like Naples—crowded, noisy, dirty. A large university was on the square, and I ...
When my husband and I divorced, we went the DIY route. He ordered legal templates from a website, filled in the blanks, and sent it to the court. A date was set, and we agreed to meet at the courthouse for our appointment ...