The other day my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I were walking down the street after leaving our favorite frozen yogurt place. We’d been celebrating her last day of preschool and were headed back to our car so that we could meet up with another kid from her preschool at a nearby park… Read full post »

 

Warning: this post contains images that some parents may find disturbing, namely, a picture of Barbie’s waistline.

The Gabriella doll came first. It was an innocent gesture from an old friend of mine who now works for the Princess Headquarters conglomerate otherwise known as Disney. Leavi… Read full post »

The way I see it, you can either congratulate me or pity me. Today I marched into a new field of knowledge, or experience, and, when you really boil it down, anxiety that I didn’t quite realize I was headed into. And all I did was attend a parent orientation at… Read full post »

When it comes to parenting, everyone has an uninvited opinion they’d like to share with you. Your job is to let them say whatever they’re going to say and to not hit them after they say it. It has been my experience that even those who are not parents inevitably fall… Read full post »

As one of good my friends says repeatedly, and this is one of the reasons I keep him as a good friend, “we in the neat community don’t appreciate the term neat freak because we find it offensive.” Both my friend and I love being part of this community. So, as… Read full post »

For a couple of days now I’ve had a picture of a lanky naked man attached to my refrigerator by several of those annoying little Make Your Own Poetry magnets that people seem to like to give me. I am so very proud of this man, tall and slim, with shimmering… Read full post »

I know this much about the three dimensions: up, down; left, right; forward, backward. I realize that space and time are relative, and I don’t have any particularly special insights to add to Einstein’s theory of the space-time continuum. I’m just a mom who is starting to freak out… Read full post »

I’ve always liked the idea of seeing life as raw material waiting to be shaped or built or sewn into something useful. But occasionally there are events so trying and uneven that they never quite make their way into the quilt—that is, they never make any sense, at least not in… Read full post »

I’ve watched the horrifying video of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, the unarmed man and BART passenger who was killed on New Year’s Day in Oakland, several times today. For the most part I think You-Tube is a glorious example of democracy in action, and I think the viral effect of this… Read full post »

   

“Put Simply: Our Healthcare Problem is Our Deficit Problem” —Barack Obama, September 9, 2009

 

There I was again, watching him, and crying in front of the TV. Not like I was when Obama was sworn in, not out of feelings of pride that we finally have someone in… Read full post »

40 is a Harshad number, an integer that is divisible by the sum of its digits in a given number base. “Harshad” is a Sanskrit word that means "great joy."

40 is a natural number. It follows 39 and precedes 41. In English, forty is the only number whose constituent… Read full post »

Everybody’s got their reasons. Some people do it because they are funny and they are good at making people laugh. Some people do it because they want to spread awareness about an issue or tell about something tragic or outrageous or cautionary. Others do it because they are trying to find… Read full post »

A few years ago I lost my husband.

His illness, one that doesn’t share the same spotlight as, say, cancer or diabetes, and consequently isn’t one that you might know much about, revealed itself gradually, surreptitiously. In my first memories of it, around the turn of the last century, af… Read full post »

On the drive to the therapist’s office, the rain is beating down on us. We haven’t fully unpacked since our move back to California, so I don’t know where my umbrella is. We don’t talk. What is there to say? You speed along the curvy, tree-lined roads, going far too fast… Read full post »

 

After listening to the interview that the HBO series Big Love writers and creators Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer did with NPR's Terri Gross, who happens to be someone whose job I have always coveted, I realized why I am a such a big fan of the show. It's not… Read full post »

 

One recent Sunday, while visiting a friend I've known since sixth grade, I caught myself saying something that even I found shocking. The conversation—one you've heard a thousand times—went something like this:

Suburban Mother: Have you thought about kindergarten yet?

Urban Mother… Read full post »

In some families good grades are important. In other families, value is placed on being polite and respectful, going to a good school, marrying well—these are the important things. In our family, it was hair. If you had good hair, and you knew what to do with it, nothing else… Read full post »

More Big Love

In the latest episode, Bill, a plainly attractive successful man who already has three respectable, smart, and beautiful wives, turns jealous, even a little belligerent, when he discovers Ana, his potential bride #4-to-be, kissing a younger, scruffier man in the doorway to he… Read full post »

Marriage is a funny thing. So many of us don’t believe in it, not in the way we are supposed to—until death do us part, I’m never going to love another woman/man but you, I’m not even going to look at anyone else the way I do you, etc. etc. Those… Read full post »

Saippuakivikauppias (translation: soap-stone vendor) is claimed to be the world's longest palindromic word in everyday use (in Finnish). Imagine slapping that one on to your vocabulary!

So, as a recovering poet, I like words. Here are some of my favorite palindromes: words and sentences that spell… Read full post »

“I steal People magazines from my doctor’s office” (from Flo in Tallahassee)

“I went to church drunk last Sunday” (from Heathen in Lake Tahoe)

“I secretly fantasize about having two husbands who will do all the cooking and the laundry and satisfy my every need”… Read full post »

Most of my life, I didn’t want to have children. I never really entertained fantasies of waltzing down an aisle in a $4,000 gown, meeting the smiles and tears of all my friends and family either. I was compelled by many fantasies that I won’t go into here, but getting
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As if your list of things to be afraid of wasn’t long enough already, here’s another one to add to it. This is probably not breaking news to anyone, but in the wake of online media becoming a more affordable, though not entirely viable, business model than that of traditional news… Read full post »

Yesterday was the first time in my life I felt proud to be an American. So, I made Jell-O.  Read full post »

“I steal People magazines from my doctor’s office” (from Flo in Tallahassee)

“I went to church drunk last Sunday” (from Heathen in Lake Tahoe)

“I DID SOMETHING HORRIBLE ONCE or twice..." (your name here)

"I SECRETLY THINK____________ , but no one knows this" (your fa… Read full post »