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 »

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 »

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 »

   

“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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

 

Yesterday, Joan Baez really pissed me off.

I can't believe I just said that. But it kind of feels good to get it out. Just to let you know right off, I'm a Joni Mitchell kind of gal, despite being on the older end of Generation X. And I… 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 »

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 »

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 »

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
…

Read full post »

 

As a *four-star complainer who still thinks that whining is something you can actually strive to be skilled at, I want to posit an earnest non-complaint here. I could be accused (mostly by myself) of looking too deeply into the bright side, or of still being a neophyte basking in the… 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 »

 

Recently a friend of mine, a former Californian who moved to New Mexico to teach at university that dissolved within one year of her new run as a tenure-track professor, was telling me about how much she misses living in the Golden State, although more specifically in the Bay Area,… Read full post »

 

 

Last Friday, as I was rushing to pack and get on the road for a weekend trip to Los Angeles, I quickly read the post about the Cosmo Orgasm Face, and though I didn't have time to respond, I did manage to spend some time in the car, while… Read full post »

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 »

My four-year-old daughter seems to have effortlessly sashayed into the realm of asking the Big Questions. I wasn’t prepared for this to happen so quickly. I imagined it happening when she’d be old enough to really wrap her head around the answers.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me how… 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 »