Life Out Loud

In my teens and early 20s, there was but one truth that I held self-evident: I would never, ever be “small town.” From my earliest...

I have often said that the reason I enjoy being a “columnist,” rather than a “journalist” is that the former can use random numbers like a “jzillion dollars” without remorse, while the latter has to report with accuracy on dull-as-dishwater things like the Gross National Product and how much it costs to fill the pothole in front of your house. (Curiously, about a “jzillion dollars.”)

Despite what psychoanalysts might claim, not everything that is wrong with you is your mother’s fault.

Is it a sign of old age — or the apocalypse — that I am suddenly feeling this winter like never before? It’s been...

I think I can safely say that I join the rest of the free world in relief that the terror and unrest is behind...

"I'm not going to vacuum until Sears makes one you can ride on." - Roseanne Barr

Apparently, a 50-percent divorce rate isn't high enough for the cellular telephone industry. No, they've given otherwise loving couples yet one more thing to squabble over: shared minutes.

He's always been less a lover, more a fighter. We bought him almost 15 years ago, in our early dating days when buying a cat together was still giddily committed, "hey look at us, we're a FAMILY!" We found him in a pet shop, stuck in a cage in a roomful of barking dogs, eyes wide, fur on end.

I knew all those years of selfishly tossing aside those urban legend chain letter e-mails that warned of dire consequences if I did not forward said chain letter to dozens of my friends posthaste would come to haunt me.

Technologically speaking, my family and I have always been more Luddite than early-adopter. We are not the first people on the block to have high-speed this or digital that.