Category: Columns

Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a Gen-X everygal loves to dish about.

Backyard Chickens a Fowl Idea?

Published on May 9, 2013

It seemed like such a good idea. And it was — until it clucking wasn’t.

Last week, I dragged my family for an overnight stay at a working farm. They didn’t want to go; it was a long drive, and they had concerts and ball games to attend back home. But I thought it would do us good to get off the grid for just a single stolen day — to slow our pace, dirty our hands, smell weird stuff, and touch base with our agrarian, distinctly non-iPodian roots.

We fed pigs and cooked flapjacks on a wood-burning stove (you’re required to call them flapjacks in these circumstances). We petted sheep and hauled logs in a wooden wagon and had a ferret habitat cage visit. We chased chickens and collected their warm, pastel-colored eggs. It was farmulous.

To be honest, though, my favorite part was leaving. To me, that’s why you go on hikes, or camping, or visiting working farms — so you can fully appreciate how clean and bug-less and easy your life is back home and so that the next time you’re inclined to whine about the timer of your Cuisinart Grind-and-Brew Thermal 10-cup coffee maker going off an hour too early, you can just be immensely thankful you don’t have dirt in your teeth.

My Midlife, Half-Hearted Crisis

Published on April 25, 2013

My grandmother, who is twice my age, is always threatening to die. “Yep,” she tells me, in that matter-of-fact way that only wise old people can, “I’m about ready to take this show on the road.”

It amuses me when she says it, and saddens me. But it also stops me in my tracks because if her predictions are right, and my math is correct — then I’m officially middle-aged.

This is it. The notorious half-life point. The infamous midlife milestone that lands men in the bucket seats of exorbitantly priced sports cars and spins women into torrid affairs with beefcake boy-toy trainers, neither of which sound like torture exactly, but …

But over this?

Forgive me. I thought middle age would be different. With all the credit it’s given (or blame it’s bequeathed) for sending forty-somethings into existential marriage-busting, job-quitting, marathon-training tailspins, I just thought that becoming halfway-to-dead would be more dramatic. More disruptive. More electric.

I always assumed that balancing atop the very fulcrum of my own personal timeline would be all-consuming, wholly engrossing, 100 percent distracting. Maybe I secretly hoped it would.

Manhattan Made

Published on April 11, 2013

Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it …

I grew up in a big city with billboards and litter and bellowing horns. We lived in a concrete jungle with beggars and highways and smog — and we vacationed, naturally, in charming, palm tree-punctuated beach towns.

Now I live in this charming, palm tree-punctuated beach town. It’s lovely — a safe, peaceful, pretty place to raise kids. And yet a part of my urban-bred brain wonders if there’s something missing from the soul of children who don’t know how to hop a subway turnstile or sleep through the blare of constant, distant sirens. Are they too content? Too … untested?

So when the tourists began pouring into Santa Barbara for spring break, I dragged my family to Manhattan for a lesson in culture, congestion, and crabby cabbies. We needed grit, I felt. Too much sustained simplicity makes ya soft in the head.

But could two laid-back pups from paradise really glean value from a week in a city that never sleeps? Could my dyed-in-the-wool country mice ever truly appreciate the bracing bedlam of Gotham?

Most of what the boys knew about New York came from Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”: “Yeah, I’m up at Brooklyn, now I’m down in TriBeCa, right next to De Niro, but I’ll be ‘hood forever. I’m the new Sinatra, and since I made it here, I can make it anywhere …”

Benefits of the Boob Tube

Published on March 14, 2013

I’m what you might call a selective consumer of news. I like stories that make me feel better about my flaws and foibles, that buttress my skewed and even irresponsible but terribly comfy world view. For example, I skim right over articles that beat the tired old “you should exercise” drum. But I memorize whole paragraphs of stories about people who got hurt or died while exercising, proving once and for all that no good comes from needless sweating, which is just as I suspected.

See how this works?

I eschew news reports about people who’ve failed in life because their parents were divorced or worked outside the home or fed them carbs. Feh, who needs the guilt? I’m always on the lookout for tales that justify my lazy parenting — but the dang things are hard to come by.

Or at least they were until Nicholas Joy whooshed into the spotlight last week. The Massachusetts teen became lost in the Maine wilderness while on a ski trip with his dad and was found by rescuers two days later — cold and hungry but otherwise utterly unscathed. How did the 17-year-old manage to survive two full nights in a blinding snowstorm with strong winds, temperatures in the low teens, and nothing but the clothes he was wearing?

By using skills he learned from watching TV.

No Children, No Comment

Published on February 28, 2013

As far as breeders go, I like to think I’m pretty tolerable. I don’t preach to my child-free friends about the unparalleled rapture that is (but kind of isn’t) parenthood. I don’t scoff when they call their pets their “babies.” I don’t sneer resentfully as they jet off to tropical, adult-only vacations in fricking February, when it’s not even a school holiday and they have no natural right to be warm and free and happy. (Okay, I do that, but they don’t know it.)

What I definitely don’t do is ask people why they don’t have children. My nonparent friends say they get asked this question all the time — sometimes by relative strangers. No one with a modicum of manners would ask, “Why aren’t you married?” or “Why don’t you earn more money?” Yet childless adults who appear within an egg’s toss of breeding age are often asked to explain why they’re not helping to populate this poor, desolate planet.

The real answer is often complicated, but my put-upon pals like to have a short, simple response at the ready — something that’ll call off the procreative inquisition and let everyone get back to vapid small talk, for the love of god.

Paranoid or Preventative?

Published on February 14, 2013

It’s a typical day in classrooms across America. Students turn in last night’s homework, take their seats, open their notebooks, and settle in for a lesson in handwriting. Or calculating the diameter of a circle. Or avoiding being shot by a madman.

Schools from elementary to high school are now putting students through “lockdown drills” to rehearse what to do if someone starts shooting up the campus. Some have been practicing like this since Columbine; others only began after the Sandy Hook school massacre in December.

The drills usually begin with a loudspeaker announcement from the principal, after which teachers lock and/or barricade their classroom doors, close any blinds, and instruct their students to huddle in a corner and remain absolutely silent for 10, 15, or even 30 minutes. Sometimes staff members bang threateningly on classroom doors or fire blanks in the hall to add realism. One school had students lay down “dead” with fake blood.

“I cried the first time my son came home and told me about these,” says a friend of mine. “They told him, ‘If you’re in the bathroom or hall when the classroom doors are locked, find somewhere else to hide because the teachers won’t let you in.’ He was 9.”

Advice for Advice Columnists

Published on January 31, 2013

This month the nation mourned the death of Pauline Friedman Phillips, the author of Dear Abby. For 40 years, Phillips dispensed thoughtful, compassionate, and occasionally wry advice in more than 1,400 newspapers. She received up to 10,000 letters per week.

I’ve always been in awe of advice columnists. They’re astoundingly astute, a rare species of human able to inhale chaos and exhale clarity. Nothing jiggles on them. Nothing flaps. They’re so smart. So sure. So shiny.

I once interviewed Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax, who is perhaps the most shockingly sensible person ever to peck at a keyboard. Star-struck, I giggled nervously and guffawed embarrassingly throughout our chat. She was like the Dalai Lama, and I hoped she would bless me with a sprinkling of her uncanny-sanity dust.

But she didn’t. So let’s call it “her fault” that when I recently began writing my own advice column — Tough Love on TheWeek.com — I found the task thrilling and stimulating and fun … but chest-squeezingly, brain-painingly, teeth-grindingly hard. So far, I’ve been hit up for help by a woman with herpes, a man whose wife dresses him funny, and a mom who caught her teen smoking pot.

No to Botox

Published on January 17, 2013

I don’t know what “natural beauty” is, but if I ever had it, it’s been long since smothered by the increasing mess of products I use to remain presentable as I age: tooth whiteners, lip plumpy-ups, retinol creams. I believe that if nature had intended for us to be beautiful as-is, she wouldn’t have invented tweezers.

So I don’t begrudge people who undergo cosmetic procedures to reverse the ruthless tug of time. Who among us hasn’t fantasized about having a silicone rack up to here and out to there? Who hasn’t stood at a mirror and pulled her flesh up around her hairline, watching in amazement as her skin stretched back to its sublime teenage tautness? Who didn’t recently invest in a waist-cinching, “tummy-taming” camisole called Suddenly Skinny, which is now her very favorite item of clothing and without which she will never again leave the house? (Wait … was that just me?).

But there is one vanity procedure to which I won’t submit: injecting Botox to eliminate the creases on my forehead. It’s not because I have concerns about shooting poison into my face (says the woman who bleached her hair throughout her pregnancies). It’s not even because, at a few hundred dollars per Botox prick, I’d be trading my wrinkled-haggard look for a financially destitute-haggard look.

Tracking Your Teen

Published on January 3, 2013

I was a pretty good teenager. Straight-A student. Didn’t smoke pot. Never had a tussle with the fuzz. But I was a dirty little liar. I lied as all teens lie, and for the same reasons: I wanted to be somewhere, and do something, and see someone, that my parents wanted me not to. I wanted those things more than I wanted to be good or trustworthy or deserving of respect.

And so I said I was sleeping at Michelle’s house when I was really at my boyfriend’s. And I zoomed home at 89 miles per hour to avoid breaking my curfew. And I once drank vodka out of a paper bag in a park in the dark with a very-bad-influence friend and a McDonald’s strawberry-shake chaser.

Most of the things I lied about were merely stupid (duh, pour the vodka into the shake, rookie), but some were outright dangerous. And my parents never knew about them until right this second (Hi, Mom!), because they had to take me at my worthless adolescent word.

Don't Bogart Christmas

Published on December 20, 2012

Most Californians don’t know from snow. We have no idea what it’s like to shovel a driveway, or awake to white-blanketed landscapes, or bundle up and stroll through frosty flurries (See? Frosty flurries — are those even a thing?). But we sing about it all just the same. Come December, we croon about sleigh bells and winter wonderlands and glistening treetops with all the enthusiasm of people who know what the flake they’re warbling about.

What I love best about this lyrical-geographical incongruity is that no one seems to care. People in nippy climes don’t ask us West Coasters to pipe down and stop singing about something we don’t — and frankly can’t — fully appreciate.

“Hey!” they don’t say. “Quit your convivial yodeling, and do some personal precipitation research!” It matters not to folks in icy Buffalo, New York, or glacial Grand Rapids, Michigan, whether our musical merriment is based in experience or willful ignorance. Whatever jingles your bells, man!

Why then — and you knew I was going somewhere with this, right? — should sourpuss religious zealots give a holly heck how the rest of us celebrate Christmas?