Difficult conversations
Yesterday at a conference of grassroots progressive activists, I was listening to a panel of data experts discuss the preliminary analysis of who voted in the 2018 midterm elections. One of the guys presented an interesting data slice. He reported that (in a traditionally conservative area of California) among “independents” (meaning mostly conservatives who reject […]
Feet and the maiden
Some years I am so weighted down and distracted by my workaday life that I have a hard time locating some authentic, profound feelings of gratitude around the holidays. This year, the news helped me locate some of these sentiments. Happy Thanksgiving, readers. As I slipped on my shoes and left the house the other […]
Cute little divining rods
An interesting thing has been happening to me when I’m out with my baby. This may have happened with my first two children, but honestly, it’s been over a decade, and I don’t remember. (I didn’t remember until today how tedious and Sisyphean quartering and peeling grapes for a baby is.) I’ve been encountering acquaintances […]
Finding Grateful, 2013 edition
If you know me in real life or have read my blog at the end of the year in the past, you will know that I am a self-identified holiday hater. I’m not proud of that, but why pretend otherwise? To sum it up, the gradual loathing came about as a result of the […]
I wanna know what love is
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet fails so regularly as love.” –Erich Fromm Last month I began reading this book. It’s a challenging book, a short, dense, mid-century tome, written by a European psychoanalyst and social theorist. In short, despite the title The […]
Keepin’ it real, friend edition
The other day I was driving my 10-year-old daughter home from swim practice, and we passed the home where a family we knew used to live. “Do you remember Q, the little girl who lived there?” I asked. “No. Yeah. Sort of,” she answered. “What happened to her anyway?” “Her family moved away,” I said. […]
Friends of a Certain Age
The New York Times ran a piece last summer on the difficulty of making friends in adulthood. It generated such a response that they newspaper ran a second piece with a selection of readers’ comments. Clearly the subject of authentic friendship is something that needs more attention than most of us give it. I’ve talked […]
Gazpacho and Love
It’s past midsummer here, and even though we live in the middle of Los Angeles, my husband I have a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grow tomatoes, strawberries, basil, and other herbs in Earth Boxes in our backyard. And blueberries in a wine barrel on wheels. It’s my small nod to having grown up on […]
Private Matters and Choices
What did the old fashioned feminists and political moderates used to say? That abortion ought to be safe, legal, and rare? Also, that it was a private matter, one for a woman (and in the case of a married woman, she and her husband) to discuss and decide. I remember the conservative politicians in the […]
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