I had a boyfriend once whose mother, when she was charmed by his bad behavior, would roll her eyes and tell me how patient I was.  But he was not my boyfriend for very long, because she was wrong.  Patience is a virtue, but it’s not one of mine.  I aspire to be more patient.  [...]

First, you have to be interested enough to spend the time.  This is true if any endeavor that pays back joy for discipline:  drawing, playing guitar, taking pictures, dancing, singing, tennis, gardening.  It has to engage you.  Everyone has something that sometimes feels as though you’re pushing a rock up a hill but still makes [...]

Chocolate is my kryptonite…well, I have to stop thinking about it as kryptonite. No one is about to give me license to carry a feed bag of M&Ms around my neck, but I’ve read lately that a little dark decadence won’t wreck my figure. In fact, it may actually keep me slim. The few extra [...]

Academics have for over 100 years measured intelligence using IQ tests, but the Flynn Effect they’ve found doesn’t necessarily mean we are more intelligent than our grandparents. We may just be better at taking tests. Aptitude tests are one way of measuring intelligence, but scholars note that most aptitude tests are biased from the writer’s [...]

Just got dumped? Here are some ideas —Send a stripper-gram to their next board meeting —Order the most expensive bottle of champagne and meal at the last dinner you have together —Fill their shampoo bottle with hair bleach —Pledge $5000 to their alumni fund, in their name —Seduce their best friend —Initiate sex, the rub [...]

There was a time not so long ago when the moviegoing experience was a big deal. It was an event. Viewers entered ornate, cavernous movie palaces and watched, along with an audience of thousands, the spectacle of a cast of thousands (real, not computer generated) rampaging across an enormous, color-saturated screen. A couple of times [...]

In the upper-middle-class California suburban family of my youth, we applied to the universities we could afford, and went to the best one that sent an acceptance letter. It would never have occurred to me to apply to an Ivy League school. Not through failure of imagination or intelligence (necessarily). We were pragmatic. From our [...]

I found myself thinking about regret as I sat down to write this week. There are two sides to our thought process: logic and emotion. Some people use one more than the other but most of us are capable of considering both, even if we are sometimes blinded by one or the other or simply [...]

Assuming that a scientific theory of everything could predict all, including when and how such a theory would be discovered, as well as when and how you’d be reading my website, one could argue that the concept of free will is irrelevant. However, even scientists agree that free will exists and that it is inherently [...]

Los Angeles was and is a nonstop kaleidoscope of faces. I walk down Ocean and marvel at the elderly lady with bright orange hair and matching flame lipstick. After encountering this walking inferno, I contemplated myself as a redhead. The Latina woman with the shaved eyebrows and purple liner—was that me? Could I wear gold [...]