Mergers and Acquisitions

April 21, 2010

Twenty-one years ago, Bret Easton Ellis hit a collective chord (at least for my generation) with his novel, Less Than Zero.  It begins:  “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”  A follow-up check-in on the state of intimacy amongst twenty-somethings twenty years hence might be that people are now simply terrified to […]

Read the full article…

Shrooms

April 20, 2010

Nearly fifty years after Timothy Leary, who evangelized hallucinogenic experience as part of the hippy generation (which was, arguably, a failed social movement that ended up more as a bacchanal than a New Age) there is renewed interest in psychedelics for emotional, psychological and spiritual purposes. A recent article in the New York Times, “Hallucinogens […]

Read the full article…

Are we jealous of our kids?

April 19, 2010

A reader/friend sent me a link to a recent article in Details about us parents being jealous of our kids for the great lives we provide… and maybe wish we got to live. Technically, jealousy is about wanting the other person not to have what they have, while envy is about wanting what the other […]

Read the full article…

Butterflies

April 18, 2010

When I was a young boy nothing interested me more than roaming the yards and alleys of my block, net in hand, searching for the exotic butterflies I read about in my insect book.  While I would find Monarchs, Mourning Cloaks and Tiger Swallowtails, I was ever on the hunt for exotic purple, blue and […]

Read the full article…

My little potato

April 17, 2010

Right when my first kid was born I was riding around in my car and the eclectic radio station played an enchanting little tune, “Little Potato,” that just about summed up my feelings for my wrinkly red little newborn, even if he had a tendency to howl in a way potatoes (and other root vegetables) never […]

Read the full article…

April Showers

April 16, 2010

When I was a kid I loved the song “California Dreamin’.”  In Chicago, when all the leaves were brown and the sky was grey, I would imagine living in sunshine and making sand-castles on the beach, the fading taste of Orange Julius playing over my seven-year-old sense memory after a family holiday to Los Angeles. […]

Read the full article…

Missing Miss April

April 15, 2010

The year nineteen-seventy marked one of my worst (see “My Scariest Teacher”), but one of the few bright spots was when a Playboy truck tipped over on the North Side of Chicago, spilling thousands of Miss Aprils onto the streets (it might have been Miss March, but let’s not let a month get in the […]

Read the full article…

Aging out of being cared for… or about

April 14, 2010

A recent NPR story about Aging out of Foster Care brought many memories and emotions from days toiling in the trenches of non-profit mental health back to the forefront of my mind.  As our kids near 18 many of us think about college for them, however, for 30,000 foster teens this year alone, the arrival of […]

Read the full article…

Running away… at four

April 13, 2010

“This is my house and if you don’t like the rules you can leave!” my dad said tersely through clenched teeth, as if he were in a board meeting with some rivalrous upstart challenging his supreme authority.  I was four. But from the start I always had some sort of fire in my gut; maybe […]

Read the full article…

Running away, again

April 12, 2010

I had been wanting to see the movie The Runaways and it so happened that I caught it with my younger kid, Will, who is an intrepid movie-goer, the very next day after watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the two films made an interesting pairing. Besides feeling the Mexicali earthquake during the film […]

Read the full article…