Be kind. It’s more important than being right. “You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.” ― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People BEING RIGHT Let’s say someone says something you know just isn’t […]
WITHOUT SIN MY PEOPLE My people don’t do the original sin thing. We don’t grow up with this doctrine. We know about guilt; we’re Jews. My people create guilt masterpieces. But original sin—a human construct upon which many lives are unduly influenced—is far darker than guilt. Far darker. Guilt stems from having done something wrong.
Emotions 101 Emotions are feelings. They happen naturally. Emotions are our response to being alive. As we are human–alive and awake–we have interactions with the world, and we experience emotions. Expressing emotions in a healthy manner is the birthright of every human being. If we were lucky, in our childhoods, we had teachers who
Why we don’t fly, a Passover story Cohen and I chat about once a week, usually on my evening walk with the dogs around my beautifully maintained 1940s NE Portland neighborhood. We chat about life, how we miss our deceased parents, his dating life, my parenting life. We tell and critique jokes. We chat
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Fresh Fish Sold Here Today I remember a magician in the 1980’s unfurling and holding up a paper banner with the words “Fresh fish sold here today” printed on it. The magician would say, “I find this phrase a touch redundant. Fresh? Of course it’s fresh fish. The sign doesn’t need the word fresh at
Laughing at as many incongruities as possible It’s a Tuesday night. We just had tacos. We do Taco Tuesdays probably more than two weeks a month, if we kept track of it. But it could be any night other than Tuesdays. Because we aren’t that uptight about stuff. The kids argue about whose turn it
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Dad and I went on our third father-son road trip in 2002. This one was in a rented RV. We leave LA, drive east, pass Palm Springs, and go south to Niland, by the shore of the Salton Sea—a huge unswimmable lake of salt, rotting fish corpses, and runoff fertilizer. From 1910 through the 1950s,
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My friend Michelle sits four feet feet away from the stainless-steel fire pit in my backyard. I’m on the other side, also four feet away. We are having a small, Covid-safe inauguration celebration. We are drinking G & Ts with Hendricks, a fancy tonic, and slices of cucumber. Two drinks in, I’m good and buzzed.
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Opt in While it’s not the rousing fun of a kids’ game of hide-and-seek or even a word search, I enjoy the game of looking for the unsubscribe button at the bottom of automated emails. I decided that I don’t need to know about all of the sales from my local craft store, the inside
*A Few Chess Lessons* The dogs and I are on our evening walk. It’s a longer than usual as my friend Carmel and I are chatting via my wireless headset about the chess lessons we took in New York City in the early 1980s. It’s raining hard, but I’ve lived in Portland long enough to