Today is Sunday, but in a way, it’s still Friday. The whole month has been nothing but Fridays, in fact. We used to have Black Friday. It was the day after Thanksgiving, when the turkey-bloated got their exercise by standing in checkout lines in stores, trying to get a jump…

When a lot of people hear the word “routine,” they think “rut.” My opinion, though, is that routine and rut are completely different. A rut is what you get into when you have nothing else in your life but work and chores, while routine is something that provides structure to…

World peace? An honest politician? A flying car? A second season of Firefly? Being able to retire? A printer that works? Those are all worthy — though extremely unlikely — goals. But I want something else. The first “thing I want to see in my lifetime” was to have a…

What you say says a lot about you. How you say it matters too. You can take a simple sentence and change its meaning just by how you pitch your voice and what words you emphasize. Try it: Say the sentence, “I want you to love me.” Emphasize the “I”…

Once a friend’s young daughter asked her, “Why don’t Janet and Dan have any children?” Robbin explained to her that not every couple had kids, and she seemed to be satisfied with that. The real answer is more complex. The idea of having children occurred to us after we got…

Seeing that I spend so much time in my blog discussing mental illness, a friend challenged me to say what “mental wellness” looks like. I’ve decided to take a crack at it. First, I have to say that I’m not sure mental wellness really exists. Everyone (at least everyone I…

I watch way too much Food Network. I’ve only ever tried to make two recipes I learned there and one was really only a theory, not an actual recipe. The actual recipe I tried was Ina Garten’s Triple Ginger Cookies. (I learned that when Ina says “jumbo eggs,” she means…

No, this isn’t a Halloween post. If the postage stamp you see here isn’t enough of a clue, the rest of the title phrase is “I’m Sticking to the Union,” a song by Woody Guthrie. (Woody Guthrie also wrote the song “This Land Is Your Land,” which isn’t the patriotic…

It’s very nearly Halloween and there are lots of scary things out there, from costumes to movies. But here’s what I find scary. My number one fear is the return of my bipolar symptoms, especially the depression. I’ve been mostly stable for years now, with only occasional and relatively mild…