Stuck

Right this minute, we're watching the clock, antsy for this long weekend to start. It's long because Monday is a federal holiday. We might, if called upon, remember that holiday's name. Or not, at least not right away. When we abandon holidays, it's often due to sheer disuse. Like riding bicycles or speaking foreign languages, holidays slip away if you don't keep them up. Rituals serve a purpose, though. They draw us out of the dreary quotidian. They give us something to look forward to. Then again, most of us grew up never observing Memorial Day.  Read More

Judgment is being bred out of our species. In school, at home, in the media -- carefully, deliberately --- the young are being told that they don't have the right to appraise others based on their private criteria. They are told to discard those standards, that criteria, those triggers which (they are told) spring not from nature but nurture, based not on logic or evidence but wicked prejudice. Judgment, the young are told systematically, is bad. But without judgment, how can we survive? Read More

Those years are long gone when the only pictures you ever saw of celebrities were posed ones. In our paparazzi-riddled era, celebrities are caught off-guard constantly, captured everywhere against their will. This has led to the phenomenon known in the gossip press as "bitchface," that peaky scowl that does not flatter most faces but lends a certain sexy menace to beautifully chiseled ones. Our faces are masks. They're just extremely sophisticated, flexible masks that we can't take on and off at will. We can and do control them. But we have default expressions: the way our faces look when we've forgotten they exist, which -- for most of us -- is most of the time.  Read More

As a hypochondriac (or, as certain therapists have preferred to put it, "a highly fuctioning person with health anxieties"), I am appalled at all this recent news about a new human-infecting strain of swine flu raging through Mexico and popping up in Texas and California. The Mexican government shut down schools from kindergarten through college today for fear of a full-blown pandemic. The Mexican government is also encouraging Mexicans not to shake hands.  Read More