My first solo road trip was impulsive: On an October Monday three years ago, while exorcising heartbreak in Los Angeles and anxiously awaiting news on a script I’d written, I decided to visit a music industry friend 2,000 miles away in Nashville, Tennessee. As I drove into Nevada, I saw one rainbow after another, six […]

I have been writing and dating for roughly the same amount of time now: 21 years. Both pursuits involve sharing your most hidden self with another person who, in the beginning at least, is a complete unknown. It’s terrifying, embarrassing and pure, gilded magic, which is why we continue to bare ourselves, even in the […]

I’ve never been one for “friends with benefits.” I know the concept works for a lot of women, but to me it suggests resignation: getting it on with a dude who’s only around because you both lack better alternatives. I don’t envy the girlfriend whose neighbor coaxes her over for a lackluster couch fumble with […]

Angel kisses. That’s what my Grammy called my freckles when I was a little girl. And what my great-grandmother called my mom’s freckles when she was a little girl. Unfortunately, our Grammys can’t be with us all of the time, and much of the universe lacks their confectioners’-sugar-dusted worldview. Where I grew up, in mid-coast […]

I felt a familiar, creeping dread when I saw the first mention of the July shooting in Aurora, Colorado, on Twitter and again not two weeks later when I read newspaper reports about the massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. It had been even worse when I first became aware of the shootings at […]

Surprisingly, the crystal tipped leather whip from Agent Provocateur, which their Web site describes as the “ultimate in feminine domination,” is not among the charming list of possible third anniversary gifts suggested by Sheri and Bob Stritof, who have been the About.com Guides to Marriage since 1997. According to the Stritofs, a leather desk set […]

It’s the new economy. That’s what a friend of mine was recently told. This after being informed that she could continue working for a magazine that had long employed her as a contributing editor. Only, now, they weren’t a print publication anymore. They were online only. And she would be paid almost no money. All […]