Getting older

My dad

10 May 2012 Brain food
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Seven months after my dad’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he is gone, after the kind of week for which the word anguish exists. I flew out to California last Monday with my two girls for a weeklong visit, and he was fine. Chemotherapy had failed him, but he was feeling better without its toxic effects. Suddenly [...]

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40

25 January 2012 Getting older
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My friends and I turn 40 this year. I’m ok with this. We have lost some exuberance of youth, but we have also shed the anxiety of beginners. Volatile years finding our way with careers, relationships and new parenthood have given way to a more relaxed confidence. We’ve learned who we are. We’ve become real [...]

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Apologies to Connecticut

5 October 2011 Getting older
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I owe Conecticut an apology. For six long months in my mid-20s I reverse-commuted from New York City to the suburbs of Connecticut for a job, and every day I wondered at the strangeness of such a nearby but utterly alien land. At lunchtime I struggled to feign interest in foreign conversation topics. “I installed [...]

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Connecting the dots

21 May 2011 Diet
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I wish that House MD from the long-running TV show were my real doctor: he’d start with my stated problem, notice symptoms didn’t even know I had, investigate my lifestyle, diet, home environment and personal history, write out all the possible causes on a large blackboard, systematically evaluate each one and come up with the [...]

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Food or foe?

10 March 2011 Diet
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I’ve become afraid of food. My lifelong eczema has become much worse, and I’ve finally admitted that the persistent red rash is my body screaming that it does not like something I am putting into it. I used to be able to soothe away the redness, with prescription creams or any number of natural remedies [...]

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New year

5 February 2011 Getting older
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It’s February, and I’m still trying to shake my new year’s angst. I made a single resolution this year – to get more sleep – and I think I liked life better when I was too exhausted to focus on the big picture. This is the first time in 10 years that I haven’t been [...]

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Bringing back fun

14 October 2010 Getting older
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Somewhere along the way, I lost fun. It’s now on my to-do list. If you’d told me at age 20 that someday I’d have to schedule fun, I’d have thought you were nuts. It took me days even to come up with three things that sounded fun. I had to return to childhood to remember. [...]

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