Antidote to Worry: Lettuce Wraps
With bathing suit season approaching, everyone seems to be more calorie conscious. Lettuce wraps are one of my favorite snacks.
Currently browsing category
TIPS
Worried About Too Many Advisors
What am I to do about too many advisors? I began preparing for the 2-minute pitch of my memoir 60 days in advance, an average of 1 day for every 3 seconds.
Name Dyslexia
Given my name dyslexia, every time I go outside, I have to rehearse all four names beforehand in case I run into any of them.
Antidote to Worry: Easy Dinners of Adobo Chicken (and Sharing)
As easy dinners go, this is the easiest. All you need is 4 ingredients.
Tip Day or Is it Enough Just to Entertain?
Is it enough just to entertain? Or do I need to make a point, share a reflection?
Now I have set myself up for failure in two ways:
Healthy Sexual Relationships: Q and A with Author of Wanting Sex Again
Valentine sex will be an issue for many couples. This manufactured day of romance offers men and women an opportunity to examine their sexual relationship.
Successful Marriage and Marital Problems: How to be Happily Married, Part III
What makes for a successful marriage? What can be done about marital problems? My two previous posts highlighted Betsy’s story and Harry’s story; below is Victoria’s story. Victoria is 58 years old and a retired history professor living in Chicago: The biggest challenge I faced in my marriage was when my …
Successful Marriage and Marital Problems: How to be Happily Married, Part II
Yesterday we heard from Victoria about her recipe for a successful marriage and avoiding marital problems. Today, a man shares how to be happily married.
Tip Day: Have a Plan & Have a Roll of Bubble Wrap
Even before 9-11 I wondered what I would do if confronted with the terrifying choice to either jump or burn. Ideas came to me this morning before I opened my eyes.
Worried About Sponges
“Mom! That’s exactly why I’m terrified of sponges!” my daughter cried.
Making Friends and E-Communication
Keeping up with friends and making friends require effort. In general, there are the reacher-outers (me) and the reacher-outees (most people I know).
Tip Day: Shredding Tip
I don’t own a shredder, so I needed to come up with a shredding tip, a homemade way to keep someone from going into my trash and stealing my identity.
Powerless
I’m sitting at the breakfast table in my bra and panties, sipping melted ice water through a straw, pretending it’s iced tea. Casey, sprawled beside me, looks barely alive.
10 Tips for Getting Rid of Telemarketers: Confessions of a Telemarketer
Confession: I was a telemarketer. In 1976—when I became a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch—I had never heard the word telemarketing; we called it cold calling.
Dear Susan: I’m a Procrastinator
Dear Susan, I should be working now but instead I’m writing to you. You see, I’m a procrastinator. Please help me stop putting things off! Signed, Puttingthingsoff in Peoria Dear PiP, I’m so glad you asked. I am great at procrastination. Here is one thing I do to procrastinate: I …
Dear Susan from Worried in Wisconsin
Worry is addictive, plain and simple. It hits the same pleasure center of the brain as alcohol and other addictive substances. If you are able to control your intake of other addictive substances, then you can control worry, now that you know how addictive it is.
TIPS DAY: MOMENT OF WORRY
Recently I wrote a piece called Easy Meditation, in which I shared a method I heard about on NPR. On that NPR segment, the author talked about allowing thoughts to pass through your mind like clouds.
OF NEWNESS AND PATINA
I have a record of attraction to worn things. Before Kindle, back when I read paperback books, they appealed to me far more after I roughed them up with: dog-ears, notes in the margins and swollen pages from the times I read them in my hot tub.
SMILING STRANGERS
When I, always the initiator, smile at a stranger and the stranger smiles back, it puts a musical note in my step. Or in my pedal, as was the case on Christmas Eve day. I was on a long bike ride from New Jersey to Staten Island and, when a driver …
ANXIETY ABOUT GIFTS: GIVING & GETTING
‘Tis the season to obsess . . . about gifts. For someone like me, who gets overwhelmed by choices, and–even when the options are narrowed to two–can’t decide, this can be a hard time of year. So I resort to creative gift-giving, like ice cream sodas for the third night …
Twitter Addiction: Advice From a Cognitive Therapist
One day, after hours of sliding my cursor from Twitter to Facebook to Stats for my blogs and back to Twitter, when I should have been writing, I emailed Dr. M, a cognitive therapist. Dr. M had previously helped me understand that worry is an addiction; it hits the same pleasure …
ANTIDOTE TO WORRY: CRUNCHY SALAD
I needed an antidote to worry this weekend, when my bike got a flat tire and then my car wouldn’t start. So here is the latest in my Antidote to Worry Series of food photos and such. Here’s how I compose this satisfying crunchy salad: A base of arugula Trader Joe’s …
IN SEARCH OF THE ART OF EATING, TECHNIQUE-WISE
Is it a worrywart trait to seek pleasure on the highest plane? To always be wondering whether–no matter how good something is–it could be better? That’s how it is with me and eating. It’s a similar quest with family time. When I hear about a family who acts out Shakespeare …
SAVING EMAILS. SAVING VOICEMAIL. MY MOM’S VOICE.
I’m a saver. Every time my inbox mounts to the limit of 4,000 emails, I move a few thousand to random folders I doubt I’ll ever find again; and then I’m set for another few weeks of not deleting messages, mainly from the likes of Sock Hop Sundays, Hot Tub …
STARTING A JOURNAL . . . OR WILL I GET TOO MANY IDEAS?
For my recent article on Home Goes Strong about Happiness at Home, I interviewed my blog crush Gretchen Rubin, whose book The Happiness Project–the same name as her blog–was a #1 New York Times best seller. Gretchen keeps a one-sentence journal, which she admits sometimes expands to 4 sentences. Says Gretchen, …
Hanging With Chad: Making a New Friend
When I’m in New York, I like to hang out and write at Jack’s, a coffee place in the West Village with a patina that suggests long afternoons of sipping lattes and tapping on laptops. The overall look is shades of brown, like paper bags and coffee. Jack’s is so …
HELP! I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T GET UP!
“Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I’ve been thinking I should get a medical alarm button to wear like the one advertised in the campy Life Alert “Help! I’ve fallen!” commercial. My mom wore one until she died at age 92. Otherwise, how would I contact someone if I were …
ANTIDOTE TO WORRY: POPCORN
Popcorn is one of my favorite comfort foods. It fills me up, is healthful, tastes delicious and I pretend that eating this overflowing pot of it, sprinkled with sea salt, won’t make me feel squeezed in the waist by my elastic waist pants. When my oldest daughter Eliza was a toddler, I …
MY OPEN TABS AND WHAT THEY REVEAL
You can tell a lot about a person’s life from the files they have open on their browser. Eugene, my computer guy, says I shouldn’t keep so many files open. But like with my desk, if I put things away, I’ll forget about them. So I leave them out and …
Yoga-Envy, Bike-Smug & How to Salt Food
There’s something serene, along with a sprinkling of smug, about people who practice yoga. They laud the benefits—“Doing yoga has saved my back.” “I’m no longer stressed.” If I had the patience to do yoga, I’d also have the attention span to meditate, read the New Yorker and maybe even drive …