I had “help” writing this column. At the recent launch party for my newest book of columns, Broad Assumptions, I held a contest inviting guests to submit the first and last lines of a column they’d like me to write — promising that I’d supply the middle part for the winning entry. Twenty-three people wrote suggestions, ranging from “My all-time most embarrassing moment is …” to “Thank God for duct tape!”

The crowd voted on the winner: an exacting couplet by vexingly imaginative reader Hattie Husbands. She won a set of my three books, and I walked away with the lines you see in bold below.

Last Saturday I was sitting in my kitchen sipping my coffee, when suddenly my cat turned and said to me …

“What the furball were you thinking?” my fictitious feline purred. “Writing a column that starts and ends with someone else’s words?! You know very well that you don’t have a cat — don’t even like cats — and certainly wouldn’t be talking to anyone before you’d finished your morning coffee. Meow the hell are you gonna write yourself out of this mess?”

Continue reading A Reader Writes My Lead

“How do I look?” It’s a funny question coming from a woman with severe bed head, a drooping lip, prune juice stains on her hospital gown, and all manner of tubes and wires emerging from various parts of her person.

So I figured you were joking. Good one, Grandma. Leave it to you to make fun of yourself just days after a stroke left you slumped and alone on the carpet of your living room. Now, propped up in your mechanical bed in the neurological wing, it figures you’d be the first to fearlessly acknowledge the rumpled old-lady elephant in the room and snicker at her unkempt state. I smiled and waited for your next line; what would it be? Something funny. A facetious quip to show us that your spunk sure as heck ain’t paralyzed. “Am I about ready for the Governor’s Ball?” you’d probably say. Or “pretty as a picture, right?” Or maybe “a face that only a mother could love.”

But the quip never came. I stopped smiling. You weren’t joking. And as I sat holding your impossibly soft hand with your impeccably shaped nails, I think I realized what you really meant.

“How do I look?”

Continue reading How My Grandma Looks

I’m about to take you on a journey to the dense, chewy nucleus of the grape Tootsie Pop that is my head. You have been warned.

You see, my brain is very busy. It’s a frickin’ railway junction. I pride myself on my ability to juggle, organize, and accomplish, even in a crunch — no, especially in a crunch. “Show me a quiet mind,” I always say, “and I’ll show you a to-do list that’s been criminally neglected.” This morning I did Kegel exercises while writing my column lead while being power-flossed in the dentist’s chair while feeling rather smug about it all.

But I had no right, it turns out, because multitasking is out and meditation is in. The Huffington Post declared 2014 The Year of Mindful Living, and Time magazine’s recent cover story declared, “If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then mindfulness is the most logical response.” Rupert Murdoch is meditating now. So are 50 Cent and Kourtney “it’s possible I can’t spell meditate” Kardashian. Meditation is the new kale; it’s the balm for all that ails us.

Continue reading What the Focus This?

I don’t have a lot of bad things to say about monogamy. Most of the time it’s a sweet deal: I never worry I’m going to blurt out the wrong guy’s name in bed, and I always have someone to drag with me to the office holiday party. But there’s an undeniable downside to sharing naked time with just the one person. And that is this: I am the last one to know about fascinating new pubic-hair trends.

While I’ve been hibernating in holy matrimony, it turns out that an increasing number of men — from pubescent teens to been-around-the-block bachelors — are going utterly hairless in their private regions. And thereby giving a whole new meaning to male-pattern baldness.

I first heard about the fad from a single girlfriend of mine. “I haven’t seen a male pube in a long time,” she said.

Then a pediatrician told another friend that it’s getting harder and harder to recognize when his patients hit puberty because that primary indicator has vanished — on both girls and boys.

There’s even a new men’s grooming product called Edge Body, the first-ever shaving cream designed for shaving “below the neck.” (Its thicker formula is supposed to “combat irritation and bumps on sensitive areas.”) And some salons now cater to guys who want to be waxed in zones where previously only females dared to be bare — giving rise to the term “Brozilians.” Yes. That actually happens.

Continue reading Men Are Going Bare. Down There.