My new criteria for love If a recent decade of your life includes such transitions as the move from “crashing with that hot hippie in the hammock hung inside his VW van” to “moving into the pristine bungalow of an only child and longstanding Libra bachelor,” you can expect some changes: You begin to lock…

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror holding a dullish pair of scissors. Decades of punk rock training had taught me this was the correct — nay, the only — way to approach a drastic haircut. And it had to be drastic; the lure of chopping off my hair…

THE ORCHID IS DEAD The orchid is dead. I’m not even sad about it. I see its last two leaves, underdeveloped from the beginning, now shriveled and turning pinkish-brown. A hundred times a day I walk by it sitting in the kitchen window, a hundred times a day showing me…

… and it’s (not) all my mother’s fault. — The day Prince died, I was with my mother in her doctor’s office. It felt like the worst day of my life — partly because of its similarity to the previous worst day of my life. It was the day after Mom’s birthday. Her dementia was making her frisky. She…

The person whom I know myself to be — the person I am inside my head — is so different from the person I see in the mirror that I can’t comfortably allow much truck between the two. They are as unrelated as two random kids seated alphabetically in a…