My hands gripped the steering wheel with such force that the tendons popped out in my arms. In the backseat of the car, my eight-year-old daughter screamed. In front of me, a tractor-trailer loomed.

“I could just run into it and end everything,” I thought, as my daughter continued to howl.

I was exhausted. Tired of trying to parent this challenging child, tired of the judgments from family, the eye rolls and looks from friends. I heard the whispers, I saw the smirks.

I was weary from meetings with teachers, calls from the nurse. Deep fatigue settled into my muscles…

The year was 2016, the season was spring and the presidential race was heating up. I remember sitting in my friend’s car driving down the main thoroughfare in Palm Springs, talking about our mutual disdain for Hillary Clinton.

At the time Bernie Sanders was campaigning and my friend seemed to like Bernie. I was open to learning more him; all I knew was that a few of my friends were rabid Bernie fans and proclaimed their love for him like teenage girls crushing on a movie star.

That summer, I visited a friend on the east coast and noted her…

I made it! I am crossing over the FINISH LINE and I fully expect awards and accolades. I’d like a gold medal even though I didn’t sprint one second of this journey but I maintained a turtle /slug like pace, slow but consistent. Sure I stopped along the way for a refreshing and much needed Pinot Grigio, I mean Gatorade, but I’m here, aren’t I?

Wow, you’re thinking, how can one person be so lazy yet accomplish a marathon? How can someone like you (me) run a full race with not one second of training? …

First, I grew up in a small town and hated it . Then I moved to a big town and missed that little suburban sprawl outside of New York City. Now I think back to it with fond memories.

In the town where I lived during my childhood years, there were probably only about seven thousand people, that’s an uneducated guess. It was an old town, formed in the late 1800s and the architecture of many homes reflected the time with Cape Cods, Dutch colonials, then later, 1980 bi-levels.

The (Very) Long Road to A Published Book

The year was 2011. The day was some day midweek, and the place was inside my friend’s car on the way to Beverly Hills. Naturally there was stop and go traffic, the worst. It was Los Angeles, after all. We were discussing books and writing.

“We should write a book together,” I said. My friend is hilarious and I think I have a decent sense of humor. “It would be so funny! Maybe a young adult book.”

“Yes! Let’s do it,” she said. And why not? …

Hey Ugly, Your Nose is Big and You’re Disgusting!

Elementary school, northern New Jersey, where everyone knows everyone and the same small group of kids follow you from first grade to senior year. It was very early on that a boy in my class, I’ll call him R for short, told me I was ugly not just ugly but super ugly. I went home and cried, as any emotional and sensitive child would do.

There were others who teased me and did the whole name calling thing but for some reason, it was his words that really stung. Maybe because…

How To Build A House When You Don’t Have The Tools

Imagine that you are given the task of building a house. Not just any house, one that is magnificent with all the bells and whistles. It has to be large in size and luxurious in details.

Hardwood flooring and skylights and solar panels, a pizza oven and anything else you can throw in there to make it worthy of a design magazine. Not only does the inside have to be awe inspiring but the landscape must be perfection with nary a weed in sight.

It was early in the 2000’s when I started a celebrity gossip blog. I was a stay at home mom, taking care of my two small children and needed something to fulfill my creativity, a blog seemed like a good idea.

I could do it from home and it required no money. Blogging gave me a sense of purpose and something to do. But what would I write about?

A friend of mine always had supermarket tabloids lying around and together, we’d laugh at the ridiculous nature of celebrity culture. Why not write about famous people? Hmmmm. …