ArcaMax

"What's your pleasure practice?" my friend Lynn asked.

We were sitting in a cafe having coffee together. And by "together," I mean I was drinking coffee, which practically landed on her lap after she asked this question and it went out my nose and across the table. Otherwise, Lynn was drinking tea.

"Little personal, don't you think?" I ...Read more

I am now of the age when all of my friends' daughters are becoming Girl Scouts. They post pictures of their cute kids in their blue Daisy uniforms and talk about meetings and singing songs and everlasting friendships and sewing patches and community work.

It gives me hives.

I loathed every minute of my time in the oddly colored scratchy ...Read more

When I was 13, all I wanted was to be popular. I wanted to sit with the popular kids. Eat with the popular kids. Be one of the popular kids.

So I started working on it. First on the agenda was clothing. All the cool kids were wearing jeans, so I had to have a pair. But in 1995, they didn't make jeans long enough for freakishly long limbs such ...Read more

I've been working a lot lately. Too much, perhaps. And though I've known people who buoy heavy workloads with a newfound dedication to meditation or morning walks, such an onslaught of deadlines and extraction of brainpower only buoys my dedication to wearing the same jeans and bra 18 days in a row. I think I remember my most recent shower, ...Read more

I am starting off 2019 with my dream job. It is the unexpected-but-always-hoped-for whipped-cream-and-cherry-on-top gig, granted after 14 years of my paying my screenwriting dues. The workload is intense, the accelerated timeline nearly impossible, but the experience is a gift.

One of the more challenging aspects of this job is the quantity ...Read more

My 3-year-old wanted one thing from Santa this year: butterflies. Not butterfly-print dresses or rubber butterfly toys. Not even the creepy pinned-down dead butterflies in display cases. Real, living butterflies. And by George, the big man in red brought her some come Christmas morning.

Well, sort of.

I'm somewhat of a celebrity at the North...Read more

New Year's Eve glistens with promise. And I'm not just talking about from the Goldschlager. It's the promise of a new tomorrow.

When we create our New Year's resolution -- whether it be to diet, change jobs or get that long-desired tattoo of Nancy Reagan -- the real question being asked is, Whom do I want to become?

This question was never ...Read more

I, like most kids who celebrated Dec. 25, wondered with keen curiosity whether the magical man with a belly full of jelly was real. I would use my best 6-year-old Holmesian detective skills to deduce whether reindeer really could fly and a fat man could fit through a chimney. But the red-nosed truth consisted of many layers, and my Harriet the ...Read more

"I can't take the picture if you're crying."

Every parent who has ever attempted professional family photos has probably heard that sentence uttered. But when the photographer said it, she was talking to me.

My children had long gone inside the house. The freezing temperature outside and subsequent death glare from my daughter had cut the ...Read more

We don't have a basement. We have a scary-basement. This distinction must be honored. On our first day in our home, there was a 6-foot snake hanging out down there. Since then, it has been home to fellow snake friends, mice, spiders, frogs and the occasional opossum.

The garage door, which goes directly into this unfinished basement does not ...Read more

This was my first Thanksgiving in six years without pregnancy pants. I've never actually been pregnant on Thanksgiving, but surely that's beside the point.

Pregnancy pants, as I've noted many times before, are God's gift to women, avid buffet-goers, shoplifters and Thanksgiving diners everywhere. The expandable pouch and elastic waistband ...Read more

We were never dining room kind of people. For years, I thought it was a before-its-time minimalist museum, boasting its sole piece of art: the table, complete with expansion wings for an extended family that would never sit at it, lit for display by its own personal chandelier. Very Andy Warhol. Surely, we must have ventured into the dining ...Read more