You’ve heard it before: perfection will permit no mistakes, while excellence learns from its mistakes.  This means that if you’re doing it right, you will actually make—I’m sorry to break it to you—mistakes.  And not theoretical mistakes; no, you’ll actually fall down hard a few times.  On your rear.  In public.  You’ll be embarrassed, you’ll […]

Let’s imagine, just hypothetically, that you have shopper’s remorse, extra Christmas pounds, and a bitch of a New Year’s hangover.  So you vow to crank yourself up out of those bad habits by sheer force of will.  Ready, set, go!…CRASH.  If willpower were all it took, you’d already be doing those things.  Until the payoff […]

Note: this first appeared in the magazine Being A Broad, where I write a monthly tip.  It was written with a Tokyo audience in mind, but hey…here it is anyway.  Sometimes living in Japan can be so surreal that it literally feels like a dream.  Like that time you shared a beer with Little Bo […]

But not quite yet.  Instead, I’ll post a poem I wrote for a friend of mine. for Pam, who is deathly pregnant I picture you stepping out of your fevered skin. Slipping into the cool robe of a long afternoon, the gentle hands of the wind, the quiet of water. I would pray ease for […]