I’m not good at being loved. It makes me uncomfortable when people sing my praises, for whatever reason. And I’ve never learned how to gracefully accept compliments (I have a bad habit of turning them in to jokes, but I am getting better). So it still astonishes me I have friends other than family. Note:…

I write frequently about being kind to our own flawed and fallible selves. Because I see so many people talking to and about themselves in ways they wouldn’t address horrible strangers. I hear dear friends talk about themselves as failures, citing their inability to walk serenely through their overwhelming lives. Colleagues badmouth their work; acquaintances…

On a FB thread a friend began, there’s a discussion of homosexuality, race, and gender. My friend is not tolerant: he lives his beliefs. An aside: I don’t really like the word ‘tolerance.’ It always reminds me of the stuff I didn’t want to eat when I was a kid. My mother & grandmother said…

As a teenager, I spent a few summers on an island in southern Thailand. Then a backwater (you had to take the ferry to get from the mainland to the island), it’s now famous. Both as a resort and as the site of a horrific tsunami. Phuket. That’s where I spent school holidays, at a…

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