A mouseburger’s friends are, in some respects, like her lungs or liver—she can’t get through life without them. Friends are almost a bigger deal than lover or husband. Those you can get through life without, at least for long periods, but friends—they are a staple of every functioning mouseburger.
Once in a while you meet […]

I call everybody—limo drivers, salesgirls, maitre d’s, cleaning women, doormen—sweetie, honey, pussycat, without a twinge of contrition. Should you be so personal with non-beloveds? Well, it isn’t lost on me that endearing terms so casually bestowed cannot have much meaning for the bestowed upon but I do it for me.
I really do like our doorman, […]

Give the storyteller a chance. He is telling you about the garage door having slipped its hinges and demolished three bicycles and a Volkswagen. You’re apt to lunge in instantly with your own garage-door story or, worse, the merits of Volkswagens versus Audis people slippy-slide so from subject to subject before the storyteller is […]

I think unconditional love is what a mother feels for her baby, and not what you should feel for yourself. Author Margaret Halsey said in a Newsweek editorial: “The [false] idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense.
Inside each of us is a mess […]