Oh, The Indignities of Travel . . . The e-mail message I sent from Rome was brief: Bring Colace. The reply from New York equally succinct: Relief is on the way! If this isn’t the most effective communication in the history of the Internet, I’ll eat my cappello. So what’s the story behind these messages between the Old Country and the New World?...

The warning signs of a Bad Dating Situation (or BADS) are like the clues in a cheesy detective story: obvious to everyone but the victim. Let’s face it, this guy is wrong for you, probably for the planet as a whole, but you, my sweet, are in total denial. If this were a song parody, it’d go something like, “You’ve got the BADS and that...

IS PRIVACY DEAD? You have to ask? With a few clicks on Google or Bing, you can find out almost anything about almost anyone. Isn’t it amazing just how much dirt we all seem to crave -and of course, the media loves giving it to us. Sure, if you’re a celbrity, you give up privacy. But really! Long before the ghoulish media coverage of Michael...

Wanna buy an apartment in New York? The good news is: prices are down and so are mortgage rates. The bad news is, you’re going to need a letter of recommendation. Here in the Big Apple, you not only have to plunk down an obscene amount of money for a space you’d laugh at if you didn’t know better, you also have to get past the dreaded coop board....

What do women want? Love? Sure. Money? Of course. Cosmetics? Now you’re talking! Rita Rudner nails it in her very funny routine about those “free gifts” — you know the ones, where you buy something you don’t need to get a bunch of things you don’t want. It’s twue, so twue.  I can rationalize falling for this a few summers ago because I was...

A minute ago, I tripped on the oriental rug in my office. Bad carpet! And if I weren’t so naturally graceful (not), I could have fallen. And if I had fallen, I might have hurt myself (Ouch!), and the rest of the afternoon and maybe the evening or even many days thereafter would have been taken up with dealing with that. I mean, I could have sprained an ankle,...

I   AM   EXPERIENCING   T E M P O R A R Y   T E C H N I CA L   D I F F I C U L T I E S Not surprising, considering that I’m afraid of my own alarm clock. No. Really. It’s a smart clock that automatically adjusts for daylight savings time, making it far, far, smarter than I. My old clock was dumb. It would start...

They say that if there are no fireworks in your relationship, you’re in trouble. I was in trouble. The guy I eventually married and I — the operative word here being “eventually”— were about to have our first Fourth of July together. That, as my friend would tell me, is such a GIRLY thing to say. Well, yes. Yes, it is. But I take these things seriously and I wanted...