SOMETIMES GOOD THINGS HAPPEN!  And yet, we tend to remember only the bad ones.  Every day is filled with these yucky events:  we lose our car keys, forget a meeting, our printer runs out of ink right before we need that document. Went down to Laguna Beach last month and put money in the parking meter next to my car, not mine (wasn’t paying attention), so got...

MOTHER’S DAY, like most holidays, can be joyous or sad, and often both.  If all of your children are happy, healthy, can stand on their own two feet, and love you, it’s a happy day!  Even if your children live many miles away, (one of my sons is in South Africa today), if you know they love you and you have many happy memories together, it’s a...

SATURDAY SALON QUESTION:  How responsible are we for what happens on the other side of the globe? BANGLADESH is not a convenient place to do business.  No good roads, unreliable electricity, and not exactly the most politically stable.  So why has it become so popular as a manufacturing site for clothing?  Walmart thinks it’s a great place to do business....

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR YOU TO BE PLATONIC FRIENDS WITH someone of the opposite sex, or will there always be some element of sexual tension?  As Harry tells Sally “…men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” This is one of my favorite Saturday Salon questions, because married partners often have very different...

OUR VERY SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON BEING ABLE TO SET AND MAINTAIN BOUNDARIES.  The lives of early hunter-gatherers had specific rules for everything from food sharing to mating to where you buried your grandfather.  Bands kept far enough apart from each other not to exhaust the carrying capacity of the land.  They knew if they didn’t, neither group would survive,...

CAN PEOPLE CHANGE?  That’s the question.  If we have any hope for the future, we need to believe that people, individually or as families, societies, nations or a global species, can change. Here’s a TED conference presentation that touches on that topic.  Worth a watch.  As a cultural anthropologist, these ideas are not new, but the current brain...