The Real Life Survival Guide has been operating on “radio silence” lately. Every once in a while you just need to stop, take a breath, regroup and recharge. I was totally stressed the other day when my wife – “Dr J” – appeared at the door of my home office and suggested a trip to […]
Paying for College: What About The Parents?
As an occasional panelist on The Real Life Survival Guide, my role is to “get real.” So here goes. In our discussion about “surviving” being parents of college aged children our panel covered a wide array of subjects with some depth and much insight. Mostly, we talked about how to help our kids navigate through the […]
Baby Boomer Parenting: The Umbilical Dilemma
Everyone of a certain age remembers “In Living Color” – the great 1990’s weekly comedy TV show that helped launch the careers of the Wayans family—Kim, Shawn, Marlon, and Dwayne as well as Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and David Alan Grier. In one skit Jim Carrey plays a teenager who literally has not been disconnected […]
A Trip Down Germ-emory Lane
“Now is the winter of our discontent…” No truer words were ever written. Last week my boys were home sick with me. Then came the Snowpocalypse of 2013. Between the brazen assault of the blizzard and the ninja-like stealth attack of cold bearing germs, my children have been home from school with me for nearly […]
Germs
Every day we come into contact with millions of invisible warriors just waiting to destroy us! In fact, if we could see them, the consequences would be devastating! Thankfully, most of us come equipped with our own arsenal of defenses against these invisible invaders. Bacteria, viruses and fungi are the invaders. They can be found […]
Soups
Growing up, soups were the foundation of most lunches and suppers, and my brothers and I loved them. Well, that is except during the blazing temperatures of the summer when my Mother still made her soup, and we ate them, complained like children, even into our teens, but we ate them and really, we loved […]
Soylent Blues
The spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down is toxic. According to Michael Pollan, “We are processed corn, walking.” Based on carbon-13 isotopes in our flesh and our hair, we North Americans “look like corn chips with legs.” Corn is the soylent yellow of our day; corn is people! The Franken-wheat we love […]
Growing Up “Husky”
Just like everybody else, my sense of myself was formed by my upbringing. As explored on this week’s Real Life Survival Guide, we are all conditioned to eat in ways that can really wreck our perspective when it comes to what we eat… Growing up in mid 20th Century whitelandia (the suburbs of New York […]
Blue Christmas
“It was Christmas eve babe In the drunk tank. An old man said to me, Won’t see another one.’ And then he sang a song, The rare auld Mountain Dew I turned my face away and dreamed about you…” These are the opening lines of The Pogues’ magnum opus, Fairytale of New York. Over the […]
Wither Winter
The advent of winter is more than a religious season for my Episco-homies, it’s the time of ecumenical energy freak out. That first oil refill, gas bill or cord of wood delivery creates an economic edge to an environmental truth: mammals do not make enough internal heat to be warm when it’s cold. Reptiles need […]
Susan Campbell: You Don’t Know Squat
When I first met my husband, I nearly dismissed him. He was the most handsome man in the room, and handsome men (in my experience) don’t have personalities. They don’t need them. They only have to walk into a room, and someone pulls them out a chair, lights their cigar, and then watches raptly as […]
Sallie Kraus: Why I Still Believe in a College Education
I enjoyed being on the “Real Life Survival Guide” for the “Personal Finance” episode –even though my first response to the topic was “this is going to be difficult” … I’m not the best person to ask about organizing papers and checks—I am someone who has had a papers coach come to my home and […]
Parenting Twilight Zone
When you are in the thick of being a parent you forget that your parents never leave you, and have no clue that your children inevitably do. As Bruce can tell you, I had a Draper Childhood, most about 7 miles south of the Draper homestead in Ossining, and later left on my own in […]
Modern Love
This may sound oxymoronic but one of marriages greatest problems is that it has been overly romanticized. Simply put, people go in expecting way too much. Marriage has been overhyped by movies and television and crammed down people’s throats by advertising mad men for generations. It’s not important to have a good marriage, it’s important […]
Ticker – On Losing Heart in Our Marriages and Finding it Again
Heart failure in marriage isn’t at all uncommon these days. Almost fifty percent of couples divorce. Plenty more—to twist Thoreau’s words a bit—live quiet marriages of desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. There is a very good chance that at some point, we married couples will fall out of […]
Susan Jacobs on Collaborative Law
I enjoyed spending time with Bruce and his guests, Laura, Erika and John on the Real Life Survival Guide this past week at The New Haven Meatball House. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a large part of the topic was devoted to divorce, and divorce is generally not a fun topic […]
Clutter This
When Siddhartha sat meditating under a Bodhi tree for six years, he came to understand that the desire for worldly comforts was a poison. And that our need to constantly accumulate possessions was the source of all the miseries of mankind. After sitting under a palm tree on a Caribbean beach with a cooler for six hours, […]
The CT Watchdog on Shopping
Because of the Internet combined with the global economy, shopping has gotten more complex: it is easier to find the best deals and it is easier to get ripped off. That means consumers have to be educated. A couple of rules: Nothing – except for free samples at a grocery store – is free. Anytime […]
Special needs are no laughing matter… or maybe they are
Last night was open house at my kid’s school. Open house is the evening where parents go to school and learn the exciting news that their kid’s classroom has awesome beanbag chairs that constitute the “Reading is Fun!” pavilion next to the coat rack. I jest of course; open house is important. It’s where you learn your […]
Sarah Kyrcz on Family Vacations
It is a rarity that I get to spend quality, together time with my daughters. It seems like there is always something on the schedule, a lacrosse game, schoolwork or housework. Going, going, going, full speed ahead. So it was an absolute treat to be 2,500 miles away from all obligations and enjoy the company […]
Eric D. Lehman on Travel and Adventure
In the 56th episode of the Real Life Survival Guide we discussed travel primarily as it pertains to “vacations” and not “adventure travel.” It’s difficult to have physically active adventures as parents of small children, as many of our panelists are. Or rather, we could say that even the simplest vacations become “adventures” when small […]
Gumfellas
After listening to Episode 55 of the Real Life Survival Guide I started to think about entrepreneurship, its challenges and its perks. During the episode, the guest editors all talked about how they had given up working for “the man” and decided to do their own thing. (Except of course for Duo, who is; The […]
Work
“Work” is more than a two-edged sword – it’s almost like a ball of razor blades, with a cutting edge at each possible point of contact. “Work” for most people is an activity they would never engage in except that it pays for you to do the things you actually “like” to do. But the […]
Confessions of a Franken-Foodie
“Eat this apple,” she said, and Adam did, and you know the rest. But still they say “An apple a day” like it’s God’s gift even though Eve, the First Foodie, cursed her husband and children and their children’s children when she offered Adam a bite. Despite its reputation, we see that damning apple everywhere […]
Fear and Loathing in Las Kitchen
There are two types of people; those who cook and those who do not cook. I am one who cooks; my wife, Karen, is one who does not. I blame my wife’s lack of culinary skills on the most likely transgressor; her mother. My Mother-in-law never learned how to cook so she never passed the […]
Food AND Etiquette
The last 2 RSLG efforts dealt with 2 basic human necessities: Eating and Living Together. Obviously food is essential, and is the focus of our most basic survival. instincts as well as being a social binder, and often a personal obsession for many – but it’s also becoming clearer that human interaction is becoming more and more of a […]
Summer-Loved and Lost
Friends we’ve lost: What about the ones we’ve fallen out of touch with, the ones we’ve let go? This conversation came up on Real Life Survival Guide’s Episode 52: “Redefining Friendship.” Some friends were particularly important, inspired us, listened, consoled, brought insight to our lives just when we needed awakening, stole our hearts, broke our […]
“Friend”ship
Word abuse is a disturbing consequence of instant universal communication (them Interwebs) – icky in that it takes what should be genuine and makes it, well, weird. “Like” has now become a grade applied to other words. “Unlike” is now a word (what happened to dislike?). “Message” and “Text” are now verbs… But the worst […]
Bob Tedeschi: Managing Noise
In Episode 51 of the Real Life Survival Guide, my fellow panelist Christine Ohlman put her finger on an increasingly troublesome self-care issue: managing noise. We watch screens all day long; they scream at us with work tasks, spam, legitimate e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, news, sports, gossip. Our society essentially demands it. Long ago the U.S. […]
Mary Elliott: Naked and New – Re-thinking What We Deserve
Like any other Catholic baby, I was born with the proverbial millstone around my neck—the burden of Original Sin—but baptized and therefore saved in the chapel of the U.S.S. Vulcan, a naval ship docked in the Norfolk shipyards. It was a regular, low-key baptism documented with Polaroid photos—no champagne bottle cracked over my head just […]
Slow – Children at Play
How much time should we, as parents, put into our kids’ extracurricular activities? Gerry McGuire raised this question during Episode 49 of Real Life Survival Guide as he and fellow conversationalists savored the excellent estate-grown wines, panoramic Connecticut hills and unspoiled air atop Gouveia Vineyards. Moved to speak freely, perhaps, by the atmospheric openness and […]
Duo Dickinson: Confusing Effort and Control
This week’s Real Life Survival Guide touched on the issue of control, or rather the lack of it. Like the rest of the largest demographic bulge in history, the Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1965 were considered by contemporary social evaluators to be the “best and the brightest.” As a generation, we drank in […]
Mary Elliott: Are You There? Narciss-stalkers, Echo-talkers and Love in the High-Tech Void
Looking for some straight stalk talk? Episode 48’s guest editors and hosts offered practical suggestions for setting boundaries when another’s desire to connect with you plunges into the pathological deep end: Don’t give out your number to creeps and weirdoes. Alert the gendarmes when obsessive texts persist. Hire my all-muscle and highly-employable college son as your bodyguard. Along […]
Mary Elliott: Photoshopping Eternity – Real Talk with Our Kids about Afterlife Survival
The conversation in Episode 47 took a more serious turn as our real-life survivors—guest editors who’d survived cancer, the loss of a spouse, the loss of young children in their church or schools—asked the big question: How to talk to our children about mortality—theirs and ours? “Tell the truth” surfaced as the consensus. “Be honest.” […]
Mary Elliott: Real Life Survival Guide and the Frenemization of American Culture
Guys, grab a prosecco, have a seat and let’s talk about your feelings. Studies on male versus female relationships prove you’ll live longer. This show is Real Life Survival Guide, after all, and if the information it provides listeners helps you add a few years to your life, all the better. Face it, survival these […]
Men Stank, Humidity and Basements
On this week’s episode, we riffed on Olde School’s great Man Cave space. Most American homes actually have a built-in cave – a basement. Ever since Cliff May invented the Raised Ranch (which is truly a dumbed-down version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-Style homes), sunlight got into more Great American Suburban Home basements. More light […]
Decorate, Deconstruct or Divorce
Houses are a lot like human beings: they have characteristics that are often genetic and cannot be overcome. Even with an aggressive 12-step program, many homes are beyond rehab by redecoration. There are two types of house dysfunction. First is the simple need for repair: things are broken and need to get fixed. Whether it’s […]
Joanne Kahan: April Fools
For Episode 40 of the Real Life Survival Guide, the stage was set for the discussion to enter rare and undiscovered places. Would the exotic spices permeating the air at Sitar in New Haven lead our intrepid conversationalists into exploring the themes of truth and virtue found in the epic tale, “The Ramayana”? Would the […]