Beth Lapides

Did you get a new camera for Xmas? It make do more to uplift your mood than Prozac. I use my camera to alchemize bad moods into good ones, or at least decent, non-sucky ones. I have 4 different techniques. They all help me get out of my head and...

World Aids Day got me thinking about my high school film teacher Richard Umans. Yale scholar and lover of hi lo culture. After feeling a big bucket of love for him I started to think RIP. But then I started wondering is that what we really wish for the dead?...

Yesterday was the crankiest day over here at Un-Cabaret Multi-Media HQ. We thought it was just us.

Then we went to yoga and everyone in class was cranky there too. Our teacher said, "Hi! I am sooo cranky!" Exact word. Ok, so it wasn't just us. Maybe...

People always talk about being happy or unhappy. As if it's an either or thing. But most of us are happy and unhappy. The trick to being more happy is being willing to be unhappy!

I've noticed in my own life that when I am willing to be 100% unhappy...

If you've been spending your allotted fashion watch time analyzing the true meaning of flats at NATO festivities, you may have missed this spring's most telling footwear: YSL's Cage Shoe.

The Cage Shoe is a shoe, actually a whole collection of shoes, that form a cage around your foot.

What exactly is an inauguration? Not a coronation. Or a confirmation. Or a commencement.

When Obama is inaugurated what exactly will be happening? Etymologically, "inauguration" comes from the Latin inaugurationem "consecration, installment under good omens."

Good omens? I like the sound of that. I want to feel this...

There was a scene in this week's "Tell me You Love Me", my favorite feel-bad TV show of the season, where the married-with-kids-but-not-having-sex-with-her-husband blonde is frantically pulling plastic containers out of her kitchen cupboards and throwing them into a plastic garbage bag. She's furious because she's just learned that these...

People say they fear public speaking more than death, although they rarely say it in public!

Fears fall into two categories. The ones you can ignore and the ones you can't. Like I have a fear of scuba diving. And you know what I intend to do about...

I always have a hard time this first week in January. I feel like I'm supposed to be back at it in full tilt and yet it seems impossible to be back at it in full tilt.

This year I have finally accepted that it is a transitional ramp...

I've never loved the Fourth of July. And not just because in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school my boyfriend, who'd been trying to get me to go all the way, plied me with Boone's Farm Apple Wine till I acquiesced, and then denied me...

China's got toxic
dust storms - expanding deserts -
and they just got E!

I wrote that haiku about a year ago and now I read that China is making rain. To stop the dust storms. And I have a lot of questions.

For one, if China...

Watching the world change
changes the world but not so
much you can see it.

I am a microbe. George Bush is a Tripod.

There's no us and them.
But still, we're not them. Are we?
Are we even us?

Trying to replace
my feelings of vague dread with
specific concerns.