A few weeks ago, a writer for the Huffington Post embarked on "a personal health journey" which was inspired by Shawn Phillips' Strength For Life. A week into his detox, the writer bemoaned his sober state, suffered a deep lamentation on missing out on "reminiscing about the last...

Lately, I've been in serious debt reduction mode. We're talking a no-frills lifestyle. We're talking PB and J for lunch. Last week you might have spied me on Fox Business News blathering on about how to pinch pennies in these precarious economic times. However, I wasn't able to fully...

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left...

Growing up in Brooklyn, our refrigerator was home to the imitation Idaho potato, sticks of Parkay, and the lone liter of Schweppes ginger ale. One summer, my mother and I subsisted on bags of potatoes cooked every which way one could fix a potato. We cut them into wedges and...

When you were fourteen, your scalp was burning, you left the cream on for two hours longer than the instructed forty-five minutes-you desperately needed this product to work. That night you almost had to go to the emergency room because you were blistering, bleeding and screaming.
When you...

For some, the holidays are a whirlwind of tree decorating, turkey carving, watching It's a Wonderful Life whilst sipping eggnog by the fire and cuddling our loved ones. This is a time for bonding, tearful toasts and Sears family portraits. For the rest of us, the holidays are a harbinger...

My first foray into the kitchen was a disaster of epic proportion. Think gastronomic Chernobyl. Julia Child would have fallen into a fit of palpitations; Martha Stewart would have surmised that Felicia Sullivan in the kitchen was not a "good thing." Mine wasn't your casual egg-curdling snafu or beef cooked...

When Kate* announced that her boyfriend of two months was moving in with her, the same apartment where her ex-boyfriend's paintings still decorated the walls, where the cable bills (which were still in his name), were delivered, I nearly choked on my dumpling. We were in Taiwan, on holiday, and...

We face one another picking apart our chicken cutlet parmesans. While my mother complains about the thieving coked-up whores in her diner, I assemble piles of mozzarella cheese -- eyes transfixed on the clock. I keep time; will it to pass by. It's 1996 and my mother and I sit...

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Menachem who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left...