I slacked Wednesday afternoon. Normally Tim would have been waiting for my column to come in, so he could look it over with his expert eye. He liked having it in a couple of days ahead of time, so he could plan for his own …
Carlman: To some families, your old beater’s a wheel big deal
That esteemed duo, McCartney and Lennon, perhaps said it best: Baby, you can drive my car (beep-beep-m-beep-beep, yeah!). But maybe you should let your mom get behind the wheel — because you’re, you know, a baby and everything. OK, so maybe the lyrics weren’t really …
The pansies are starting to turn up at area nurseries and garden centers. Lizzie’s has them. So does The Growing Place. That just has to be a good sign. Because here’s the thing: it’s hard to go anywhere these days without running into the same …
It’s a questionable subject. This week, as you likely know, we passed the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. At this point regarded by most of us as a sincerely bad move, the purportedly preemptive strike against a feudal nation said to be aiming massively …
Freedom is a fungible phenomenon. We’ve established that it doesn’t come free. Things of value seldom do. But the concept is intriguingly subject to individual interpretation. Does the First Amendment guarantee us the right to say despicable and perhaps untrue things? Yes, it often does. …
Beware the fickle finger of blame. Several national news cycles ago, we heard of young Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s heinous edict that all employees then based at home return to the office, effective June 1. Righteous outrage quickly flooded the blogosphere. Already quite pregnant when …
The topic itself can make us uncomfortable. Systemic change, and the learning curve it entails, sometimes has that effect. Tough darts. A lot of us have begun to pay a little closer attention to the psychological state of those around us. Prompted by the unspeakably …
I’m not sure just what we were expecting. The whole cyber hacking thing seems to hit close to home these days — often, and with great impunity. As you probably know, news of the latest brazen electronic break-in broke this week, when it was discovered …
Time share. Market share. Fair share. Enough with the sharing, already! Of course, I jest. But it can’t be denied that from personal foibles to political views, petty gripes to, yes, things as mundane as what we just ate for lunch, we share a lot …
It’s not easy to watch a loved one go to a dark place. Lots of us know what that’s like. The National Institute of Mental Health says one in four of us lives with a diagnosable mental illness. If you haven’t looked depression or anxiety …
Once again, change is our only constant
The only constant, we are sagely reminded from time to time, is change. Some days that can be a formidable pill to wash down, but it’s not as though we can do anything about it. So change is good. I know I’ve said that little …
It’s not always obvious, but the security blanket is tucked in mighty tightly here. The awful trio of bloody murders in Naperville last year made that sort of easy to overlook. In fact, the city’s 60 violent crimes in the first half of 2012 — …
Yes, we women can still rewrite herstory
My spouse calls it a matriarchy. One of my brothers-in-law dubs us a coven. I choose to take offense at neither. Silly boys. They usually don’t get it. The family into which I had the good fortune of being born is skewed toward a female …
Carlman: Kidding aside, it’s hard to be a child these days
From recently encountered poverty, to violence in school or out of it, to the dangers of social media, being a kid isn’t easy these days.
The end of the world as we know it would be an easier pill to swallow if we knew a better one would take its place, writes Susan Frick Carlman.
