On the Top Ten of my Hit Parade of Worries is bedbugs. It started when friends contracted bedbugs in their home and told me they had to lie in bed at night to be hosts, which drew out the critters, so the Hazmat folks could come in their Hazmat suits …
I’d been rooting around for a good mental picture to swap to whenever I get visions of things like having no one to play Scrabble with when I reach my December years. I was searching for a sweet memory of which I have many. The ones that kept leaping to …
Right after posting One Space or Two? I began to worry that readers would roll their eyes, wondering why I thought anyone would want to hear about the minutiae that hopscotches around in my head. It was wasted worry, because the views of my blog doubled that day and plenty of …
Unrelated announcement: See my latest article on Home Goes Strong, “Renovation Basics, What You Should Know Before You Remodel.” I was not looking for trouble. As you may know, my riskiest activity is bicycling and I do so with great caution, riding on sidewalks, wearing a helmet, using a Velcro …
When I travel, and even when I don’t, I’m both a schlepper and a non-schlepper. It’s in the worrywart’s nature to schlep. For example, I take seven pens in case six run out of ink. On the other hand, my back hurts when I carry things. To show you how serious …
This afternoon I knew my taxi would arrive in ten minutes to take me to the train for a few days in New York. I always worry about being late for the train, late for the taxi, late for whatever. And, I worry that my regular taxi driver won’t show up …
As a kid at the Jersey shore, on days of ocean calm, I would float over the occasional ripple with my dad, his hands folded behind his head and his tan, slender, feet parallel and pointing skyward. “Ahh, this is worth a million bucks,” he’d say and now I know …
Oh dear, I’m afraid I was terribly insensitive in my previous blog post, Worry Orgasm, which was about how worried I became when a train I was scheduled to take became delayed due to someone jumping in front of it at a previous stop. A friend, generally a supportive fan, …
In case you don’t make it to the end, where I’ll refer to this again, see my latest post on NBC’s new Website Home Goes Strong, “My (91-year-old) Mom’s Do-It-Youself Decorating Tips.” On another note, this past weekend I visited my brother’s family in Philly, where I picked up some …
Picture a worrywart mom getting a call from her mid-twenties-aged daughter, who is all excited to tell about the New Zealand trip she and a friend are planning. We’re going “cave rafting,” the daughter says. The worried mother later looks up this cave rafting to discover it’s also called black …
I contract other people’s worries, as though they were chicken pox. That’s why I plug my ears and hum at the mere mention of, for example, sleeplessness. My friend Joe suffers from travel anxiety. Joe’s a guy who moves around Washington with the ease of a gifted politician, but who–weeks …
Today, my first article appears on the NBC Website Home Goes Strong, where I’ll be posting new pieces 2 or 3 times a week. As you may know, I am capable of worrying about anything. The feng shui fracas began when a friend pointed out that my newly renovated space–where I could …
Today, as I was unlocking my bike in front of Trader Joe’s, I heard the sound of car meets guy on bike, and I looked up to see this guy sliding off the hood of the car that hit him. To my relief, he picked up his bike and hobbled …
Ever since beginning this blog, I’ve become a repository for friends’ and family members’ unnerving scenarios. Just last month my youngest daughter called from Minnesota to say she was reading a review in a Duluth newspaper of The Hypochondriac’s Handbook: Syndromes, Diseases, and Ailments that Probably Should Have Killed You By Now. …
1. I occasionally allow a fan to whir overhead in my bedroom despite a lifelong fear of decapitation by ceiling fan. 2. I eat in restaurants, even though there’s the possibility that a waiter (annoyed by my requests for tastes of wine, glasses of ice, dish of lemons, sauce on the side) …
Before going out the other night, I headed into the living room, whose door I keep closed so my beagle-y mutt Casey can’t get in and dig at the rug. As soon as I entered, I glimpsed a twitch of a bushy tail by the window. It was a squirrel …
Friends often say to me something like, “I can’t believe you’re afraid of driving to New York, but you bicycle everywhere.” I don’t worry as much as you’d think a worrywart might about getting hit by a car while biking (uh-oh will this jinx me?). It helps that I wear …
My first tip today is get a mantra. Many of the things I worry about, I have little or no control over. For instance, what if the power goes off while I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner? Then there’s my preoccupation with how I’ll keep my brain busy and distracted if I’m …
I can practically bring myself to tears with morbid fantasies. When a TV commercial aired for a movie about someone getting buried alive, I immediately pictured myself meeting such a fate. I tried to reason that of all the people I had ever known, and all the people each of …
The splendid thing about being a worrywart with a blog is that you awaken worrying how you’ll come up with an idea for your next post, even though you know that one worry after another will pop up into your head all day long like a CNN ribbon winding itself …
This may sound cockeyed but–without a religious streak strong enough to be sure prayers get answered–I feel doomed to a lifetime of worry. Yet I spring to action each evening when the stars show up. I realize, of course, that if I tell you my nightly wish on a star, …
A worrywart can benefit from a connection to God. If I believed prayers were answered, I wouldn’t need to worry anymore. Even though I’m an agnostic, I consider my relationship with God a pretty good one. Like those halfway-decent, parallel-play marriages between two independent sorts, God and I go into …
I can’t stop thinking about President Obama’s shared chest bump last year with a Naval Academy graduate. That was when I added chest bump to my list of handshake alternatives. In fact, I’ve been on the lookout for germ-free ways to greet people ever since the outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease …
Recently, while visiting my daughter at college, I awoke in the night with the worst pain I’ve had since giving birth. In a way this suffering was more severe than childbirth, because the cannonball that was grinding inside my belly never let up the way contractions do. I thought I …
Sometimes I play a game in which I name an object and then try to associate a worry with it, just to see if I can stump myself. “Venetian blinds,” I say. “Peeping Tom!” I answer without having inhaled. “Tomatoes,” I try. “Salmonella poisoning!” Another way to play is to …