Back in the days when I was a strange, humorless, hyper-sensitive, psychotically shy 8 year old with no friends, my mother offered me this time-worn advice: “if you want to have a friend, you have to be a friend.” Time must have really worn that advice out because in my experience, it’s is mostly a load. I didn’t start making friends until after I aquired the basics of humor from my math teacher’s “Insult a Day” book in 5th grade. If you want a friend being amusing goes a lot

I’ve said before that the events which lead to my husband and my separation last year was so intense and sordid that it would have made a great episode of Dateline Special Edition. If only we had no shame and one of us were a homicidal maniac. But, since we enjoy healthy levels of shame and we didn’t devolve into poisoning one another (not that such a thing was never contemplated), it’s a story which will have to wait ’til the great by and by to be widely disseminated. Suffic