The news about my mother gets more disturbing all the time. At Thanksgiving dinner, I was told, she referred to her daughter-in-law with a vile epithet … even though she was in that daughter-in-law’s home, and the insulted person had just cooked dinner for 11 members of our family.

I’m sorry to be vague about what was said; it would be a much more interesting and powerful story if I just repeated the insult, especially if I described the context. But because I have filters, I won’t. My family would never forgive me, and I wouldn’t expect them to.

The open question is whether my mother was always thinking such nasty thoughts about the people around her, and we only know it now because dementia has removed her filters.

If that’s the case, all I can say is, thank goodness for filters.

So here’s a question: How many times a day do your filters…

Tags: Tags: adhd, dementia, family, filters, Media, trends

According to the New York Times, the “coolios” among us — the first movers, the Influentials, the ones who get their fashion tips from celestial sources and force the less favored among us to play perpetual catch-up — are fat.

Not obese, mind you. Just skinny at the ends and round in the middle. In the words of a magazine editor, the hipsters are “proudly rocking a gut.”

The author, Guy Trebay, quotes his own trainer for this passage:

[A]s lean muscle and functionality become the new gym mantras, hypertrophied He-Men with grapefruit biceps and blister-pack abs have come to resemble specimens from a diorama of “A Vanished World.”

“When do you ever see that guy, anyway?” Mr. Morea asked, referring to those legendary Men’s Health cover models, with their rippling torsos and famished smiles. “The only time you really see that guy, he’s standing in front of an Abercrombie & Fitch…

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Tags: Tags: fashion, fitness, Media, skinny-fat, trends