Dr. Helen Fisher describes brain systems, sex, love and “life’s greatest prize, a mating partner.” I like how she says “we give up too fast” when looking for what’s wrong instead of what’s right in a person.

The cost of food and the time it takes to prepare it are major contributing factors in the food choices we make for ourselves and our children. But, we have lost the thread of meal preparation as a central organizing role in our daily lives because we have put ourselves in the position and come to think that we don’t have the time or can’t afford to make healthier choices and eat mostly at home. Taking the time to prepare a healthier meal and making it affordable to do so, and deemphasizing fast food as a first or in many cases only choice is where our focus needs to be. The slow food movement has been making the concerted effort to help people understand the importance of meal preparation and healthier choices as has Jamie Oliver.

Find the chart at the Good Medicine Magazine in a post titled “Health vs. Pork: Congress Debates the Farm Bill.” Hat tip to the Daily Dish.)

The establishment of sexual Orientation law is a human rights and family rights issue.There has been some progress when it comes to legal equality and social justice for the GLBTQ community, but it remains tenuous with so much work ahead. As we have noted in previous posts Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer equality is the civil rights issue of our day along with making sure that every American has access to affordable healthcare. We are concerned that the well-being of individuals and our nation as a whole, which is determined by our freedom to be who we are and choose who we want to be with, is being compromised. The right to be who we are is central to democracy as are the rights to privacy and earned and shared property. (Check out the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. Hat tip for the chart to The Economist.)

Finding who we belong with and where we need to be is in many ways a matter of choices with an eye on our fate. I mean fate in the sense that our family, friends, peers and community combined with the actual physical place we live and move in the world all determine what will happen to us. This is why we should view our life in terms of who we are surrounded by and where we call home as a series of choices, recognizing that we have to live with the family we are given and the place we were born, but we don’t have to stay with them or there if in doing so we are not allowed to be who we are. If we build this kind of awareness of family, friends, peers, and place as our reality and central to our identity, but not necessarily who we want to stay with or where we want to be, then we can make the kinds of choices that reflect who we are and where we really belong. Read more…

A clip from the 2010 Oscar winning animated short film by Nicolas Schmerkin titled “Logorama.”

It’s hard to see how any sector of the labor force isn’t being effected by the current recession. The depth and breadth of it cuts across demographics. But, the poles of young and old are being hit particularly hard by the declining economy of the past decade. Read more…

As we watch the healthcare reform debate unfold and move its way toward some conclusion in terms of passing a bill the way many of us think and feel about this process and what has been accomplished will change. However, for some who are just ideologically and politically opposed to this President and any proposal driven by the Democratic party little or nothing will change even if they benefit from particular aspects of this reform. I view the bill as a process that move us forward, not an end point where our healthcare crisis and the burden of debt it places on future generations will be resolved because of it. Read more…

We are only now scratching the surface of what social media platforms are capable of achieving while at the same time recognizing how these emerging communication technologies are also being used for bad purposes. Human behaviors in all their forms follow whatever new tools we create and apply. Building communities around critical issues and challenges we face is where social media sites like Twitter for example, gives us real to access to sharing information, recruiting others, and problem solving. Read more…

Jonathan Metzl, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Department of Women’s Studies and author of the book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease and Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs describes how “in the racially charged 1960s, dissent was redefined as insanity, and insanity as criminal behavior. Countless patients are still living with the consequences.”

We all make monsters throughout our lifetimes starting at an early age. They become our way of both avoiding and dealing with what frightens and overwhelms us. In affect, the monsters we create hold our tension for us as we move into and through difficult situations and phases of our lives. Our monsters also seem to get bigger as we become more frightened and anxious, overtaking our hearts and minds as we respond by trying to run from or destroy them. What if instead of running from or annihilating our monsters we confront them, facing our fears and anxieties head on. Think of it as having a conversation with the monster you create, asking it why it is here and what it wants from you. Read more…