Posts filed as “Ephemera”
Remembering Harry Chapin
I can tell you exactly where I was on July 16, 1981: stuck in a ghastly traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway. I was heading out to my boyfriend’s house, when all came to an absolute standstill. Reports came in over the radio of multi-lane closures, due to what sounded like a horrific accident ...Read more.This One’s for George
As many of my friends know, I have a definite thing for the Armageddon types. I suspect I am one of those people who needs to know how much worse things can be before I appreciate what I have in the here and now (Yeah, my health insurance bites! But hey, in five years, things ...Read more.On Leaving Los Angeles …
I’m not sure you can call this week’s Lives essay by Rachel Cline in the back of The New York Times magazine brilliant. Critiques of Los Angeles always seem hackneyed and trite to those who never lived there. Cline, however, captures the gothic feel of Los Angeles, how time slips away and one month becomes ten years overnight, ...Read more.Nicest Thing Ever Said About Me
Liza Was Here compared my voice in my recently published essay “The Mean Moms” to that of Anne Lamott. Thank you, fellow Smith College grad! And thanks to the magic of Google alerts, I now know of another great blog worth reading. As for “The Mean Moms,” it’s in the recently published anthology The Maternal is ...Read more.Best Comment of the Week
This gets handed out to a fellow mom at my younger son’s nursery school who must remain anonymous. We were sitting next to one another last night at the annual fundraising auction for our forever financially challenged play program. The item up for a bid was an evening with an extremely connected media personage who covers the world of ...Read more.Updates
I realize it has been a week since I posted here but I’ve not been silent. Slightly edited versions of It’s Yesterday No More and Wouldn’t It Be Nice? were featured on the Huffington Post and Girl With Pen blogs respectively. In addition, I wrote original post for Huffington on John McCain’s travails, which got noted by BuzzTracker and a few ...Read more.Conversations, Part II
It’s only fair to include a conversation between my younger son and one of his best friends I had the good fortune to overhear last week. Both parties in the conversation are four years old. Best friend: I don’t want to get old. Luke: You know what? My grandma — my grandma isn’t old, but ...Read more.Conversations
Today, I decided to tell Jake, who was home sick from school, what life was like in the distant past when mommy was eight years old. Me: Televisions only had thirteen channels. There was no remote. You had to get off the couch and change the channel. Jake: That’s horrible. Me: And if you called someone ...Read more.California Dreamin’
It was 65 and sunny today in New York. Driving in my car with the windows down, I suffered from geographic dislocation. I kept thinking I was driving east down Beverly Blvd, toward La Brea. But then I would look up and see the Hudson River and the Palisades, not the snow capped hills surrounding the L.A. basin. ...Read more.About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
Read More...