I’ve never been much for diets. The tomato sandwich diet I tried as a kid didn’t work, and neither did the green bean diet (several cans a day – my own invention).

So when I started hearing about something called the FastDiet, I figured it was just another one of those lose-weight-quick schemes.

I always feel better when I go, so why is it so hard to get there?

The 10 million dollar question is usually reserved for dragging my body from the computer to the car to the overheard press at the gym. But in the last couple of months, it’s popped up in a new place: Facebook.

If I aspire to anything as a parent of grown children, it’s to be unruffled.

“She just goes with the flow,” I want them to say.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of being Ms. Nonchalant till my daughter-in-law picked me up at the Phoenix airport last month and mentioned we’d all be staying at a hotel for the night.

As much as I urge others to “stay in the present moment,” I must confess that being “Zen-sational” is not my best thing.

Although I know I’d be much more centered if I just stayed Buddha-like in the here and now, I’m all too prone to visit the past and regret it. Or flirt with the future and worry.

The world breaks down between people who agonize over six possible answers to every true-false question and those who see two. Judging from my ability to navigate what my friend Janis described as a very simple public transit system, I am apparently in category number one.

Why would I, a single person, join a giant membership warehouse store that sells everything from French fries to toilet paper in tribe-size plastic bags?

Maybe because I’m addicted to bargains and the coffee they sell. But mostly because with the kids grown, it’s the new way to complicate my life.

It was too tempting. With a MacBook and an iPad in hand and my Blackberry contract expiring, I was already an easy mark for a

As someone who has just finished an entire graduate program that teaches how” stuff” does not make us happy, I hate to make this confession. Contrary to everything positive psychology teaches, I’ve lusted for – and finally been seduced by – a single- serve coffeemaker.