I like clothes, all right? I’m not going to apologize for that, or turn in my feminist or intellectual credentials. In fact, I’ve been so inspired by some of the excellent style bloggers out there that I’ve decided to devote my Friday post — weekly? biweekly? monthly? haven’t decided — to style blogging, both of my own outfits and Boston/Cambridge street fashion. Pictures will go under the jump, for those who aren’t interested in such things.

Unfortunately, on Friday, making pictures go under the jump was about the most I could manage, technically. There’s a lot I need to figure out about photography and lighting, and also about blog-picture layout.

Then, this weekend, I realized: this is a blog. This is a dress rehearsal. If my pictures aren’t that good, maybe you can tell me how to make them better.

If y’all don’t like my outfits, though, you’re wack. I dress great. See you after the jump!

… is online here.

Hey, friends. Please don’t be concerned about the relative lack of blogging around here. I’m doing fine — I’m just enjoying summer, and taking things easy for a change. (Almost the entire past year was spent either coping with my illness or various work emergencies, so normal life seems pretty sweet.) Keep me on your RSS feed, I’ll be posting here and there. Got some plans to update the site, and I’m planning to start style blogging fairly soon as soon as I can figure out a few things about my camera.

If there’s more or less of anything that you’d like to see on the blog, let me know. I’ve been thinking I should start blogging more about findings in the social sciences, pop culture, and possibly current events. I’ll continue to use my Twitter (robinabrahams, or you can keep up with the feed on the right-hand column) to link to articles that I think would be of interest to people who read my writing.

And, of course, there should always be room on all blogs for the occasional cute dog picture.

… is online here.

I’ll be doing a live chat today from noon-1 Eastern time on boston.com/missconduct. Come by! Chats are always fun and generally useful.

Last week, on my usual appearance on WCAP (980 FM, every Tuesday from 1:15-2pm!), Dean Johnson e-mailed me a link to this advice column for a discussion topic. Baby-touching (and pregnant-belly-touching) is a topic I’ve addressed before, but I really liked the columnist “Advice Mama,” particularly this quote:

Decide what’s right for you and your baby, and put your parenting instincts before your desire for approval. Not everyone will agree with you, but that’s pretty much par for the course along the parenting road.

So true. As I put it in my book, “You get to act, they get to judge.” And judge they will.

Advice Mama’s take also made me think of one of Aesop’s fables — the one about the old man, his son, and the donkey. Remember that one? It’s a good one to keep in mind.

… is online here.

I’m going to be participating in the opening of Petco’s new boutique store, “Unleashed,” next Thursday (June 17) from 6-8 pm at the new Wellesley store at 165 Linden Street. Here’s what the press release has to say:

Unleashed by PETCO, a community pet store iintroduced by leading pet specialty retailer PETCO, invites Boston dogs and their owners to join the Animal Rescue League of Boston for a special benefit and celebration of the human animal bond kicking off June 17, 6 – 8 pm at the Wellesley, MA store. Complete with a green carpet and “pawparrazi”, the VIP event for pets will launch a four-day fundraiser and adoption event …

Open to all Boston-area pet owners, pets will receive star treatment during the June 17 fundraiser launch event with “pawparazzi” photos of dogs strutting the green carpet, pet swag bags, bartenders serving treat bar snacks, a pet-friendly ice cream social, and giveaways. Pet owners will also be treated to hors d’oeuvres and refreshments, such as the “Cat’s Meow” and “Hair of the Dog” fizzes. In addition, the Animal Rescue League of Boston will bring over 30 adoptable pets via the Mobile Animal Transport (MAT) to meet with potential new parents and will host adoption and education events at select Boston-area locations throughout the weekend.

I’ll be doing a brief reading from the pets chapter of Mind over Manners, answering your questions on “petiquette,” and introducing some of those adorable dogs up for adoption. And yes, Mr. Improbable is really, really hoping I don’t come home with one.

I hope to see some of my fellow dog-loving readers there! (You won’t get to meet Milo, alas. He is not quite ready for prime time.)

Last week, I was immensely sad to read that Jorge Garcia’s dog Nunu died: “as we were preparing to all go to the airport Nunu was struck by a car as she crossed the street. She died in my arms,” Mr. Garcia wrote.

Poor Jorge! He loved that dog. His life must feel so strange now, with “Lost” over, living back on the mainland, with Nunu dead. This is one of the pains of the death of a pet — not only the loss of a companion, but the end of an era. We often get pets at times of transition in our lives, and when those pets die, that chapter in our life feels even more definitively closed. Mr. Garcia has shut down his “Dispatches from the Island” blog and started a new blog, for this new phase of his life. The Nunu years are over. Have you ever had a pet whose lifetime coincided with a particular phase of your life, whose passing seemed to be the end of one chapter of your story?

Before we all leave the island for good, I suppose I should reassess my earlier criticism of how Hurley’s alternative universe was played out. Since the alternaverses were only mental constructs, or purgatory, or a bardo, or some damned thing or other, the emphasis on Hurley’s weight in his alternate-universe story reflected his own insecurity, not the writers’ fat prejudice. I think there’s still room for criticism — was Hurley’s primary reason for insecurity really his weight? He seemed to not trust himself because of his earlier bouts with mental illness and his lack of education and acknowledged leadership capabilities — but I think a lot of character development got sloppy toward the end there, so I don’t feel Hurley got a particularly raw deal.

I remain impressed by the quality of the quotations on Good Earth herbal teabags. (As well as its sweet and spicy flavor.) Today’s was “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely,” by Auguste Rodin.

I like that rather a lot. I spent a summer working as a housecleaner one year in college, which might not seemed to have had much to do with my main interests — theater and sociology — at all. But you can tell a lot about people by the inside of their houses. I decided to look on that summer as an experiential tutorial in set design and the sociology of class and taste, and I think I learned rather a lot.

As I mentioned last week, I went on Paxil in December. My digestive system had not been working well for a couple of years, and what had once been an occasional annoyance turned into a full-time debilitation by last fall. As it turned out, I have the trifecta: IBS, gastritis, and esophageal reflux disease. This was going to require not only medication, time, and rest, but significant changes to my diet and cutting out alcohol. And as my gastroenterologist is one of the good ones who realizes that I am not a bunch of interconnected malfunctioning tubes, but a person, she suggested I go to behavioral health and get myself on, as she put it, “something that will help you cope without dissolving your esophagus.”

Now, here’s the thing. Every time I had gone to this doctor before with a bout of gut misery, she would ask, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I would say, “No.”

And, having seen the incredible difference that Paxil has made in my life, I was obviously wrong. Why didn’t I answer the question correctly?

Because of how it was asked, that’s why. People are notoriously susceptible to answering a question based on how it’s worded: for example, a recent study showed that more people agreed that “gay men and lesbians” should be able to serve in the military than that “homosexuals” should be able to serve in the military. Same question, obviously, but “homosexuals” sounds clinical and perverted, while “gay men and lesbians” sounds like people you know.

The question “Are you under stress?” or “Are there particular stressors in your life?” is a question that leads me to look outward, away from my emotions and to the objective circumstances of my life. And every time I did, I simply couldn’t see anything that could be, almost literally, twisting my gut into knots. My husband and I get along well. We are both in relatively good health, physically and financially. Yes, sometimes it can be difficult to juggle multiple jobs and projects, but I’ve always preferred to have a lot going on (and in this economy, having multiple sources of income seems like a good thing). I have good friends to confide in. What did I have to be stressed about?

But if she’d said, “Do you feel anxious?” — oh, I would have given a very different answer to that. Because that’s a question that would lead me to look inside, to how I felt. And I am an anxious person. Not because of my life circumstances, but because of how my brain chemicals are mixed. My flight-or-fight response threshold is ridiculously low.

And it isn’t anymore. I don’t have the off-the-chain startle reflex that I used to. I find it easier to read e-mails criticizing my work, even when they’re completely hateful, without my heartbeat going into overdrive. To my great surprise, even Milo has picked up on this. Before, if he was sitting on my lap at night while I watched TV or movies, he’d leap out of the chair and run to the window barking at the slightest noise. Now, he’s more likely to lift his head, growl, and settle back down immediately when I say “It’s just the wind, little guy.”

I’m amazed that the way a question was worded kept me from getting the help I needed for several years. I study this kind of thing: I know about cognitive biases, and the power of language and framing, and even a fair bit about temperament and brain chemistry. It’s a good lesson in staying humble and always, always, remembering to look at a situation from more than one perspective.

Going on Paxil really did a job on my dream life, too, in some fairly amusing ways. But I’ll save that for another post.

Meredith Goldstein of the Globe’s “Love Letters” column and I had such a good time at Central Square Theater’s Ann Landers play “The Lady with All the Answers” last month, and our pre-show discussion went so well, that the theater has invited us back for an encore performance!

We’ll be doing another appearance this Saturday, June 12. The show starts at 8pm and the discussion starts at 7. The theater has a nice snack bar with tea, coffee, soft drinks, beer and wine, so you can grab a beverage and join us for a nice dish about the advice business. How would you answer some of Ann’s classic questions?

I have two tickets to give away, so go the Monday question on my boston.com blog and leave a comment if you want to go — I’ll pick a winner at random* and announce it at 5pm on Tuesday.

*As someone trained in the social sciences, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s random selection.

One of the reasons I love writing an advice column is because I do my best thinking not in a solitary state of meditation, but in response to other people. And here’s a non-advice-related example. A friend of mine e-mailed me a week or so ago to ask about the common distinction between left brain/right brain, and how much of that is actually based in science and how much is simply shorthand for analytical v. artsy-fartsy.

I gave him some basic 411 about the different brain hemispheres, and the corpus callosum, and handedness, and neural plasticity. Then I summed it up with this:

“I mean, sure, they’re different, but it’s like Manhattan v. Brooklyn. You can’t really imagine one without the other, and everything is constantly commuting between one and the other. Real estate’s a little cheaper in the right hemisphere, and the left hemisphere is more influential in the world of ideas and commerce, but fundamentally, it’s two halves of a whole.”

I gotta say, I’m fairly proud of that one. And it sure beats the last metaphor I came up with for the difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

… is online here.

As I noted, I didn’t much agree with the criticism of my May 2nd column. I did get a letter about my May 16th column that brought me up short. In that one, a person had written in to ask if it would be possible to back out of plans that had been agreed to far in advance: “Between now and midsummer, there is exactly one weekend when my spouse and I don’t have child-tending, a crush of work, visitors, etc.,” she wrote. I As part of my reply, I said, “We all have such complicated and demanding lives nowadays, who could fail to understand your dilemma?”

I received an e-mail titled “busy, complicated lives,” that read:

No, some people do not. Some people are lonely & have time on their hands despite their best efforts to make friends, to engage in volunteer activities, etc. Please be aware of that & don’t make them all feel worse by writing as if everyone (or maybe just everyone who “matters”?) led busy fulfilled lives.

Wow. That stopped me dead in my tracks. It’s a challenge, as an advice columnist, to not make assumptions about the situation beyond the information given (e.g., not to assume that someone who writes “my husband” must be a woman). And it’s a challenge to remember that people have very different resources when it comes to money, education, time, health, a social network, and so on. I’m neither complaining nor patting myself on the back by saying this: it’s just the way it is, and I’m immensely lucky to have a job where I get to reflect on my own privileges and hone my awareness of the situations of others.

But this one — no. I’ve been working for five years now on the notion that, male or female, rich or poor, child-free or child-enhanced, educated or not, healthy or ill, everyone is “busy.” Maybe the busy-ness is wonderful and enriching: too many good friends to see, too many community activities, too many exciting work projects. Maybe it’s not: too many doctors’ appointments, too much overtime to make rent, too long a commute because you can’t afford to live where you work.

I have some thinking to do.

In the meantime, readers and friends, has my “oh we’re all so busy busy busy” rhetoric ever made you feel marginalized? What are your thoughts on this?

And my deepest thanks to the person who called me out.