I don't think my father considered allowing a teenager to follow his dreams was necessarily good parenting, or even parenting. I think he thought I was a teenager with teenage impulses. I'm pretty sure he knew that if he just let me follow those impulses, it would wind up being very expensive and perhaps even life-endangering.

Communicating with teenage girls is easy unless you're an adult, and then it's like having someone take a pair of pliers and, one-by-one, yank off your fingernails through your ears.

My philosophy on snow skiing is that there are less expensive ways to fall down a mountain. Yet every couple of years, I go on a ski trip for the same reason that women will have multiple children - they simply forget how much it hurts.

I've tried several diets over the past couple of years - not because I need to lose weight, but because my pants are trying to cut me in two.