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Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  Photo: tawalker Several weeks ago, I was editing together some video footage for a home movie and was surprised to discover how irritated, negative, and just plain mean I sounded when talking to my wife. I remember most of the interactions that were filmed but not any of the feelings I was quite clearly projecting. In one segment, my wife was trying out a tripod and having trouble figuring out how to use it correctly. “You’re holding it wrong,” I snapped sharply. “That’s not right at all!” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Steve Keys Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs (of course), and scores of others—all part of the new and wonderful ways we can now connect with one another electronically, each with its own culture and unique set of rules. In one sense, the planet has never been more interconnected. And yet, this interconnectedness, while wonderful, hasn’t come without cost. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: LaPrimaDonna How many patients have I known over the years who’ve found themselves caught in the quicksand that is caring for a chronically ill loved one? Too many to count, so I’ll recount just one. Mrs. S is an elderly woman married to a retired university law professor, who has been slowly losing a battle with dementia. Once a witty, intelligent, and self-deprecating delight of a man, over the years I’ve been caring for him, he’s gradually changed into a cantankerous, vitriolic, shell of his former self, now barely able to remember the day or month, much less the year. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  A reputation is an animal designed by committee: you give birth to it, but the way it develops depends on the actions of others. Your reputation lives a very real existence apart from you, representing the collective mental construct everyone but you shares about you, a construct based partially on your own actions but also on the perceptions others have about others’ perceptions of your actions. We only ever have influence over our reputation—never control—as is the case with all things external to us, but it remains one of our most precious assets (far more important than any one job, house, car, or even, some would argue, money). Just why it’s so important and how to positively influence it is the subject of this post. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  “What do you want for dinner?” I asked my wife.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “What do you want?”
“How about hamburgers?”
“No, I don’t want hamburgers.”
“What do you want then?”
“I don’t know…pasta.” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Changing another person’s mind is literally one of the hardest things to do in the world. Think of how many conversations you’ve ever had in which one of the participants decided the other was right and abandoned their previous views altogether. It almost never happens.
Why? Because even though ideas flit in and out of our heads like mosquitoes, ideas that are believed cling with electromagnetic power. Once we believe an idea we develop an emotional connection to it, not to mention a commitment to it—as if to a person—and often become attached to it with a strength we often don’t realize has little to do with the merit of the belief itself. And once we’re attached to anything—whether a person, place, thing, or idea—giving it up is extremely hard. We will always grieve over a loss, no matter how small. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife. I wasn’t surprised. He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason: his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.
Or so he’d described to me. Though he’d managed, over the years, to paint a clear picture of her personality and character, I couldn’t personally verify any of it. I’d never met her. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  I am the eldest of four boys. In 2002, my second-youngest brother and his wife announced they were going to have a baby. The news absolutely floored me. This would be the first baby of our generation and represented a significant life change for us all.
I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages and transitions and found myself wondering why I wasn’t married yet. I’d always felt I’d wanted to be and had certainly had a number of opportunities. But I’d passed them all up for one reason or another and at 34 remained single.
Learning one of my brothers was going to be a father triggered something in me—a sense of urgency, a greater interest in moving my life forward, a need to shake things up—I’m not sure what. But the next morning I began a campaign to find my wife. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Several months ago, my wife and I began toilet training our son, Cruise (the Montessori method is to train toddlers to use the toilet as early as possible). We’d diligently put him on a small potty in his bathroom as often as we could drag ourselves into doing it and repeat over and over to him, “Pee pee on the potty, Cruise. Pee pee on the potty.” In order to get him to remain sitting on it so that he might actually pee into it, we’d read books to him, which he loves more than almost anything.
Like many toddlers, when his bedtime arrives, he often prefers to stay up playing with his parents. One night as we were laying him down in his crib, he surprised us by grabbing his diaper with his hand and exclaiming, “Pee pee on potty. Pee pee on potty” in a plaintive, expectant voice. But we knew he didn’t need to pee as we’d just taken a freshly wet diaper off him. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: said&done My student’s voice trembled as she answered my question. “How do you think you’ve done so far?” I’d asked her. We’d been together on the general medicine inpatient ward for two weeks—the midpoint of the rotation—and as was my usual custom I was giving her feedback on her performance by first asking her to rate her performance herself. Continue reading…
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