The secret of living well, outlined simply

The secret of living well, outlined simply

Once you start fiddling with your phone, you blend right in.

There were people all around me, and one by one they were identified by the physician’s assistants who came out from behind the implacably closed door.

Every time the door opened, I looked up, a hopeful expression in my eyes, only to have the assistant pick out another person in the lounge area.

I had finished texting everyone I could think of and was now surfing Facebook.

[...] 45 minutes later, I went up to the desk and described my plight.

Years of spiritual work, I think, coupled with intense therapy and practice of anger-softening techniques.

Some people have described embracing maturity as a way to hasten personal growth; that, sadly, doesn’t work for me.

Whenever I open my mouth to say something intemperate, I hear the ghostly echoes of one of those notes that copy editors routinely send along.

Latterly, it’s come to mean either (a) a person (usually male) who abuses his power in sundry unscrupulous and creepy ways, or (b) what used to be called a 'cad’ or a 'bounder.’

The idea for the health plan was not original with Henry J. Kaiser, who was better known as a shipbuilder than as a paving contractor.

[...] he was hardly 'jumped up’; when the Kaiser Permanente health plan was started, he’d been in business almost 35 years.

[...] all that begs the question of whether you’re a soulless cyborg’ is meaningless.

Try the direct, forceful statement: 'You are a soulless cyborg.’

[...] by the time that tape stops running through my head, I am halfway to the elevator, brilliant whimsical rejoinders lost in a maze of formalistic objections.

[...] yet I am happy — every time a copy editor has talked me down from the edge of malice, it’s been a good thing.

Really, I always try to put patients first.

Thank God I have a copy editor perched somewhere in my brain stem.