* I am a 40 year old woman who has never been married and who has only had several boyfriends in her lifetime. I am very untrusting and I have problems with intimacy. I was injured time and time again by my family of origin, physically and emotionally, but now they are all gone and I keep myself sequestered, in essence. And I eat for comfort. I don’t find relationships or others a comfort. So I am obese. All this, and then I’m incredibly lonely on top of it and getting lonelier each year. Any good books you can suggest? Or good people to see? Worse than that, even, is that I am getting ready to go back out to remote Alaska for another 9 months.

Will you be so remote that no good psychotherapist exists within miles? Check www.psychologytoday.com or www.aasect.org or even the area Yellow Pages. A therapy group would be ideal if any exists there. I don’t think one can learn to trust from reading a book and I know of none that will be sure to inspire you to either accept your body as it is or get yourself into shape. I suggest that you resolve to make a friend or two. Actively look. Extend yourself to any even vaguely likely person, female or male. Loneliness can be alleviated by intimacy and intimacy can only be achieved by taking risks. Intimacy = into me see. One has to take the risk of showing who is there behind the mask and hoping that the gesture will be reciprocated. Be a good listener. Be interested. By taking baby steps with your people skills you will get some wins under your belt and you can build on that.

* In the professional literature I presume you read, do you have inside info on any good news coming up? Will there be a female Viagra? A new and easy birth control method for women or for men? An early warning test for breast or prostate cancer? I‘m so tired of reading medical doom stories in my morning paper on hearing dire warnings on the evening news. Even summer tomatoes are causing worldwide scares. What do you know that the general public doesn’t?

There are dozens of eager reporters scouring the same professional journals that I read and many more far more esoteric. Anything even remotely promising or exciting or even scandalous will appear in your morning paper, TV news and even on your computer desk top news bulletins before the ink is dry on the scientific report. A weekly columnist is just not geared for breaking news, I’m afraid.

* My cat loving friends tell me there is definitely a “kitten season” and times when there is hardly a young cat to be found at shelters or adoption centers. If this is true, is this anything like the boom in baby births 9 months after a citywide blackout? Why would births of any creature go in cycles, if they do?

The boom in babies after an electrical failure is undoubtedly true because two people stuck at home unable to read, watch TV or even play checkers, turn to the obvious to amuse themselves. (Although why they can‘t find their usual form of birth control in the dark is beyond me.) Apparently, spring‘s warm weather and longer days produce hormonal changes in cats that send them into heat. Some global warming experts suggest that heat cycles of cats will increase in the future, so if the melting icecaps don’t do is in, we may drown in avalanches of kittens.