Rather than face a horrible, lingering death, some AIDS patients say they plan to end their lives. For them, it's a way of keeping control. NEW YORK - During the day, Joe Miller stays busy helping AIDS patients. At night, the catheter delivering a medley of...

You swore you'd be best pals forever, but it went sour. And the pain is very real. You can't think of the person without a sickening lurch in your gut. You alternate between angrily wishing you'd never met the Judas and agonizing over what went wrong. It hurts when...

Maybe there's another way. Moderation Management, a renegade program for alcoholics, wants to teach problem drinkers how to control how much they imbibe. You enjoy drinking alcohol. Or at least you thought you did. Now you wonder about those hangovers, that string of...

Two scientists have bottled competing products that are supposed to enhance romance--or at least make you feel good. With names like Realm and Athena, they certainly sound sexy, like something you'd see advertised in the back of a magazine--and we're not talking about...

Finances: Consumers are surfing from one credit card to another, dodging interest and racking up perks. But one false move and . . . wipeout! Time was major credit cards were all about the same--standard interest rates and fees, used mostly for travel and...

Book Is Source of Inspiration to Followers, Who Meet in Groups to Learn Ways to Attain Spiritual Enlightenment FULLERTON--In their quest for enlightenment, Southern Californians have tried est, hung out with swamis, turned themselves into yoga pretzels and eaten...

Health: Procedures to widen and lengthen the penis are gaining favor and sparking debate over necessity and safety. Between operations at his Culver City office, Dr. Melvyn Rosenstein, dressed in surgical greens, leans back and discusses his booming business: penis...

Eating disorders have long been associated with women. But men also succumb to self-hatred and the battle to look good. Most everyone has heard stories or seen made-for-TV movies about women and girls who starve themselves into barely walking skeletons or gorge on...

Relationships: More O.C. women, and some men, are investigating backgrounds to make sure a match is not just a game. In 1992, Anna--a divorced Orange County management consultant--started a serious relationship with a high-powered executive she'd met five years...

Environment: Armed with pillowcases, an 'ambulance' and 10 other women, Helene Aylon traveled the nation to save 'endangered Earth.' NEW YORK--It's a twisty tale that spans two coasts and a dozen years, a massive mission involving an artist, an ambulance, 2,000...

They relived war stories about working under potentially dangerous conditions for as little as $1.25 an hour. They recalled the constant uniform and grooming checks, and how their work restricted their personal life with the demanding, long hours. But mainly they...

A Woman Finds Treasure in the Trash of Balboa Island She came riding through the pre-dawn drizzle into the soft glow of the Balboa Island alley street lamp. Her knee bumped into the white plastic shopping bag that swung from the handlebars as she pedaled down the...

Mining's in His Blood, but It Hasn't Claimed His Soul ORANGE - Gold fever. A sickness that can strike otherwise normal people to cause loss of all rational judgment. An affliction that makes thieves out of people who otherwise wouldn't steal, turns country against...

Forty married couples with problems checked into an Irvine hotel one Friday night. Some were combatants, just steps from divorce. Others thought their marriages were good, but they could be better. Forty-four hours later, every relationship had changed and the couples...

Books: British scholar Rosalind Miles cringes at the public whining of Charles and Diana. Both, she says, would have been better off following Elizabeth I's dignified example. NEW YORK--If Elizabeth I had been faced with the likes of the wayward Princess Diana, she'd...

She's 26, a just-divorced mother of two young children and the only child of celebrities who separated when she was 4. Her mother is an actress. Her father, who by most reports died more than 15 years ago, was addicted to drugs. After a turbulent adolescence marked by...

On the sultry summer morning I turned 40, a package arrived from my mother. Inside was a book sporting a cover photo of a beatific woman in her 40s. Within its pages was her account--and those of many others--about entering life's prime time. These serene and...

600 Women Gather in Irvine to Talk About Their Recovery From Crippling Addictions IRVINE--Addiction used to be thought of as a male phenomenon. No one talked about, or even saw, the women who hid in their houses drinking gallons of vodka, popping handfuls of Valium...

East Coast Publisher Sol Stein Comes West to Nurture Young Writers Except for the Beverly Hills Hotel and a few obscure book tour stops, New Yorker Sol Stein had seen little of California before 1989. But the man who founded the New York publishing house Stein &...

New English Tudor Has the Illusion of Being Weathered ANAHEIM--Seven years ago, Tony Baxter drove by a house in the hills and fell in love with its basic floor plan. Although he couldn't afford to buy the home, the then chief designer of Disneyland's Splash Mountain...

Ranks of O.C. Children Turn Baby-Sitting Into Certified Business Time was if you needed a baby-sitter and couldn't grab Grandma, you'd rustle some quarters out of your apron, set out a bag of potato chips and call over the fence to the kid next door. But in today's...

In a world where access to services is gained through a series of secret passwords and log-ons, forgetfulness can spell D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R Back in the '60s, life was as easy as 1-2-3. The only number I had to remember was my telephone number. Today, our heads must store...

ZIP codes, area codes, bus routes and freeways. It's become a digital domain. When did this become the sum of our existence? Just a few decades ago, we identified everything from ourselves to our roads only by proper names. Now, complex numbering systems define and...

Americans are spending less and less time reading books. But experts say we'd better start if we want want to keep ourselves . . .Intellectually Fit Think you can't afford the time and energy to read books? Think again, because it may be that you can't afford not to....

Consumers: A carefully planned garage sale can lead to greater profits, says the co-author of a how-to-sell book. Every Saturday morning, hundreds of paper plates and jagged pieces of cardboard sprout on trees and telephone poles in towns from La Habra to Laguna...

Order: People waste time searching for misplaced items yet resist cleaning up, expert says, claiming that they don't have time. For many people, a walk through their disorganized home is usually accompanied by an irritating voice inside their head that screams "slob,...

Shark Island Yacht Club hopes to lure more powerboaters to hop aboard NEWPORT BEACH--After years of the daily grind, the last thing some people want to do is trim sails and haul halyards. So at Shark Island Yacht Club, captains from every walk of industry join...

Sitting in a downtown Manhattan bistro snacking on trendy breads, she looks and acts the stereotype of a healthy Southern California transplant: blond, blue-eyed and pretty, effervescent in manner and eager to swap life stories. It's only when she stands and walks...

When national drug manufacturers can't provide the right medicine, local doctors turn to Santa Ana pharmacist William Garvey. And he does what any neighborhood chemist could do at the turn of the century -- he concocts his own "A lot of times, patients can't handle or...

Homeless: Woman's presence in Corona del Mar is a stark reminder ofhow another segment of the population lives. NEWPORT BEACH--She sits on a bench, a stone's throw from the million-dollar beachfront homes, a black homeless woman wrapped in a heavy wool blanket,...