LW, send your kid to summer camp. Then you will have some time to yourself in the daytime for solitude, novel-writing or socialization. It will also help for your kid to establish relationships with other kids, as you already mentioned that you plan playdates weeks in advance, so I'm assuming your kid doesn't get to socialize much. You say that socializing drains you of your energy, but I think you are just constantly tired from having to take care of your 6-year-old. If you send your kid to summer camp, then you can really devote quality time to him when he is at home, rather then just getting annoyed at him the whole day. You may also find that socializing with your friends will be less stressful and tiring for you.

As for your own dilemma, I think a big part of it is your perceived lack of success in novel-writing. Maybe I'm being presumptuous here, but I think having an audience is important to you. As a struggling novelist, you cannot reap the rewards of reaching a wider audience and being potentially helpful. Maybe it's time for you to reconsider what the top priorities for your career is. Is a compromise possible, whereby you write freelance articles and continue to work on your novels? You could also consider other forms of writing that can help you connect with others, such as blogging.

I understand that spending my time yammering on about a guy I can't even vote for is even more of a waste of time

NO! The American election is about damage control for Canadians. We can't afford to let Harper have another Republican president to follow around. On the grander scheme of things, it's also damage control for the rest of the world.

Oh yes, finding out who the Salon trolls are. An important rite of passage for all Salon readers. Welcome.

Most news networks are losing viewers even as population is growing, so they are catering to smaller and smaller groups of people.

Firstly, thanks, jhudson2, for your excellent response to berlet98.

As for you, berlet98, you said that I did not counter your claim that detainees at GITMO received "medical treatment, the freedom to perform their religious observances five times daily, and the three square meals they get daily." I deemed that unnecessary as it seemed to me quite obvious to anyone that this claim would be totally falsified by the fact that these detainees were exposed to a program of systematic torture. If one has such a low regard for people so as to permit brutal torture to be enacted on them, then one certainly would not bother to give them the superior treatment you claim they receive.

Consider the case of Saudi detainee al-Qahtani:

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fa_fact?currentPage=all

Obviously al-Qahtani did not receive medical treatment, the right to religious observances and three square meals a day.

And before you go bashing the ACLU, without even entertaining the question of whether or not it is a legitimate and respectable institution, if you actually used the link I provided then you would see that it was to a page of documents that the CIA released to ACLU. Thus those were CIA documents, not ACLU documents.

Oh and btw, I am a woman.

Berlet98- I'm both amused and horrified that at this point people are still so ignorant so as to believe that the prisoners at GITMO are actually treated well. Prisoners at GITMO are systematically tortured and debased, and guards are told that anything goes.

List of torture documents released to the ACLU:

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/torturefoia.html

noah- I think you must be referring to the International Criminal Court at the Hague, whose jurisdiction, not surprisingly, the US doesn't recognize:

http://www.iccnow.org/?mod=usaicc