Another option you may want to look into is changing positions within your company. Most large companies have internal job postings that employees can apply for. If you are really at the end of your rope, perhaps you can make a lateral move to another department and escape the dreaded Olga.

Of course, there's likely to be someone in the new department who gets on your nerves as much as Olga does, but at least you'll have a change of scenery.

To quote Dan Savage.

You went out of the house without wearing a burka? You're just asking to be raped if you don't use common sense and cover yourself from head to toe. It's all the fault of feminism. Men would never commit rape if foolish women didn't have delusions of equality.

And they say irony is dead!

News to me.

Seriously, though, I'd rather hear about what Angela Merkel has been doing while sitting on said butt at her desk in the Chancellor's office than see a pic of it.

It was in Division III, which is pretty laid back compared to the other college divisions. One year we only had four girls go out for swimming, so we practiced and competed with the men's team. If another team had girls, we swam against them; if not, we swam against the guys. Didn't win very much, but then again none of us were exactly Olympic caliber. In the conference championships, we competed against women from other schools in the conference. Overall it worked out OK.

So the solution seems simple to me. If a school doesn't have a women's team, women should be able to compete on the men's team. If a school doesn't have a men's team, men should be able to compete on the women's team. If there's both women's and men's teams, play on the team that's appropriate for your gender. And if a whole bunch of players of the opposite sex go out for a sport, start a new team for them.

They are already working against the anti-HPV vaccine -- apparently, scaring kids about STDs is more important than preventing thousands of cervical cancer deaths and saving millions of dollars. Now, a gel that protects women from HIV is on the horizon. Does anyone really think that they will cheer at the prospect of limiting the spread of this terrible disease? More likely, they will denounce the gel for promoting sexual license and work behind the scenes to keep it from reaching the market. After all, fear of AIDS is one of the big guns in their arsenal against sex. If the male-to-female spread of AIDS is virtually eliminated, how can they possibly terrify high school girls into abstinence?

Software billionaires benefit enormously from cheap Indian IT labor, whether H1-B or outsourced. (How do you think they got to be billionaires in the first place?) Cutting a check to an organization that supports American IT workers is simply not going to happen.

Take your kids to concerts, theater, ballets, expensive restaurants and the like when they're old enough to sit still through the entire thing. You'll be doing both yourself and your kids a favor. If you want to give your kids a dose of culture, most cities have outdoor concerts and theater, "tiny tots" concerts, and the like where it's perfectly appropriate to bring infants and very young children.

Personally, I find obnoxious adults to be far more irritating than crying kids.

I read an opinion piece where a mother worried that her sons would grow up to make bad choices and commit acts of violence like the guys she encountered when she was younger. After all, they were innocent little boys once, too, with mothers who loved them and never dreamed that they'd turn into appalling, hateful young men.

I must have skipped over the part where she declared her undying hatred of all things male and universally condemned all men (including her own kids) as future rapists.

We can do things for the sheer pleasure of doing them, not because they are hip or punk or alt or cool or whatever. We can indulge our inner nerd, inner child, inner diva, inner Napoleon, or whatever other inner identities we may have without having to worry about what the popular kids think. Isn't that the point of being an adult?

Do what makes you happy and don't listen to the consumer culture and talking heads. (Our children think we are fossils anyhow, no matter what we do, so don't even worry about them.) Be an individual; don't worry about being individualistic. Otherwise you'll end up like Hal Niedzviecki!

Perhaps the LW isn't the passionate love of his life. Although she's a great girlfriend, she isn't the One. If she was, he'd want to keep the flame alive: he'd plan to go to the Arctic with her despite personal hardship, propose a long-distance relationship, etc. But there is no mention of that in the letter.

BF might see her Arctic adventure as a way to painlessly end things. Maybe he doesn't want to stand in the way of her career or promise her the kind of love that he just can't deliver. Either way, he's letting her go on many different levels.

Apparently this has replaced baseball steroids and missing white girls as our favorite national distraction.

"So, Mr. Press Secretary, when will the President withdraw troops from Iraq?"

"The President is the decider and he decides when to --- Look! Over there! That guy is singing the national anthem in Spanish. Get him!!!!"

Ignore her and she'll eventually go away.