I loved a previous commenter's analogy to rock climbing. This won't really improve on it, but give a slightly different perspective. Watch bridge players sometime. When dealt a perfect hand, there's satisfaction in winning. But when dealt a really crappy hand and someone actually manages to finagle a win, there is REAL satisfaction--even happiness.

My own life has been a series of crappy hands and great hands and average hands, and I've dealt with my cards sometimes way better than it seemed like I could have, sometimes worse, and sometimes pretty much the way anyone would. Sometimes I played them perfectly according to the rules. Sometimes I haven't. And following those rules has sometimes led to a winning game, and sometimes not, because even when you know what your own cards are, you don't know what the other hands are. The times I've been happiest haven't been when I was dealt all the aces--they've been when I negotiated a very tricky hand and succeeded or at least fended off a total disaster. When I've been truly happiest in my life, I've been pretty pleasant to be around, because real happiness is contagious, and genuinely happy people want others to be happy and are focused on the happy and good elements of our friends and our friendships, not the negative. Looking back I can see times when I was pretty smug and judgmental. Those times I was not genuinely happy, but struggling to ward off my own fears of losing badly, and clinging to rules before I really understood that the game itself, not the winning or losing at the end but the negotiation of each unpredictable hand, is the part that gives us happiness or sadness.

Choosing one bridge master and following his rules every step of the way gives one a system for winning, but not a system for joyfully playing the game. Little by little coming up with your own system, working it out delicately with your partner, and coming up with lovely little insights of your own is where real happiness comes from. With luck and maybe a few unexpected hands, the LW will come to that realization herself.

Men are vile pigs. And they have been waited on hand and foot by their adoring mommies for umpteen years...I'll never forget the brilliant woman on Oprah years ago who said her husband just dropped his underpants on the floor wherever he took them off, walked away, expected her to pick them up.

I remember reading that Jackie Kennedy left her clothes on the floor, too, to be picked up by someone else. And I do believe she was a woman.

We humans are individuals, and every marriage between individuals is different. Reading these responses is like reading different answers to a Rorschach test--most people are bringing their own personal success or failure at marriage, their own personal standards of household and laundry cleanliness, their own personal anger at or love for women or men, their own sense of responsibility for the children of family members, into their analysis. A few people have giving constructive suggestions about techniques for simplifying laundry or for "outsourcing" it. Frankly, Cary's response was pretty much on target, and pretty much said it all.

To me, the whole point of being liberal is that one truly believes in the democratic values of accepting the good in everyone, and one truly believes that everyone has a right to their beliefs and opinions, regardless of how much we may disagree with them. So perhaps the greatest test of true liberalism is whether we can still love the conservatives in our midst.

Okay, so a big sportsguy commits some crimes, lies about it to his bosses, and may be sentenced up to five years in prison. Is this too much of a punishment? Let's compare it to another case I'm intimately familiar with. My 54-year-old sister, a white woman from the lower middle class, was convicted of embezzlement in May and got a five-year sentence to a maximum security facility in Dwight, Illinois. She grew up in an abusive home with a violent but usually absentee father and an abusive, psychopath mother. The newspaper accounts quoted the prosecuting attorney saying she had lied more than any defendant he'd ever heard in his long career, but still. Five years in maximum security for theft? Almost two months after her incarceration, she was put into a lower-security facility, and following the normal course of imprisonment in Illinois will be eligible for parole in 2 1/2 years, when she is 57. In the face of that, I don't think 5 years is excessive for dog fighting and the sociopathic techniques of killing dogs that Vick has pleaded guilty to.

Will he be able to resume his career? I know my sister won't--the one she embezzled money from was her boss, and it's going to be darned hard for her to find another job that entrusts her with money. I suspect a lot of people have trouble finding work, much less multi-million dollar contracts, after getting out of jail, except for politicians. Maybe Vick should have aspired to that.