Does your future husband's last name tell your story? I suppose it could, but not as well as your name does now. You're old enough to be a high school teacher, and even if you're still quite young, there must be something of authority about you. You've lived, you have a history and a heritage. Yes, your name is your father's, but it's YOUR father's, not someone else's father's name.

Your name means something and as a teacher, especially in a high school, where if the kids like you they will drop off the title Miss or Ms. or Mr. altogether and just call you by your last name, your last name means a lot.

I teach high school in somewhat rural Georgia, where my ridiculously ethnic, unusual-for-these-parts last name trips up my students daily. It's its own history and cultural lesson. Sometimes I get tired of pronouncing it and spelling it, but that's okay. Living here has made me 100% sure that I don't want to change my name.

Maybe your last name isn't unusual or especially cultural. Maybe your last name was foisted on your ancestors by slave owners or by some lazy bureaucrat at Ellis Island. But it's your name, and if you keep it, then when people hear your name, they really know something about YOU, not the man you married.

Plus, if you change your name, then you have do all the paperwork to change it on all your legal documents and your teaching certificate and blah blah blah.

McClelland is about half-right in this article. Many of the people who've left the midwest in the last 50 years have done so because the south is now hospitable. But some of us, particularly those of us with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), left the north because the winter was NEVER hospitable to us. I grew up shoveling snow and de-icing my car in northern Illinois. I hated it! I hated the bone-chilling winds, bulky winter coats and darkness at 4 pm for months on end.

As soon as I was 18, I applied to a college waaay down south and left. I love the south: sunbathing in November, light at 5:30 in December, flowers in February. And you know what? In many places down here, it doesn't get much hotter than the 95 degrees and humid summers in Illinois. But the south IS air-conditioned. It's expected. I'm a teacher, and I'd much rather teach at an air-conditioned school down here than a burning-up-in-May school building in the midwest.

Most of my family is still up north, so I went back up for one year to be near them and try to come to peace with winter. In January, cold, depressed, and sun-starved, I moved back down south. So I guess as a northern liberal, I'm betraying my people? But as someone with SAD, wild horses couldn't drag me back to the area that got 40 inches of snow last winter!

Here's where McClelland is wrong. If all these liberal northern snowbirds are moving down south, shouldn't the south be getting MORE liberal? I actually think that the south IS getting more liberal, and it IS because of the Yankees. Things are shaken up right now with the American population--I think this is a reason for the red state-blue state fight. All of us blue staters are coming into red state territory and now we're pissing them off.

Also, the DNC has to get their sh*t together and show Bubba and Billy Jo Bob that the Democrats are the ones on the side of the little guy. I have no idea how a bunch of country club, "rich to me is anyone who makes more than 5 mil" old Republican white dudes became attractive to a bunch of poor, downtrodden young people in the south, but it's happened. And it wasn't because of air conditioning.

An early letter related the juvenile quality of the Republican pranksters and asked: how do we get them to take things seriously?

I teach juveniles, the worst kind, high school freshmen. I love them to death, but there is a contingent of them who are too busy making fart jokes to worry about their grades. They don't get their work done, regardless of whether they have the ability to or not (and some don't; they've been socially promoted to high school). They have no thought of the future. (Much like the Republicans: Global warming is a farce! Spend spend spend us further into a deficit! Borrow money from China---we'll be dead by the time someone has to pay it back!)

My lecturing this group of students (and I'm a blonde, buxom chick) did nothing, so one of my senior male students gave the fart-lobbing freshmen a heart-to-heart: "What you do here effects you for the next four years and even beyond that." Little or no improvement.

I handed out quarter grades today. The fart-lobbing students were eerily quiet; nearly all are failing. I don't want to fail anybody, and they know that. That's why I warned them so vociferously. Not one of them complained about their grades.

So in that sense, my freshmen are more mature than the prankster Republicans: eventually, even my students took responsibility for their actions.

I have yet to see a Republican take responsibility for the messes of the Bush administration:

-Two wars (both losing propositions)

-An economy in shambles

-Crumbling pension plans

-More and more Americans lacking health care coverage

-More and more Americans losing their homes

-An atrocious international reputation

-Bad relations with Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, and other countries with scary weapons

-and MY personal favorite, the No Child Left Behind Act (More commonly called "No Teacher Left Standing")