How you feel is how you feel. As long as you're not screaming how bored you are, assigning neurotic motivations, or shredding manuscripts, you have a right to your feelings, and without guilt about being selfish, which is a word people use to say "I don't like that. Shut up." You're from a family of born and trained communicators. You're not going to shut up, and you have a right not to feel guilty about it.

You may be glad of those manuscripts when you are older, and I can predict that a time will come when you have questions you'd love to have answered and no one surviving to ask them of. That is just how things are as time passes.

Now, if people are casting you in the role of auditor, not creator, you have a right to speak up. You have a right to tell your stories and get them respected or, if they're not respected, to write them anyhow. Coming from a family of nonwriters (who thought my work was "weird" -- a fatal term in my family), I think that being from a family of writers would be nice.

Start writing, if you're not already. Be SEEN writing. Don't offer to show your stuff. Maybe they'll ask. If they don't, you're still writing about your own stories, and you don't have to share unless you feel like it. Or, you may decide you want an external focus: writing for a group, for a blog, for publication. You'll probably get, as I did, "are you saying horrible things about US?" Or you may get indifference, or pride.

But you're right to believe that these stories should continue into the next generation. Cut yourself some slack and some distance and write without guilt. I was guilted out of writing from when I was about 12 to 24. My mother wanted a normal, happy girl and got a writer. You've got a lot of writers.

Writing, in your family, is power. Aren't you saying, in effect, that you want some of the power and to take up the motherlines yourself? Grab 'em and TUG.

I was delighted to see Ms. Lipman's article, especially her acknowledgment that the Post-Feminists jumped to the conclusion that Feminists were "strident" and out of date. I have been hoping for this. I have also been expecting it, and I'm very thankful.

One of the things that Post-Feminists like Ms. Lipman can still learn from Second-Wave feminists is that we insisted not just on advancement, but on respect. We got called lots of names for it. In the past few weeks on Salon, I've been called senile, insane, depressed, miserable, all sorts of things that are the projections (their only projections) of angry trolls. I never traded my dignity for perkiness, never mocked the Post-Feminists for thinking I was antiquated, and did my work. Many of them have surpassed many of the things I was proud to accomplish. I am proud of that: it's something they have yet to achieve, but now I think they might.

I don't think it's fair to blame this loss of respect on post-9/11 conditions. I think the Post-Feminists need to acknowledge their own responsibility and accept that there is a price to pay for whatever positions they achieve. If wearing a skirt with the slit open in an interview is the price of the job, there are consequences. I might have chosen to do the same thing, but you can bet I'd have shown up in pantsuits or longer skirts thereafter.

I think 9/11 made us more aware of the heroism in many otherwise anonymous men, and that is a good thing. But their virtue doesn't denigrate any women: we can take pride in their humanity as we take pride in our own.

I think some of the Post-Feminists took for granted hard-won rights. Eternal vigilance isn't just for civics classes. And, as the economy deteriorated and people like Lisa Belkin started to croon about opting out, some ceased their vigilance.

It may have been inevitable. Now, there's some ground to be made up.

Granted, women have made strides in the 30 or so years I've been active in the Women's Movement that I did not expect, and it's logical to assume that some people (male AND female) are suffering culture shock. But while you're climbing, respect yourself rather than simply marketing yourself or assuming that everyone shares your views. Be what you'd like to seem, and if someone treats you disrespectfully, ball that person on it. With that attitude, you'd probably lose the job or whatever anyhow.

You have nothing else to lose, however, but being in bad faith.

I don't see "cankle" talk as progress. I see Hillary's position as progress, but she's Second Wave too.

Was "Bread and Circuses" a third-season episode? If it wasn't, it should have been.

NY City Opera once had plans to do a STAR TREK opera. Talk about space opera! That was what -I- wanted to see. Hell, I wanted to write it. Some of the basses are big enough to be Klingons anyhow, and Klingon opera was a staple of the franchise starting with TNG.

I rather enjoyed last summer's film. While it wasn't particularly kind to the Romulans and did something that shocked me out of my pointy ears, I forgave almost all of it for the wonderful moment in which Nimoy confronts Quinto, Old and Young Spock. At that point, the screen blurred, and I'm waiting for the DVDs to see it again.

Nimoy acted everyone off the screen.

And I still wish they'd do a real opera. The audience reaction alone would be a complete and total joy.

I'm reminded of the late Sir Rudolf Bing's aphorism about critics: they're failed artists.