Improved family leave policies are all to the good, especially when I see how frantic my colleagues often are.

And I was certainly grateful for the law behind me when I had to go home to assist my (now-deceased) mother.

But with current lean-and-mean staffing, while family people are off doing what they need to do in their private lives, SOMEONE's got to absorb that work.

What provision will be made for the single and/or childfree? We don't benefit from the improved family relationship, we share in the work, and there seems not to be a countervailing benefit for us.

I'm not asking for bread and circuses, but for equity: perhaps cafeteria benefits, or a discount rate on long-term-care, or a sabbatical as a retention incentive. We are not a group that can be used until it's used up.

In my experience, people who have a lot of money and power take it on themselves to make some of the most awful, un-funny jokes possible. Much humor contains hostility; this certainly does. But it also contains a bit of the "I can make this joke, and you have to laugh because I AM THE PRESIDENT."

Heh heh heh.

I'm laughing.

Now, will he please GO AWAY?

I remember my time as a caregiver. Office work was much easier, as you say.

For the rest of it, I'm in complete agreement.

Perhaps a tax-subsidy for temps hired so that the work doesn't come crashing down on everyone?

The cross-training is an excellent idea, but if you don't have time to do your work, someone else's work AND train, it's a bit of a moot point. I'd like to see it made feasible.

And, returning to the point on which we somewhat disagree -- the "why do they get to take time off," my caveat is assumptions of entitlement. It's about to blizzard; the family people need to get home first; X-time is Family Vacation Time; you had plans? Tough." Or even, if one needs family leave oneself (as I did), "What are YOU taking it for?"

It needs to be said that most people do NOT behave this way. But those who do leave a bad taste in the mouth.

The United States Armed Forces takes oath to the Constitution.

If Bush pulled this sort of stunt, I have more faith than skepticism that they would do their duty.

Anyone got some Tri-Ox compound to give my Red Sox in Denver?

Isn't it nice for Alice that she gets to devote her life to her chosen form of writing and eating? It does sound wonderful. It sounds delicious. But it also sounds highly specialized, costly in some parts of the country, and, frankly, when she questions people's priorities, it shades over into elitism, which generates animosity.

The food's fine. The life-style judgments need to be toned down along with the other life-style snobberies.

You know, it was much easier when people simply high-hatted other people about money in the bank or bloodlines. These days, the lifestyle snobs offer conflicting ways of trying to make us dissatisfied.

While some people have -no- eggs at all and would be glad of any, we have people debating different types of egg production (ethical, grass-raised, or whatever). And then, there are the vegans, who won't eat them at all; and the shifting views of the medical community about cholesterol and eggs, and how many one -should- eat.

EACH of these groups thinks its way is best and how lovely it would be, to say nothing of better for health, the planet, and general esthetics, if everyone did what this group said. To protest this is called defensive and hostile. But advocating it seems to generate a sense of moral and aesthetic superiority. To me, that sounds like a double standard. I don't give you feedback (except when I'm fed up -- on whatever sort of food); spare me your opinions of my lifestyle, unless I ask you.

Health is one thing. The sort of self-gratulatory fastidiousness I see in this sort of lifestyle snobbery, accompanied by sniffs at the accommodations Some People (like me) have to make, is bound to cause annoyance. It's simply too precious for words and the comments about just adjusting priorities are disingenuous. Repeat after me, Alice: it's not that easy.

To say that a working person's doing his or her best to produce nourishing, delicious, and practicable meals just isn't enough and that such a person needs to change his or her ways -- sorry, I call that spinach (locally garden grown, with nice compost and no pesticides, served in season), and I say the hell with it.

I am really tired of feedback delivered from the heights of other people's shibboleths. That's probably a mixed metaphor, but, in or out of season, that's tough.

Isn't it helpful that all these disenfranchised (BUT with six-figure incomes), disempowered, abused, disrespected, and otherwise nobody-loves-me-everybody-hates-me and I-don't-get-any-respect gentlement with ready access to canned citations have been able to come together here and form such a comforting consciousness-raising society and gripe session for themselves?

I doubt women would be permitted the same freedom on an MRA board.

OTOH, I don't think women go in for circle jerks, ideological or otherwise.

Ah. One of the anonymice whose name is Legion.

Legionaries tended to be much braver, however.

Thank you for the website. Is that where you all get your quotes?

How splendid that all you disrespected gentlemen now have TWO places to vent.

Censorship = not getting to hog the conversation whenever and wherever you want.

I don't think I'll be posting over there because I prefer to work on ground of -my- choosing, but thank you for the invitation, however sincerely I don't think it was meant.

I wonder what her name is.