After the tenth time you've lost vacation because it's "family vacation," or you were stuck in on a High Holy Day because your non-Jewish manager had to watch her Jewish husband honored during services, or a stroller or SUV almost creamed you and YOU Got glared at because of the Chil-Dren, OR when the mommies had time off to go to doctors (which they needed), but you got an abscess because you were guilted every time you needed a dentist, you don't have "anger issues."

Leave? Everyone worried about a woman on maternity leave. I had to quote the law to get two weeks to get my (now-deceased) mother through hip-replacement surgery. And this was a major company, but my supervisor was an Aunt, in the sense of the Republic of Gilead. When her mother passed, she lost it, inherited a million, and retired, and that was fine. When I lost it, shortly afterward, I lost my job. I don't think they were connected, but it can't have helped. Oh, my supervisor at the time was out because HIS father had passed, but that was okay. He had a Wife.

You have no vacation, no religious holiday, and sore ankles at the very least. You're on your own with illness and bereavement, despite protection of the law. Things like that tend to make people genuinely angry. Even shrinks say so. So, if you're going to use that kind of line, expect me to have Anger Issues about -it- and feel quite justified.

I earned my Ph.D. without inconveniencing anyone but myself, by the way. But I've been inconvenienced plenty by mommy princesses and daddy princesses. Equity, I understand. Special privilege, I don't accept. If you're defining special privilege as parity, your definitions need work, not my psyche.

KitchenGirl, I think you're backing up real fast. You came on too strong with this, and a lot of single people (with sore ankles and sore backs) are tired of it. Just a fair share of the pie, please, and recognition that what Saint Family has one another to produce, single people produce on their own. We do it very well. We are -- or I am -- proud of it. It's not a character deficit, and I won't be fined or snooted because of it.

(And if you say "no one's trying to snoot you" or I hear about Anger Issues, oh dear, oh dear.)

"Oh reason not the need!" says King Lear to his daughters. "Our basest beggars are in the meanest thing superfluous."

Now that I've gotten that out of my system in a verbal hairball, I'll get to Mcwhatever his name was who pointed out that a mother may NEED to take her child to the doctor more than I NEED personal fulfillment.

Health takes precedence, even for singles. I could have saved several thousand dollars if I'd had a boss that recognized that.

But this question of NEED. I tend to worry whenever I see NEED in caps or when I hear it stressed. The more "e's" I hear in it, the more I distrust it and check my wallet.

Need is need. NEED, and especially NEEEEED, is a preemptive moral strike across someone else's boundaries.

It is all right for me to decide that someone getting to attend a kid's soccer game promptly warrants my being late for the opera, say. It is all right for someone to ask me and say "I'll make it up to you."

It is not all right for people to assume it and/or mandate it. And it is DEFINITELY not all right for people to criticize me if that happens and I point it out.

I really don't see why that is so hard to understand.

I'd be honored to shake her hand, thank her for her service, and buy her dinner.

As you can see from the list of nurses who won the Silver Star, military with medical specializations often find themselves in the thick of the action. Others have been conscientious objectors, serving in a way their consciences permitted.

It doesn't make sense, but it's the rules. I don't think those rules were written for the types of fighting our troops are doing now, but I don't make the rules. Private Brown is a good soldier. She'll serve with honor wherever she goes.

There's also the PR angle. If her award had been posthumous, the resultant bad karma from the press would have made this war even more unpopular. I haven't a problem with that, but not at the cost of yet another life...

I'm showing my age. My first impulse is to turn off the TV, take away the phones and the Wiis and IMs, scrub their spiteful little faces, dress them in jeans and tees and send them outside to play.

At the very worst, we become self-sufficient so that we are not living under a bridge or on welfare.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the latest and most loathed demographic: Welfare Singles.

At least, by focusing on work, we won't be a charge on our familied "betters."

Oops. No, that's not my anger issues. That's contempt for people who think that way. As my previous entries have shown, even in NYC, I've run into a batch of them.