Letters to the Editor
Allie_
Published Letters: 1252 Editor's Choice: 109
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Start with the stray dogs
[Read the article: I dream of living a heroic life but I fear I'm just mediocre]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One thing I've learned about being a hero, in 38 years of living, is that you never notice you're doing it at the time. You just live. You see a stray dog and you either save it or you check your watch and drive to work and it dies. You become a hero by doing the things you do well, by caring about the things you notice out of place in the world. Sometimes that means being a fireman. Sometimes it means being a little old lady who mostly putters around in the garden but has personally saved the sanity of all the neighborhood kids who know they can talk to her when they can't talk to anyone else.
The most heroic man I know at the moment runs a wings shop.
Do what you love. Get angry at the things that make you angry and do something about them. Try to stay away at the wheel and don't let yourself take the lazy way out. Later you will look back and be startled at some of the heroic things you ended up doing, as well as depressed at some of the heroic things you missed doing because you were too busy being a schmuck. Try to increase your hero-to-schmuck ratio. You need not move to another country or learn to leap tall buildings to do this; there are many people who need your help within five miles of you, right now, and they need things done that you already know how to do.
My husband goes in for one of the flashier styles of heroism. He's tackled an armed robber before. That sort of thing just happens when he's around, and he has the situational awareness and training to deal with it in such a way that no one gets hurt. That's who he is and what he's good at. If I tried to do what he does, people would get accidentally shot and instead of a hero I would be an idiot. On the other hand, I've talked a kid out of a murder/suicide. You can't force yourself to be someone you aren't. Just walk in the world and do the best you can.
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awake
[Read the article: I dream of living a heroic life but I fear I'm just mediocre]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Should be "awake at the wheel."
Now that we have to register to post, could we please edit our letters?
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estrogen
[Read the article: The hormone-replacement roller coaster]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right. Seems estrogen doesn't CAUSE cancer; it causes cancer to grow faster, which means it's more likely to be diagnosed in a shorter time frame.
As far as I can tell as a layman following the research, breast cancer risk is largely genetic. If I had breast cancer in my family, I would avoid HRT.
On a related note, I take aspirin daily for my lupus. Recent research has found this reduces my "risk of breast cancer." Actually, aspirin reduces estrogen production, which explains the drop in cancer rates.
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age
[Read the article: Breasts: An educational (?) slide show]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm going to chime in with the ladies who would have liked to have seen some older women in this lineup.
Everyone's focusing on how good this site will be for women. How about guys? I've spoken to young guys who, by the time they were old enough to see a pair of boobs in person, were so used to porn images that they thought it was normal for boobs to be hemispherical. Does anyone else find it odd that there are "fetish" sites specializing in women who have not had boob jobs?