I can imagine LW and her brother as children forging mutual loyalty to each other as their parents left them in spirit if not in body. LW grew up to take care of herself, but her brother hasn't, and I can equally imagine how hard it must be to cut him loose to fend for himself, as their parents did to them when they were children. It's just possible that LW can't overcome her compulsion to help her brother without exiling him from her life, any more than a dieter can avoid eating junk food without banishing it from his house. But a brother is not like junk food, and it seems sad that would be the only solution. And it might very well be. I can only hope that LW will find the will and the means to stand up for herself without totally severing her relationship with her brother.

This is LW's main excuse, so far as I can tell. So LW, I can virtually guarantee you that nothing the stepfather is doing or has done should be taken personally as a rejection of you. People who know that they are on the last leg of their journey through life begin disengaging from the living, even from those that they love most. The dying have little interest in meeting new people. Your main job is to comfort the living. Doing that without complaint will earn you a deep reservoir of good will, all the more so because it is probably apparent to those in a position to notice that your efforts are not appreciated by the stepdad. So really, Cary's advice is very, very good.

to Interrobang's thorough (and thoroughly good) advice: If LW is still hesitant to take action, consider how deliberate D.J.'s conduct was. It was not a momentary lapse, or a misunderstanding (however contrived or unconvincing) based on something the student said or did. Rather than "forgetting" his official place for a moment and acting out of bounds, he deliberately used his position to lure a student to his office under false pretenses. That's really bad, in fact, much worse than the kind of incidents that usually lead to sexual harassment complaints.

And then I read about the lovely princess who convinced her fiance that amazing wedding night sex could be his in return for a big load of wedding related debt. And she even trained herself by watching actual porn! I'm not going to debase myself or the conversation further, but the point is that many of us managed to have weddings in the style that we wanted that cost less because we did not lose sight of the essential fact that it was our wedding, and as such, we had to pay for it and live with whatever we couldn't pay for at a high rate of interest. A wedding that prevents you from putting a down payment on a house or funding a year or two of graduate school is certainly yours for the taking, but don't pretend that it was within your means, it wasn't if it interfered with your longer term goals. It reminds me of what a friend of mine who lived in Japan told me was a fading custom in Japan, about 30 years ago -- families who gave a daughter a ritual, exceedingly costly kimono upon high school graduation. By the time my friend was in college, most families were offering the daughter a choice between a kimono and a college education. I doubt if most of us consider ourselves the kind of person who would choose the kimono. That doesn't mean our weddings can't be special.

I like Miss Manners' take on weddings -- think of it as the most formal party you will ever throw, keeping it in the style of entertaining you do best and focusing on the enjoyment of your guests rather than the glorification of the bridal couple. I like to think my wedding followed these precepts and I've been to weddings that clearly have. So ditch the pumpkin limo and buy more champagne if you must spend the money. But it's nutty to start your life in debt, and it's hardly insurance against divorce. The minister of my husband's church has told me that he has counseled many couples whose wedding debts quickly undermined their relationship.

What a sad story. My sister and father were both helped by psychiatric medications, so I know that medications are sometimes the right course of treatment. What is saddest and frankly, rather frightening, is that by overprescribing and misdiagnosing (or diagnosing too cavalierly) and engaging in flagrantly conflicted behavior, psychiatrists are providing their patients, already notoriously resistant to treatment, with good excuses to reject even appropriate medical treatment. And neither Salon nor the author of this story should be faulted for publicizing the truth. Responsibility for distrust of medications falls squarely on the professionals who prescribe them without adhering to minimal notions of professional independence.

Every medical student should be required to read an annotated version of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which was essentially the story of a doctor in the mid-19th century. Doctors were never compensated for their services and made money only from selling medications or other items -- and the best a doctor could do was to make sure that what they sold was harmless. Otherwise they earned nothing from their profession. It took enormous effort to convince society at large that it was better to compensate physicians for their services, because advice untainted by the need to hawk products was most likely to be in the patient's best interest. It is so sad to see so many doctors selling out their professional integrity.