Hey, self-righteous moron commenters who think you're so much smarter and have such better judgment than Heather Ryan, I'm just waiting for the day when your comfortable, safe job vanishes, your spouse comes down with a debilitating illness, and your parents suddenly need round-the-clock care.

I can't wait for the comments you'll so richly deserve. You should have known that CS degree wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. You should have made sure that the person you married didn't have any serious health conditions in his/her background when you popped the question. Oh, and as for your parents' monthly medication bills: did you know that you can substitute homeopathic remedies for just pennies a day? Try a potato dangling from a string round the neck to draw out fever! Who needs antibiotics? You're just not being creative enough.

My father was an electrical engineer who worked on computerized dashboards for 18-wheelers. He was out of work for months at a time in the eighties. There were three of us kids. Never had to eat in a soup kitchen, but we wore second hand clothes and got a few boxes of Reagan cheese at a couple points. Once, we came upon a train that had collided with a truck with a huge load of frozen meat from Australia, and my father walked away with a thirty-pound package. It turned out later that the meat was tough and stringy and intended to be made into dog food, but my mother cooked it for hours and hours in a crockpot until it was edible, and we ate that stuff for a month. (I think it was beef. I hope it was beef.)

It can happen to anyone, even the people who pride themselves on how much more sensible their choices are than the rest of ours. I'm guessing you think you can stave off the badness by picking on others who chose differently. You'd be wrong about that.

I used to feel some slight discomfort about how some male acquaintances/co-workers referred to women they knew via their professions or avocations as "gals," but then I realized they seemed to be using it as an equivalent to "guys," without at all intending to be patronizing.

I'm finding it hard to believe that the LW is extracting payments from her parents, too. There's got to be a reasonable explanation for this. Maybe her parents wanted the wedding, insisted on it, but couldn't pay for it. Could she come from a cultural background where a large wedding, a big show of hospitality on the part of the bride's parents, is really important? Did she lend them the money so they wouldn't lose face? Is it a point of pride for them to be able to say they at least partly paid for their daughter's wedding? Since she says she doesn't think parents should be responsible for paying for an entire wedding and that she was happy to contribute, I suspect she's not quite as ungrateful as a lot of posters seem to think she is.

If that's the case, maybe she could set aside that money and save it so that someday, when they need it, she'll have it in reserve for them.

Her husband sounds like a jerk with a serious dose of class anxiety. Come on! Medical school is expensive. Most doctors start out with a huge amount of debt. If he has none, they should be able to pay hers off all the more quickly. Unless, of course, he won't share his money with her. If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for the marriage--but then, neither did the comment he made to his mother about it having been a mistake to marry someone with so much debt.

Now I really want a cupcake. Chocolate with vanilla butter-cream icing. Got some Duncan Hines box mix around here somewhere...

Aren't nuns, like any other Catholic clergy, supposed to put aside all worldly sentiments, or at least try to? Isn't vanity a sin? Isn't pride a cardinal sin, and possibly the root of all the others? Why on earth would someone even suggest to these women, who adopt the names of saints and commit themselves to a life of devotion and service, that they should compete against each other on the basis of appearance? The inappropriateness of this just stuns me.

the beefcake photos Edward R. Murrow took to promote "Harvest of Shame" back in 1960, standing in an empty field, shirtless, wearing tattered shorts, and holding a basket of fresh nectarines, the late-afternoon California sun glistening off his well-oiled muscles.

Aw, damn. I actually was about to google those when I realized you were just screwing with my head.

The actual photo accompanying this entry creeps me out.

Can't we stop talking about breastfeeding now? As a non-mother, I am so bored with the issue that I'm ready to scream.

uh, the burqini wasn't meant to be a joke about Muslim fashion? follow the link and save your humorless, spittle-laced outrage for some other perceived slight to your Christian sensibilities.

can still be found online, but I don't want to draw the trolls to the site.