Cary's advice is pleasantly clever in its improbable directiveness, but it is just too presumptuous that these friends are close enough, or even available to plan and participate in travel. Knock out the first premise, it is lousy advice.

Almost everyone loves music, so, here is what you do: pick out a great blues festival at least two states away, and go. Photograph the artists and the crowds. Eat the local cooking. Ask a lot of questions of strangers. Chat about what acts you like or not. Buy a bunch of the albums of the bands that play. Plan on looking up the answers to the many questions you will have when you get home. Make it a long weekend-- four days. Wonder if you could start your own festival in your town or work on one that already exists. Look forward to doing it again next year at the same or a different place.

And if the blues doesn't work for you try jazz, or bluegrass, or punkabilly, or the final rounds of some hotshot int'l violin prize competition.

But the music will be therapeutic, the crowds will help you connect with other people in a specifically non-professional "I have to have all the answers" way, you will discover you are creating a diversion you can turn to year round-- home and away, you will profoundly engage your curiosity, and you may find an outlet for badly needed community service. Oh, and you will probably make some new friends.

Or, learn to scuba dive. Neither you nor Cary should listen to the comments of those who write to minimize your problem. Your agony is profound, and the gap between our competent little lives and our potential is one of the most important problems on this planet.

Yes, the personal is the political, and you,dear letter writer, are-- in the political realm of the workplace-- a fascist.

I'd just add, the schools are also authoritarian, and most families too. Which means that for most Americans the only tangible referent for "freedom" is impulsivity, therefore the slavery of addiction, the passivity of mass consumerism and spectatorship, or the effeteness of solitary diversion.

Know you are one of the middle level leg breakers who are the enforcers for capitalism. Be certain you bring utter misery to those with whom you work.

my parents, especially my mother, had a marvelous way of getting quiet and serious when someone near at hand faced a difficult life choice and made compromising decisions-- and she would let us know-- that this is not the way we would handle this in our family-- and we would ask why-- and she would explain-- we would feel included, and flattered that some of the weight of the adult world had been shifted in our direction, and that we were trustworthy to share this burden. It was a wonderful style of giving moral instruction to the young-- timely, taught us to draw distinctions, designed to get at the sobriety of the matter but not to accidentally enlarge it by hyperbole.

Do this for your daughter; do not stage a righteous, divisive protest.