I don't think there is any way you will be able to think clearly about your future while your parents are helping you in exchange for your continued compliance with their vision for your life. And if you don't share their vision, you have to stop sharing their resources. After being a janitor full time for a couple years and figuring out how to feed, clothe and house yourself on that pay scale, I am guessing you'll start feeling more interested in college again.

You will probably get a lot of letters running you down, but it sounds like you're already doing a fine job of running yourself down. Why? You're not that old. You have plenty of time to figure it out. You just need some space and time, and more faith in yourself.

do you remember Farhad Manjoo's Broadsheet debut, back in the day? I would love to see more guys writing here (personally, I think they should just give the Middle East beat to C-Bob), but there appears to be a bit of a hazing process. (And I appear to be participating. Maybe I am more "feral" than I realized!)

I totally agree with you about the relative merits of MADD and GTA. However, I think "demonize" is a ridiculously strong word in this context. Try replacing it with "accuse of shallow short-sightedness" and you might have something. But I still think MADD is being shallow and short-sided about this one thing. And I am not a fan of video games; for someone like me, going to the next level of play would be getting by for thirty whole seconds without dying or just getting bored. But I'm really, really, REALLY not a fan of censorship for shallow, short-sighted, unsubstantiated reasons.

I'm not sure it's accurate, though. Though they grew up outside civilization, they weren't raised in the wild; they were confined.

James, I do appreciate your attempt to make what is essentially a Broadsheet roundup into a single narrative, but I don't think it actually worked this time. These are all very different stories and not all of them involve mothers. And some of them actually deserve a post of their own. A follow-up about the polygamist ranch now that we know the mothers I stupidly felt sorry for last week were actually coaching their multiply-fractured, sexually abused kids not to talk to authorities would be a great idea. And I know all that just from looking at AP wire headlines, so someone who actually looked into it further could really go to town.

Sorry.

Because I don't think there is any. While she was probably a recreational user, there are lots of medical conditions (pregnancy-related and otherwise) which respond best to marijuana. And if you had any idea some of the drugs that are being prescribed for pregnant women these days, you might not be so judgmental.

Of course, I do think that people who have just smoked or are actively smoking pot should not drive. However, I don't see how pregnancy makes this a worse crime.

Also, Rob Lowe and that Austrian freak are fathers, not mothers.

A drunk driving simulator is a great way to teach teenagers what horrible drivers they are while drunk. Cops actually take them to schools as an educational tool. I am really having trouble seeing the problem here. Am I just drunk?

That's why surgeons make big bucks. Not everybody can handle watching surgery, let alone performing it.

I am not really comparing a fetus to a knee, but the argument at this point seems to be that abortion is gross. Which is undoubtedly true. And relevant ... how again?

Are the people who make this argument meat eaters? And if so, have you ever killed, skinned and gutted a mammal? If you have not, have you ever been to a slaughterhouse and watched someone kill, skin and gut a mammal? That looks pretty horrible too.

There is an emotional and ethical burden in choosing to end a life of any kind for one's convenience or even for one's survival. At this point, you get to choose how seriously you take that burden and how much of it you think you can shoulder. Would you like the government to require that you look a cow in the eye right before it is slaughtered in order to gain permission to cook and eat its muscles?

Eating healthful food is not that hard, really, although it is much easier if you have a good co-op. If you do have a good co-op, there is pleeeeeenty of junk food there, believe me. But anything processed and packaged is less nutritious than plain old food your great-grandparents would have recognized and eaten.

If I were you and just getting started on this, I would set up some guidelines for myself about what must be organic and just stick with them. The first and second things on my list would be meat and dairy. (If I ate meat, I would not buy anything factory farmed.) As far as fruits and veggies go, there are several top ten lists of the most important ones to buy organic. Greens are a big one, because consumers demand cosmetic perfection, and they are hard to clean. As far as your own health is concerned, things like bananas matter very little; you just peel them anyway. Of course, you can get all into it and complicate things for yourself terribly, but as a transitional phase, just try the meat and dairy and go gradually from there. I don't think you will be sorry you did.