why do you all only hang around other married people with kids?

Schedules. And mess.

Kids are noisy. They want attention. They need to be in bed around 7 or 8 o'clock, and you can't make much noise after that hour or leave them alone in the house after they're asleep.

So that means you start your bedtime routine around 7:30PM and are generally in bed yourself by 9 or 10. That rules out weeknights.

On weekends, sure, you can see your friends. In the early afternoons. Or maybe even catch a band or something on Saturday night. If you can't get a sitter, though -- and keep in mind that if you CAN get a sitter, you're adding $20 to $50 to the cost of anything you do -- you're going to be dragging along children who aren't interested in walking more than a quarter-mile and can't concentrate on something for more than about half an hour at a time. If you start having "grown-up" conversations at the table with your friends, your kids will deliberately interrupt to get your attention -- meaning that you're going to have to either ignore or discipline them, either of which are fatal to conversation.

Single friends, for all their merits, just don't get this. They somehow expect that you can, alone with them and your kids, somehow pay attention to them. And you can't. Friends with their own kids, however, not only know the routine and are more understanding of it, but -- and this is key -- are perfectly willing to bring their kids over to distract yours, or even to throw themselves on the grenade and simply watch your kids for you while you do something else, a favor for which you will be immeasurably grateful.

...I often find this conversation (and others of its sort) baffling. It's like the whole "to breastfeed or not" argument, which a lot of mothers -- including my wife -- took very seriously, indeed, as if it were somehow defining a major part of their identity.

It's not like women -- like parents in general -- have to take sides in some kind of imaginary culture war. Be a mom. Don't be a mom. As a mom, be one who owns a trendy, huge-ass stroller. Or don't.

It doesn't really matter. The world will continue to revolve. Children will continue to be born, and most of them will grow up okay.

Decisions need to be made. People will make different decisions for a variety of reasons. And yet, as I noted earlier, the world will continue to turn.

I don't understand the frowning disapproval, the screeching, the rending of garments that goes on here. Why does every little decision need to be fraught with such DRAMA, as if some little child's life -- or the very soul and style of a neighborhood -- hangs in the balance?

This is all completely unimportant.

...I feel the need to point out that the original poster did not actually say she hadn't had affairs. Her husband, as described, does come off like a jealous maniac -- the credit card thing is especially ridiculous -- but I find it odd that, in a letter all about how her husband becomes insecure when she travels, she doesn't once discuss whether his insecurity is justified. She hasn't been "undigified" -- but what does that mean, exactly?

I mention this only because it raises an interesting academic question: if he's insanely jealous and petty because he correctly perceives her infidelity, but doesn't know how to actually address the issue, does that make a difference to our opinions of the situation?

...and everything to do with sound. Accelerate simply sounds like an album that'd be played on college radio, and is the first REM album to sound like a college radio album since Monster.

...because it doesn't give her the number of delegates she would need to be statistically able to catch up with Obama. Unless she intends to sell the presidency to the delegates in backroom deals to obtain the nomination, thus guaranteeing a Republican victory, it's simply not possible for her to be the nominee. She needed 20% in Pennsylvania, and she didn't get it.

Given Obama's purportedly unassailable delegate lead, it was stunning that 43 percent of Pennsylvania voters said they believed that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee.

It's considerably less surprising when you consider that 55% of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania are obviously idiots. ;)

...there would be no "women's issues." They would be "issues," and people would have them.

Unless you've got a job with a company staffed with dumb people willing to pay for Business Class tickets or are for some reason already independently wealthy, you're flying coach.

...hip room certainly is. I'm one of a growing number of obese people in this country, and the width of a standard economy seat is a major problem. Forget tray tables altogether; it's simply not possible for me to lower one without -- thanks to the limited space between rows -- perching it at a precarious slope on my prodigious stomach, so that anything I'm foolish enough to try to put there is slowed only by the friction coefficient of hard plastic in its acceleration towards the Earth below.

And God help any poor stranger who has to sit next to me. I try to grab aisle seats, where I can spill over and inconvenience only the drink tray, and try to fly when possible with my stick-thin wife in the middle seat, but the simple fact is that my a** is wider than the seat by about an inch.

It is of course humiliating and shameful to be so fat. It is, however, additionally humiliating to, as a consequence of my fatness and the airline's determination to pinch a few pennies, be forced to choose between grossly inconveniencing (and maybe grossing out) a fellow flyer and paying up to an extra $400 per flight.

Forget the legroom. Widen the seats by two or three inches.