I am not a cancer survivor, but I do know something about the grieving process, about facing death from another perspective.

When my father died two years ago, it made me realize a lot of things - amongst them, that I no longer wanted to live my life trying to play the part my family wanted me to play, but to rather be fully myself. My husband supported this wholeheartedly, and so did his family, though my own family has had a really difficult time with it.

The way they have dealt with grief is to slip back into routine, to try and recreate life the way it was before Dad died, to try and find some comfort in sameness. But as Cary says, you can't go back.

I urge the letter writer to move forward with her life, to follow her heart, to be true to herself. The people who have depended on her now need to realize that she has supported them and now it's time for them to support her as she finds herself again - or maybe for the first time.

Death is a powerful teacher, and if it teaches you to love yourself more fully, then you will have learned one of the toughest lessons of all.

If Disney is out to subjugate India, it's also subjugating all of us. It's what massive corporations do, isn't it?

Let's not confuse a Bollywood High School Musical adaptation with Said's Orientalism. While Disney may be purely out to make a buck (or several billion, as the case may be), the central message of HSM is about empowerment and being yourself, not the common Orientalist themes of emasculation, domination and subservience. If anything, this project would help improve the perception of India by young people in the US. Not to mention that the storyline of HSM is practically lifted right out of a Bollywood script anyway, so it's a perfect match, only now it has much better music. Ha!

I'm also a little taken aback by the apparent labeling of all things Indian as "exotic." Indian music has been part of the musical landscape in the West for a long, long time, and bhangra has infused hip-hop with its complex rhythms for at least a couple of decades now. India has for millenia influenced cultures throughout the world, as well as incorporated and absorbed various modes of expression from the cultures it has come into contact with. Indian pop music now is such a hybrid of East and West, it's sometimes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. I'd say to anyone: if you can't get past the Hindi, that's your problem!

Let's face it - India has become and is becoming part of the global conversation and cultural landscape on every level.

And if India could survive Alexander, the Romans, the Mughals, and the Brits, it'll certainly survive Disney.

Looking at the set, it looks to me like it's meant to evoke the White House - and with the oval shape and windows, specifically the Oval Office - not any kind of Greek temple. True, the current Oval Office interior design has curtains and no columns, but the windows are the same, and everyone is familiar with the semi-circular arrangement of columns outside the residence area. I honestly don't see how anyone can read anything else into it.

If you've been to Washington, you'll recognize this kind of architecture all over government buildings. Even if you haven't, I think it's still very US Capitol.

This is a really sad story - child marriage is fairly common in some parts of the world. In some areas the child is married off early and then not sent to be a "wife" until puberty, in others she's sent off right away - in both cases she's still a child with little or no choice in the matte.

But often child marriage is tied closely to economics. I wonder, what is the father's story here? Is he looking to make some sort of financial or business alliance with this older man, or with a relative? Does he think it's going to be too expensive or impossible to marry off his daughter when she's older? Did he receive money in the deal? Or was he trying to repay a debt and is ashamed to say so? Were they very poor and he was worried he wouldn't be able to feed his family, so he did the traditional thing and married off his daughter to compensate?

Or was it really just him exercising what he thinks is his right as a father? Was it a power trip?

These are often important questions to ask in situations like these, in order to try and understand the larger issues at stake when it comes to child marriage. Only if you get at the deeper issues involved - usually economic as well as cultural - can this kind of practice be understood and stopped.

I don't know that I agree with this assessment - while there hasn't been a huge focus on the extremism of the current administration, both Kerry and President Clinton skewered McCain and the extremist policies of the Bush administration. Clinton nailed it down, framing the "extremist philosophies" (his quote, not mine) with the devastating results of those philosophies. The entire convention is about "change" - and change from what? From the radical neocon policies of the current administration.

I don't know what speeches you were watching last night, but the ones I watched totally nailed it.

Sigh.

The dress code for my wedding was "personal fabulous," with semi-formal in parentheses. It was meant to take the edge off of semi-formal so that my more flamboyant friends could wear their fabulous hats and retro chic outfits.

Also... nothing on Palin? Seriously? I expected some kind of smart, toothy analysis on why Palin is a bad choice for women, but instead we get... dress codes?