...that you pick up a book by Alfred Lubrano, called "Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams." The book's main focus is upon people Lubrano calls "straddlers" - white collar children of blue-collar parents, and the cultural 'straddling' such people often need to find a way to accomplish as they achieve more financial success than their parents. I felt it provided immense insight into class values. The book contains several chapters of interviews with people navigating these class issues in marriages and relationships which might resonate for you.

This book was tremendously valuable to me in my life - particularly in my relationship with my parents. They sacrificed a lot to ensure I received a college education. This sacrifice created an unanticipated gulf between us - one of class (as it is financially defined). This gulf is still an issue, but thanks to this book, I have more insight into the dynamics.

I urge you to turn the question around: Why should bad things always happen to someone else? Why NOT to you and those you love? What makes you so special? The simple answer? Nothing. And, paradoxically, everything. Which makes you just like every other human on Earth.

So, I welcome you to the real world, where bad things happen to good people all the time.

Illness, accidents, being a victim of a crime etc. can often serve as a catalyst for crises of religious faith for people whose religious worldview is built upon a punitive creator who punishes "bad people" with these types of challenges. It's up to you to parse the metaphysics of all this, but - speaking from personal experience, this illness is an opportunity, a tremendous gift, and it is being presented to you relatively early in your life. This is an opportunity for conscious decision-making, for growth, for setting your own path, for finding strengths you never knew you had.

What you do with this opportunity, this gift, is entirely up to you. But, again, speaking from personal experience, I think you will start moving forward more productively once you get past the "why me?" mindset. Because this is a question you will never be able to answer. Move past it. Move forward.

With 'education' like this, it's no wonder India and China are poised to eat America's economic lunch.

How nice to see a real hourglass figure - instead of a silicone rack cobbled onto a hungry young woman whose head looks way too big for her ematiated body to hold up.

I hate that this crap is what people in other countries see about our culture.

Words and phrases like this drive me absolutely nuts. "Comeback" from what? "Upset" in context with what, when THE PEOPLE HADN'T ACTUALLY VOTED YET? The only context the media and political pundits have to make these statements against is polls, which everyone realizes are unreliable, predictions, which are gut checks at best, and their own voices yammering to each other in their self-absorbed media echo chamber.

When did the media start accepting their collective "wisdom" - their opinions - as fact, as news?

Consider the data source for polls - HUMANS. Polls are completely reliant upon the human giving the pollster the data, even when the analysis methodology is good. Garbage in, garbage out. Humans produce bad data all the time, either consciously or unconsciously. People may have told a pollster they were voting Obama, wanting to appear to the pollster as being 'progressive' on race for whatever reason, when indeed they had planned on voting Clinton all along. People genuinely change their minds. People lie for all sorts of reasons, most of them emotional and thus not predictable by polls. Trying to predict people's behavior using poll data is fraught with risk.

I personally hate polls, indeed will FUCK with any and all pollsters, ESPECIALLY election pollsters, in protest of the polling process itself, and how the data is used. I'm tired of our electoral politics being overly influenced by so-called cable "journalists" yammering to each other in their self-congratulatory media echo chamber. I would love to see an organized "Lie to All Pollsters!" mindset start permeating electorial politics. Let the news channels start REPORTING the news instead of overtly INFLUENCING it. There are still some of us out here who expect some objectivity in our journalists, and unfortunately less and less of this objectivity is on display.

I DARE NBC/MSNBC to allocate some of their journalists to - oh, what else is going on? How did the Bush Administration eviscerate or ignore the Constitution today? Who died in Iraq?

I shake my head in disgust at the whole damn lot of you.

where Salon TT'ers discuss some of the reasons they have made the same choice. Without the vitriol. Pretty much.

If you turn on any cable news channel, you can hear someone yammering about the nightmare economy every five minutes or so. The more people hear this, the more scared they are. The more scared they are, the more likely they are to make short-sighted, emotionally-based financial decisions - like dump their stock. Which makes the economy - say it with me now - a nightmare. Anyone else see a pattern here?

Yes, the country's financial fundamentals are weak right now. But listening to talking heads yammer about it ad nauseum in the cable news echo chamber creates more of the behavior which is contributing to the slide.

I wonder how much less panicked people would be if they heard this news only once per day, say on the Nightly News.