Letters to the Editor
steto
Published Letters: 19 Editor's Choice: 3
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a possible invisible reason
[Read the article: Lonely single guy tired of being lonely and single seeks person ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kudos you to the person who said "brush your teeth." I know a guy who won a National Book Award for a novel he wrote in his 20's. He could not be better looking. Really, it's weird how good looking he is. And how good his novel is. He has been single for years and the last time I saw him he was starting to give off a little desperation (and talk about his National Book Award a little too often.) I had a suspicion why he was single for so long and it was confirmed after a cousin of mine went on a date with him, through match.com., and I asked her "So?" and she said "Bad breath that could kill a bear." I had known this all along but thought, well, he must take Binaca with him on his dates. There is no shame in halitosis. Maybe this young man could check into it.
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philosophy
[Read the article: My laptop was stolen -- I feel like my life is gone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In classical Greece and Rome when people had emotional problems they would go to philosophers. They would go to Socrates and learn to attack their problems through reasoning and dialog. They would go to Epictetus and learn the art of loving detachment. They would find new constructs through which to view the inescapable agonies of life. Cary, you are not a psychiatrist or a Dear Abby. You are, in the very ancient sense of the word, a philosopher, and in this letter you have written a Philosophy of Loss that may serve as a guide to the perplexed for a very long time.
There's a story that might also help the writer. One day before World War I Ernest Hemingway traveled from Paris to Austria for a long skiing vacation. His wife was to join him a week later and was to bring with her a suitcase full of his manuscripts. She left the suitcase in a train station on the way and it was never found. Hemingway was devastated by the loss of irreplaceable work. And then he wrote The Sun Also Rises.
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From Personal Experience
[Read the article: If Britney Spears shouldn't be naked in front of her kids, what about me?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear Naked vs. Nekkid,
You sound a lot like my wife and the mother of my children, whom I love, and so reading your letter I kind of started to love you, too. When my kids were little my wife would also very casually and naturally walk around naked in front of them. I thought it wasn't a good idea, and told her so, but she was very confident that I was wrong and I wasn't able to convince her otherwise. My son went through a period of troubles and confusion in early adolescence, which I bring up not because I think there is direct cause and effect there but because these troubles led to a great deal of family therapy and talking and revealing of long-unexpressed feelings and long-unspoken secrets, in the course of which we learned that, by my son's own admission, his mother's occasional nakedness was uncomfortable for him. Uncomfortable, confusing, unsettling. Affection and love get all mixed up--for boys, anyway, and being a boy it's all I really know--with seductiveness and All That Other Stuff, and the images he grew up with made him feel bad sometimes. I know that there must be boys out there for whom their mother walking around chatting with them in nothing but the clothes God gave her would not be uncomfortable, confusing and unsettling, but for my son it was. He's 20 now and doing wonderfully and he and his mother, after a long period of difficulties, are very close. Because you sound like the best possible kind of mom--that is to say, a lot like my son's mom--there's no reason that what you are doing should cause actual damage. I will, however, venture a guess that the reason you are wrote to Cary s not because people are questioning Brittany's choice but because long before Brittany's behavior flashed across the headlines you were questioning your own. And that questioning itself, that constructive self-awareness, is the root of why you are a good mom and why your son will be more than okay no matter what.