Making him a senior. Which means that, if he's been carrying a full course load, that he graduates at the end of the next semester, and is no longer your editor.

If you are working at a typical college newspaper, you don't get paid, and there IS no HR to complain to. But there IS the threat of not being allowed to work on the paper for poor behavior. That is what you should be talking to the head of the department about--how your relationship is strictly professional at the paper, and you are being harassed. Name names, and see what you can do.

OTOH, while you are both doing your best to be professional about the whole thing, the fact of the matter is that how we feel about a person does affect how we feel about their work. And your editor REALLY likes you as a person. So he'll need to bend over backwards to avoid treating you preferentially.

in a national news story, I throw up a little in my mouth.

The rest of you only know him as the LOSAH who carried McCain's water all through 2007 and 2008, only to wake up and learn, last August, that Sarah F'ing Palin was going to be McCain's running mate.

I am one of those who has suffered through nearly two terms of his being governor of my state, doing his utmost best to collapse our entire infrastructure.

In MN, he's beholden to the disingenuously named Tax Payers' League, a group led by a local version of GW: inherited all his money and hopes to hang on to it and the hell with everyone else.

The thing that frightens me about Pawlenty is that he's personable and passing intelligent, therefore actually being a threat.

Pardon me while I go have a lie down.

to your husband and child. Everyone else is entitled to your politeness, your kindness and whatever else you choose to share with them.

But if you choose not to be honest with your husband, then he cannot love you, because you haven't given him YOU to love.

If you choose not to be honest with your child, then you cannot expect him to ever be honest with you, because children model what's been modeled for them.

But here's the thing. Your husband deserves the entire truth: Honey, I don't believe in the Church anymore, if I ever did. I know that your family holds it dear, and I respect that. I know that you love me enough that you will respect my beliefs.

Your son is an infant, and will be a child for a long time. Up till the time that he actually asks "Mom, do you believe in (God/the Church/the Blessed Virgin Mary)?" you need only avoid making affirmative statements about religion in order to be honest with him.

And, even then, you can answer the question with a question: "What do you believe, Honey?"

My family is Catholic to the extreme. I was divorced, and when I remarried, my dear friend got an internet minister's license and registered with the county for $5. My family knows, sort of, that my beliefs are not theirs. I'm sure that, on some level, it bothers them.

But they're too polite to say anything. And here's the bottom line. If I treat them with respect and love, despite my differences with them, how can they find fault with me? If you treat your husband's family with love and respect, despite your differences with them, how can they find fault with you?

You hold all the cards, Dear, truly you do. Their son/brother lives with you. Their grandson lives with you. Take possession of the power that you have in the relationship, rather than feeling like the poor relation, and you'll be fine. Things will be different, but they'll be OK.

My kids vary in age from 34 to 31, with the oldest a feminine adult, and the other three masculine.

Since ultrasounds were done VERY early in pregnancy back then, the gonadal style of each of them was a mystery till they arrived on the extrq-uteral scene.

There were SOME who were relieved when my second child was a boy; an heir for my ex! I had known, since adolescence, that I wanted more than two kids, and I wanted both genders. But really, as a young feminist, I was puzzled at what I would do with a boy.

So, I understand your dude friends who do NOT have daughters; until you get there, it's a challenge to imagine what one will do with a child of the opposite sex. Once you are there, of course, you learn that what you do is to love them, discipline them and raise them into good, caring adults. And that the presence or absence of a penis makes little difference.

As to the teenage girl issues. I don't know about that. All I know is that MY daughter, as a teenage girl, was funny, scary smart, loving, hating, exasperating, amazing and beautiful. My sons, as teenagers were funny scary smart, loving, hating, exasperating and handsome. The biggest difference, so far as I could see, was that my daughter was quicker to tears, and my boys quicker to anger, d/t the surging hormones of adolescence.

In the end, it's parenting. Not "parenting girls" and "parenting boys". It's parenting PEOPLE.

THANK YOU to those who risked permanent blindness from reading the egregious lies and self-serving pap in the *book* by Sarah Palin.

I couldn't even get through the excerpts from the diary of the woman who wrote it for her; the glorifying of that lying waste of human protoplasm was more than I could take.