One more thought, LW. I wasn't clear from your letter if your parents have college degrees. If they don't, realize that while they want the best for you, college is a completely unfamiliar world to them.

My parents don't have degrees, and never went past high school. I wish I would have known some things going in to college that they had no way of knowing, or understanding that they knew very little about the advice they were giving.

Your college career counseling center probably has more relevant and up to date advice than your parents will.

My college also had an excellent alumni mentoring program, which got students in touch with alums working in a variety of fields, either for one-day visits, or for semester long internships. Use every resource your college can offer to dabble in a variety of fields. Understand that your parents may simply not know these things.

I say this as the older, wiser, once upon a time college student who stayed with her very inappropriate boyfriend simply because she didn't want her disapproving mother to be right.

The guy I dated in high school (and then all through college) was inappropriate in many ways, we were completely incompatible, but I was In Love, and he was gorgeous, and isn't love wonderful?

In retrospect, my parents extreme disapproval of him, expressed in looks, in words, in lack of invitations to our house, just made being with him all the more wonderful because it was forbidden. If my mom had had the sense to trust that I'd eventually figure it out for myself, I think I'd have spent a lot less time rebelling and a lot more time figuring out why I wasn't really all that happy around him. I hope I have the sense to remember this when my own kids are this age... if I can be blandly noncomittal instead of actively opposing, they'll figure it out.

If you make a stink and refuse to attend, this wedding will become the elusive Forbidden Fruit for your kids, and you'll lose the chance to make a teachable moment out of it, especially for your daughter who will be a bridesmaid.

I'd say, explain to your kids that you feel sorry for their cousin, and why. Help them to understand what marriage means, what having a baby really means (months and months of sleep-deprived psychosis followed by years with no money), and what a lack of college education really means. Or having a spouse in college when everyone else is just hoping for a date.

Good luck.

Seems like once a week, I send my school age kids to their rooms with a grocery bag each. "Put in 10 things," I say, and they start rummaging. They can fill a bag now without even much angst, from stuff they didn't even know they had.

I don't know where it all comes from. It multiplies in the dark. A trip to Burger King with Grandma. A birthday party last week with a bag of plastic goodies. A trip to the dollar store. A birthday. The one before that. The one before that. Christmas, from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We are drowning in toys, and they keep coming in.

They are plentiful and cheap, and we live in a plastic Made In China graveyard. We give it away all the time, and it keeps arriving.

Does anyone NEED all this stuff? Of course not. But because it's cheap, it turns up, again and again. The unholy piles of it mask the favorites, the really well-made things that hold up over time.

I wouldn't mind a bit if the price of toys doubled overnight. Maybe my kids would get one or two for a birthday instead of 10 or 15.

If you don't have kids, just go to the Goodwill toy section sometime, and you'll see what I mean.

... at a large metro area hospital in the US. What most people don't know is that psychiatric wards are money losers. Newer hospitals don't have them. People who want to work in psych care have a long waiting line (almost as long as the patients line to get in) because there are relatively few jobs.

The truth is that psych patients don't have benefits. These are people who are not capable of getting or holding a "good" job, and what benefits they have (Medicaid, county, etc.)often don't cover the cost of their care. The hospital eats the difference, thus your $9 tylenol on your next visit for some routine surgery.

Some newer hospitals are built to cater to high-profit procedures for people with benefits--knee replacements, hip replacements, heart procedures, maternity. Not mental health. Rather than caring for them, we'd prefer they just go away.

When the police pick up a person who smells terrible and barks at the moon, and brings them to the hospital, the county pays for maybe 2/3 of their care. It costs $1200 a day for inpatient acute psych treatment, for people who cycle through the hospital 3-6 times a year when they forget to take their meds.

Mental health care in the US is beyond broken. We have no way of adequately caring for people who cannot get and hold a job.