Response to comments

Here's an amazing misguided-overprotective parent story. Apparently, the school reconsidered.

***
The hedgehog has an official check-out date. Its handler, who had arranged that date without my input, tried to postpone it by two weeks when I told her I’d be out of town and thus have to evict it early, leaving it outside for an extra day before the UPS guy can collect it... but I would have none of it. I want that thing out of the house.

***
ETC, I’m honored to have had a positive influence on your relationship with your sister! I’ve felt strongly about unsolicited advice for a long time—I wasn’t very old before I noticed how unhelpful it was. But there are two kinds of advice, as I’d written in my original post: the ‘you should do this’ kind and the ‘be aware of this fact, think about yourself and your priorities, and integrate the two’ advice. For example, there’s ‘lower your standards if you want to meet someone’ and there’s ‘think about the extent to which it’s important for you to be in a relationship, and consider whether it’s worth changing your ways to make it happen.’

Incidentally, I met some friends for drinks last night and pointed them to our debate re: dating. They’re successful, amazing, beautiful, interesting, African-American and single. They agreed that the city sucked in general but that it was notably worse for them.

They’re also two of the few people from whom I take advice on my appearance without bristling, usually because they don’t offer it without solicitation. I generally get annoyed when people advise me to dye my gray hair—and I’m still not going to do it—but they said it in a context that was practical and non-offensive.

In case you were wondering, our recurring ‘this city sucks for dating’ conversation ended in ‘too bad. We’re not desperate, we’re not going to lower our standards, and we’re going to go on living our very full lives.’ Although we agreed that what we did need was (1) a ‘wife,’ i.e. personal assistant and (2) a boy toy, none of us felt she needed, wanted a husband. I revisited that feeling today when a coworker told me that her mother-in-law had taken to complaining over the dearth of home-cooked meals her son was getting and gave my coworker... wait for it... a gift subscription to Good Housekeeping.

***
re: family, my mother, but not my father, is the same way: the more I have my $hit together, the less she can believe it and the more she picks at me. Probably because that way she feels needed.

***
Doris Kearns Goodwin says bring on the filibuster.