Advice column roundup with RM implications

Carolyn Hax brilliantly sums up the self-awareness deficit that so complicates communication with my roommate:

To be as intrusive as you describe, your sister-in-law would have to be oblivious to her own rudeness. Either that, or she is arrogant or consciously evil -- which is possible, but cluelessness and self-absorption make more sense.

That's why, in your last line, you'll find your first step: Do not regard your sister-in-law as someone who thinks like you. The reasons she doesn't recognize the boundaries you think are obvious -- different culture, values, brain chemistry, whatever -- don't matter so much as the result. She is, for your purposes, a visitor from another planet, a planet where creatures move in and out of each other's lives without recognizing this thing you know as privacy.

Now take this argument a step further, and note that for her to be unaware of how intrusive she is, there has to be something she finds sympathetic about herself or her ways.

On an unrelated note, I loved Miss Manners' response to the third letter in this column.