Word. Thanks for this. I've spent a lot of time in Berlin, and live here now, and it's totally in keeping with the place. Memorials are everywhere, and the point is not to shut them off from everyday life, but to incorporate the commemoration and mourning of the past into our daily life. But there are a lot of people…

What an insulting comment to someone who is more thoughtful than you.

When you live in Berlin, you are in a memorial to a past tragedy a good amount of the time. You live in it, because you have to.

Well, it becomes part of the city... I actually kind of like that people live in it and on it and through it, but that it also draws them into this recollection. If the designers had wanted to hit everyone with "HOLOCAUST" straight off the bat, they would have put the educational museum above ground.

The first thing I should say is, I wouldn't think someone else was horrible for leaving their kid alone for three minutes. But every parent has their own, personal lines where their instincts for keeping kiddo alive kick in, and that's one of mine. For me the fire thing is not totally theoretical — I live in a prewar…

I often think about it — I live in an apartment, and life would be so much easier if I could take the damn garbage out for a minute or get a bit of bread from the bakery just downstairs without doing the whole dressing the baby thing. I'm mainly worried about the possibility of a fire though. It really would take so…

You sure have a lot of very strong opinions about something you know shit all about.

:) If it helps, I have not actually put any shit or naked pics of my baby, even on the private, link-only picasa site. But my main concern there is my kid's privacy. My mom did get a really fabulous shit pic from early on, but she knows how to appreciate that kind of thing.

Word. A really good cut can last quite a while, but the dye job will make sure it doesn't. And they always dye the poor women's hair. I get that it looks better on tv if a woman has highlights, but I don't think it always looks better in real life. Often, it just looks fake. And then you have roots.

The thing is... quite a bit of the stuff on FB is stuff you really wouldn't get to communicate to people about if there wasn't FB. Think about it: before FB, parents did talk about potty training. But if FB (and similar social media) didn't exist, would people be taking photographs of their most boring restaurant…

Are you my sister? I got rid of it too, and have also been soooo much more productive since I quit! I just only correspond with real friends now, and that's a much smaller group.

For what it's worth, I like her, I like some of her music, and I respect her insane work ethic. But every time I hear a woman talking about birth being "sensual" or "orgasmic" or the most amazing, transformative thing ever, I want to punch her in the mouth. I can never tell if that's what her experience was really…

I hear you. The main reason why my husband and I had a wedding at all instead of eloping was that it was our one chance to get our friends and family together.

We had a big party when we got married because it was the only way we could get a good number of our friends and family in one place. They're spread all over the world, and if we'd written everyone saying, "hey, we want the important people in our lives to meet each other" they probably wouldn't have come. For us it…

This is freakin' ridiculous, but it's your workplace that is at fault. That's abusive.

For what it's worth, I think having a JD and LLM is more impressive than getting married and having kids. But it's also perfectly possible to have a party when you get a degree — lots of people do it. I had a small celebration when I got my PhD. If you want a party, you throw it, and get people together who will help…

Ha ha! I don't trust those either! Not one bit. I'd rather have a really filthy toilet seat where I know I have to hover than those weird, wrinkly sausage toilets!

Nah, no, and nope. I'm pro-kids — heck, I have one myself — and while I have no compunction about inflicting mine on fellow plane passengers or human beings in other places I have to, or occasionally just want to be, I think this is inappropriate. A toddler means the place has to be childproofed, everyone there has to…

Well, we were hypervigilant because we traveled with the kiddo internationally (by plane) at 3 mos, and then a round trip at 9 mos. So in both cases, with doctors' advice and accord, we sped up the immunization a bit, for example, having his 4 month shots at just before 3 months. I was really worried about exposing…

That's kind of what we've been doing with our 10 month-old. We've been on an accelerated vaccination schedule because of travel — how I learned that Texas's regular vaccine schedule, probably that of other states too, actually calls for the vaccines to be given *later* than the optimal ages. But we let him put…