It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.

The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families.

We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.