I don’t know why people think of DOGS when the subject of heroic pets comes up. Why, just this morning, one of our cats realized he needed to throw up and, with Indiana-Jones-like reflexes, immediately emitted an unearthly yowl to alert the sleeping household to the emergency. As I was still trying to figure out what time it was and how to walk without falling over, he realized something even more serious: he was on a HARD FLOOR! With no thought for his own safety, he ran as fast as his plush paws could carry him down the stairs to the only carpeted area of the house. Just in the nick of time he reached the bottom step. It was a very close call, but he managed it. A true hero for our times.

I have not yet thanked you all for your responses to the Frustration Crying post. I kept seeing comments and thinking, “Yes. YES!” Then I’d start to respond, and feel like I was just repeating myself—or worse, repeating the comment itself. And then it seemed as if it would seem as if I wasn’t responding to OTHER comments because they WEREN’T good, rather than because I didn’t have any response other than gratitude and relief and comforted feelings. Anyway, the whole incident threw me for a bit of a loop, and in a loop like that everything seems impossible to figure out, so let’s just leave it at THANK YOU FOR ALL THOSE GREAT COMMENTS.

Today I am continuing to have this “WHY IS THE LEAST-KNOWLEDGEABLE PERSON IN CHARGE??” feeling about doctors and insurance and so forth, because over the weekend we received two letters. One was from our insurance company, saying “Referral? What referral? We never received any referral, so here is a heads-up that you will have to pay the entire $400 specialist fee yourself.” So I will need to call about that. It’s possible that there WAS a referral. It’s also possible that the pediatrician’s office forgot to send it over. If the pediatrician knows there needs to be a referral, which they do know, and if the specialist knows they need to receive the referral, which they do know, and if the insurance company knows everyone knows this, then WHY OH WHY do I have to be the one to call this morning to ask the pediatrician to send the referral to the specialist, and to ask the specialist to send it to the insurance? Why can’t THE PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID TO DO THIS be the ones to do this??

The second letter was from the specialist, saying that because we have no insurance information on file, they are giving us their uninsured-patient discount. Well. That is very nice of them, and it’s a surprisingly nice discount: it takes off about half the charge. But since I stood at a registration desk for OVER TWENTY MINUTES giving them our insurance information and trying to answer questions such as “When did this insurance coverage start?” (I don’t know, like five years ago I guess, THIS IS NOT INFORMATION I USE BRAIN STORAGE SPACE FOR), and telling them Paul’s Social Security number and birth date, and letting them scan the card, I don’t know WHY I now have to call them and give them all the information again.

Also, if they have no insurance information on file, why is our insurance company alerting us that they’ve received a claim and the visit will not be covered?

It does help to realize that most of this is done automatically by computer. That is, it isn’t as if a person at the specialist’s office deliberately ignored our insurance information; there was just some reason the computer couldn’t process it, so the computer printed out a letter. But it also DOESN’T help, because wouldn’t it be nice if a person DID check before sending out one of these automated letters? Just a quick double-check to see if perhaps alllllllll the information was already in the computer and some glitch just prevented it from processing? Since I think we all know how unpleasant it is to receive such a letter? Well. It does no good to think these counter-reality thoughts.

Follow-up: It is only fair, especially after making cynical remarks about reality, to say that when I called the pediatrician about the missing referral (shortly after writing this post) they said, “Oh, yes: the specialist called us Friday and we faxed it right over.” So! The very people I would LOVE to have handle the situation, DID IN FACT HANDLE IT. The specialist’s office saw the issue, understood the issue, and took action! The pediatrician’s office responded by fixing the issue! EVERYONE GETS NEW CARS.

I just got back from yet another frustrating experience at the lab where Edward has his blood drawn. It’s supposed to be much, much better to drive half an hour to an easy familiar location than to drive two hours to the scary big city with all the honking drivers who think everyone should be totally 100% familiar with their scary big city, and it OFTEN IS better, but just often enough it happens that we end up driving an hour round-trip for NOTHING, and ALSO I end up with lots of mental arguments going on in my head as I explain to imaginary technicians why what happened was something that shouldn’t have happened. This morning was one of those times.

I hate to have Edward miss school, but I was working this weekend (insert work-related conflicted feelings here) and couldn’t take him until today, and I was already feeling tense because we should have done it last week. We rushed around so that he and I could leave right after the other kids got on the bus. It’s a walk-in lab, so we waited more than half an hour, and then it was finally our turn, and they said, “Oh, yes, we got the paperwork, but to do this test we need a kit, and we don’t have that kit.”

This is the kind of thing that drives me batty. When they received the orders, and saw the orders would require a kit they didn’t have, why didn’t they call the doctor who faxed the orders and say so? Why doesn’t our doctor know that they would need to send the kit, since, as it turns out, they did send it last time? Why are we, the Clueless Patients, left to figure it all out, when we know NOTHING ABOUT ANY OF THIS? Doesn’t it make the most sense that they should talk to each other and combine their knowledge, instead of having me serve as mediator? Wouldn’t that, in the long run, save a LOT OF TIME AND TROUBLE? But I suppose the time and trouble saved would be the PATIENTS’ time and trouble, so there’s little motivation for the doctor’s office or the lab.

Even worse is that I tried to CALL the lab ahead of time to make sure everything was all set, and all they have is a 2-minute recording (their hours, their location, etc.) that doesn’t give an option to speak to anyone, and doesn’t give an option to leave a message. So the only way I could have prevented this situation from happening was to drive half an hour over there and ask.

Worst of all, when I tried to Use My Words and say all these things in a reasonable way, I started crying. And not just a little crying, but a lot of crying. And I kept crying the whole rest of the time we were there, which was like another ten minutes. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, and it wouldn’t stop. I was just so frustrated with EVERYTHING. To her credit, the technician was very kind at this point, and even sat next to me and gave me a side hug, and said kind things about how I must be so stressed and worried, and that of course made me cry MORE, and arg. Just, arg. And now we will have to go back in a couple of days, and they will recognize me as That Mom Who Cried So Much.

And I am feeling some despair, too, because I always thought that these episodes of frustration/rage-crying (which at least usually are not QUITE so lengthy and damp) would at some point STOP. I had in mind a future where I would be…”old enough,” I guess, not to do it anymore. And there is still hope: apparently a lot of women toughen up after menopause, because of estrogen dropping or testosterone rising or something. But arrrrrrrrrrggggggggggg.

I should have posted this earlier, but I forgot: here’s the link to the “Wait, right now it would be SEVEN o’clock—no, wait, it would NORMALLY be NINE o’clock…” printout.

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I got eight inches cut off my hair and I am so much happier with it:

It’s still long enough to put up, but I no longer hate washing it and brushing it. When I take it down at night, I like the way it looks; before, when I took it down I felt frumpy and oppressed. I’ve even been wearing it down sometimes during the day.

I got some bleachy streaks put in at the same time, and those too improve my hair happiness by a significant amount. I am hoping they will help decrease the frequency with which I am asked if I homeschool.

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I got a little sentimental last night while trick-or-treating. People buy candy, so that they can give it away for free to children who come to their houses. They voluntarily spend a couple of hours being inconvenienced by the ringing doorbell. Some of them even dress up, and/or decorate their houses, and they say nice things to these children they don’t even know. All of this because we are an animal species and we VALUE our community children. WEEP. It reminded me of when I got all sentimental about playgrounds. Grown-ups with jobs spend lots of time and effort to design safe structures for children to PLAY on. WEEP.

Book/movie recommendations, before I forget them:

(image from Amazon.com)

Red 2 (Netflix link). Loved it. I hope they just keep making these movies forever. The cast is obviously having a wonderful time. It reminds me of the Ocean’s Eleven series.

(image from Amazon.com)

10% Happier, by Dan Harris. I thought I would just skim this a little, but I ended up reading the whole thing. As with many non-fiction books, the actual POINT of the book is only the length of a chapter or two, so it has to be expanded SOMEHOW into a book-length; he does this by combining it with a memoir. I thought he was interesting and funny and surprisingly open and frank, and I found his internal thought processes amusingly relatable. Also, I like behind-the-scenes things, and this gives some behind-the-scenes stories about working for the television news.

(image from Amazon.com)

I Am Big Bird: the Caroll Spinney Story (Netflix link). My parents recommended this to me, and I kept not watching it because I always think documentaries are not going to be as fun to watch as movies. But I really loved it. It made me feel sentimental feelings about Sesame Street.

The other day one of my clients wondered why, on a particular prescription bottle, the number of pills was circled. And I used to work in a pharmacy, so I could supply the not-very-interesting answer! I shouldn’t say it’s not interesting, because it IS interesting to ME. I like knowing this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff.

The first thing to know is that in the pharmacy where I worked, pharmacy technicians (that’s an entry-level job) did almost all of what you might picture being the pharmacist’s job: counting pills and putting them into bottles, putting the labels on the bottles. The pharmacist would then verify that it had been done correctly.

At my pharmacy, a circled number of pills was the technician saying to the pharmacist, “I noticed that this number was not 30.” So many prescriptions are for 30 pills at a time, that one of the more common pharmacy errors is putting 30 pills in a bottle when it’s supposed to be 10 or 45 or 90 or 120. So a technician might circle the number to let the pharmacist know that the non-30 number was taken into account.

If the number is 30 and it is circled, I’m not sure what it means. That pharmacy might have a policy of circling all numbers, as a way to remind the technicians to check it every time.

If there is a “DC” handwritten next to the number, it meant the technician double-counted the pills. One reason for counting twice is if the medication is a controlled substance, such as a narcotic. Pharmacies have to rigorously document any controlled substance, and there are regular inspections. If the number of pills in the store differs from the number there OUGHT to be, there is trouble: even a single missing pill will have everyone on hands and knees looking under the furniture. So it’s common for a pharmacy to have a policy of double-counting any controlled medication.

Another reason for counting twice is if there’s a note in the customer’s file mentioning a past problem. If a customer recently received the wrong number of pills, for example, we wanted to be careful not to let that happen again soon afterward. Or if a customer repeatedly complained about getting the wrong number, we wanted to be able to say we had counted them twice. Sometimes the technician would count them twice and then the pharmacist would do a final count, just to be really, really sure. If the prescription is a narcotic AND it’s for a customer who routinely says they were shorted on the number of pills, the technician might count THREE times, and write “TC” next to the number.

If you see initials written next to the number, those are usually the initials of the technician who counted the pills and put them in the bottle. Some technicians like to do this because there’s no other way to know who filled what: if a number of errors are being made, a technician might want to be able to say, “My initials aren’t on this, so it wasn’t me.” Sometimes pharmacies will have everyone write their initials every time; other times it’s optional. Or sometimes only new employees do it, so that the pharmacist knows to be extra careful checking those.

In the pharmacy where I worked, the pharmacist didn’t add their initials because we had only one pharmacist working per day, and the computer added their initials automatically to the labels of all prescriptions processed that day. On the very rare occasions when we had two pharmacists, the pharmacist would write his or her initials after the tech’s: ST/CA would be Swistle Thistle (tech) and then Carla Alamo (pharmacist).

In fact, one reason many of the technicians wrote our initials on the labels of bottles we filled is that the computer ALSO automatically added the initials of the technician who had printed the label. But it was very very common for the prescription to be filled by a different technician than the one who had printed the label. It was annoying to see another technician’s initials on the label of a bottle I’d filled, so I liked to add my initials. “No, it was ME!!” Plus, if I made a mistake, I wanted to know about it; and if I DIDN’T make a mistake, I didn’t want to get blamed for it. Plus, I like writing my initials.

I like to know what’s in a pre-packaged See’s assortment, but they don’t list every single piece in the box—quite possibly because it’s not always the same, so perhaps I will need to get several of each box JUST TO BE SURE. See also:

What Pieces are in the See’s Candies Milk Chocolates Box?
Which Pieces Are in the See’s Candies Chocolate and Variety Box?
Which Pieces Are in the See’s Candies Soft Centers Box?
Which Pieces Are in the See’s Candies Assorted Chocolates Box?
What Pieces Are in the See’s Candies Silver Box?

I see I have not been consistent with What/Which.

I’m not sure how I missed the Nuts and Chews box before, and in fact I was pretty sure I HAD done it, but I can’t find it, so oops, oh dear, what a shame, I had to order another box.

Here’s the description See’s gives for the Nuts and Chews Assortment: “Featuring California-grown walnuts, almonds, rich caramel and more, enrobed in layers of milk and dark chocolate. Hand-packed with bestsellers, including Dark Almond, Milk Walnut, Scotchmallow®, Caramel and more.”

It’s one pound, and here’s what was in my box (see here for descriptions):

Caramel
Dark Almond (4)
Dark Butterchew (2)
Dark Nougat
Dark Pattie
Dark Peanut (not listed in Custom Mix options)
Milk Almond (3)
Milk Butterchew (3)
Milk Pattie
Milk Peanut
Milk Walnut
Peanut Nougat
Rum Nougat
Scotchmallow (2)
Walnut Square
looked like Walnut Square, but with almonds
looked like Walnut Square, but with peanuts (2)

The ones where I say they “looked like Walnut Square,” I would have just called them Almond Square and Peanut Square, because that probably IS what they’re called, but those pieces aren’t listed in the Custom Mix section.

I felt as if this box had GRACIOUS PLENTY Dark Almond pieces.

Also, the box overall seemed a little heavy on the peanut flavor.

Of the seventeen types, only one is the sort I tend to include in a Custom Mix—but it’s not because I don’t like the others. I really love the chocolate-covered nut cluster type of candy, but I always feel…as if I could make those myself, or something. And although I really like chocolate-covered caramel, for some reason I don’t think of choosing them. THIS MUST CHANGE.

Let’s see, that leaves sixteen types to put into categories. I’d say ten are kinds I might not think to order, but am very happy to see. And all the rest are ones I do like, but don’t go crazy for.

That assessment seems kind of unenthusiastic, but actually I think this was the first assortment that, for my tastes, would be a good value over the custom mix: I liked all the pieces in the box, and wasn’t disappointed by any of it. I liked the balance of nut pieces to caramel pieces, and I liked the mix of dark and milk chocolate. Custom mix is $23.00/pound, and the Nuts & Chews assortment is $18.50 a pound: for my own chocolate preferences, that makes the Nuts & Chews assortment a box I’ll order again.

I think one of the least helpful safety tips I’ve ever heard is the one about not having a predictable routine. I am wondering what life looks like, if the day’s schedule needs to be built with the assumption that criminals are watching and charting our EVERY MOVE, looking for patterns. All this tip does is give me a rush of adrenaline when Paul leaves for work at the same time each day: QUICK! LOCK THE DOOR BEHIND HIM! THIS IS THE MOMENT THE CRIMINAL WILL BE READY TO SPRING!!

By the way, if you do what I do and buy gift cards one at a time each time you go to Target, this is around the time to start. The number of weeks until Christmas is roughly nine, so in fact some of us may need to double up on the cards: I need three for classroom teachers, five for school bus drivers, three for music lesson teachers, one for a coach, and one for the mail carrier. I think I usually try to start in September, but spaced it.

I do notice this new job, as few hours as it is, leaves me with fewer available brain ports. I have to write things down immediately or they’re gone. And then I lose track of the lists.

I’m interested in Postcrossing again. I’d gone down to doing it mostly in December: I liked sending holiday postcards with holiday stamps. But suddenly I was in the mood to send cards, so I did, and now I’m at my sending limit and waiting eagerly for some to arrive at their destinations so I can send more.

Job update: As of right now, I would say I really, really, really like my job. Right now I’m working only 10 hours a week, down from 16, and I would actually PREFER to increase my hours, because I would LIKE to work more. When I left my shift yesterday, I was wishing I could STAY LONGER. Then I wished I was working there again the next day. Also, I had a couple of triumphs recently, where for example the staff nurse was visiting and coincidentally witnessed me being awesome, or where I reported something to the office and it turned out it was really good I’d reported it, or where I did something without being asked and it turned out the client was really hoping someone would do it but hadn’t wanted to ask someone to do it.

It’s going really well, is what I am telling you. I feel happier with this job than I did without it. It fixed the suffocating ennui I was feeling, where I would sit in the house feeling, simultaneously, (1) trapped to the point of panic and (2) overwhelmingly free to do anything, but not wanting to do any of it. Now when I’m home, I feel happy to be home, and I play Candy Crush with relish.

And I have LOTS to think about. If you are someone who likes to think about other people’s families and other people’s lives and other people’s problems, this job has TONS of that. And I feel like I’m adding useful skills and knowledge to my apocalypse repertoire.

One thing I find interesting to think about is that, fairly often, I have to make client vs. employer decisions. Here’s a sample I gave Rob last night, thinking he would enjoy discussing it. I don’t know if you knew this already, but if an elderly person falls, there can be a lot of drama. If a client falls while I’m with them, I have to call 911—even if they seem 100% fine. Just for starters, it’s because I’m not allowed to help them up off the floor (it’s too likely to cause an employee injury), but it’s also because I’m not educated/authorized to determine if someone is hurt or not. We pass the buck to the paramedics and let THEM call it. Often the person ends up with a day in the emergency room and/or hospital, getting x-rayed. It’s expensive and time-consuming, and the client usually hates all the fuss and feels embarrassed about falling, and then their grown children worry and start talking about nursing homes, and so on.

Anyway, that’s not the example yet. Here’s the example. If a client TELLS me that they fell when I was NOT there, I’m supposed to report that to my employer. That is, if I arrive and the client says that she fell the day before but is fine, I’m supposed to report that. But what about when a client doesn’t KNOW that that’s the case, and tells me about a fall the day before, and says, “I’m only telling YOU: I don’t want any FUSS because I’m FINE.” Dilemma. And if I tell, she’ll know it was me, and perhaps feel betrayed, and trust me less in the future, and not tell me things that I really ought to be told.

What Rob said, and this is what I think as well, is that from now on, I will look for ways to inform clients that I have to report certain things they tell me. That seems only fair. Though it worries me to think that then they might not tell me things they really ought to tell me. Still, I would expect ANYONE I might confide in (doctor, lawyer, friend) to be clear with me if there are things I might tell them that they would have to report to someone else.

One tricky area is not knowing what the client really WANTS. That is, I have one client who seems to be rushing me out of the house at the end of my shift, as she goes up to bed (“Are you still here?,” she’ll say, or “Here pretty late, aren’t you?”—when I’m ALWAYS there until the same time). It makes me feel antsy, and I’ve wondered if I should ask my employer if I can change my hours so I arrive and leave 15 minutes earlier. But there’s a good possibility she may actually WANT me to be there as she goes up the stairs. She may ACT as if she wants me gone, and she may in fact truly want me gone—or she may want to act as if she doesn’t want me there, while actually being glad I’m there Just In Case. Maybe it’s lonely going up to a dark room she used to share with her husband, and nice to know someone is still downstairs; maybe it’s nice to have someone else shut off the last light; maybe she has visions of falling down the stairs and lying there until morning. Another example: a client may complain about a grown child who worries too much, while deep-down being grateful that they can use it as their excuse for going to the doctor (“I wouldn’t even BE here, but my daughter INSISTED!”). Just so, a client may act as if she wants to confide in me secretly, when actually she is counting on me to report it. The client may or may not be aware of that motivation in herself, which adds a layer of difficulty.

Rob says, and he’s right but it was annoying the way he said it, that all this complicated stuff is THE VERY REASON THERE IS AN ESTABLISHED PROCEDURE. Well, yes. But I like to turn the issues over in my mind. I think it’s interesting. Where does my loyalty lie? How much am I willing to bend the rules (for example, by pretending not to remember them) in order to do things the way I think they ought to be done? How DO I think they ought to be done? Things like that.

I have been buying used Lane Bryant jeans from EBay, because I hate so much going to the store: it’s far away, it’s in a mall, the sales are confusing and the non-sale prices are too high, things are often out of stock in my size; the website is not much better. But what I hadn’t noticed is that “Genius Fit” is apparently new, and different than what I thought I was buying. I have two or three pairs of them now, because of buying ahead of what I needed, and they are just not right. I am tugging them up in the back so often, I actually HURT MY SHOULDER doing it. One of the pairs also gradually pulls my underwear down, which cannot continue.

I made a little joke to Paul, saying that I was trying not to be offended that jeans meant to fit a genius didn’t fit me, har har, and he carefully explained to me that “genius” referred to the awesomeness of the fit, rather than to the wearer. Yes. Thank you, Paul. I understand now. Originally I was thinking that jeans would fit differently based on the intelligence of the person wearing them, but now I see my mistake.

(image from Amazon.com)

My sister-in-law, my sister-in-law’s sister, and I have all decided to re-read Little Women. As an aside, I don’t think of my sister-in-law’s sister as “my sister-in-law’s sister,” I just think of both of them as my sisters-in-law. But every time I go to refer to her that way, it seems I should provide an explanation, because otherwise it’s confusing: how would I have two sisters-in-law, if I only have one sibling? And actually I DO have two sisters-in-law, because Paul has a sister, but my brother’s wife and my husband’s sister don’t know each other. Plus, it seems like it matters that the two I AM referring to are sisters of each other. So anyway. “Sister-in-law’s sister” it is. Now the word sister is looking strange.

ANYWAY. We are re-reading it, if you’d like to join us. Our deadline is Saturday, and I started reading it this morning, and now here I am at the computer instead of reading, and this book is thicker than I’d remembered. It is also a LOT preachier than I remembered. My goodness. I had barely started it when the girls, who were not going to get any presents for Christmas, started reprimanding themselves and each other for feeling slightly sad about that. Most of them are doing it in a way I find funny/pleasing (like the way any of us might try to adjust our own behavior), but I’m finding Beth (and the way the others worship Beth) close to intolerable.

Back in late spring, I bought a clearance Easter wreath at Target. It was made of paper flowers, and was nice bright Eastery pastels. It pleases me TREMENDOUSLY that in the summer sun the flowers faded to be PERFECT for fall: now they’re mostly white, with tints of golden yellow and barn red, and the leaves have faded from spring green to sage green.

I realize this is going to sound very silly to many of you, but I have been blowing my own mind recently by WEARING DIFFERENT EARRINGS. Wait, have I already mentioned this? I’m getting deja vu. Well, I will go ahead, and you can stop me if you’ve heard it before. I tend to wear MATCHING earrings: if I am wearing a BLUE shirt, I will look through the pile of BLUE earrings. (The late ’80s were a good time for me: so much matching!) Or else I will wear silver or gold or otherwise neutral earrings. But today, I am wearing a dark purple shirt, and I put on the DARK TEAL earrings I usually wear with shades of teal. IT’S SHOCKING. Yesterday I was wearing a dark teal shirt, and I wore GREEN earrings.

The nice thing about being sort of timid and non-adventurous by nature is that it doesn’t take much to really SHAKE THINGS UP. No need to have an affair or buy a sports car: I can manage my midlife crisis by CHANGING EARRINGS. Or BUYING A NEW KIND OF CRACKERS.

Speaking of affairs, I dreamed last night that I had a long-standing arrangement with my ex-husband, that once a year at a big family reunion we would sleep together. It was all out in the open: that is, both spouses were fully aware. THAT part of the dream was, I’m relieved to say, just UNDERSTOOD TO BE THE CASE (in real life, the one where my ex-husband and I have had zero contact of any kind since our divorce, I would not enjoy this arrangement). The part that was interesting (interesting to me, I mean: other people’s dreams are understood to be Not Interesting, which is why I’m keeping this mercifully brief) is that I was standing around with the ex-husband’s wife, who was very nice but of course things were a little awkward between us and we were fiddling with our drinks and trying to think of what to say, and I said, “Did you ever realize, back when you were imagining marriage, how many accommodations you’d end up making?” And she said, “NO!” and we were both laughing a little crazily.

This dream isn’t hard to figure out: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about marriages, and all the accommodations that get made over the years. Some people happen not to change very much over the years, or happen to change in ways very parallel to their spouse, so that they end up saying, “Well, SURE, marriage takes EFFORT, but you just MAKE THE DECISION to…” or whatever. Meanwhile, other people get married to someone who is not AT ALL the person they would (or should) choose twenty years later, and/or they change a LOT. I’m at the age where a batch of divorces are happening among my peers, as people stand at the midpoint of their lives and say, “This is silly. I’m not spending the rest of my life like this.”

This post is taking a bit of an unexpected turn, for one that started with paper wreaths and earrings. But the dream has got me thinking about something I was already thinking about. I grew up in a religious tradition that says there are only a few reasons divorce is allowed. Misery is not one of those reasons. Wanting to live in two completely different and incompatible ways is not one of those reasons. HATING EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR LIFE is not one of those reasons. As I get older, I find it harder to understand this system. One of my friends comes from a similar tradition, and her parents honestly hate each other but have been married over fifty years because they feel they are not allowed to divorce.

I am, as you might imagine, on the side of NOT doing that. Which doesn’t at all mean I take marriage lightly. Don’t you hate it when people act as if the only possibilities are the two extremes? Like, either marriage is UNTIL DEATH, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU HATE IT, or else obviously you are someone who divorces someone after one small argument because you are a frivolous idiot who doesn’t take commitments seriously and thought marriage was supposed to be all fun all the time. I am in the middle somewhere, as I’m guessing most of us are. I think there are a lot of good reasons to stay married even if it’s not going well; I also think marriage is a useful social contract and that there are a lot of good reasons to end that contract if it’s no longer useful, just as there can be good reasons to end any other kind of contract. I like the Judith Viorst quote: “One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with him, or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you maybe fall in again.”