I was reading Pandagon[yes, I know!] and I thought that the fact that I am a slacker is greatly determined by my gender. I work 30 hours a week in my nonpaid job. Now, for a dude, that would be great! But as a woman, I'm expected to do girly crap[with what money? and you can spend all day in the beauty shop, just sitting there], clean stuff, etc. I'm an old maid at 25, so I don't have to do a bunch of wedding planning or fool with kids[today I had a hard time thinking of a solution for a woman who wanted a changing table our bathroom didn't have]

Possibly related, is bfp's story about health. The health care debate pains me because we talk about cost,cost, cost, and nothing about the cost of keeping everyone sick! Or the cost of being a woman doing a complicated calculus about how many cups of rice are in your pepper and how many points that is. Or the cost of being a little kid asking for an adult's chips and getting a lecture about working for what you want.

I think about this guy at work. He's biked from 18 miles to get his classes and drug tests so he doesn't have to spend a weekend, a week in jail. So he doesn't have to miss work and lose money for his wife, his nine grandkids. There's so much going on, that even I, a middle classer apparently closer to the ground than those on their lofty perches talking about how if health care was free, we'd use more of it.

What about the cost of our babies born too little, too soon, too sick? What about that?