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Most people don’t want to live next door to a vacant house. Not me, I relish the absence of neighbors.

For the last few weeks, every morning when I have awoken, the first words from my lips are, “Bill Moyers said.” My dear husband is surely tired of hearing me wake up starting with the phrase.

Google has stepped in for our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and even a favorite aunt. Intimate knowledge that used to be shared between family members must now be gathered, ad hoc, from the first ten websites that appear in the search results.

Two different people have crossed my mind lately. First, H. David Nahai, the former chief of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power.

Okay it’s been fourteen years, I’m still bitter, and I’m not the only one. Really, I am trying to get over it, but I still feel like I got stiffed by the whole law school/student loan gambit. Yes, I (or rather my husband) paid off my hundred thousand dollar plus student loan debt. I no longer live under the specter of banks or fear bill collectors. But I haven’t quite recovered from my own Japanese-style lost decade and a half.

Someone recently pointed out that I have a lot of “don’ts” in my life. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t eat processed food. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart or Target. I don’t fly Delta (or any American airline company, for that matter). I don’t have full coverage health insurance. I don’t save for my child’s college education. I don’t like the President, the police department or my neighbors. The list, apparently, goes on and on.

I’m not saving for college. I’ll stand up and admit it. My husband and I are not socking away every red cent so my newly born son can enter an Ivy League school in the fall of 2028.

I hate Target. I don’t find that red bul-seye the least bit enticing. And don't start trying to distinguish it from any other run-of-the-mill cheap goods store by using that fake French accent.

My mother does not recycle. I was shocked when I found this out. She’d come out to visit us and put everything in the garbage can, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, junk mail, everything. I kept pointing her toward the recycling bin in the house and the big blue bin outside. But she insisted on putting everything in the garbage. I couldn’t figure it out. We had carefully recycled in the 1980s when refuse-sorting started, just like we started wearing seatbelts when the laws changed. So I finally had to ask.

My hackles rose when I forgot my iPod. I hate listening to the car radio – especially on a Saturday. There have to be some choices between the poor reception of shouting heads – screaming about socialism on AM, and pop music – which all seems to be variations on the theme of Lady Gaga on FM.