I don't care about whether we can bill for two separate Emergency Services Crisis Assessments in one day. I don't care about whether we need copies of every lab drawn at the hospital, or only even-numbered ones, or only certain ones for certain people. I don't care that by bringing back copies of all of them, I am creating an extra two pieces of paper in the shredder bin in a day.

I don't care that my father-in-law wants to give away his earthly possessions before he dies. That is, I support his choices, but I don't want anything from his house and don't want to fight with my mother-in-law over the inevitable process in which I, under duress, randomly pick something, only to have her decide that I have chosen the one item that was her most favorite in the history of items. I don't care that she's worried that she's making the wrong health decisions; she's not a doctor. I don't care that my husband doesn't care about my father-in-law's earthly possessions.

I don't care that my poor high-mileage-and-full-of-crap Saturn is still sitting on the front lawn, albeit to the side, waiting for me to get my act together, clean it out, and either donate it or slap a "For Sale" sign on it. I don't care that when my father is home, we have four private vehicles and the cab of a semi parked at random intervals in front of my house. I don't care that it actually kind of looks like a little piece of West Virginia (or - if you're from West Virginia and easily bruised, Alabama) in New Hampshire, with the number of vehicles out there. I even had a couch out there over the weekend - I didn't care about that, either.

I don't care that my parents make each other so unhappy, in such clueless and thoughtless ways. I don't care that Willem's parents make each other unhappy. I can't make them treat each other better, so I care more about how they all treat my brood. Including me.

I don't care that my decision to breastfeed for more than a year each time is "gross" to one friend and "weird" to another. I don't care that my decision not to let my kids cry it out at night makes their (former) pediatrician look at me as though I have burst into diarrhea on his exam room floor. I don't care that my father believes that two-year-olds shouldn't whine.

Ready for this one? It's a big bad one. I don't care about the situation in Israel. I don't care about tsunamis in the Pacific. I don't care about the health and welfare of the President. Of anything. I am not unaware or ignorant about these things, and I have strong opinions, but in my world, caring implies imputing enough emotion to a topic to feel a personal stake in the outcome. I can be knowledgeable about something without caring about it.

Lest one assume that my give-a-damn level has completely evaporated, I do have things I care about. Plenty of them. I just try to pick my cares based on my own life, not based on someone else's priorities. And having a week alone, I am faced with lots of decisions about how to spend my time and caring and energy.

Week alone? Oh, right, I haven't updated in a few days. I'll do a separate, less soapboxy post for that. Because that's stuff that I - mostly - DO care about.