Quotes from Sandra Tsing Loh

I really don't think our school system is an evil borg force. It's sort of like the government. It's not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.

Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage.

My sister is not my mother, but more than anyone else, she fills that role for me now - like it or not. And indeed, all women I know play that role for somebody - like it or not.

I don't know how it's going for my sisters, but as my 40s and Verizon bills and mortgage payments roll on, I seem to have an ever more recurring 1950s housewife fantasy.

I'm pretty sure that changing diapers of all sizes isn't the kind of women's work Betty Friedan had in mind, nor Linda Hirshman.

I think live music is really, really important. And I think it's very important to do together. It's much more fun to play to music together than the one person listening to their lone iPod Shuffle. I think it's an amazing way to build community and have children do things that are funded that's not a videogame.

Yes, I was one of the slightly vintage women who let out a shriek when we saw it at Costco: 'The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories', a complete boxed set, fifty-six familiar yellow spines, shrink-wrapped.

Things need shaking up when American women feel endangered even as Yosemite bears lumber around belching, their eyes glazed with surfeit, their pelts covered in Oreo crumbs.

I think that in L.A., one thing that nobody will ever talk about is, for instance, how just one in five kids in L.A. County is white, so when you're looking out there, it's a very brown city.

Struggling with my finances, nudging toward 50, I sometimes daydream about being happily married to a matching frugaholic husband in a matching Christmas-red tracksuit with matching walkie-talkies as we troll Ralphs, excitedly comparing triple coupons.

While at a biological disadvantage in competitions, women - who even make trips to restaurant bathrooms in pairs - are at a clear advantage when it comes to grouping together and the activities that accompany it: gossiping, sharing, bonding, assisting, scrapbooking, and building networks.

Work... family - I'm doing it all. But here's the secret I share with so many other nanny- and housekeeper-less mothers I see working the same balance: my house is trashed. It is strewn with socks and tutus.

Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl's.

In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household's natural rhythms.

Beating up on public schools is not just our nation's favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off - like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of 'Big Love' - who, of course, have no dog in the fight.

There's an image that some of us have of Jackie Onassis, stepping out in the rain, and Maurice Tempelsman is holding her umbrella. We want that man. We want the man to be the concierge and the masseur and the travel booker.

I'd be lying if I claimed that, in spite of our amiable afternoons, I don't have an ache somewhere in my heart that my children will not be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon.

In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson.

I cohabited for 20 years with my longtime husband and father of my two now-teen daughters in a stable family household.

My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that's blended a certain way from Costa Rica.

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.

You go into the book store, there's the cut-out of Dr. Phil, and then the dreaded women's health section where every book, instead of the menopause book with the fanged Medusa head on the cover that might be more pertinent, you always see a flower and a poppy and a daisy and a stethoscope.

My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.

We all fantasize about work that uses our creativity, is self-directed, happens during the hours we choose, and occurs in an attractively lit setting with fascinating people - you know, jobs like women have on TV.