"This is just fun for me. This is not a job. I don�t do it for the money, I do it because I love driving and because I�m a sociable person."

Says the man officially recognized as the best Uber driver in Canada.

"I only Uber when I�m upbeat, positive, feeling good, when the car�s clean, I want to go be sociable and get to know my own city a little bit more," he said. "The key is that if this ever feels like a job, I�m done. I�m out... Driving has always come very naturally to me. It�s a passion,� he said. He was raised in rural Saskatchewan, where �your driver�s licence is your ticket to freedom. This allows me to enjoy it even more, be social, meet new people, tour my own city and have some fun,� he said.

He was awarded Uber's Sixth Star medal, which he'll display in the car but not call attention to because "That would be un-Canadian."

He has 5 tips for Uber drivers: "1. A clean car... 2. Smooth driving... 3. Amenities... cold water, Perrier, mints, gum and cellphone chargers...  free Wi-Fi... 4. Music... 'chill house music'... 5. Clean personal appearance... shirt with a collar, blue jeans, driving shoes...."

Note: This man also has a regular job.

"I want to play in the NBA. Or be a mortician."

"Why a mortician?"

"I liked the way that my uncle was dressed at his funeral. And if I�m a mortician when someone in my family passes away, then I can take care of their body. Also my science teacher went on the internet for me and found out that morticians make $54,000 a year."

"Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she�s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation..."

"... sources say."

Sources.... Reading the article, I'm thinking the people who have left are aggrieved because it's obvious that Chelsea is in a privileged position. Are we really to think that her unpleasantness is what's driving them out? Isn't it more that she's blocking them and can't be criticized in a normal way? I'm willing to believe she's unpleasant. There are unpleasant people everywhere, but when do you quit your job over somebody's unpleasantness?

"I get so tired of the sad articles that desperately try to reassure working mothers that their children are 'better off' than the children of mothers who stay home."

"Work if you want to, but don't imply that my children were at any disadvantage because I stayed home until the youngest started school. That's laughable. As for 'mommy wars,' maybe the constant need to downplay or subtly denigrate the value of SAHM in order to make working moms feel better about leaving their children with others for 8-10 hours a day is a big part of the problem. How about this: there are pros and cons to both scenarios and what matters most is that children are loved. Children who are loved are the ones who are 'better off' so let's leave it at that."

A comment at a NYT piece titled "Mounting Evidence of Advantages for Children of Working Mothers." The term "mommy wars"is in the article, the third sentence of which is:

The mommy wars might seem like a relic of the 1990s, but 41 percent of adults say the increase in working mothers is bad for society, while just 22 percent say it is good, according to the Pew Research Center.

That Pew poll is from 2007, which seems a little relic-y, but the term "mommy wars" comes from a 1990 Newsweek article called "Mommy Vs. Mommy" that begins:

Tension between mothers is building as they increasingly choose divergent paths: going to work, or staying home to care for their kids

These are the Mommy Wars...

Man, that is desperate journalism. And yet it is remembered a quarter century later.

Picture the working mother. Like most mothers of her generation, she probably grew up in a family with an at-home mom, so she's vulnerable to criticism that she's not spending enough time with her children.... She is anxious that her children are growing up without her, that she's missing the important landmarks in their lives...

Now cross the battle lines for a look at the working-at-home mother. She's usually there because she believes that's best for her children. Either she's lucky and her husband can support them easily, or they've agreed to sacrifice and economize so that they can live on one salary. Once ensconced, however, she is often isolated....

Making peace... Many feel that feminism's first wave didn't give them the alternatives they need. Because of that, some gave up on feminism... But perhaps the mothers can't "get it right" all on their own. It seems likely that a truce won't be possible until Congress passes legislation to give families more choices, without sacrificing either the children's welfare or the mother's individual needs. After all, isn't choice what feminism was supposed to be all about?

A truce won't be possible until Congress passes legislation...

"If this sounds spiteful and ugly it is. But I think it is also appropriate, and who else would say it besides me?"

Wrote Penelope Trunk, guessing that Sheryl Sandberg's husband, David Goldberg, had killed himself and that he may have done so because she "leaned" into her job too much. (We later learned that Goldberg died in an accident on an exercise treadmill.)

In New York Magazine, Marin Cogan gets quite hostile to Trunk.

But instead of apologizing for her mistake, Trunk doubled down on the idea that he killed himself... If you�ve never read her, the posts come across as inexplicably cruel...

I�m not sure what exactly made me turn away from Trunk�s blog. I don�t think it was any one specific post, but the gradual realization, upon closer reading, that my friends and I were mistaken in assuming that Trunk�s brazen careerism was a feminist project in any meaningful sense. Some of her posts read more like trolling than genuine advice.... Not that long after I stopped reading it, the tone of the blog got dark...

"The reason why job prospects are improving for law students is because the amount of people in law school is going down."

"We're not creating more real lawyer jobs, we're just decreasing the supply of would-be lawyers."  

"Is that a bad thing?"

"12 Things Successful People Never Reveal About Themselves at Work."

"Sharing the right aspects of yourself at work is an art form, with dire consequences when you fail."

I need a word that means: the feeling of annoyance and loss that comes from reading all the way to the end of a NYT article with one thought foremost in your head...

... I can't wait to see what people say in the comments and then seeing that this is one of those NYT articles without a comments section. The little comments icon � a cartoon-style speech bubble with a number on it � appears at the bottom of the page, increasing the risk that you'll keep reading and assuming that various problems with the article will already be articulated by NYT readers. Then you hit bottom and see, no, if you're going to blog that, you're going to have to do the reactions yourself, or just set it up so that comments on your blog might possibly do what readers at the NYT might have done, except that they won't, because my readers tend not even to like the NYT in the first place and to skew way more right wing.

The article that wracked me with that feeling this morning was "A Woman-Led Law Firm That Lets Partners Be Parents." Excerpt (buried deep in the long piece):

One reason Ms. Simon and Ms. Geller don�t feel they have to sneak out of the office is that there are no offices. The firm shuns a permanent home in favor of a shared work space managed by a company called Metro Offices, where it rents a conference room for an hour, an office for a day, as needed.... They did this partly to encourage their employees to work from home and on their own schedules....

The other advantage is to hold down expenses, of course, which allows the Geller Law Group to maintain reasonable profit margins while charging less than competitors with higher overhead.... To keep track of one another, the lawyers and a paralegal meticulously update their shared Google calendars and communicate constantly through Gchat.

Ms. Simon delights in the guerrilla-style logistics of a mostly virtual firm....

Delights? Guerrilla-style? This is unswallowable. They found 2 women who have been struggling to do something for a short time, show little sign of success, and are somehow celebrated in the NYT with head-slappingly unbelievable puffery. Now, I know my readers will attack this article, but that's not the same as comments at the NYT, which is serving up material like this because it thinks its readers will lap it up with pleasure. Did they? I bet they didn't! Show me the comments!

By the way, in case you're wondering if fathers appear in this article, the answer is yes. Once:

Ms. Geller wanted to spend part of her daytime hours around her children without giving up on a legal career. �I saw no role models who didn�t have a husband as a stay-at-home dad,� Ms. Geller said of the partners at the large firm she left before starting the Geller Law Group in 2011. Ms. Simon wanted to be home for dinner and attend school events without worrying about how it would affect her annual review.

There is one other cameo appearance by a man in this women-having-it-all puff piece:

The firm�s lone male associate, Michael Munson, told me he left the firm in February because he craved the camaraderie of colleagues.

Oh! It's the man who wants more real, flesh-and-blood relationships and the women who delight in the guerrilla logistics of living on line? Pay no attention to that problem, lady NYT readers! Ms. Simon gets lots of face time with one 4-year-old boy. She's able to leave meetings early and fight through an hour of "punishing rush-hour traffic" to get to that child whom she rewards with a smile when he says "Mommy, I have an idea... Why don�t we eat noodles and watch superheroes?"

Now, lady NYT readers, isn't that just a dream of the way the world should be? Silence!

UPDATE: 5 minutes after I put up this post, I saw that the NYT opened a comments section on the article. I am positive that it was not there before, because there isn't one comment on the article yet. (And I'd searched the page scrupulously for a comments icon before writing this.)

"The frustrating/strange/down right annoying thing is, I frequently hear things like 'that's not a real job'...:

"... 'you can't possibly make enough money doing that!,' 'that's only a temporary thing, right?' and '"what are you going to do after this?' But what is a 'real job'?.... Is blogging not a real job because you can't go to school for it or because you don't need a resume to do it? Is it not a real job because you don't need an interview to fill the position or because you don't personally know anyone who does it?... Whatever your answer I assure you, blogging is a real job.... I pay all my own bills with the money I make blogging.... It needs to be acknowledged that any way of supporting yourself even if it isn't traditional, so long as you aren't stealing or hurting anyone, is a real job. It seems awfully silly to criticize someone for making a living doing something they love and enjoy, doesn't it?..."

 Writes The Dainty Squid (on a blog I quite like).

I'm all for giving respect to those who can make their living doing free-lance writing (such as blogging), but part of the respect I'd like to give is that you are free lance, you are independent, you have avoided getting a job.

You ask the question "What is a job?" You made that the centerpiece of your thinking, apparently because you're letting people get into your head, demeaning you with the statement that you don't have a job, and that tracks you into arguing for a broader meaning for the word "job" so that what you do gets to be "a job."

But why do you want that? Because it's the word other people use to make you feel bad about your freedom and success?

I'd say: Get the upper hand in these conversations with jerks. You're lucky not to have to work for somebody else in the structured position known as "a job" (to use the narrow definition of the word you'd prefer to stretch). You're an entrepreneur.

When did the job become the standard of a worthy, successful life?

ADDED: I'd say more about the word "job," but it was only a couple months ago that I wrote "5 things about the word 'job.'"

"It�s no longer a way for a working-class guy with street smarts and a huge native intelligence to make a lot of money."

"It�s now the domain of the kinds of technical specialists who are really winners in other parts of the economy as well," said the cultural anthropologist, Caitlin Zaloom, on the occasion of the closing of the futures pits in the Chicago Board of Trade.