Until this morning, it never occurred to me that it could be.

I developed a love for travel when I was very young. I had the good fortune to have an aunt, a teacher, who took me away with her on Christmas and Easter vacations, and we went to Venezuela and California and the Caribbean and Washington, DC. She planned to take me to England, which had become a big dream of mine, but then she met a guy and got married, and that was the end of that.

In high school, I had the opportunity to go to England for an exchange program. I went, and I am not being dramatic when I say it changed my life. Attending school for four weeks in another country transformed my thinking and forever altered my view of the world. I’ve been back to England four times since and visited other wonderful places.

In my twenties, after a particularly rough parade of boyfriends, I chose to go to San Francisco by myself to get perspective. (I had given up on dating, having made a vow not to date again until I met someone truly worth spending my free time with, and at that point, I didn’t even really know what that meant.)  An earlier trip to Ireland taught me that distance clarified my feelings about things going on at home, and so I welcomed the chance to spend some time on my own in a less familiar place to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life. (Not only did I attract rotten men at the time, I also attracted bad employers.)

When I came back from San Francisco, I felt changed. I decided to find a better employer. And succeeded. I decided to attract much better men than the ones I formerly dated. And succeeded.

So, travel was clearly never a waste of time for people like me, but this morning I read Penelope Trunk’s piece on why travel is definitely a waste of time for people like her. And she makes some interesting points.

Click here to read them.

Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci, otherwise known as Garfunkel and Oates, think pregnant women are smug, and they wrote a little song to express their feelings.

I have some thoughts on this. I’ve been pregnant twice, and both times I was too freaked out to luxuriate in smugness. What was I freaked out about? Birth defects. Having my baby mixed up with someone else’s in the hospital (there had been several publicized cases at the time). The inevitable change in the relationship between me and the father. Losing my identity as ‘Terry’ and becoming ‘Mom’ to people who really should know better (pediatricians and school administrators call me ‘Mom,’ and I hate it).

Also, people have been getting pregnant for a while now. On one hand it’s a miracle. On the other, it’s not such a big deal. Any smugness on my part would ickily and erroneously imply that I had fulfilled my purpose as a woman.

In case you’re wondering, I am glad I had my children (most of the time), but if I’d found myself unable to get pregnant, I’m sure I’d have found something else to do. In fact, I can think of three things off the top of my head already.

Some of my friends did find something else to do. Two of them chose not to have children, and boy are they happy girls. Another friend wanted children, but when she couldn’t get pregnant, she turned her attention to travel and general enjoyment of life. Trust me, she’s not jealous of anybody. Sometimes those of us with children are jealous of her.

And let’s face it, as last week’s much-discussed news story about the fed-up woman who threw her daughters out of the car told us, having kids isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk agrees. After a male follower criticized for an offhand remark she made about her children on Twitter, she offered a fabulous rebuttal. I loved it.

As for the above video and the song, it’s kind of funny (and the girls harmonize beautifully), but it’s also kind of mean.

I mean, can’t we all just get along?

Photo: Jim Young/Reuters

But if we believed the tripe in the mainstream media last week, First Ladies Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni were fated to clash in a “fashion face-off” (as if neither one of them had anything else to occupy her tiny mind than pretty clothes). And, then when it turned out they actually did get along (big surprise there — two women actually getting along instead of competing for the role of Homecoming Queen), some toad actually referred to them them as “BFFs.”

Oy.

Crap media commentary aside, Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk called last week’s G-20 Summit “BS for women” and “the tea party from hell.” Read all about it here.

By the way, I really hate the term catfight.

While on a cruise last month, I met a series of people who’d just been laid off (they’d paid for the vacation, and then BOOM!). It seems everywhere I go, I meet someone who’s been laid off. And I want to say the right thing.

You see, I know firsthand the importance of saying the right thing. During the economic downturn of the 1970s, my father was laid off for a long time, and none of us will forget how scared he was, how scared my mother was, or how scared my siblings and I were. (And how scared some of us sometimes still are.) We were scared witless.

Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk offers excellent suggestions on how to say — and do — the right thing when someone you care about has suffered the humiliation of having to empty the contents of their desk into a box and be escorted out of the building by security. Read ‘em here.