Do you ever have JAP-realization moments? Mine usually strike when New York City housing is the subject. As in, I don’t do prewar apartments — old bathrooms are ick. As in, I don’t do the suburbs — I don’t garden, take out the garbage or fix the roof. As in, I don’t sardine-it like the families profiled The Times’s Home section. Rather than depart downtown, these well-established, white-collar families make it work in 700-square-foot studios (nobody, apparently, lives like FOBers uptown). Never mind that they have mute couch sex or that their kid sleeps on a foldout mattress. They get to see LiLo at Da Silvano.

Now, I know most families worldwide live in cramped conditions. But most cultures also make girls feel ashamed of their bodies, and I can’t help but wonder if this stems in part from sharing close quarters with siblings of the opposite sex. (Recall how you felt about your body from the ages of 10 to, oh, about now.) But the Times families, unlike 10-in-a-room families in Bangladesh, actually have choices and they don’t all involve Westchester. Like, Brooklyn and the Upper West Side, for starters. Ah. Now I feel superior, responsible and a lot less JAPpy.