A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, e-mailed me with the following:

What do you do when you need a bathroom break while you’re teaching a class? As a student, of course, I would just slip out quietly, but I can’t exactly do that when I’m leading a discussion. I also have IBS, which has happily been in a bit of remission lately, but I worry about the etiquette of that too–there are moments when my body just goes “Get up NOW” and I am not really sure how best to handle this. In a class that was two hours or more, I would probably build in a 5-minute break as a general policy, but right now I’m teaching an 80-minute class, which is exactly the wrong amount of time if you have a small bladder, as far as I’m concerned.

I thought I’d email you not just because I want your opinion, but also because I thought this might be a good question for your blog–I’m sure other academics have this problem! It can’t just be me, right?

I’m sure it’s not just her. I know this for a fact.

And here’s what you do: small group discussions. “Okay, everyone, break into groups of three or four, and take five minutes to [come up with something creative about whatever it is we're discussing]. I’ll pick a couple of groups to report when I get back.”

Convenient, simple, and almost always pedagogically appropriate.

Like most advice columnists, I get far more questions than I can use, and the only ones that get answered are the ones that are published in my column. (I wish more people understood that about the nature of advice-column writing, but that’s a topic for another day.) I think perhaps once or twice I’ve written a person back directly, not for publication. One of these happened last week, and it’s fairly obvious why the following question would have caught my eye:

My partner started a new job, and colleagues have been inviting us to dinner parties to welcome us. This would be great except that I have a digestive disorder and have strong reactions to dairy, red meat, fried food, shellfish, chocolate, and alcohol. It feels like a big imposition to give hosts this long list, especially when we barely know them and they are already being so kind. I don’t want them to feel obligated to serve some dreary menu lacking all these yummy things, or feel they need to cook extra things for me.

I need to make a good impression, not be a pain in the neck. But I can’t eat those foods; if there’s alcohol in something, I get sick pretty rapidly.

Is there a graceful way to inform hosts about my health issues but not make them feel they must go to extra trouble? Or is it better to say nothing, show up, and just eat the carrots? Or should I just stay home? Thank you!

The LW signed the letter with the initials “IBS.”

I wrote back:

I almost never e-mail directly to questions, but I’ve got a lot of food-related q’s coming up in the column, so this one won’t make it in.

I also have the digestive trifecta: IBS, gastritis, and GERD. You and I could have a good time together drinking our herbal tea (with no mint!) and playing “Forbidden Foods Bingo,” so I’m really feeling where you’re coming from.

Here’s what I’d do. I think you should go. We’re not living in the “Mad Men” era where the proper corporate wife was an essential part of her husband’s career, but still, it’s good to get to know the folks your partner will be working with. Bail on a couple of dinners, if you need to, but do try to make most of them.

For the ones you’re going to attend, call the hosts. Tell them something like, “I’m so looking forward to meeting you. Unfortunately, I am dealing with some digestive issues at the moment, and I’m on a ridiculously restricted diet. Can I bring a side dish? It would make things easier for me, and I don’t want you to have to change your menu.” Then you make your side dish, bring it (along with some non-alcoholic wine or sparkling cider), and eat that and whatever else you can have. If they protest, laugh and say, “No, believe me, I can’t eat X and Y and Z and A and B–you’re not the Canyon Ranch Spa, I don’t expect to be catered to! Besides, my partner loves all those things, and it’s not like s/he gets them at home!”

If the colleagues become close friends, you’ll work it out together over time. And I don’t know why telling people you have digestive issues “at the moment” makes them more comfortable (and less likely to tell you about the magical cure that worked for their sister-in-law) than admitting to a chronic condition, but it does.

Good luck!

“IBS” wrote back, thanked me for my advice, and said things had been going well so far.

I’m still questioning myself about that “at the moment” thing, though. I’ve been saying this a lot about myself, but that’s because I’m still working out exactly how much margin for error I have in my diet. IBS clearly knows, and doesn’t have much margin at all.

So was I going against my own principles of body acceptance, and acknowledging our “sicks,” by suggesting that IBS elide the actual nature of her condition? (It’s not a lie, per se: she is dealing with IBS “at the moment,” after all.)

Yet I find people are more comfortable, and also much less likely to pry/sympathize excessively/suggest cures, when you frame your condition as temporary. So if “I have a chronic illness and I’m not ashamed of it” is something that a person is militant about, there’s going to be the psychic cost involved of constantly dealing with the clueless. (Obviously, whether you frame an illness as short- or long-term depends on how visible it is. You can’t see that IBS and I have diseases. People like the woman with trichotillomania don’t have the luxury of this debate.)

There’s also something known as the “primacy effect” that comes into play here. People tend to place greater weight on the first pieces of information they receive. If you lead with your illness, which IBS would have to do if she’s calling people she never met to ask about their menus — that’s going to be the main thing people remember about you. By downplaying the illness and, er, up-playing her willingness to bring a side dish and enthusiasm to meet her husband’s colleagues, IBS can shift her initial impression from “the sick lady” to “the friendly lady and creative cook.”

What do you think? Was my advice good, or too namby-pamby?

… Miss Conduct’s Guide to the Holiday Season, perhaps you’d enjoy it.

(Also, may I point out — Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners makes a terrific holiday gift! It’s inexpensive, entertaining, and has enough psychology and humor in it that it avoids the horrible message that “OMG someone just gave me an ETIQUETTE BOOK do they think I need one??” that can be a risk with more traditional tomes.)

Last week’s episode of “The Office” was, even more than usual, a virtual seminar in How Not to Do Things, from How Not to Play Office Politics to How Not to RSVP to a Wedding (“I’ll just text you for directions the day of. And put me down for whatever’s fanciest. Unless there’s ribs.”)

However, there is one thing that Pam Beesley-soon-to-be-Halpert got right, and that she’s gotten right before: how to call someone out on bad behavior.

In this episode, Michael warns Pam that if she lies to him, her baby will be born a liar, because he will imbibe dishonesty through her breast milk. To which Pam replies, “Please don’t talk about my breast milk.”

That’s how you do it. You don’t interpret the behavior, you describe it, as neutrally and objectively as possible, in a calm voice. If Pam had said, “Please respect my privacy,” or “Please don’t say things that are work-inappropriate,” that would be an invitation — as she knows all too well — for a long digression on Michael Scott’s part as to why talking about his employee’s breast milk is not an invasion of privacy or inappropriate at work. Because anyone who will talk about his employee’s breast milk, pretty well by definition, does not understand the concepts of privacy and appropriateness. But he could hardly argue that he was, as a matter of empirical fact, talking about her breast milk.

She has done this before with Michael, most notably when she said, “Please don’t throw garbage at me.” And here’s the thing: it works. It works about as well as anything will work with the Michael Scotts in our lives. He never did throw garbage at her again after that, nor, at least for the rest of the episode, did he talk about her breast milk.

Of course, he continues to violate all norms of social conduct in every other way, because he is Michael Scott, and has the emotional development and social skills of a not particularly cool kindergartner.* This is what’s frustrating about people like that — and we all have them, in some version or another, in our lives — they never generalize to an overarching principle. Tell them not to throw garbage at you, and they’ll just put butter on your desk.

But hey, at least they’re not throwing garbage at you anymore. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.

*I know at least one kindergartner whose empathy, humor, and sense of occasion far outstrips that of Michael Scott, so if you are the parent of a similar one, please don’t take what I said personally. That’s why I added that “not particularly cool” clause.

I have a chronic illness that flares up from time to time. If you’re a personal friend*, you probably know what it is; if you aren’t, you don’t need to. It’s not life-threatening, or even painful, but it’s capable of knocking me down to about 30% of operating capacity for days at a time. There’s medicine that helps — sometimes — and things I can do to minimize the chances of a flareup — sometimes. The body is a complex system affected in many ways by many things, and there’s no easy if-X-then-Y with this one.

(The main reason I’m not saying what it is isn’t because I’m terribly private, or that it’s terribly disgusting, but because people feel compelled, when hearing of another’s illness, to either share their own stories of much worse suffering or else suggest this new medicine or diet or asana that worked wonders for their sister-in-law who had the exact same thing, really! Neither of these are lines of discourse that most sick people are at home to. Although it does motivate us to get our strength back, so we can pop you one.)

Part of my New Year’s resolutions last week was to get better. To heal myself. Not physically, because I can’t do that, but to reconcile my body and my mind and my responsibilities and my relationships so that I don’t make things any worse than they have to be. I recently finished Loretta Lynn’s second autobiography, Still Woman Enough, and one line jumped out for its pure simplicity and sense: “I do not believe in pain if there is any way around it.” A woman who has had as much pain in her life as Loretta Lynn damn well knows what she’s talking about, and damn well knows that pain does not ennoble. We’ll be talking about Ms. Lynn — and about Tina Turner, too — a bit later.

I wasn’t intending to spend my New Year’s energy on that project, but guess what, the Days of Awe this year turned into the Days of Aw Crap, It’s Back Again. If the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are like a dangerous ocean voyage, the good Lord decreed that I was going to spend most of my time in sickbay. So I figured, okay, that’s my challenge for this year. It wasn’t what I’d planned to focus on, but you can’t order up life lessons like they’re adult-ed seminars. God don’t run no JuCo.

Anyway, here are my resolutions:

1. Don’t use my illness as an excuse to get out of doing things that I really can do, and that would be good for me, but that I just don’t want to do. Sometimes I will bail out on things when I’m sick because I’m embarrassed to compromise. I don’t want to call a friend and say, “I can’t make our dinner date tonight because I don’t feel well, but I’d love to see you–could you come over for a quick after-work cup of tea instead?” It’s easier to pretend that “something came up” and I need to reschedule entirely. I feel weird going to the gym and only working out for 15 minutes. It’s easier not to go at all. But hey, my friends love and accept me, and I’m sure everyone at the gym is paying attention to their own workouts and not timing mine.

… but …

2. Don’t be all macho or martyrish and force myself to do things that I really can’t. I’m not doing anyone any favors by promising things I can’t deliver. Nor am I doing myself any favors by pushing my limits, either because I don’t want to believe that I have them, or because I want to punish myself for being so weak and stupid as to get sick in the first place.

3. Do what I can to keep it under control. Oh, all right — it’s a stomach thing, okay? And I will pop you one if you give me unsolicited advice. Anyway, the point is, there’s certain things I can eat or avoid eating that put me at lesser risk for having a flareup. Small, frequent, high-fiber/high-fat meals are good; coffee and raw vegetables and too much rich food are bad. Sometimes. Mostly. Like I said, it’s a complex system.

… but …

4. Don’t blame myself when I do get sick, even if I got sick during a time when I wasn’t eating “right.” I’m not ignoring the reality of the connection — although as mentioned it’s by no means a hard-and-fast causality — between my habits and my health, but I truly don’t have to paint it in moral terms. Getting sick doesn’t mean God is punishing me for having a latte. It means I took a small gamble and lost. And we take a gamble every day just by getting out of bed, let alone leaving the house.

… and finally …

5. When I’m sick, to realize that the inevitable feelings of low self-worth and hopelessness are part of the symptoms. I don’t have to fight the feelings, but I don’t have to believe in them, either. That’s a tricky line to walk, but I think I can do it. I did pretty well with that last week, and I’m proud of myself for it.

I’m posting this because maybe you haz a sick, too. A lot of people do. And a lot of us are ashamed of it. We are a problem-solving, can-do, bootstrapping nation with a medical tradition that doesn’t handle chronic and complicated illnesses terribly well. (I’m about the furthest thing from a New Ager when it comes to medicine — don’t give me a smudge stick and healing dances if I need penicillin, already. But that doesn’t mean I think Western medicine has it all figured out right now. If it did, we wouldn’t continue to do research.) And 21st-century American culture has raised body-shaming to something akin to a religious tradition.

So maybe if you haz a sick, you could stop beating yourself up over it. Do the right thing by yourself, as much as you can, and when you can’t, well, that’s life. You can’t always be perfect, and even if suffering is the price you pay for a fall, that doesn’t mean it’s the price you deserve to pay.

Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Heal yourself.

Comments open, and please don’t take my “Don’t give me advice!” screeches to mean that I don’t want to hear what’s worked for you in dealing with your own chronic or recurrent illnesses. I very much do. I mean, please don’t tell me what to eat, that’s all.

*I’ve always thought the term “personal friend” was redundant and stupid, and in most cases, it is. But sometimes it is the right phrase. I do feel I have a relationship with my regular readers and commenters, but you aren’t people I know in everyday life. Friends, but not “personal friends.”

I believe I am going to take a very long weekend off from this blog. (Do check out the lively commenting action at the other one, though.)

In honor of school starting again, may I direct you to two blog postings from last year, in case you missed them:

Advice for teachers

and

Advice for students.

Feel free to add your own back-to-school advice in comments!

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday. (Note: because of the holiday, there’s no Globe magazine this week, and hence no column.)

Meredith Goldstein of the Globe‘s “Love Letters” column has a wonderful question about a couple’s … sandwich incompatibility. You’ll want to read the comments (how often do I say that?), too.

Man, some advice columnists get all the good questions. It’s just not fair. Y’all write in to me, like, “Oooh, Miss Conduct, how much do I have to spend on a wedding present?” “Oooh, Miss Conduct, how can I make the guy in the next cubicle stop beatboxing?” Meanwhile, people are asking Cary Tennis how to grow webbed feet.

I want some surrealist questions to answer, doggone it. Leave ‘em in comments. CAVEAT: You’re on your honor here, obviously, but just to make it more fun for all of us, leave a question you’ve actually thought about in some vague “what-if” fashion. In other words, a question that’s surreal but does have some emotional resonance for you, not just one you made up. And maybe I’ll answer them.

Let’s play.

In case any of you haven’t seen, in addition to today’s column, I have a feature on money etiquette in today’s magazine. This is an excerpt from Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners (which goes on sale Tuesday!).

Also, boston.com has a fun photo feature based on tips from MCMom–plus three bonus tips on Facebook etiquette.