What unfolded next turned the bathroom into a battleground, or at least, as the Montreal Gazette called it, a “washroom debate.” At issue – the rights of transgendered individuals to use the restrooms appropriate to their gender identities versus a whipped up concern over protecting females. Because as the bill moved forward, an amendment was added – and hotly debated – that would have specifically excluded “bathrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms” from protection. Supporters of the amendment argued that unchanged, the bill would lead to men wandering into ladies’ rooms to assault with impunity, even though, as the Baltimore Sun pointed out, “critics could not point to any specific incidents in places that have transgender anti-discrimination laws.”

In fact, in the Baltimore Sun earlier this week, transgendered writer Whitney Conneally called the argument:

… A wholly imagined threat to women from male voyeurs gaining access to female restrooms by impersonating the opposite sex — a scenario so absurdly unlikely that there has been no documented case of such a crime ever being committed in Maryland…. The idea that Baltimore County would suddenly be inundated with cross-dressing peeping Toms intent on insinuating themselves into women’s bathrooms to commit crimes would be almost comical if the stakes for sexual and gender equality weren’t so high.

That’s why it’s heartening that the bill passed without the amendment, making only vague provisions for “distinctly private or personal” facilities.

Gender is not always as clear-cut as an outline on a restroom door wearing a dress or pants. For people who are still transitioning, it can be tricky knowing when to make the move from one facility to the other. But sometime or another, everybody’s got to go. And as Jillian Page pondered Wednesday in the Montréal Gazette, “I’m just not sure what the women who are opposed really expect trans people to do when they need to use the washroom.” It should be obvious that the way a person lives his or her life everywhere else doesn’t abruptly change when it’s time to wash hands. We all deserve respect and protection, whether it’s at work or home or the ladies’ room of a McDonald’s. And sometimes, the biggest of victories for equality are won in the smallest of rooms.

And now, just as the world has begun to recover from the shock and horror of seeing the longest finger of a woman’s hand standing apart from its fellow digits, along comes Adele.

After cleaning up with six Grammy awards and making a triumphant comeback after vocal chord surgery, the British chanteuse and object of Karl Lagerfeld’s derision came back to the U.K. a hero, picking up album of the year and best British female solo artist at Tuesday’s Brit Awards. But in the midst of her emotional speech, just as she was declaring that  she was “so, so proud to be British and to be flying our flag and I’m so proud to be in the room with all of you,” the show’s mortified-looking host, actor James Corden, appeared onstage to whimper, “I’m so sorry…”

“Are you about to cut me off?” she replied, “Can I just say then, goodbye and I’ll see you next time round?” Then she gave him the one-finger salute to thunderous applause. Seriously, Brits, you were in that big a hurry to bring out Blur? What, was this the 1998 awards? You’ve got the biggest singer in the world right now, basking in the glow of hometown glory. Blur can freaking wait.

The finger is a powerful gesture – its origins go all the way back to a throwdown between Greek philosopher Diogenes and that punkass hater Demosthenes. The finger says, succinctly, “My penis!” and with it, all the power it wields and all the things that you, the object of said gesture, can do with it. Actual penis not required. The bird has been famously flipped by almost every public figure you can think of who doesn’t have the words “His Holiness” in front of his name – by everyone from George W. Bush to Katy Perry and Rihanna to most iconically, Johnny Cash. It is, in short, the most “obscene” a person can get without removing pants.

And in flipping off James Corden and all he stands for, Adele, who devoted a portion of her Grammy acceptance speech to a bit of rogue snot, achieved something that M.I.A. and her Super Bowl shenanigans could not. She gave the gesture context and meaning, proving yet again that under all that hair and eyeliner and singular cool is an artist who can really rage. Later Tuesday evening, she explained, “I flung the middle finger. That was for the suits at the Brit Awards, not my fans. I’m sorry if I offended anyone but the suits offended me.” Adele’s finger wasn’t a random moment of naughty provocation, calculated to get attention. It was, as a good flip-off should be, a wordless expression of genuine irritation, a thoroughly rock ‘n’ roll gesture that predates rock ‘n’ roll itself. Amazingly, one finger can still stun the world. And sometimes, the suits need to be reminded of that.

We live in a world that is changing at a breakneck pace. Yet drug awareness is still stuck somewhere around the “Saved by the Bell” era. And it was lame back then too.

Though “Pot, the Party Crasher” sounds like a lesser-known B-side by the Wiggles, it is in fact an educational film developed by Project Alert, a substance abuse prevention curriculum that also incorporates classroom activities and exercises. It was developed by the think tank RAND Corp. and boasts “measurable results” in reducing drug, tobacco and alcohol use that are “grounded in solid science.”

Science isn’t exactly art, though. Maybe that’s why the acting and dramatic resonance of “Pot, the Party Crasher” flat-lines at roughly the level of a local mobile home ad, and the score seems straight out of a 1979 video game. Did you know that teenage boys, crazed on their jazz cigarettes, still say things like “Chillax! Take a hit!” and “Quit being a buzzkill”? They do! Spoiler alert: The evening busts up when our heroine declares, “Nobody’s ordering any cheese bread because this party is over!” Take that, party-crashing pot.

It’s been a mighty long time since my own adolescence, right at the height of D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. Yet I’ve got to tell you, of all the reasons I ever turned down anything, wondering, “What would Nancy Reagan do?’ was never one of them. On the contrary, “Just say no” was a phrase most often bandied about jokingly, usually heralding the appearance of someone’s bong. But I also know that one little word is almost all it’s ever taken to decline an offer.

What’s surprising is how little drug awareness seems to have changed since we parents were rocking the acid wash. Why is D.A.R.E., with its ongoing efforts and successes, still as cheesy as its current campaign, “Keepin’ it REAL”? Sure, if by REAL, you mean something Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch might say. And if you want to get really absurd, behold the intense spots from the Scientology-front “Foundation for a Drug-Free World” or the “horrors” that the conservative Family Life International’s “Hugs Not Drugs” campaign is still cranking out.

And the success rate of these initiatives is unclear. Two months ago, a University of Michigan study found that teen alcohol use hit an all-time low in 2011, but that marijuana use was on the rise.

The reality of modern parenting is that most parents themselves have  experimented with drugs and alcohol — and may continue to. Frankly, as a nonsmoking social drinker who asks her doctor how to dispose of the Percocets she didn’t finish, I’ve never been one who particularly needed help resisting too many substances. But I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about the recreational habits of others. And I can certainly distinguish between the person running a meth lab in his basement and the cancer patient who uses some party-crashing pot for pain and nausea relief. That’s why I suspect I’m not the only parent who’s rolling her eyes as much as her kids at the profound unsubtlety of substance abuse campaigns, or the hard lines organizations like the Partnership at Drugfree.org often take on issues like medical marijuana.

Make no mistake: I’m glad my child and her peers are having conversations about drinking, drugs and smoking. My firstborn, on the cusp of adolescence, is entering a world fraught with vices and potential hazards, and she’s doing it with a family history of substance abuse on both sides. I want her equipped to deal with decisions and their consequences. I’m glad that their eminently artsy school, where the images of John Coltrane, Joey Ramone and John Lennon – men not exactly known to for their strict abstinence policies — adorn the walls, is preparing kids for how to deal with the choices that will be offered to them. But how we can teach kids reason and responsibility if the tools we’re using are so outdated and corny?

There’s no easy way to talk to kids about drugs and alcohol. But there’s got to be a better way. And in all the conversation about how to teach them, I wonder how much anyone is listening to the kids themselves. I wonder where all the humor and weirdness and spirit of authentic 12-year-olds is. Because it’s there, waiting to be tapped. I love that when my daughter’s teacher suggested everyone in the class pledge simply to not drink alcohol just for today, one of my daughter’s friends raised her hand and cracked, “Come on. I’m Italian.” Better still, I love that when one of her classmates was recently offered pot in the park near the school, the kid disdainfully directed the guy to “Go back to your mother’s basement.” It was simple, direct and effective. And, I’d wager, delivered with a hell of an eye roll.

Then, for a moment, it seemed the two might have moved on. In December 2010, Brown proudly boasted how he’d completed his anger management classes, and two months later, Rihanna eased the terms of her restraining order against him. But human stories are far more complicated and tangled than any paperwork can reveal. By last March, Brown was pitching temper tantrums on the set of “Good Morning America,” and just this month he was aggressively gloating of his Grammy win by tweeting “HATE ALL U WANT BECUZ I GOT A GRAMMY Now!” Perhaps that anger thing isn’t quite all better yet.

Rihanna’s obvious fascination with the imagery of violence, meanwhile, has been dissected endlessly over the past few years. From her “extreme” photo shoot for Italian Vogue to her bold vocals on Eminem’s domestic abuse anthem “Love the Way You Lie” to her murder fantasy video for “Man Down,” she’s teasingly played both victim and avenger, toying with empowerment expectations as she straddles tanks.

Most provocative, though, has been the way the two estranged lovers have never seemed quite through with each other. Brown told Larry King back in 2009 that he was still “definitely” in love with her and would spend a lifetime with her, and Rihanna has been cryptically tweeting about love and relationships for months.

Now there’s this most public atrocity. Perez Hilton wrote Monday that the collaboration was “genius” — and if by “genius” he means “gross,” then yes. On Brown’s eminently mediocre “Turn Up the Music,” Rihanna serves mostly to add a few more “turn it ups” to the mix, though her “I love you” at the three-minute mark and again at the end seems poignantly awful. And on “Birthday Cake,” when Rihanna teases, “I know you want to bite this, it’s so enticing,” Brown replies, “Girl I want to f— you right now, been a long time; I been missing your body.”  No wonder the Vimeo clip of “Turn Up the Music” is labeled “YIKES!” Yikes, indeed.

The duo have also been playing out a coy back and forth on Twitter, where Brown recently wished Rihanna a happy birthday by familiarly addressing her by her real first name, Robyn. Rihanna cheerfully announced her guest appearance on the Brown track by declaring herself #teambreezy. Ironically, Rihanna also tweeted Monday the Maya Angelou maxim that when “People show u who they are….believe them!”

That two young people with a volatile dynamic might still be drawn to each other is perhaps understandable. The idea that a person would continue to associate with the man who beat her — either professionally or personally — is a lot more difficult for most of us to fathom. It might appear marginally less self-destructive were Brown himself not continuing to make such a fantastic show of being an arrogant creep, a guy who tweets, “Don’t like it, don’t listen!” And it wouldn’t be so thoroughly nauseating if the whole enterprise didn’t smack of opportunism, a clever way of leveraging domestic violence into two awesome dance tracks. Based on the Vimeo commenters gushing “awww I love them,” it seems to be working.

You know what? Screw that. Most abusers don’t get to win Grammys, and most victims don’t get to top the charts. They don’t get gold records for their fights and their reconciliations. They’re not romantic or sexy, they don’t drop remixes. They just get bruises and restraining orders and emergency-room visits and cops pounding on the door. And though Brown’s and Rihanna’s songs are different, they both sound exactly the same. Cynical. Painful. And unbearably pathetic.

I’d thought I would. Months ago, when the treatment was just starting and my fate was uncertain, life without a flurry of infusions and blood work seemed unimaginable. That was around the time my friend, the writer Anne Stockwell, wrote to say that she was planning a Web community called WellAgain. “We cancer cases get amazing and heroic care during treatment,” she wrote, “but after is when the emotional hammer hits, and somehow after is exactly when we find ourselves alone again.” The name, she explained, “refers to the fact that cancer never gives you the certainty that you’re well again. So you have to decide what well again is for you.”

Anne understands that feeling all too well. She has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer three times and describes herself now as a two-year “cancer survivor who hates the word ‘survivor’.” She prefers “cancer veteran.” “I think of myself as someone who went to that war and came home,” she says, “and was lucky to not to be too grievously injured.”

Here in the homestretch, I can almost start to see myself that way too. I used to keep a keen eye toward March 15, like a child waiting for Christmas. I eagerly imagined the bright new world of improved energy and fewer afternoons tethered to an IV drip. But now, like many who’ve been in this very fortunate position, I find myself approaching this milestone date with both indescribable relief and gratitude — and a fair amount of other, surprising emotions as well.

There’s the fear, of course. My treatment schedule has been working well just like this. It’s saved my life from shockingly dire odds. What happens when the protocol changes? The hope with immunotherapy is the body will continue to fight off cancer cells, but there’s something pretty comforting about watching the drugs go in and knowing that they’re doing the fighting for me. This is the beginning of finding out how much my body can do on its own. It’s not exactly flying without a net, but it does represent a different and scary level of autonomy. As Anne puts it, “I’d been pumping my guts full of something to fight cancer — now what? I was quietly afraid for a long, long time.” And my friend Martha, a therapist who had breast cancer two and a half years ago, likens the end of chemo to when she had her first child. “I was in the hospital after a Caesarean,” she says. “Of course I wanted to go home, but when they discharged me, I remember bursting into tears and thinking, ‘It’s all on me to do this now.’”

Until that day comes for me, I’m still living in a body that feels like crap a lot of the time. And the side effects, cumulative and intense, of cancer treatment don’t melt away the moment the nurse unhooks the drip. In fact, the treatment itself often doesn’t even end then. There are maintenance drugs and infusions, often stretching on for years. In my case, I’ll move to a schedule of treatments every three months that I hope will continue to do the job.  And while I likewise hope for my energy to return and my rashes and dizzy spells to go away, I don’t expect that to kick in by happy hour on March 15.

At least the dread of recurrence and the ongoing struggles of side effects are the kinds of things that are easy enough to explain to people. But there are other aspects of wrapping up an initial course of treatment that are harder to discuss. There’s an oddly sad element to it, and an often-awkward identity shift. It’s almost like a graduation – there’s the sense of accomplishment and anticipation, but it’s mixed with a strong loss of security. Ending regular treatment means the reassuring, friendly doctors and nurses who are right now a near constant part of my life will become less frequent participants in it. Similarly, I will have to begin transitioning out of my weekly cancer support group; I’ll have to prepare for the Tuesday night that it will not include me. I’ll be so grateful to no longer be an active patient, but I’ll miss the updates and stories, the camaraderie and humor. Sure, some of us will keep in touch. But you know what it’s like when you leave a place, even for happy reasons.

“A lot of people go into depression when treatment is over,” says Martha. “I felt a little bit lost after treatment. People shore themselves up to get through it. It takes everything in you to cross that finish line. But I had had a lot of good things that had come up from treatment — I’d started writing music, and found I had a gift for it. There was a lot of hope then. It’s taken time to really learn how to take care of myself in a new way and live again.”

That’s why it’s bittersweet to move on to the next part. “I think there’s a huge rush of the tide to get you back as though nothing happened. To reassemble the picture that you had before,” says Anne. “People think that must be what you want, you must want to forget this. The big mistake is that it’s forgettable. Or that there’s an end to it. There’s no end to it.” And as Martha says, “The doctors will say, ‘Oh, you’re good. Go enjoy your life.’ But you don’t stop having had cancer once treatment is over.”

Cancer is part of me now. It’s part of all of us who’ve experienced it, whether we call ourselves survivors or continue to grope, as I do, for a word that makes sense of this new place. How can I call myself a “survivor” when I will spend the rest of my life monitored and tested, a veteran who knows all too well that another deployment could be as close as the next CT scan? We cancer vets live daily with our cancer — in the scars on our bodies, the memories of the people who were kind when we needed help, and the way that we can never again take for granted what a gift it is to make plans.

This President’s Day, I am getting a CT scan. On Thursday, I will go back to Sloan-Kettering  for my penultimate regular treatment. I’ll come armed with a freshly squeezed orange juice I got at the Jamba Juice around the corner, as I do each time. I’ll sit in my suite and watch movies on my laptop. I’ll probably cry when they try to draw blood, because my veins are shot to hell. I know the drill. Will I miss it? No. But I’ll miss the security of it; the purposeful sense of being so actively engaged in the job of killing cancer cells. I’ll miss the regular engagement of my medical team and my support group, who I’ve come to regard as good friends. I will no longer be a full-time patient. I won’t be my old, pre-cancer self either. I’ll miss those old selves, even the one with the life-threatening cancer. She was one tough broad. I will be someone different after March 15, and that’s scary and strange to contemplate. Fortunately, it looks like I’ve got the rest of my life to figure out who she can be from here on in.

Questions continue about whether Colbert and his nation will return Monday (the show doesn’t tape Fridays). The leading theory is that the sudden hiatus has to do with the host’s 91-year-old mother. The Wall Street Journal reports that “people familiar with the show” attribute the sudden suspension of production to “an emergency in Mr. Colbert’s family.”

Whatever the cause, it’s impressive that Colbert has managed for so long to keep a respectable degree of privacy around his off-screen persona and family life. His colleague Jon Stewart trades in daily snark too, but mingles it with intense sincerity — for proof, look no further than Stewart’s interview Thursday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the way the schoolteacher’s son from New Jersey made the conversation eminently personal.

Stephen Colbert, in contrast, the youngest of 11 children, the boy who grew up in South Carolina pronouncing his last name with a hard “t” on the end, nightly slips easily into the guise of Stephen Colbert, bespectacled, vaguely French sounding, super PAC-starting conservative blowhard. He’s spent his Comedy Central career deftly creating a knowing caricature, a man whose absurdity isn’t just brilliantly funny, it’s also a hell of a disguise – one that has no doubt afforded him and his family a degree of insulation from his larger-than-life persona.

A mysterious and sudden halting to a successful television show is always newsworthy. But this week, his silence has also made clear how deeply viewers depend on the show for a nightly dose of satire in a sea of political and religious insanity. Just the night before the show went dark, the Catholic Colbert was raising hackles for citing “Obama’s vengeful crusade against the Catholic Church,” and noting, “Vengeful crusades? Kind of our thing.”

It’s clear already that television without Colbert – even for a mere two episodes – creates a keenly felt absence. But a guy absurd enough to wear star-spangled pants also knows that there are moments in real life when the best thing you can say about what’s going on is nothing at all.