Dear Gringal: That sounds like a perfectly reasonable way of understanding the situation; it's a cultural contrast and conflict. Mudgirl, however, doesn't or won't accept or understand it. She sounds very judgmental to me, though she claims not to be making judgements at all. Others who take some apparent discomfort at the invocation of external standards, which "mudgirl" (love the dirty name;-) attribute to the Professional World (and herself) wouldn't agree, though the situation strikes an outsider as one full of insularity. I suspect that the woods down there are full of Gringos who earn passive aggressive responses which they neither understand nor anticipate.