I’m at my grandma’s in LA and she asked me within 30 hours of my arrival if I “really liked” the chocolate mousse she made because I’d only had two servings. In two days! GRANDMA, I LIKE THE PUDDING, I JUST DON’T WANT MORE THAN ONE A DAY, GENERALLY. I’LL GET AROUND TO EATING THE REST OF IT, ALSO I LOVE YOU.
Tatum O’Neal is dating babes! (“What if this just ends up like Cate Blanchett and she issues a BISEXUAL RETRACTION, Mallory?” LET’S JUST CROSS THAT BRIDGE WHEN WE COME TO IT, GUYS.)
Please know that I am reading and enjoying all of your tweets about the spelling bee. How many of you competed as youths? I went to district but got knocked out immediately due to PAVILION, which is embarrassing.
OF COURSE I’M GONNA SEE SAN ANDREAS
“‘We at least have health insurance,‘ says an injured veteran whose family debt is larger than his annual family income; his wife is the sole breadwinner and works as a night-shift nurse, and the two are struggling to afford to move into a house outfitted for his disabilities. (It’ll be more urgent when their second child is born in a few weeks.) We at least have health insurance. Part of me is moved by his kindness. And part of me wants to start throwing furniture in the street so we can get a new Les Mizgoing or something because oh my God, fuck everything. How much struggle are we expecting everyone to endure? And how much are we exploiting that struggle by turning it into entertainment?
A lot. We’re exploiting it a lot. The Briefcase does it in a clear and methodical way, but we live in a culture that habitually depicts poor people or poverty as inherently other. In fact, The Briefcase avoids using the word poor at all: Participants are repeatedly described as ‘hardworking, middle-class families.’ But overwhelmingly the families are in extremely dire financial circumstances. If you’re utterly financially unstable, is that really middle class? If you cry every day knowing that you will be unable to provide for your children in meaningful ways, is that middle class? If, in your 40s, you become certain that you will still be in debt when you die, are you middle class? Can homeowners still be considered ‘poor’? How old must a car be before driving it invalidates a person as ‘poor’?”
Meghan Daum’s essay about Emma Sulkowicz was dumb and bad, badly dumb, and dumbly bad. This essay is good and thoughtful and smart instead, which is a better thing to be. (The DARKLY FUNNY part of this, of course, is that Daum doesn’t actually talk much about Boko Haram, which would have been a more effective way of getting her point across, which was getting people to talk more about Boko Haram, than complaining that other people aren’t talking enough about Boko Haram!)
Wait, this was CHARMING!
Nyasha Junior in Bitch Magazine with “Don’t We Hurt Like You?“
“The lack of images of African American women with mental illness, combined with the myth of the “strong Black woman,” contributes to the mistaken notion of mental health issues as “a white-girl thing” and compounds their stigma among African American women.”
The years she’s spent in Sunday school and church services have prepared her for this very moment. Her hand shoots up, and the teacher calls her name. Breathless, she asks a question.
“How do you know evolution really happened? Were you there?”
I was that student, and I remember the knot that formed in my stomach whenever my high school science teacher directed class discussion toward that dreaded E-word. I remember the day I asked him if he was there when an ape evolved into a human. Some of my classmates rolled their eyes. I wasn’t even trying to make a joke about his age. For me it was a serious question, almost sacred.
IT ME
IT UNCOMFORTABLE
IT ME
If you guys want to talk about FIFA, I can’t really join in, but I want to offer you the chance to do so here. (I just don’t know anything about FIFA, I’m not like, recusing myself because I own part of the board or anything.)
Dear Prudence supplies us with at least a nation’s worth of BANANAS on the regular:
“My mother-in-law tries to act more like our children’s mother than a grandmother. She loves her grandchildren, but she is very interfering, judgmental, and disrespectful to me and my husband. On this recent visit she brought a children’s book for our 5-year-old daughter that was missing the last two pages. The book was about a girl who visits her grandmother for the summer every year; my MIL wrote an ending with my daughter that said the girl’s parents died and she got to live with her grandmother forever. It was written like a happy ending!When we confronted her (away from the children) that it was inappropriate, she blamed our 5-year-old saying it was all her idea. I am so upset I can’t even look at this woman; and now she is suggesting we get together again next month to go camping. What should we do?”
Spelling bee! I don’t usually follow, but my high school chemistry teacher’s daughter is tied for 12th right now and it’s very exciting!
I won my school spelling bee and competed in the Cook County Bee as a 13-year-old, only to be ejected in the fourth round after misspelling “corduroy.” IT STILL HURTS.
Also, confidential to the lady with the bananas MIL: be really careful about accepting food or drink from her, taking trips on water, or walking under heavy things.
Everybody: tell us the word that knocked you out of the spelling bee!
For me it was “cylinder”.
Squirrel!
Predator (I mixed up the D and the T!) :((((((
Senility! In the second round of regionals, after I won my middle school’s spelling bee on “aerodynamic.” The girl who won Regionals won on “borealization.” I can remember almost every word I won or lost on throughout my school years.
The best part is the kid who went first at Regionals lost on the first word. Of the entire bee, “Column.” The entire stage of nerds gasped as one.
Gubernatorial! (I said something about this to my mom recently, and learned that 1) apparently the spelling bee official pronounced it wrong, and 2) my mom is still pissed about it.)
Euphonious!
occlusion!
Choleric (I thought it was rooted in collar, not cholera, and the example sentence didn’t help)
RASPBERRY. It was so embarrassing. I totally knew how to spell it.
crowd (in my defense, I was a terrified 4th grader on stage in front of a lot of people)
“Gambol,” which I TOTALLY KNEW, but we were a team and I had to report the consensus decision. What, me, bitter 30 years later? Of course not!
I took 5th place in the Nevada County Spelling Bee in 5th grade. I believe I lost out on the word “inauguration” but I can’t be sure because either the official pronounced it wrong, or he was saying some other word and I have no idea what word that was. I stupidly didn’t ask for a definition to clarify and to this day I don’t know if I misspelled “inauguration” or if I spelled it right but it was the wrong word. Argh!
Hieroglyphics in sixth grade, and, embarrassingly, calendar in eighth.
Facade. I was like 9 and I had never heard of this word and I spelled it FASOD.
TRESPASS. goddamn double letters, I spelled it tresspass.
“Carousel.”
Even better/worse?
I SPELLED IT CORRECTLY. The official list that the judges had was WRONG. They figured out what happened TOO LATE.
The first time a teacher corrected me falsely was upsetting.
cemetery
I was mortified.
Said this elsewhere, but “sandwiches.”
‘Prairie’ at county, ‘intermittent’ at regionals the next year.
SEDIMENT. I am still so ashamed.
Germane. I spelled it with an i, like romaine lettuce.
Parallax! I maintain that the announcer pronounced it in an unusual fashion.
Trunnion.
Business! I kind of like that capitalist endeavours were beneath my notice at 9 years old.
Mackerel! I’ll never forgive the nice spelling bee lady for pronouncing it like a two-syllable word.
Chloroform. Uggghhhhhh. I was 10 and had stage fright.
“indictment”
SUPER EMBARRASSING because my father worked in law and had even come to my middle school to talk about it during career week.
I got the word ‘piece’ immediately after we were taught the rule ‘i before e except after c’. I was 6 years old and spelling was the only team sport we had that I got picked first for. I decided the rule must mean the i and e HAD to go after the c, so I spelled something like ‘p-c-i-e’ and was FURIOUS that the RULE MY TEACHER TAUGHT ME MADE ME WRONG.
Suffering from adults giving you incomplete/unclear “rules” is the worst when you are six! In preschool, my best friend and I got into an EPIC fight because we’d just been taught that your left hand is the one that makes the L with your thumb and index finger, but not that our lefts would be different if we were standing face to face. . .I clearly knew where my L was at! We also had a set of doors in my church with the left side labeled “Please use other door” and the right side labeled “keep door closed at all times.” The spiritual angst that caused me about inevitably breaking a rule in church!
These are all the next one up after I’d beaten everyone in my school, BY THE WAY—
3rd grade: tenor
6th grade: edifice
7th grade: deficiency (I just got of got lost in the middle there)
8th grade: palpitant
Mantilla! I spelled it Mantia 🙁 I also did not know what it was, and had never heard of it before that day.
I knew I was doomed when I walked in and a girl asked me if I thought they’d be accepting British spellings too. I was not that hardcore.
I saw the trailer for San Andreas when we saw Mad Max and my datefriend was laughing SO HARD at my geologist rage. I just kept going “that’s not how this works!! That’s not how any of this works!!” He then said he was going to have to bring me to the movie because it would be too funny not to.
And, you know, The Rock, I will watch him do anything, except maybe eat that much damn fish.
We also got the San Andreas trailer with Mad Max and the entire theater was just kind of giggling. It’s also fascinating to think back on how unreal it looked when compared to the 99% practical effects in Mad Max.
I ha that trailer when I saw the Spooks movie. I was quite tempted!
I saw the preview before Age of Ultron and immediately knew my catastrophe modeling husband would have a similar reaction. He did and it was great. 😀
You mean it’s . . . not scientifically accurate?
Oh man right?
Apparently some other geology students I know went to the midnight premiere of the Avengers movie and a San Andreas trailer played before it, resulting in an entire row of geologists yelling at the screen.
I nearly raged into space when I saw the trailer back before the last Hobbit movie. I’m SO HAPPY that other geologists are being exposed to this movie and I have someone to rage with!! I’m totally seeing this stupid movie when I get back from vacation in a few weeks.
I absolutely love hate-watching bad geology movies. I had a professor introduce me to this my first semester of college when we watched Dante’s Peak and pointed out how horrifically bad it was.
I’m gonna love this one.
I had an archaeology professor who made us watch several bad-example archaeology movies! I support this style of teaching.
Wasn’t there one where they went into the center of the earth to “restart the earth’s core”? Or am I confusing the sun one with some other movie?
Yes! It was The Core, wasn’t it? SO BAD.
the Core! When DJ Qualls hacks the earth! what a terrible but fun movie.
My Mad Max theater was laughing loudly, too! Aside from the inaccuracies, the preview was just SO BAD. It was the most formulaic action movie preview I’ve ever seen – complete with a terrible cover of “California Dreamin'”!
When I saw it, I just thought that my urge to the world explode had been sated by “2012”, which also seemed to think that LA was built on a thin crust over a huge void.
Look, I love The Rock and all, but there’s something about natural disasters depicted in a semi-realistic (even if it’s all CGI) style that I just can’t deal with. Idk, man, it’s just too close to something I could see myself dealing with and then I freak out. I saw the trailer before Avengers and just went like D: the whole time.
Yeah, it just seemed upsetting to me~
Yeah I love the Rock with all my heart and I hope the movie does well for his sake but I’m not really interested in seeing thousands of people die on screen?
yep, exactly.
I’m well and truly disgusted with my panic-glee response to bombastic natural disaster movies. I’m like 😀 😀 and then a firm self-directed >:(
You sound like the kind of person I’d like to watch Metal Tornado on Netflix with.
Any film description containing the nonsense phrase “magnetic vortex” is going to be SPECIAL.
I am all in for disaster films. Especially if the hero is outrunning something impossible (I’m lookin right at you, ‘2012’).
I just went “nope … nope … NOPE” increasingly insistently throughout the whole trailer. NOPE!!!
My love for San Francisco is too great to take any pleasure in seeing it (and 1000s of people) destroyed on screen. When I saw the bridge in the trailer I flashed back to Loma Prieta and the thought of more destruction made me feel sick.
I lived through the Fukushima earthquake! I just saw the trailer and went 😀 *manic grin* NOPE
I love you, The Rock, but I don’t love you that much. I don’t love anyone that much. I don’t even love VIN DIESEL that much.
I was legitimately disappointed as a child that my school did not have a spelling bee but instead had the geography bee. My nickname was “the walking dictionary”! I COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER.
Meanwhile I was so bad at geography that I voluntarily recused myself from my class’s qualifying round to keep score.
I feel your pain! My school had the geography bee too, and I’m not sure why we couldn’t have both…!
I won my school’s geography bee! Then, decades later, I ended up working at a travel company and realized I’d forgotten EVERYTHING I knew.
We didn’t have any bees at my school, except a third-grade spelling bee which I won with “anyway.” It was the first thing I ever won in my life and cemented my place as a nerdy outcast for the next nine years.
We had the geography bee too! I made it to the school-wide competition, but got knocked out in the last round by a seventh grader. I would’ve killed at a spelling bee.
“The walking dictionary” was my nickname too! Any other Toasties? I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a bunch of us. Also I competed in my diocesan spelling bee when I was in Catholic school, (came in 3rd! “Acquittal” was my downfall) but I never did the national one.
Yup, I was also a walking dictionary. My 11th grade English teacher had everyone write down one nice thing about everyone else in the class and then she compiled them all for us – half of mine called me a human dictionary.
In my heart, though, I know that I have to write words down to spell them correctly.
“In my heart, though, I know that I have to write words down to spell them correctly.”
Oh my, yes! I only got as far in the spelling bee as I did by visualizing written words in my head.
I, too, was a “walking dictionary”, and am still occasionally accused of being such to this day. I was also an “absentminded professor”, and – of course – a “bookworm”.
What? How come my school didn’t have a geography bee? I was OBSESSED with geography as a small child. When I was 7 or 8 I asked my parents for a globe for Christmas and it is, to this day, the most excited I have ever been upon opening a present. And then I was disappointed, because the one they got me still said “Zaire” on it even though the country had been known as the Democratic Republic of Congo for MONTHS.
I would have traded you! I wish we had a geography bee, I was so awful at spelling.
HELL YES geography bee. I won my school’s bee twice and went to the state level, where I was ONE QUESTION from making it to the televised top 10 in my eighth grade year. I actually remember quite a lot of geography trivia to this day.
In high school we had spell bowl, which was like a team spelling bee where you could write the words down instead of spelling out loud – I loved it. Our team placed something like third in the state every year.
ME TOO
THAT IS EXACTLY MY EIGHTH GRADE GEOGRAPHY BEE STORY
It was a meteorology question that did me in. Who the hell decided to just toss in a meteorology question at the last minute?
I was also the walking dictionary!! But my school never had any formal spelling bee; just one time in 8th-grade English class when I was the only one in the room who knew how to spell “bougainvillea.” THAT WAS MY WOODSTOCK!
I have literally said I COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER about the spelling bee. On multiple occasions. Both my parents went to the National Spelling Bee, and I was second in my school bee in sixth grade and third in seventh grade. I was convinced eighth grade was the year I would go all the way, and that was the year my school stopped having a spelling bee.
I was convinced eighth grade was the year I would go all the way, and that was the year my school stopped having a spelling bee.
My school held awards ceremonies for each year group at the end of each school year, and one of the awards was “Best Overall Student” (or similar). I was a nerdy teacher’s pet, top of basically all my classes, and never won it, to my great dismay. I hoped desperately that I would win it before leaving school, waited excitedly for the ceremony in my final year (the date of which was printed in our planners), and then was told they’d decided not to bother holding one. I was furious.
Omg THANK YOU for making sure I didn’t miss the Spelling Bee finals tonight. Aka my favorite sporting event of the year. THIS BEE HAS EVERYTHING: polite 11-year-olds, word nerdery, Jacques Bailly, Latin roots, and air spelling. I love it so.
I have never done a spelling bee but I did spell on TV while at university, and now I spell for a living.
When I was in my first (I think) year, there was a kerfuffle in the UK papers about Oxford English undergraduates who couldn’t spell, so the local BBC news rounded up a bunch of English students and some other students (via a firend of mine who did the student radio) and we all went on the local news and spelled. The only people who got everything right were me and a dude who was doing history.
What do you mean you spell for a living?? Say more!
I’m an editor! There is also some comma-wrangling involved as well as spelling.
There was a lovely piece in the New Yorker a few weeks ago where it seemed like comma-wrangling could be an all-out bout with some authors. Because, opinions, you know.
IT IS.
And I’m always right.
Ahhhh! Awesome.
As a former Oxford English undergraduate, I am horrified by this slander. I can spell! Don’t tar me with the others’ brush, society!
I still remember the shame of spelling “hippopotamus” wrong.
Mine was “tertiary” in regionals. I was in sixth grade. Still smarting over that.
I once spelled “calendar” wrong in a classroom spelling bee. I was standing right under the class calendar with the very word spelled out in paper cutout bubble letters right over my head.
The shame will never be forgotten.
I’m middle-aged (and a good speller), and even I have to take a second every time I write that word and think, “-ar? -er? No, it’s definitely -ar.”
Don’t be ashamed.
I spelled “vehicle” wrong in a class spelling bee and was mortified. But that day I had a huge, disgusting zit on my nose that I was convinced everyone was staring at and thus couldn’t concentrate.
Fifth grade: I missed opera
Sixth grade: perish (I spelled it like the church)
I still hate both of those words.
For me it was “restaurant.” Fifth grade classroom spelling bee, and I was one away from winning. The sting never really goes away.
I still have to think damn hard about “restaurant.”
“Restaraunt” makes so much more sense, especially with my totally classy accent.
thats a hard one!
And I almost had it, too, I just forgot the second “po.” Wincing for DAYS
My eternal shame is missing “pretzel” at Districts in grade 4. I was over-confident & went too quickly, before I knew it I blurted “P-R-teehhhhh” eyes wide & they knocked me out. :'(
I kept doing spelling bees for four more years, but that was the worst moment.
I stuttered. For the first and only time in my life. Etiquette. E-t-i-q-u-e-t-t-t-t-e. Etiquette.
It’s been 20 years and the shame and hurt and anger are still there. I feel the knot at the pit of my stomach, the desire to punish myself for being stupid and bad and wrong, all over again.
Additionally, my high school English teacher lost a spelling bee in her youth because she pronounced the letter R as “air,” even though she got the spelling exactly right, and never got over it.
Vacuum, in 4th grade at the county level.
The worst shame? Part of my brain still wants to spell it vacuam. WHY.
Broccoli!
In sixth grade, I lost on “condemn.”
“Sandwiches” for me.
I was in third or fourth grade at the time. I forgot the damn e. Never again. Plus, I was a kid and had never really seen it written out I guess.
I’ve not read the article yet, but I was also the smart-alecky (but inwardly anxious as hell) kid re: evolution, and to see The Mallory Ortberg say that she was one of those kids makes me feel weepy and relieved in a way that I can’t explain. Like, “oh thank god, I won’t forever be held back by how dumb I was in middle school.”
I mean I’m also weepy because PMS and not enough sleep last night, but. Thank you, anyway.
In 5th grade, I won the school spelling bee (which went through 8th grade!!). Still pretty sure one of the older kids dropped out on purpose for fear of being a nerd (what 8th grader can’t spell LIMELIGHT? In the days before spellcheck anyhow), but whatever.
Went on to the county bee, where I misheard “cardiogram” as “carniogram,” which, having never heard the word before made just as much sense to me, so I spelled it the latter way and eliminated myself in the first or second round.
This all being almost 20 years ago, I’m now kind of weirded out with the level of detail I remember it in.
I have a blank stare going re: the mother-in-law and the kid’s book. What.
i dont have kids yet, but my mom would 1000% do that
WHAT
I KNOW RIGHT — I read the story and was like “thats a plausible future scenario you can look fwd to!”
JESUS CHRIST. I am so so sorry.
but did you see what Prudie titled her submission?? “MIL Hopes We Die”
MIL HOPES WE DIE
I mean, it’s certainly succinct!
Lifetime movie pitch!
Yeah this was like a scene out of a horror movie, or one of those long-read true crime stories where, I dunno, the MIL murders the parents or something. Not just annoying but murder-y.
Yeah and it’s one of those things that is SO weird and insane that you find yourself making excuses for it and I mean she’s my mother in law surely she wouldn’t want to murder her own son and then she poisons your tea.
Seriously. I’d start insisting on driving, checking all the parts of my car before doing so, bringing my own food and drink, hiring a taster? I don’t know.
It’s one of those things that sounds like a totally outlandish, campy movie, where you roll your eyes at the implausibility of a mother-in-law being just that fiendishly villainous. JEEZ.
(Also, hi Dave! Miss you all in Houston. Hope you’re staying dry, I heard even the Heights got some water)
We did get a LOT of water. I’ll maybe post some pics in the open thread tomorrow. I hope the great, damp Pacific NW is treating you well!
I’ll look for them! And Oregon is nowhere NEAR as damp as Houston these days!
Seriously. The boundary-stomping grandparent is a common beast, alas, but the creativity there is just chilling.
At least? it would have backfired on neurotic little me. I legit worried for years the Angel of Death from Exodus was going to come for my brother after I first learned the story of Moses, which is a lot more abstract than this!
I really hope there’s an end-of-year update on this letter, mostly because I love the end-of-year updates but also because I’m afraid of the implications if one doesn’t exist.
D:
D: D: D:
I was so relieved when there was an update to the “my mother-in-law is legit trying to poison me and my husband doesn’t believe me” one a few years ago.
I just looked that up and my hair is standing on end. Especially the husband’s reaction. I hope she took him to the cleaners and is now living like the Happiest Woman in the World.
Link??
Part the first:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/dear_prudence/…
Part the second:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/dear_prudence/…
Sorry, I assumed this was something that everyone but me would have seen already!
Oh godddddd I remember that
HOLY CHRIST
MY FACE IS STUCK IN D:
Legit shivers!
I never participated in an English language spelling bee for some reason but when I was in high school I pretty much went to allll the citywide school competitions there were, both to get out of class and to hang with nerds from other schools. Writing competition, math competition, thespian tournaments, you name it. And I won the spelling bee in the French language competition as a junior. (I also recited a Jacques Prévert poem at a different division of the same event, but won no glory that way.)
I am also killer at spelling words backwords in Cranium but no one ever gives you a prize for that.
“and now she is suggesting we get together again next month to go camping.”
Don’t go into the woods with this woman! Also: don’t accept any apples or other hand fruit from her; avoid riddle contests or dares she may propose; sprinkle salt around your threshold and around your children’s beds; burn cleansing sage after her visits; ritually bury any gifts she’s bestowed upon your children at a crossroads under the light of a full moon.
And never ever ever mess around with her greens.
Especially the beans.
Do people still have hunting accidents? Because I’d be worried about that.
Dick Cheney says yes.
THE BISEXUAL RETRACTION sounds like a 70s sci-if paperback, possibly by Ian Banks.
The “were you there” question would work both ways of course…Did you SEE God create the Earth? These poor confused kids! Their parents are monsters.
I thought that you ask how she knew that the person beside her was born. Did you see that?
If I had a mother-in-law who wrote such stories, I’d get a restraining order and lock my doors and windows every night.
I had a fine Christian upbringing and a not-so-great biology teacher in public high school. I remember staring at a textbook graphic about recapitulation in high school (a theory where embryonic development mirrors evolutionary development AND ISN’T EVEN A VALID THEORY ANYMORE), and being so bewildered by the insanity of the march of fetuses, human and fish. I could not even compute evolution as a remotely rational thing.
But then! I had a brief sojourn at a rather conservative Christian private school and the biology teacher there actually taught the science well, unpacking it slowly and patiently. AND. He taught it with great awareness of the beliefs his students were bringing with them into the classroom. Ironies of ironies, miracle of miracles, I learned to believe in evolution at Christian high school. I even majored in genetics in college (with a brief consideration of evolution and ecology until I realized you’d have to really inhabit the “red in tooth and claw” thing to get even the most pitiful job).
The march of fetuses, BTW:
So if your baby is born premature, you just get like, a turtle? Awesome.
If I could give birth to something I can store in a box and feed lettuce, I would maybe consider becoming a parent.
I laughed so hard at this I had a coughing fit. Yes. Absolutely yes.
I am really glad they cut The March of Fetuses from Fantasia.
Eek, the ones in the second row are looking right at me!
Oh you totally reminded me of my awesome Canadian 9th grade biology teacher. He said he had to present all the different theories of how we all came to be, so he did evolution, creationism, and a very serious piece following the teachings of Erich von Däniken. He was a hero.
I was going to say that I didn’t know who this von Daniken fellow is, but I just looked him up and realized he has been on Ancient Aliens, my favorite I-have-insomnia show. In my heart of hearts, I want to agree with the basic premise that neither nature nor human ingenuity is responsible for anything worthwhile. “Aliens” is the answer for everything.
Oh my god von Daniken is the BEST for a certain value of “best” that means “most crackpottiest.”
Isn’t it ludicrous that college-level biology professors also have to be qualified as diplomats in order to succeed at their jobs? Ugh.
I got mine when I became a grad TA and then adjunct in literature with strong feminist tendencies. Wily and gentle tact is the name of the game.
Karma is such a dick, though.
LOL, academic-based competition in MY poor rural district? Surely you jest! Spelling bees were mystical events I could only read about and weep over the lack in my life.
Yikes, over-stepping grandmama needs a lengthy-ass time out. Like, years and years.
FIFA!!!! It’s incredible how mob-like this is playing out. The lower level lieutenants are getting their asses handed to them, while the boss kicks back and looks at a basically uncontested election for his fifth term of filthy behavior. Plus side, I’m glad that the world finally got outraged enough to pay attention. I mean, Qatar? Go fuck yourselves, sincerely.
We never had them either and I grew up in the middle of a city. So you aren’t alone. I def would have flunked out early, though. I can’t spell.
I just don’t know anything about FIFA, I’m not like, recusing myself because I own part of the board or anything.
There’s a trope for that.
Four hours later…
I was knocked out of a (in-class, very low stakes, actually zero stakes) spelling bee in the 3rd grade. I repeatedly and with increasing anger spelled it B-O-L-O-G-N-A but my teacher was looking for B-A-L-O-N-E-Y.
… it’s possible that I’m still upset about it. Just a bit.
You are upset because you were RIGHT and she was WRONG and I totally get it. I’m still smarting over an argument I had with my 9th grade English teacher regarding the correct definitions of alliteration and assonance. I was right. He had to look it up in the dictionary, because he was an English “teacher” because we didn’t have a drama department, not because he was a good English teacher. He then redirected the argument WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGING MY CORRECTNESS TO MY PEERS.
No, you deserve to be upset about that, that’s some BS right there.
As you should be. You were wronged.
That is some straight up bullshit!
Baloney, even.
In grade two, I was upset because the EA told me that “tire” had one syllable. It’s obviously two?
Welcome to the rhoticity wars! Professionals still argue about that.
I wouldn’t have been nearly as upset if I knew there was a debate! She was just like “nah you’re wrong” and I’m like, “WHAT ELSE IN MY LIFE COULD BE WRONG?”
The rhoticity wars sound so much more interesting than the Clone Wars.
I had a smoulderingly hot Latin prof in uni who would talk about rhotacism and I always thought he was saying “eroticism.” I’d be like “Oooh professor, tell me more” and he’d start talking about how intervocalic sigma turned into rho over time. So I had to smile and nod and act interested to mask my disappointment.
Fucking homophones, am I right?
My fourth grade teacher dinged me on a worksheet for saying “dinosaur” has three syllables, because somehow the answer was supposed to be two? I still remember she wrote me a note saying “It’s okay to guess, but always back it up with a LOOK!” and drew eyes in the Os. Of course, this was also the teacher who ominously warned my mother that my mother was turning me into some kind of. . .FEMINIST (shock! horror!) and smiled when a boy in class called me a b*tch, so clearly her judgment was not aces.
I still have a sore spot about a single worksheet question that I got wrong sometime around the third grade. We were learning the difference between fact and opinion and the example was “Lisa prefers chocolate ice cream.” I figured it could be verified that Lisa really does enjoy chocolate ice cream, so I marked it as fact. And then the teacher stood in front of the class and gave me a long explanation about how not everybody likes the same kind of ice cream, little bird_internet, don’t you know that your favorite kind of ice cream is only your opinion? And decades later I’m still fuming because I GET IT YOU RUBE BUT THAT’S NOT HOW THE QUESTION WAS FRAMED
UGH ambiguous questions are the worst. I got in an argument with a certification thing a few months ago because there was a T/F question that I knew what it was trying to ask, but the wording was weird (I think it was one of those X Y + Z things, where it could be X (Y+ Z) or (X Y) + Z, and interpreting it with a different clustering would change the answer), and when the online program told me I only had 9/10 on a stupid super-basic certification thing I would have known the answers to even without the 3 hour class, I was really annoyed.
Luckily you only needed 8/10 to be certified, but still! it’s the principle of the thing!
I absolutely hate the ambiguous questions!
I once had a test in 10th grade English in which the teach included an excerpt from “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe. She instructed us to “underline the rhythm”. I even went to speak with her at her desk to answer what she meant by this. Stressed vs. unstressed syllables, perhaps? Or did she mean “underline the rhyme”, thinking to have us underline the words that rhymed with each other? She answered, “Just underline the rhythm.” I protested that rhythm is something that suffused the entire poem. She answered, “Underline the parts that have the most rhythm.”
I grumpily underlined the entire poem and was marked wrong.
100% bullshit. If you work at the ice cream shop and Lisa comes in and says she prefers chocolate you can’t respond “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Remember that scene from one of the Ramona books where Ramona marks that the chair with the plastic slipcover is for the dog, and the teacher won’t listen to her about the slipcover because chairs aren’t for dogs? Beverly Cleary, you know us so well.
My life in a nutshell.
No I’m not being “literal” I’m being LITERATE
In a similar teacher-is-wrong situation, I won the 5th grade class spelling contest because my teacher pronounced “dinghy” as “dingy” and I was the ONLY ONE in the class who had finished the spelling workbook in October (this happened in March or April) and had memorized every single word in the final lessons and therefore recognized that she was just basically going through the book’s wordlists and had reached Lesson 33 of 35 and therefore what she was calling “dingy” must CLEARLY be “dinghy”.
And then I mixed up a stupid I-before-E rule in the all-school finals that would have sent me to the city competition, because hubris.
Wait. I have never heard dinghy pronounced in any other way! Is not the H silent? Is there a place in the world where people say ding-hee or somesuch? My mind is melting so please elaborate.
It’s not about the h, it’s about the quality of the g. Dinghy (“small boat”) is pronounced with a hard g, as in game, but dingy (“drab, dismal”) is pronounced with a soft g, as in giraffe.
I still remember a drivers license test where the question was something like “how long does it take for the body to digest alcohol?” and I guessed a reasonable time and the answer was actually “the body does not digest alcohol, it processes it through the liver.” WELL OKAY I’M GOING TO KEEP THAT IN MIND NEXT TIME I NEED TO DECIDE WHETHER I’M SOBER ENOUGH TO DRIVE.
Nerds unite! My first detention was in ninth grade, because my social studies teacher said that Mary Queen of Scots was sometimes called Bloody Mary and I corrected him, then spent lunch in the library researching it (where I of course found out I was right), then brought it up again in class with correction and proof and got detention for having a sassy mouth.
My fifth grade teacher, whom I now realize was a very, very recent college graduate, would not accept that a way to judge or measure something was spelled “gauge” rather than “gage.” She then threatened me with detention for challenging her authority. I wasn’t! I was trying to helpfully let her know that she was in possession of inaccurate information!
You wuz robbed. Oscar Meyer starts to cry at B-A-L-O-N-E-Y.
We had a spelling test in fifth grade including the word “bough” and the student teacher pronounced it wrong. (I guessed she meant “beau” since “bow” seemed way too easy. And I read a lot of Lucy Maud Montgomery.) Our spelling curriculum made you write ten times any word you missed, neatly, in a small space (writing longhand was never my forte), AND if you got them all correct on the pretest you got to read quietly during the post-test and I was so mad. My mom called to complain and when she gave us the post-test she helpfully used it in a sentence–something about shooting at a deer with a BOW and arrow.
I still bear grudges over teachers getting things wrong. I have not got over the time in Year 4 when we had to make boats out of different materials, and then race them to see which was best; I tried to say to the teacher that lining them all up at the start with their backs against the back wall of the trough was not a fair competition, because they were all different lengths and they were being measured on how long it took for their front ends to hit the far wall. It just wasn’t logical! They had different distances to cover! She ignored me.
Other examples of infuriating teacher wrongness: my sister’s teacher not knowing how to spell “multiplication”; having Treasure Island read to us and having the teacher wonder aloud what “tarry [rhyming with “Larry”] string” was when it was clearly “tar-y” string, which had tar on it; my boyfriend’s teacher not believing him that platypi were mammals that laid eggs.
I have a spelling bee story from a classmate of mine. It was 5th grade, and he got the word buffalo. He stuttered when nervous, and stuttered on the f, so he spelled it bufffalo, and got disqualified. Poor kid.
I want to read that book.
I am an unabashed So Cal hippie person who does not believe in children competing w winners and losers bc of #socialism and also IN PART because of my still anxiety-inducing stint as an International Black History Super Quiz Competitor.
I won my school spelling bee in fifth grade but was booted in pre-regionals for misspelling “surmounted” (damn “u”). I will never be(e) over it.
From Dear Prudence:
I’ve been dating my girlfriend for almost two years now, and overall we have a fantastic relationship and have moved in together. However, there is one thing that really annoys me. My girlfriend is an extremely picky eater. She doesn’t eat many types of vegetables, seafood, anything the least bit spicy, or meat that hasn’t been cooked exactly to her taste. I love to cook, and it absolutely infuriates me when she says she doesn’t want to eat a certain thing. While I understand this is a minor thing, I feel she should just be polite and eat something she doesn’t like. How do I approach this without offending her, or without making myself angry?
As a picky eater, I’m pretty infuriated with this guy back. YOU LIVE TOGETHER. You can’t expect her to suck it up and eat food she doesn’t like every day because you want her to. This isn’t some special occasion where it would be rude to refuse food. She should be able to eat what she wants in her own home without worrying about being polite. Also, after two years, why is he still cooking food and expecting her to eat it if he knows there’s a good chance she won’t like it? Not that he needs to memorize all of her preferences. Just assume she’s probably not going to like something unless you ask her. My non-boyfriend/gentleman friend knew after two months to just assume I don’t like something unless he asks. I don’t know why this guy is having so many problems with that two years in.
ETA: ‘”I understand this is a minor thing” so instead of accepting it I would like her to just eat things she hates on a daily basis, because I don’t want to have this minor inconvience so I think she should experience discomfort when she eats to spare me this.’
Yeah, this is definitely something he should’ve dealt with before moving in with her. I love to cook and eat out, and someone being a picky eater would be an out and out dealbreaker for me. It’s ridiculous to still be beating your head against the wall about it two years later!
Yeah, I’m fine with it being a dealbreaker. If me not eating sushi is going to ruin our relationship for you, that’s fine. Just don’t expect me to change two years in! You know this is how I eat!
Two whole years. Of probably the same dang argument at least weekly. I just…man…you see these advice letters and you wonder what makes the relationship worth it, and if it’s such a great relationship, why don’t they resolve to quit that argument.
I remember once as a kid helpfully pointing out to my parents that Dad has never stopped driving the way Mom hates, and Mom has never stopped making oh-no-we’re-all-gonna-die noises when Dad drives that way, so maybe they should stop yelling at each other when he does that driving thing and she reacts? I don’t think they appreciated my SUPER LOGICAL ADVICE but I still think kid-Emily was right.
“She’s refusing to be my audience and fails to fall at my feet at my culinary brilliance, because of her own stupid needs!” I hope she wises up.
I dated an exceedingly picky eater (when ordering a burger he would ask for nothing but the meat and cheese on it), and it IS annoying – but not because it meant I couldn’t show off. It’s just that as a couple you often eat together and after a few weeks I was so bored of the stuff he was willing to eat.
That’s how I feel about my sister. Family dinners are often boring because she won’t eat anything that touched an onion or a mushroom. I can’t eat ham and broccoli and rice for every family meal for the rest of ever!
Branch out: spam, rice, and pineapple!
I have a very picky sister-in-law who, for a while, would only eat pasta, burgers, and sashimi. While she was in this phase, meals with her were either really boring or really excellent.
I actually stormed out of the kitchen once when my now-ex came up as I was chopping fresh basil to put on the pizza I was making (since that was just about the only way to create a meal we were both willing to eat), and said, “you aren’t putting any poison on my half, are you??” Poison being vegetables. It got old pretty fast.
After we broke up, I minced and cooked with so many onions, it was amazing.
Oh man, I do sympathise with this guy a little bit. Not so much with the ‘HOW DAR SHE NOT CHOKE DOWN SOMETHING SHE THINKS IS VILE FOR MY AMUSEMENT’, but having a partner with picky habits.
Mr. Hydra and I are extreeeemely well-suited in many of our mutual likes and dislikes. The two major things we differ on are 1) the brilliance of Harry Partch (he was genius, babe!) and 2) food. I spend an obscene amount of time looking at recipes or wandering around the grocery store looking for pre-made stuff he’ll actually eat. When you’re the one that does all of the cooking (because elementary chemistry is lost on your partner), it gets fucking tiresome fast. This goes double when you decide to travel and they are not a fan of the local cuisine.
I die a little every spring seeing all the lovely asparagus and artichokes bursting with freshness and knowing I can’t use it.
I get that it can be annoying and I try to make it as easy as possible for friends or whoever when we eat out. And I can generally find at least one thing on the menu to eat, so hopefully I’m not too terrible to know. But if I lived with a partner, I also would not expect them to cook for me. I don’t really ever expect anyone to cater to my picky tastes. Sooo maybe buy him some cans of soup and eat whatever you want for dinner while he eats his soup? Or whatever he likes. Life is too short to not eat the food you like! Or to eat the food you don’t like to make your boyfriend happy!
yeah I do this thing where I tell my picky eater partner “I am going to make X for myself. Do you want some or do you want to make your own meal?” That way I get to make my weird food and nom it all and not worry about whether she’ll like it.
she’s not too picky though so she is generally willing to eat what I make, and even if she makes her own meal she’ll try a bit of mine to see if she likes it.
What a rational, adult way to address the situation! Who could have thought such a thing would be possible.
Yes, I lived with a dude for three years, and neither of us were overly picky but we had totally different tastes. We also had different schedules though, so we didn’t always eat at the same time, which made it feel pretty natural to cook separate meals. We’d always offer each other some of whatever we were making, with no expectations about whether the other person would eat it or not, and it worked out fine. Sometimes it was nice to eat whatever he was making and not have to cook, and sometimes it was nice to be able to veto whatever he was having and cook exactly what I wanted.
Not that I know anything about how you share household duties other than cooking, but… I kind of feel like he should be wandering around the grocery store looking for his own pre-made stuff. I mean, especially if you already do all the cooking.
Not a bad idea in theory but in practice…meh. I generally go the the grocery store after work a few times a week because I am a veggie freshness stickler, so he’s not with me. And I feel that if I sent him – he wouldn’t know about proper substitutions if they were out of something. I can also envision a ‘Sorry babe, they didn’t have any fennel – only anise’ scenario or two.
“Sorry babe, they didn’t have any California Pizza Kitchen Crispy Thin Crust Vegetable frozen pizzas, only store brand super puffy rising crust Hawaiian style. Hope you don’t mind!!!”
Anyway, I hope he at least appreciates that his lack of skills is getting him out of a lot of work!
I don’t know when in his youth Mr. Blazes missed out on the “read the labels” conversation, but it has been my mission to teach him. His mind is blown every time I show him (for example) that Advil and store brand ibuprofen are literally the same thing in the same amounts. Of course, if I send him to buy butter he is just as likely to come home with margarine because they “looked the same and this one was cheaper.”
Yes! It doesn’t help that a lot of our foods have two different names: anise and fennel, zucchini and courgettes, aubergines and eggplant, yams and sweet potatoes, cilantro and coriander…
The Hydra household’s arrangements sound pretty normal to me. I am the primary cook/food buyer in the Blazes household and have a similar situation. Mr. Blazes is terrible at both shopping and cooking, so he has other household responsibilities. And yeah, it is kind of a bummer that he doesn’t like broccoli or green beans (not even perfect, fresh fuzzy green beans straight off the vine HE IS A MONSTER) but it’s not all that big of a deal for me to mostly accommodate his preferences. He does the same for me in other areas of our lives. NBD.
WHY WON’T SHE CHANGE FOR ME? That’s all I get out of that question.
Ugh this is so tricky. I am a reformed picky eater, so I can see both sides — on her part, her disgust at most foods and her happiness to eat plain pasta or whatever every single day, and on his part, his incredulousness at her unwillingness to expand her horizons. like, can’t you just see that adding a pinch of oregano to your scrambled eggs will make them so much better??? I am pretty sure this guy really thought he could change her habits, because he’s probably a good cook. But obviously it doesn’t work like that. It’s really damn annoying when you love cooking for people but your favorite person doesn’t want to eat what you made, day in, day out. I don’t really see a compromise here unless she’s willing to change her palate or he’s willing to whittle down his cooking, which seems unfair to ask of both people.
My dad was a strict meat and potatoes kindof guy, and on the rare occasion he wasn’t home for dinner, my mom would go nuts preparing seafood, unusual pasta sauces, etc. It always made me really sad for her that she lost that part of herself and had to spend her life either making two dinners or eating pork chops and mashed potatoes every. single. day.
“It always made me really sad for her that she lost that part of herself and had to spend her life either making two dinners or eating pork chops and mashed potatoes every. single. day.”
🙁
Ugh. I would slice myself (actually, more likely him) with my own mandolin.
My mom loves to talk about when her dad would travel for work (1950s/60s), because if he was out of the house, Grammy could make casseroles. Granddad was a bit iron-fisted about meat/potatoes/veg/bread being the only conceivable dinner arrangement, so tuna noodle was a huge treat for them.
I’m a kind of reformed picky eater also, and for some reason that makes me LESS sympathetic to the letter writer’s girlfriend. If I’d never tried anything I didn’t think I’d like, I’d still be eating pasta with butter and cheese for dinner three nights a week. I’d be the friend who vetoes every restaurant because I’m unwilling to try anything that’s not American.
Obviously, GF is an adult and can make her own decisions about her diet, but I understand LW’s frustration. You’d eat what was put in front of you if you were a guest at somebody’s house, so why can’t you at least try something your partner put a lot of effort into and is really proud of? I feel like one meal a week where you don’t eat the exact same thing you always do isn’t too much to ask.
Because she’s not a guest at somebody’s house — they share a home. I totally try to be on my “best” behaviour at somebody’s house, but at home, I kind of want to do things my way. This might not be my best, or it’s another kind of “best” that friends and strangers don’t get to see.
The girlfriend is as much the “host” of the home as he is … just because he cooks doesn’t mean he’s the host and she owes him deference. If I were eating in my own home, I’d sure be offended if a visitor started telling me how I should eat.
And food can be so personal. It’s literally something you put in your body. Somebody might be able to change their ways about other typical conflict stuff like picking up dirty laundry or promptly closing windows during a rainstorm, but food can be its own category.
They’re *both* adults. If he’s told her he puts a lot of effort in and this *really matters to him* and she 1) doesn’t care or 2) does care about his feelings but just wants to respect/love him in other ways, then they work out a compromise that works for both of them, or let this entire thing go, or break up.
Like, maybe she has tried eating more things and hasn’t liked it. Maybe they’ve had a discussion about their different “love languages” (does he even realize maybe he’s hurt because he’s trying to show her love but it doesn’t work for her?), or maybe they haven’t. I can’t really tell from the letter.
On the “maybe she’s tried eating more things and hasn’t liked it” front: I do try to eat things to see if I’ll like them. Sometimes I go back and try things I’m pretty sure I don’t like because it’s been a while, and maybe I like them now. But sometimes people will try to get me to try something that I know I don’t like, like I’m child who’s just refusing out of stubbornness. It’s very annoying. I may not enjoy all the same foods as other adults, but that doesn’t mean I’m mentally a child.
So if she has tried these things and he keeps pushing her, I feel for her.
right, as a non-picky eater*, I absolutely get this irrational “why won’t you try thaaaat?” feeling around people who refuse to try new/unusual food and I just sorta hope it doesn’t show up on my face. Cooking and eating out and being flexible when traveling are a big deal to me so pickiness might be a dealbreaker, but, like, that’s a dating dealbreaker that’s gonna show up before two years, right?
But I gotta wonder how much this guy’s “why isn’t she more like me / I don’t believe her when she says she doesn’t like it” attitude shows up in other parts of their lives. Just give this TV show five more episodes, you can’t possibly be bored! You say you don’t like dogs, but I want one and you’ll get used to him!
*haha I am a vegetarian and a bazillion people are thinking the same thing about me
He thinks it’s a “minor thing” but it “absolutely infuriates” him and the only person who should be doing any accommodating is her, not him. Okay, dude.
I totally get the non-picky-eater/vegetarian dilemma. The thing is that you don’t have as many options when you’re a vegetarian so you just learn to eat whatever the one meatless option on the menu is. But of course everyone else is rolling their eyes that I won’t try the chicken.
personally my veg-ism is totally a preference, not a religous/ethical/health thing, so I’m usually fine with being flexible while traveling outside veg-friendly places. But oh man yeah so many times you see a delightful menu that you have to narrow down to the boring old black bean burger or mac-n-cheese, meh, I have black beans and mac-n-cheese at home all the time so why am I even going out 🙁 I’m actually kinda counterintuitively happy about the bacon craze because there are so many interesting bacon-topped salads, pastas, etc that are still interesting without the bacon.
Yeah same here – unpicky vegan. There’s no actively growing mold on it? No animal byproducts? Down the hatch! People think vegan means healthy for some reason
I’m a vegetarian married to a meat loving picky eater and we manage pretty well at home. our meals are designed for the meat to be cooked separately or added last, and I have a lovely selection of condiments and sauces to liven up the bland dishes.
Restaurants, on the other hand…
I’m one of those non-picky eaters who can get a bit annoyed with picky eaters, especially since I’ve noticed a lot of it coming from a place of xenophobia or classism, but I’ve also tried really hard to get ok with my picky eater friends because I know that different bodies experience things in different ways and some people who are “picky” may be supertasters or have textural/sensation issues or any number of things.
In my own personal life, I’m on team “would not date a picky eater” but am definitely be also on team “do not try to change other people.” Being in a relationship with someone for TWO YEARS with this kind of standing issue and the attitude of “only one person needs to change to fix this” is uhhhhhh not gonna work out.
I’m a supertaster! I just genuinely can’t stand the way a lot of things taste. When I found this out and told it to friends/family they pretty much all said the same thing:
“I’m a supertaster!”
“No you’re not. You’re just picky.”
“Why do you think I’m picky though? Where do you think it comes from if not from what I taste?”
“I have no idea.”
But I don’t care, but it’s nice to know why so many things taste terrible for me and not for other people.
When I discovered the term “supertaster,” I forwarded the relevant articles to every camp counsellor who ever sat me down and said “you can’t leave the table until you finish eating this.” Humiliating someone by making them choke down nauseating (to them) food while their peers gawk is absolutely going to broaden their horizons!
Huh. Interesting thinking about the classism thing. A lot of my conservative food choice issues actually come from a class background place, b/c it’s so hard to learn to be brave and experiment as a kid when your parents can’t really afford to take risks w/ something as important as your next meal.
That’s absolutely true, and a very good point. I was more thinking of it from the other direction, of being unwilling to entertain certain foods because they’re “low class” even if they are very delicious, for example certain kinds of organ meats or offal, or even cuts of meat, or traditional “immigrant” foods.
I know, and I’d never thought about it from that side before, not knowing anybody highborn enough (or insecure enough about their middle-class position) to act that way…
Part of what really fascinates me about food is just how tied up with identity, history, heritage, personality it can be.
When I was a kid and we butchered an animal, we had to eat the organ meats first, because they don’t keep. As an adult I *will not* eat them. Not. I loathed them as a kid and I loathe them now. I always said we should feed them to the dogs, and I would do that now if I butchered my own meat.
It’s not that I consider it low class, but it *was* a symbol of being poor, and though I am still poor, I would rather eat rice and beans and various forms of potatoes than organ meats. Though I guess now that they are trendy, they are no longer all that cheap. I tried to buy soup bones recently and they cost more per pound than hamburger!
Ugh. It’s the Bone Broth Fetishists.
Bone Broth Fetishists? Is that a subset of Paleo? Is bone broth supposed to be a super food? I’ve missed that memo, ha!
I used to rely on the cheap soup bones. I could buy soup bones to make stock and make a better soup than with just water, have some beefy flavor, and cheaper than buying canned broth. Even making some stock and using it to cook the rice and/or beans, it gives it a some depth of flavor for not much money (or used to). I could get some soup bones for .30 or .50 and get *lots* of stock out of it. I had gotten lazy for a year or so (and had been able to purchase a case of really cheap broth), and now the same amount of bones were $5!
But I’m still never eating organ meat again, even if it is free! I’ll live on beans and rice cooked in water forever before I eat another sweetbread or piece of liver or tripe! 😉
Yes to both I think? It’s really kind of insufferable.
I hear you on sweetbreads and tripe but I will eat ALL of your liver, cheeks, and tongue. Oh and black puddings.
Oh dear gods/goddesses/amorphous beings! I Googled bone broth, and the recipes call for cooking and *throwing away* vegetables!?! To make basic stock, you roast the bones and then boil them in water with some salt. Longer if you want a more concentrated flavor. *After* you strain it, then you cook other stuff with it. And, honestly, ugh at the idea of drinking straight stock.
But I guess that explains the $5 & up soup bones.
Yeah #notallorganmeats are delicious, it is true.
Yeah, I have feelings about this. I wouldn’t say I’m a terrifically picky eater, but I grew up in a household where you ate it because it was for dinner, end of discussion, and there are a lot of power issues around that. I vowed when I left for college that I would never eat a canned green bean again.
Figuring out what I wanted and didn’t worked reasonably well when I lived with roommates or by myself, but I’m still trying to figure out how to say, “I don’t want to eat that,” to the person whom I love and with whom I live every day. For instance, I’ve stopped eating meat; he’s not willing to go completely veg but most of our meals are meatless now and sometimes will have different mains with the same sides vel sim. I can’t shake the feeling that I am imposing dreadfully on him. I am wilfully, with my own ridiculous preferences, putting lentils in front of the Man Of The House–a Texan to boot!–instead of ribeyes.* Who do I think I am?
*To be clear, this is what I am saying to myself, not what he is saying to me.
I can still remember the taste of canned green beans and cringe at the thought.
True story: My mom only served fresh or frozen green beans. When I got to college the cafeteria had things they called “green beans” but they were SO MUCH MORE DELICIOUS than any green bean I had ever had in my life. I went up to one of the cafeteria ladies and was all, “HOW DO YOU MAKE THESE GREEN BEANS THEY ARE EXQUISITE” and she was like “ummmm they come out of an enormous generic can?”
I love canned green beans. They have a slight tea overtone to me, and the canning process seems to take away that cooked-vegetable-bitterness that I taste and others don’t. (Supertaster, confirmed with a test strip.)
My husband’s a pretty picky eater and I love to cook. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest to adjust recipes for him. The only time it bums me out a bit is if I see a recipe I’d love but it’s entirely made of things he dislikes, because there’s no “adjusting” that. However, I’m of the mind that when your partner’s a picky eater you accept it and work with it, and if you can’t then maybe that person shouldn’t be your partner! This letter writer needs to let his rage go or he needs to reevaluate being with this person because the contention about this issue WILL last. We all have to eat, multiple times a day, there’s no way they’re going to work out long term if he can’t learn to live with their differences.
^^this^^
i am a “i will LITERALLY try anything once” eater and i am partnered with a “VERY PICKY” eater. he was totally upfront about it, though, so i knew exactly what i was getting into. as he says, “i’m a gown ass adult and if i don’t want to eat something i will not eat it.”. fair enough. i work around it when i cook for us or make us different things or we compromise like when we developed our perfect half&half pizza.
if different eating habits are such an imposition to a person, being with someone with vastly different tastes is not the best idea. this dude needs to let it go or move on. that poor woman.
The one thing I am picky about is seafood. It makes me gag. If you force me to eat it, I will probably vomit. I just can’t handle it. I’ve finally learned that the politest way that I can turn it down (for cases where a simple “no thank you” won’t work and people insist) is to say “I have a really visceral reaction to it” and let people imagine on their own what that be.
Anyway, if my partner insisted I eat seafood just because he made it… well, I don’t think it would ever get to the point where we moved in together.
FIFA THREAD!
So who is following this with the giddy excitement of a child at Christmas? Because I AM. Any football fans that haven’t wanted to drop-kick Sepp Blatter are questionable tbh.
Great links: Uefa is stepping up & saying they’ll pull out of Fifa if Blatter wins re-election: https://twitter.com/BBCSport/status/6039145703448…
LORETTA LYNCH the amazing woman taking on Fifa! http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-329121183
Why the US is going after Fifa: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32889845
Sponsors like Visa are lining up threatening Fifa they’ll pull out if they’re found to be a corrupt bag of dicks (which they are): http://visacorporate.tumblr.com/post/120062181438…
Actual footballers have been suspiciously silent about the whole matter…
I’m not shocked footballers have been silent. Their lives don’t change no matter what happens and they legally work for fifa. I don’t blame them for not speaking out against their empoyer
Yeah, that’s where I’m at, too. The footballers are likely thinking about their paychecks.
I’m following it because, as I saw someone say on the Twitters the other day, “Really, what sports organization would you not want to see dragged through the streets in chains?” Exactly.
While I doubt that was the motivation, when looked at from a PR standpoint this is a masterful move by the US. Whatever amount of money has been spent on the investigation, you could probably multiply it by ten, spend it on advertising all over the world, and not buy half as much goodwill as has resulted from this investigation. Solid investment, guys!
Sincerely hope that with all they’ve apparently got on the FIFA bigwigs, there will be a way for them to take Sepp Blatter down too. I do have a slight suspicion that it’ll be a bit like cutting the head off a hydra, but we can always hope. Nothing could really make up for the bloodshed these men are more-than-indirectly responsible for, but justice will be sweet if it is served.
In nicer news, with regard to “other FIFA” (the video game version), it was announced today that you can play women’s national teams in the 2016 version of the FIFA game.
*grabs popcorn, opens Twitter*
Yesssssss I watched a trailer for FIFA + ladies on youtube this morning and the comments were full of whiny douchebros all like “nobody even WANTS THIS UGH” and “but have u considered that girls suck at sports????????” and “THEY SHOULD HAVE A CELEBRATION WHERE THEY TAKE THEIR SHIRTS OFF LOLOLOLOL” but whatever douchebros, suck it.
As a women’s soccer fan, my reaction to the FIFA 16 news was “dammit, now I have to learn to be less terrible at that video game.”
This Coke ad has been all over TV here in Canada lately and the first time I saw it I thought it was a CGI-based commercial for the video game and I was like “well, neat! about time!” and then it was an ad for Coke and the tagline at the end was “Happiness is …. seeing yourself in the game” and I went >:(
So… neat! About time, EA!
My parents still tell my spelling bee story : I was competing in the city-wide competition when I was 12, and right at the beginning they announced the date of the next round–which was the same date as my bat mitzvah. I didn’t even try after that, knowing I couldn’t move forward, and deliberately spelled a word wrong just to end my misery. Possibly the word I spelled wrong was “forfeiture” for a li’l irony.
I saw this yesterday, and it seems to blow The Briefcase out of the water for sheer awful: http://jezebel.com/uk-reality-show-challenges-nat…
Isn’t this basically exactly what they did in the Hunger Games? “If you win, your family gets to EAT! For a WHOLE YEAR!”
I kind of feel that the only reason they haven’t gone straight for “Button,Button”/The Box is that Legal hasn’t figured out how to pull it off yet. . .
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_%28The_Twilight_Zone%29)
FIFAAAAAA This is legitimately the greatest thing to happen to world football in the past 5 years. And, as I said on Twitter yesterday, I will embrace any opportunity to spread the news of Chuck Blazer’s cat apartment in Trump Towers.
I finally saw Mad Max last night and now I’m spending my morning finding Immortan Joe – Sepp Blatter comparisons.
ALSO I came in 3rd in the town-wide spelling bee in 4th grade, but got knocked out on a really easy word (again or afraid, it was the AI or IA q that messed me up) and have been ashamed ever since. BUT when it was down to two kids, my friend Jane beat the know-it-all boy, so it wasn’t that bad.
The FIFA stuff is delightful but I just feel cynical at the thought that things might actually change? I don’t know, maybe they really will this time, but.
No, I’m with you. Sepp’s not going to lose an election any time soon, he has too much support from Africa, Asia, etc… I’m a little bit hopeful that the Swiss authorities opening up their own criminal investigation means other countries might follow the US’s lead and like, actually indict people for criminal activity committed on their soil?? But as far as actually reforming FIFA, naahhhhhhhh. The only way to fix anything would be to tear it completely down and start again, and there’s too much money invested in things as they are for that to happen.
I think, though, that as football fans we had sort of gotten used to a status quo where like- everyone knows FIFA is corrupt, it is actually not that hard to prove that FIFA execs have taken bribes, journalists do it all the time. But we also have the expectation that they’ll maybe, maybe get a 30-day suspension or a slap on the wrist. Or like Jack Warner, they can resign from all their positions and then suddenly not have to answer for any illegal activity.
imo, that’s why these arrests have had such a big, delightful impact. Even though there was the story of Sepp Blatter being ~afraid~ to come to the US, and we all knew the FBI had been investigating FIFA, before yesterday it had never even occurred to me as a POSSIBILITY that they would actually face consequences for their actions. And even if the charges don’t stick and everything goes back to status quo in a month, we now live in a world where there IS the possibility that corrupt soccer officials might be arrested for illegal activity. And that’s a better world than the one we were in before yesterday.
ANYWAYS I still think Qatar 2022 is going to be the real breaking point as far as National FAs and footballers themselves taking real action. It’s not like there’s no precedents- the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and in soccer itself, the Soviet Union team refused to play a WCQ Playoff in Pinochet’s Chile. The longer FIFA persists in the face of every death and every other thing that’s happened in Qatar, the worse it would be to actually play there. And there’s still seven years to go, but I think there needs to be a big push towards players and national teams embracing such “political” views as “wow there shouldn’t be slave labor and people dying to build these stadiums”.
I don’t remember any of the words involved, but in seventh grade I was knocked out in the middle rounds of the school spelling bee, and a church friend went on to win it. After it was over, I checked the biggest dictionary in the library and found that just as I’d suspected, my attempt was a valid alternative spelling.
The moral of the story should be that that was the day I learned a lesson about sportsmanship and the value of perserverance in the face of misfortune. But even at 12, I was a small man in some ways. A small, petty man. I went to the teacher, and he decided to rerun the bee from the point of my elimination forward. (So everyone was falling down on the “learn a valuable life lesson” thing that day.) I lost again, and I think my church friend still won.
My school never participated in serious spelling bee feeder competitions or anything (that’s how this works, right?) but one time I got to the final round of my 5th grade class spelling bee! It was a stand off against me and one other classmate. We had to spell each other’s last names, and well.. Truong vs. Khajuria. My nemesis (j/k! he was always very nice when I knew him) had a much easier time with my last name than vice versa.
I won my school bee, and then my district bee (which was a big deal in our small town, they ran a big photo of me hugging my dad on the front page of the local newspaper).
Then I went to the county bee, where I was ejected for misspelling “modicum.” The next kid was asked to spell “pretzel,” so of course I BURNED with the injustice of it all.
You tried to put an extra ‘l’ in pavilion, didn’t you Mallory?
Well, that’s what I would have done…I just had to google the correct spelling to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken just now.
I made it to the state spelling bee in fifth grade! And then got out in the third or fourth round on “excavate.” (Definitely Googled that word to make sure I spelled it right this time before posting the comment.)
the thing that gets me about the “stop focusing on X, start focusing on Y!” argument is that it’s directed at the young, educated, American (probably white, probably middle/upper class) feminist who’s presumed to be angry about campus rape. That woman knows a whole hell of a lot more about the American criminal justice system, college administration, college culture, etc., than she does about anything related to terrorism in Nigeria. Maybe she even recognizes that people like her have not had the greatest track record of trying to Fix Things In Africa, and her trying to focus on Boko Haram would be ineffective at best.
So this gets framed as American young feminists making it All About Me, and Nigerian young feminists…um….maybe they’re doing something important? I dunno, I didn’t talk to any of them…
Oh, dear. Daum, Emma Sulkowicz, rape, old feminists vs. new feminists.
I guess I’m an “old feminist”, in my 50s.
I was reading longform.org and I’ve been coming across magazine articles from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, you know, when there were real men and women knew their place. As demonstrated in this Roger Ebert profile of actor Lee Marvin in 1970. This is what we had to deal with daily, with boyfriends and husbands, et al … back then and it was actually much worse in our personal lives:
http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/whos-gonna-g…
And so, with all these years of feminism, you’d think men would know how to speak differently about women, but as demonstrated in this interview with some _celebrated_ author named VS Naipaul, who is in his 80s … I just don’t know. But also, this is why sometimes I wish in my heart of hearts, that a certain generation of men would just DIE and make way for a younger, less-misogynistic men …
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/110946/vs-naip…
But is the younger generation of men any better? I mean, rape on campus right? Why isn’t that gone by now? Because in the 1980s, I was at college … and sometimes I’d be in a room full of college boys talking, and they’d forget I was there, and they’d start talking about rape. They used the word rape interchangeably with sex and making love, and so of course I spoke up. “Do you even know what rape is?” I asked. And they said yeah of course. … Then why are you saying it’s the same as sex? And I went on a bit about my mother’s rape and how they were being cavalier and scary and it sounded to me like they’d rape a woman and say it was just sex and that she’d asked for it and what they were doing was trying to rationalize away any definition of rape to make themselves feel better. You see, I hadn’t had a Women’s Studies course and didn’t really know how to talk about rape, just what I knew from when my mom was raped.
And they said that this was just how MEN talked and that they forgot I was there and oh, they were drinking and had gotten a bit loose and I said yeah bullshit how many of you have gone ahead and done it with a woman after she said I don’t want to go any further … just think about that, cuz it means you’re a rapist.
So 30 years later, there’s a campus rape epidemic and boys and MEN haven’t learned about rape yet. No, it’s MRA’s wanting the days of Lee Marvin and get me a beer … . Except that it’s not just the MRAs. Boys and men still want to rape women and call it sex.
College is a place where you get really mad and decide to be an activist, unless you’re like me and learned the hard way about rape in high school. College is the place where you learn about the code words men use … and it’s where you learn to fight back against it. (Given the sexualization of young girls these days, though, girls learn about rape and rape culture and objectification much much earlier.)
I hope this comment isn’t too stupid but uh, I see today’s generation of feminists and I have hope that they do things better than we did. Is better the right word? We had different starting places though, so maybe it seems like old feminists didn’t do enough or they did it the wrong way.
What did I have to personally fight against? My step-father asking/telling me: “Why do you study so hard? You’re not going to college anyway, you’ll just end up barefoot and pregnant.” He actually said those words. He also routinely disrupted my studying, by giving me more and more chores to do. I was actually taking care of the house, because my mother was a drunk, and then, I had to do the outside chores as well. After a few weeks though I said “enough”, which, you just didn’t say back then to a parent. I quit the chores and refused to do any more. And I went to college anyway.
Nowadays men pay lip service to a bunch of things … but their actions are what speak.
But please, I don’t want old feminists and new feminists to fight … what can we do to work with and understand each other? I think articles like Katrin Higher’s are important … it reminds old feminists of where we started and what we’ve been through since then, and that young feminists today have to start somewhere and learn as well. It also reminds old feminists that some things just seem to be stubbornly stuck … and no matter how frustrating that is … it’s important that the fight continues forward.
When I first saw articles about Emma Sulkowicz I thought she was just a badass and amazing.
You know, my mom was an artist, but she didn’t do anything like Emma Sulkowicz. If she had, though, I imagine she would have carried Medieval torture devices around, because she believed that rapists should be “hung up by their balls and have their pieces-parts cut off.” Yeah. I may have mentioned this to the college boys I was talking to.
I ONE HUNDRED PERCENT want to read that book.
Also, I think this- https://grantland.com/the-triangle/fifa-elections… – is essential reading for anyone trying to really understand Sepp’s autocracy, and also the political positions of Platini and UEFA in all of this.
And from today, this article is a good follow-up, more from the African side of things.
Said & Done is, imo, the most important sports column in the world, and also my source for any and all hilarious one-liners and ridiculous hypocrisy in world football.
anddd a summary of the incredible teflon skills of Jack Warner – this is probably the most relevant background to the actual arrests made yesterday, since they were mostly CONCACAF or CONMEBOL and I’m sure his hands were in every pot. This article fails to mention that after the 2011 votes scandal, all proceedings against him from FIFA itself were immediately halted and forgotten as soon as he resigned his positions in 2011. Convenient, that.
He’s the public face of an organization that has spent the last several years air-running Wile E. Coyote–style over the 1,000-yard drop of a massive corruption scandal.
*rubs hands*
Spellers, have at! http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling-challe…
Haha I thought that said “Spoilers, have at!” Now I’m going to see
Warning:Spoilers
and think
Warning:Spellers!
SPELLER ALERT
Well there goes my afternoon.
i went through a few rounds on “fiendish” at 15/15 and then i got cocky and forgot that “iridescent” has only one “r.”
also, i’ve been saying “apartheid” and “culottes” incorrectly.
The only memory I have of a spelling bee was the first qualifying round in my fifth grade homeroom class. It was down to about five people, and the word was “bulletin board”. The first person spelled it, incorrectly I think, and so the next person spelled it correctly. Yet the teacher said it was wrong. The whole class was baffled. The next person attempted to correct the spelling by adding a hyphen. (Who added a compound word to the list anyhow?) Anyways, the five people went around, trying to spell “bulletin board” in as many ways possible, and I think we just ended up moving on to a different word.
I’m also reminded of the strategy thought up by my mother and used by me, to avoid having to go to the nerve-wracking public stages of spelling bees. We were both smart kids, who could’ve gotten decently far if we wanted to, but alas, social anxiety strikes. The idea was to get far enough in the class competition to be respectable, and then purposely misspell a word to get out. Of course, this backfired on my mom TWICE. One time she misspelled a word and the teacher didn’t catch it, and since she obviously couldn’t correct the teacher herself, she had to hope someone else would notice (someone did). Then, she accidentally let herself reach the final two and become alternate, and OF COURSE the kid got sick the day of the competition. I can’t remember how she handled that; I think she just pulled the same trick.
Last night I followed everyone who listed a tumblr in the Toast Connections spreadsheet. You will probably notice from my blog content* that I am not a creeper, but just in case, thought I’d let y’all know here.
* Currently ALL MAD MAX ALL THE TIME except when it’s puppies and kittens
exqueeze me where can i find this spreadsheet of tumblrs??
Toast Connections! (Thanks dakimel for starting it!)
AH TY
I keep getting follows on twitter and tumblr that are real people rather than spambots, and every time i have this brief moment of “what? i haven’t ever met this person IRL, how on earth did this happen??????” and then i remember.
Ooooh that was you! HI! I never get new followers. I’m Strophoria. *waves*
WAIT did nobody read the Dear Prudence letter before the picky eater one:
“My girlfriend’s brother is in prison for a felony. She and their parents are convinced he was innocent. My mother is a lawyer, and at one time was a prosecutor. Looking at court records, I discovered that she helped prosecute that case! Our last name is common, so I doubt that my girlfriend’s parents have made any connection.”
This is a dude who has got to start watching more noir movies.
I am still trying to figure out how he went from “My mom prosecuted my girlfriend’s brother” to “I have to dump my girlfriend.” Is it a pre-emptive move because he thinks his girlfriend will find out and will break up with him? Is he afraid the girlfriend’s family will seek revenge? It seemed very out of the blue.
It’s either a noir movie or a bold take on the wacky Dharma and Greg-type sitcom.
In my school we would have periodic spelling bees where the top two spellers in the 2nd-4th grade would all face off, each with a list of words from their own grade. It was my very first non-class spelling bee — I had just made it as the second-place speller of the second grade), and it was down to just a fourth grader and me.
And we spelled.
For an hour.
They ran out of words for my list and had to move to the third grade list.
I finally lost when I forgot to ask for a sentence to clarify “weather” and “whether” and spelled it “wheather”.
We never really interacted again in that elementary school, but seven years later, I joined my high school academic team as the only freshman girl, saw my former spelling nemesis as the now eleventh-grade Academic Team co-captain — and he picked me for every single team he ever got to choose, without question.
I want to read this book.
We didn’t have spelling bees really but I still remember when I had a streak of all-100%’s on my fifth grade essays & then the teacher took off a point for “misspelling” mourning dove (he thought it was morning dove WHICH IS WRONG THAT ISN’T EVEN A KIND OF BIRD UUUGH.)
One of my most embarrassing moments of all time was at a spelling bee. I won my elementary school’s bee in 5th grade and moved on to the county. But the district decided to have another one just for the district winners, “just for fun.” I was horrifically nervous and SO shy, I hated talking in front of people. So I go up for my VERY FIRST WORD, which was “social.” I took a deep breath and said “Social. C —-” I immediately started crying and said, “do I even need to finish?” and they said YES so I said “o-c-i-a-l” and sat down and then I had to sit up there for the ENTIRE DURATION OF THE BEE because as you will recall, that was my first word. It was a nightmare.
I think the reason I won the school bee is because I got in a horrible screaming fight with my BFF right beforehand so I was distracted. (Neither of us can remember what the fight was about now but I won so who cares.)
I’m going to the spelling bee tonight! I live in the DC area and tickets are free. I’m not 100% sure how popular it is, so I’m not sure if I’m going to get in, but I’m super excited by the possibility.
Disaster movies are like NECTAR FROM HEAVEN for me, I love them with all of my heart and soul. The worse the science, the more I love it. It’s like I’m the exact target audience for them and that’s BEFORE they cast The Rock in the damn thing. I WILL ABSOLUTELY BE SEEING SAN ANDREAS.
Also I don’t know a damn thing about Tatum O’Neal except that she was recently on Hell’s Kitchen in one of the VIP kitchen booths and was hands down the rudest person I’ve ever seen dine in at Hell’s Kitchen. I’m sitting there gaping at the television because she’s swearing that Gordon Ramsay somehow managed to let a completely raw Wellington get to her table and then sent it back for a fish dish instead and when that came she called it mediocre and sneered the whole time as if she were forcing trash down her throat. Now, like him or not, there’s no way Gordon Ramsay would let something like that get past him for the VIP table, the way he harps on those chefs.
…I care way too much about this stupid show.
I like to credit ‘The Towering Inferno’ with my affection for disaster movies. I’m pretty sure I saw that (as a kid) prior to ‘The Poseidon Adventure’.
I went as far as the metro-regional spelling bee in fifth grade and state in sixth (the school I went to for seventh and eighth grades didn’t participate) and would love to watch it now, but it reminds me too acutely and painfully of what it was like to be me at that age. 🙁
– Totally agree with you about grandma’s mousse. There are some desserts that make you sad because you’re already thinking of when it’s all gone.
– Maybe O’Neal just really prefers tennis players?
– It’s not like I’m allergic to disaster porn, but I’ve got a cousin who lives in LA and just had her first child and I don’t like to think about a big earthquake there.
– Just reading the description of The Briefcase, I’m reminded of the social experiment where they left bowls of candy that were stated to be meant for other people unattended, and the 1% took much more of it than other people. I can just imagine them getting the briefcase of cash and going, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
– Also, I’m pretty much past done with people (mostly conservatives, it seems) who use the excuse of “people elsewhere in the world have it much worse” to avoid talking about the things that we can actually more directly fix here.
– “Evolution is still happening, so yeah, I’m there, so are you.”
– The thing about the grandmother reminded me a thread relatively recently in MetaFilter on parents who can’t understand why their adult children cut off all contact with them, because they are way deep in their denial about their own abusiveness, and how sometimes they try to do an end-run around the adult children and get their hooks in the grandkids; while I haven’t yet found the most recent thread, I found this one and this one, and the first comment in the first one links back to something you wrote back in January. The circle of liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife….
– Yeah, Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak may be cool as hell, but I… no.
It’s Bee Day! I finished 167th in the 1998 National Spelling Bee. Those kids were hardcore; I was just excited to stay in a fancy hotel for the first time in my life. I refuse to mention the word that brought me down.
There is a spelling bee for grown ups that happens in my town every year. It’s a fundraiser for a literary nonprofit. (you pay a little to enter the bee and the audience can place bets on the spellers, and whoever places the most money on the winning speller wins a prize.)
One year I came in second place. the winner and I went back and forth for like 15 rounds, either both getting our words right, or both getting them wrong. I don’t remember what I ended up losing on, but I didn’t feel bad about it.
Last year, I entered again, and I was one of the first people out. I got out on the word futtock. what the hell kind of word is futtock? Apparently it’s a part of a ship’s frame. I asked for language of origin, and they were like, “our dictionary doesn’t say.” The announcer pronounced it “fuddick,” and I had nothing to go on, so I spelled it like that. way too obscure a word for that early in the competition.
I am still bitter.
I made it to the school wide part of the spelling bee but lost on “inspector”. I only remember this specifically because I was chided thoroughly for it by the mean girls who said, “How could you not spell that? The Inspector is on every afternoon after school.” Because I couldn’t, apparently. Shut up, 5th grade mean girls.
Happy to help!
(although just realised I explained it wrong in the parentheses, obviously it means 'one "c", two "s" – I clearly have Friday brain)
Yeah same here – unpicky vegan. There's no actively growing mold on it? No animal byproducts? Down the hatch! People think vegan means healthy for some reason
Ooooh that was you! HI! I never get new followers. I'm Strophoria. *waves*
Really? You write "bisexual retraction" as though a bisexual woman instead of a lesbian woman would of course be a dissapointment to everyone? I don't want to sound combative, but the rejection/general casual distaste for bisexual women wasn't something I expected to see at The Toast, or I guess hoped I wouldn't see.
Oh, I read the article and she says she dates "mostly women" and she's not "one or the other" so I guess she's bisexual anyway. Good, that makes me feel better.
Oh, I’m afraid you’ve rather misunderstood me! Cate Blanchett said something that made people think she was bisexual, then clarified the next day that she is in fact heterosexual. So the “bisexual retraction” means she later claimed not to be bisexual, not that she attempted to “downgrade” herself from lesbianism to bisexuality.