Sansa rolled in a dead thing and was banished to the patio while her bath was drawn.
I wrote about Erma Bombeck!
For Bombeck, the great cosmic joke was motherhood, and suburban motherhood in particular. She and her husband Bill moved to Centerville, Ohio in 1959, buying a home in a tract housing development she would mine brilliantly for material in her 1976 classic, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. We are so used, now, to critiques of suburbia that reading Bombeck’s more curious, anthropological take on it seems like dropping through time. Her materials are carpooling, drive-through-everything, lost clarinet reeds, children who clamor for a pet and then never look after it, dirty ovens, gently bumbling husbands who drift through the house opening cabinets and never closing them, etc.
This may seem pedestrian stuff, but Bombeck’s voice is so fresh, so sharp and so eerily acute that there are moments that her work compares to that of Ira Levin, that great chronicler of suburban loneliness and alienation, or Shirley Jackson. She also wrote keenly about being an adoptive mother, about feeling unattractive, about empty-nesting and, more rarely, about sex. (She certainly wrote more frequently about meat loaf.)
So what’s next while we wait to see whether Martha returns?
I have a pretty interesting part in Ben Affleck’s movie “The Accountant.” The director, Gavin O’Connor, warned me: “Ben is a freak for ‘The Americans.’ He’s obsessed with the show.” So I get to this massive sound stage in Atlanta, and I just hear: “She’s here? She’s here? Oh my God!” from across the hangar, “Martha’s here?” And he comes running at me, arms out, and he’s a big guy, and he’s like, “God, just give me a hug, give me a hug, call me Clark once, oh my God — Martha!” After which I’m like, “I’m the coolest person on the set, everybody.”
*
This story about a real life version of The Americans (“The Canadians,” perhaps) is incredible, and I am also horrified and disgusted that the Canadian government revoked the birthright citizenship of their children:
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Union, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet programme of deep-cover secret agents, known in Russia as the “illegals”. After a slow-burning career building up an ordinary North American background, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
Congratulations to the new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan! Zac Goldsmith was an embarrassment and Khan is a cool dude, and also, I LOVE THIS:
Fort Mac isn’t just a company town, it’s a community:
Nor is it a raw, unfinished place. The indigenous peoples, Cree, Chipewyan and Dene, have called this region home for centuries. Historically it was one of the first areas of western Canada visited by European explorers, travelling over theMethye Portage to reach the Clearwater and Athabasca rivers, rich sources of the furs that were shipped back to England to feed the demand for beaver hats – the first resource exploitation. In 1870 the post was named after William McMurray, the Métis Hudson’s Bay Company factor. As time passed, it transformed into a transportation hub and railway terminus, with fish plants and a salt mine, the gateway to the north. In the second world war, it was a logistical supply centre for defence and the building of roads and pipelines.
To their shame, Canadians themselves don’t know much about Fort McMurray (unless they have been there). But that has not stopped people from giving their opinions freely about its character and disposition, referring to the area as Fort McMoney, the place where people go to make easy dosh, or as an outpost for displaced Newfoundlanders – and while many people from Newfoundland and the Maritimes live and work there, they make up only about 20% of the population.
guys:
Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man laughed.
He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.
Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.
EVERYONE knows the words to “You’ll Be Back,” Andrew Rannells! My husband maintains a stony indifference to Hamilton, and I was like “Steve, do you know the words to King George’s song?” and he barely glanced up from the Financial Times and crooned a perfectly acceptable “oceans rise, empires fall.” (Honestly, I don’t know how anyone performs live, it’s terrrrrifying.)
I plagiarized Erma Bombeck’s essay about The Star Spangled Banner my sophomore year of high school and I ::think:: I got away with it, even though it has now been 27 years, and every day I live in fear that my diploma will be revoked.
I think Erma would be proud of your slyness and gumption. What grade did she get?
She got an A ::and:: my teacher, Mr Dow, read it aloud to everyone in the class as an example of “a perfect essay.”
You know that Robert Frost poem I also wrote, about the two roads? I legit should probably be more of a sociopath than I am because I wasn’t filled with any sort of dread or embarrassment at the time Mr Dow read the essay aloud — only a warm suffusion of pride because finally those a-holes thought I could do something right.
In 11th grade English I tattled on a kid who turned in for his Write Your Own Epitaph assignment four lines of verse: two he had written, followed by “home is the sailor, home from the sea / and the hunter home from the hill.”
ETA: I think I raised my hand and asked out loud, “Darren, is it true that glad did you live, and gladly you die”????
(nope not even gonna redact that kid’s name)
You’re both a monster and entirely justified. (As I wrote in my famous novel Wise Blood, “No man with a good car needs to be justified!”)
That reminds me: I have another friend who turned in a story called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and because she (the friend) is awesome, and because I am inconsistent in my monstrosities, I did not tattle on her at all.
Like she turned in the actual story, or just one with the same title?
Same title, no acknowledgment of source; the teacher had never heard of Flannery O’Connor.
Well then the teacher got what was coming to him/her.
Same teacher (male, very kind, not very well-educated tbh) had never read ANY James Joyce, up to and including Dubliners. This was AP English, my inner still-bitter still-snarky teenage self compels me to tell you.
OH my god, that is terrible. It’s not Dubliners is rare, or hard to read, or anything!
a highschool frenemy of mine lost a big scholarship because he submitted someone else’s short story (I forget whose, now) to our AP english class and the teacher was so impressed that she submitted it to a national competition….and then he got busted.
he works on wall street last I heard. o.0
From the article about the economist and his racist seatmate:
He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.
Simple elegance indeed, sir. Props to anyone who can rock Diesel jeans after finishing a PhD.
A+++
My kid has listened to Hamilton one time (“Mama, do you like this music? I think I like this music”) but even he can sing “dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-da-dah-DIE-dah-da da-da-da-da-DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE-ay-ay” really loudly, because I suspect I may have sung it a lot while washing his hair or something.
I sang You’ll Be Back to my cat once while chasing him around the house (while referring to him as Meowlexander Hamilcat, obviously) and I’m almost positive that he now remembers the tune because he now jumps out at me whenever he hears it like it’s time to play. EVERYONE knows the song.
Now you can write him a new song: “You’re the Cat” !!!
I haven’t listened to Hamilton, so I’m currently singing this to Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”.
… a song I often, really embarrassingly frequently often, sing to my kid and/or just quote at him. E.g. “Thanks for this beautiful drawing of these flowers. You’re the top! You’re the Colisseum!”
Nice! I should start doing that to people (though I guess “You’re a Waldorf salad” might confuse them).
My mom brought me up on MTV in the ’80s, so the things she used to sing at me were more of that era (e.g., waking me up with “Anybody alive in heeeeeeere” by The Police).
You’re an O’Neill drama! You’re Whistler’s mama! You’re CAMEMBERT!!!!!
(FWIW I have yet to work up the courage to just … slide that into casual conversation.)
MEOWLEXANDER HAMILCAT. A+ cat nicknaming.
Before I rescued him he was a baby starving to death in a trash can, and I called him Scraps until I came up with a better name, so it was only a short jump to “young, scrappy, and hungry”.
My sister has been teaching her boys (ages 4 and 2) to sing the songs from Hamilton, and it warms my heart every time I open up WhatsApp to see them stumbling over the words with their tiny toddler lisps.
Parenting, you’re doing it right!
“gently bumbling husbands who drift through the house opening cabinets and never closing them”
I didn’t realize this was a thing, because HOW could this possibly be a thing?? But I had a roommate that would leave all the cupboards in the kitchen open. I used to be able to walk into the kitchen after her and trace exactly what she had done in there. “She got a glass of water. She ate a snack.” I thought it was just her and that she was just a uniquely crazy person but my next roommate after her did the same thing. Finding out that this behavior/tic exists in some people in the world was truly an amazing discovery.
This is my office too. The dudes complain about no one making coffee, and having to do it themselves — and then leave the cupboard door open, sugar spilled all over the counter, cups in disarray. Neato, guys.
I do this hahaha, I have gotten better about it, once my partner told me it makes him think of that scene in the 6th sense that terrified him as a child. I really just don’t know how it happens. I don’t even realize it. And then I go back into the kitchen and two cabinets and the silverware drawer are all open.
I do it as well, but I live alone so I am not annoying anyone, unless the cats hate it. And the cats are the reason the wardrobe doors are open as they like to sleep in it.
I don’t leave cupboard doors open, but my cats do. At least, I hope it’s the cats, because if not, then I have some really big cockroaches.
Mine are only motivated enough to open their treat cupboard, and luckily not able to actually open the tub of cat-crack (freeze dried chicken) that lives in there.
My husband does it and it ALWAYS reminds me of that scene!
Haha, yes! My partner leaves the cabinet doors open, and I have been known to yell at him about not wanting to live in the kitchen from the Sixth Sense.
Both my husband and I have this tic, and friends have made the same Sixth Sense comment! I guess at least they don’t have to live with us.
“that scene in the 6th sense that terrified him as a child.”
This makes me feel older than I could have realized.
Me too!
Fortunately we have a bigger kitchen now, but when we were first together, he was constantly bumping into open drawers and hitting his head on open cabinets.
Can confirm; this is a thing. My husband does it and it drives me crazy.
Me: Are you done in that cabinet?
Him: No.
Me: *waits five minutes*
Me: *sighs heavily*
Me: *closes cabinet*
In our house it goes like this:
Me: Are you done in that cabinet?
Him: Yes.
Me: WHYYYYY did you not close the door, then, are you trying to make me crazy?!???!? [SLAM]
I’m very chill, obviously.
I do this. It is my husband’s number one pet peeve. My specialty is closing drawers almost all the way but leaving them open an inch or two. I do manage to close the cabinets, but odds are good that somewhere in my house a drawer is open.
I’m a monster, apparently.
…and I am your monster twin. I’m a bit scared though, because lately I’ve almost forgotten to put the handbreak on a few times, so maybe I’ve got a brain tumour? #hypochondriac. Alternatively, finishing my PhD used up all of my finishing-things powers for ever, no more finishing anything for me, oh well.
Ummmmmm, as I read this, I currently have three cupboards open and they’ll be closed at some point (probably not by me).
I would say it was my husband’s biggest pet peeve about me, but it’s definitely not. (Although, not closing the kibble cupboard ranks up there on the list)
ME TOO. Our husbands could start a support group.
My husband does this, and I do not know why but I cannot function properly until the drawer is closed correctly. It’s such a nothing thing, and it bothers me way too much.
See, the way I see it, it is such a small thing, he should really get it right, because it’s such a simple way for him to avoid making you angry.
I’m with you, but my husband seems to see it as, “It’s such a small thing, why are you even getting annoyed by it?” *heavy sigh*
I do this too and it annoys the heck out of my husband. We thought our new kitchen cabinets with soft-close would solve the problem but I manage to leave them open just enough that the soft-close mechanism won’t engage. Oops.
His equivalent is mastery of the adjacent-but-not-quite: dirty clothes left on the lid of the hamper, not inside. New toilet paper roll placed on the edge of the sink, not on the spindle. Scraped dishes left on top of the counter next to, but not in, the dishwasher.
The dishwasher thing… arghsjdfassao;dgiuawo;l
My partner does that, and is also a monster. (The drawer barely sticks out, and it is not very noticeable, but it still drives me mad. I make a point of closing it all the way every time.)
I know I am not your roommate, but I am also your roommate. Except it’s my 7 year old child who walks around closing cupboards behind me with a scowl.
I am ashamed.
I am THE LIVING WORST about taking dirty plates and glasses to the sink. My toddler (not even two) comes through behind me and does it.
Can I rent your toddler?
Haha I really like the image of a child already annoyed and resigned to this reality.
Almost all of my roommates (I have 7) do this and it drives me nuts. I had never encountered it before living with them. I just don’t understand, it is so easy to then close the cupboard after opening it! They are all lovely people, but some of their kitchen habits are like alien behaviors from another planet to me.
I’m more amazed that you can live with seven other people without losing your everlovin’ mind than I am that most of them can’t close cabinets.
We have a big house, and we all genuinely like each other, both of which help tremendously. But sometimes, when I am staring at a pile of dishes in the sink (when we have a dishwasher! IT’S RIGHT THERE NEXT TO THE SINK), I do wonder how I have gotten myself into this situation and what I have done to deserve it.
Also, they all used to use spoons/forks/knives and then just leave them on the counter, as if they are going to use it again soon thereafter, but then never did. I’ve managed to get them to stop doing that, mostly. The dishes, though. THE DISHES.
I went with “open shelving” for our dinnerware cabinet for this very reason. It is no longer a problem.
yes!!
Brilliant!
We tried this. After the cats broke three plates we decided maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
When you *take* something from a cabinet, it’s in your hands, so what do you use to *close* the cabinet?
Elbows! Knees! Your Jaw! The Thing You Took From The Cabinet!
I’m a firm believer in the “bump it with your hip” method (this also works for utensil drawers), but this doesn’t work for high cabinets, obviously.
Put the thing on the counter?
(I’m not exactly sure what I do but I know I have zero problems with closing cabinets when I’m done with them, so obviously something’s working for me.)
*edit* then again I am the person who uses her feet and legs to open and close the fridge when my hands are full, so maybe I’m just unusually inventive.
Your other hand (assumiong that most of the people commenting about this have two}? Most of the stuff we have in our higher cabinets are one-hand only. Two hand stuff is usually heavier and in the lower cabinets, so you can bump those shut with your hip or bum.
My dad and my sister both do this, along with collecting cups in their rooms (my dad at least brings them down at the end of the week, my sister leaves hers to mold forever) and leaving things in the sink all day. My sister is a very messy person but my dad isn’t at all, which makes the whole thing super confusing. Maybe he thinks it’s more efficient?
Oh I’m definitely a cup collector. I have my own bathroom so I just leave my coffee mug on the counter after I finish my coffee in the morning.
I understand cup collecting up to a point. It’s not ok when things start to solidify and mold and everyone is wondering what happened to the tableware. My sister hides moldy cups in her desk instead of taking them down to the kitchen. WHY?
I cannot stand it when people leave things to mold. A couple years ago I went to Kobe on a study-abroad for a month, leaving my then-boyfriend alone in our apartment. When I returned, I discovered that a cup he had left on the counter before taking me to the airport 1) had not been moved and 2) had a mold colony in it even though 3) he’d had a cleaning service in before I came back.
Also last year I went to Tokyo for six months and when I came back to our apartment I discovered that he hadn’t opened the vegetable crisper the whole time I’d been gone and the carrots I’d bought before I left were still in there. Black, slimy, disintegrating–but still there.
I lived with a chronic cup-and-bowl hoarder for a summer. When this person moved out of their room (still owing me $200 in rent) we found half the house’s bowls and mugs in their room, covered in congealed substances. My favorite was the bowl hidden in a dresser drawer that contained dried ramen remnants and a used pregnancy test.
Well, don’t leave us in suspense. Pregnant or not?
That’s capital punishment level housekeeping crimes you have there. May he forever sleep on a bare mattress covered in crumbs and dog fur.
Yes, I was reading along this thread being like ‘LEAVING CABINET DOORS OPEN WHAT IS THIS MADNESS THING’ but then realized that my weird thing is that I leave half-full glasses of water all around my apartment until I’ve run out of cups and have to hunt them down. When i had a roommate, she used to say that I was like the girl in Signs leaving water all over the place.
My housemate legitimately just told me I was this person yesterday… whopps
My housemate does that and I can’t stand it. “Oh yes, no problem, I’ll just work around this useless glass of water which I definitely won’t accidentally spill at some point since it is right in the middle of our shared living space which I am currently trying to use.”
I did this all the time until my housemate pulled me aside and told me that having open cabinets in the kitchen made her irrationally anxious. Ever since then I’ve tried to close them after I use them, even though she no longer lives with us. (I mostly remember, although sometimes it takes me until the end of a cooking session to notice the door is still open… it’s just not something I really notice or think about if left to my own devices.)
I leave all the cabinets open, and I legit do not notice. I like to think it’s my ADD trying to manifest itself in the physical world, my dad thinks I’ve channeled a poltergeist. Maybe they’re the same thing…
I think that’s what really amuses me about this behavioral split. Like, obviously people who leave the cupboards open aren’t doing so intentionally; they just forget to close them. But I also can’t even begin to comprehend how a person forgets. So it’s just two different people with two different brains regarding this one small thing.
It must be some kind of task-organization difference:
Like, is it: Get the thing – use the thing (which leaves cabinets open), or
Open cabinet-get the thing-close cabinet-use the thing (which closes them).
My partner claims to sometimes forget to flush the toilet and I DON’T BELIEVE THEM and obviously it is probably the truth for them but how? How?! HOW
Ok, so I do this occasionally, and I blame it on the fact that all the toilets at work are auto-flush and my brain gets on auto-pilot and forgets that the toilet at home isn’t.
My excuse (and my sister’s, so she is forgiven) is that the water pressure in our house is crap, and so if you are in a hurry getting ready for work, not flushing before jumping in the shower is a good way to save five minutes of waiting for the toilet to stop running. But then we forget to flush after we get out of the shower because “step 3: get dressed, step 4: get your ass to work before you’re late why did you hit snooze three more times WHY!?”
Look, if you leave the cabinet doors open, then you don’t have to waste time & energy opening them to get the thing. It’s more efficient!
(I’m forever closing certain cabinet doors behind my BF because I have hit my head on them, but others I don’t care about because of where the open doors sit)
CLOSE THE FUCKING DOORS
I just went to check and 3 of the 4 cupboards in the kitchen are open, my underwear drawer is open about an inch and my long-sleeved top drawer is completely open and has a cat in it.
I wish you hadn’t told me, because now I desperately need to come close all your drawers or it will bother me all day ( except the one with the cat in it. I’m neurotic, I’m not a MONSTER)
I will go and close them forthwith to save your botheredness. And the cat is out now as it’s dinner time.
Well now that long-sleeved top drawer has to stay open. Those are the rules.
I thought I was losing my mind once because I thought I remembered to close me sweater drawer but I’d come home to find it open. Until I realized the cat figured out how to open it and that became his preferred afternoon nap spot
My dad was coming over to feed the cat while I was out of town and I forgot to tell him that she knew how to open the dresser drawers. He arrived the second or third day to find them open and sat there, trying to remember if they had been open the day before or if someone had been in my house.
This happened to me, too! Except my pervy cats preferred the underwear drawer.
Can’t, the hinges are broken 🙁
My husband does this. Usually it’s just like, one or two open cabinet doors, but yesterday I went into the kitchen and it was like that scene in the 6th Sense, where Mom leaves Hailey Joel Osment in the kitchen for a minute and comes back to find him sitting in the same place, but all the drawers and cabinets are open.
There must be some difference of genetics or upbringing that causes the split. I feel ever so weird with open cabinets, its very uncomfortable. Also at night, I need to close blinds.
And I can’t let a glass or plate sit too long. Helps if you have a cat who will stick her face into things, but I think I was always a clear the plates right after eating person.
I will poll my family and find out.
Yes, I also feel very weird about it, especially since I live alone. Like, on the rare occasion that I do leave a cabinet open, it is unsettling coming to the kitchen and seeing it not shut.
Turns out both my sisters are also leaver-openers, so we are evidence for it being a genetic thing. Mother claims she is anal about shutting them all and blames dad, who is no longer here to confirm or deny her claims.
When the first boyfriend I ever lived with insisted I left cabinet doors open, I was completely indignant. I would never! How dare he! MAYBE sometimes they didn’t swing all the way closed, but that wasn’t MY fault.
Reader, he was right. I can admit as much now to my current partner, who knows not to do anything more than half-smile and nod gently.
YES. I have actually trained myself out of it after 3 years of a roommate who, while in every other aspect a literal human tornado, was ABSOLUTELY MILITANT about cabinet-closing, and when she first pointed it out to me I was soooooo indignant about it. (I mean, to be fair, I remained partially indignant once I realized I totally was guilty, since in every other regard I was the tidier one, but I was chastened by the reality of my door-leaving-open ways).
Anyway ever since it became a Thing I’m Aware Of, I noticed that my dad leaves every SINGLE CABINET DOOR OPEN EVER, so at least I know where I got it.
My husband does this all the time. One time he did it while we were visiting my mom, and I asked him to be more aware of it and make sure he closed all the cabinets. Instead he opened every single drawer and cabinet in the kitchen and then waited on the couch for me to notice. Lucky for him my mom thought it was hilarious.
He also takes things out of the microwave before it beeps and doesn’t clear the time, so the clock always says something like 0:23.
OMG I am an insistent time-clearer. If I walk into the kitchen and notice time remaining on the microwave I’ll clear it just because it bothers me. Honestly, if it weren’t a totally insane request I’d ask my roommates to please clear the time after they use the microwave.
i have toyed with the idea of installing a camera over our office microwave because there is someone who consistently pulls their food out of the microwave between three and one seconds before it beeps and it makes me irrationally upset
I bet they do that to avoid the sound of the beep. My microwave beeps five times whether or not I’ve already opened the door to get the food and I’ve always found it mildly obnoxious.
My spouse turned off the beeper on our microwave when our child was a baby so that the beeps didn’t disturb her. She is now almost in kindergarten and we still keep the sound off on the microwave. It is heaven.
my gf does this! I’m more likely to leave the cabinets open (I close them ~80% of the times, she does all the time) but leaving time on the microwave annoys me. I will never say anything, cause it is so silly, but it does bug me.
oh, man that microwave thing drives me CRAZY. Just wait till it’s done! People in our kitchen at work do it all the time and then I am always confused for a minute and think the microwave is in use when it is not.
No then it beeps! Sound pollution is so annoying an actually bad for our health and the health of the environment!
Do you know that in Europe cars do not beep when you lock them from afar? And you can have this feature turned off if you, like me, hate noise pollution? I don’t have a car, but I might consider this if I did, but I also have no sense of direction and rely on the remote beeping to find cars in parking garages.
ARGH my husband does this and it fills me with murder.
oh god this is meeeee. i am aware of how annoying it is and am doing my best to change my absentminded ways, but sometimes i will sneak open a cabinet right after my partner closes it and pretend we have a ghost in the apartment. it’s fine, everything’s fine
I always try to remember to close my cabinets, but my apartment has these weird 50’s cupboard doors that need magnets to hold the doors shut. Now that said magnets have been in use for 60+ years they don’t stick as well as they could and I will enter the kitchen to find at least 3 doors open at any given time.
My brother just moved in a couple of weeks ago and I feel like I’ve been spending half my time either closing doors & drawers behind him or saying “close all the things!”
My wife does this and it drives me nuts. The worst is when she leaves the medicine cabinet in the bathroom open a crack, because it’s mirrored and opens in 3 panels, so one of them being askew puts the whole reflection off. I go in there to brush my hair or whatever and am looking in a fun house mirror. >:-(
The fact that so many people are capable of remembering what’s in a cupboard AFTER the door has been closed makes me suspect that you were enrolled in Alias/Fringe-style super spy preschools and just haven’t been activated yet.
I dunno, if I don’t know where something is I open cupboards to look for it, but then I close them when I’m done. (Not because I’m tidy, just because otherwise the cat crawls in and starts appropriating things for her own.)
The only reasons I ever close my bathroom cupboards is because they stupidly put the mirrors on the front. I mean really, I use the stuff every day, why does it have to be hidden?
I also used to be that way about making my bed, but now I prefer to have a cat-hair-free fitted sheet when I go to bed an “making” the bed fixes that problem (making: I drag the duvet back on. I may put one of the shower towels back in the bathroom)
My dad’s analogous behavior is making himself a cup of tea (or pouring a glass of water) and drinking all but the last half inch. Then he leaves the cup or glass wherever he happened to be when he decided he was done and forgets that it ever existed.
A guy in my office does this. He leaves an inch of beverage in the cup, leaves it to curdle on his desk overnight, then brings it into the kitchen in the morning to put in the sink that is actually right next to the dishwasher.
My sister used to eat half an apple and leave the other half somewhere in the house pretty much every day.
I can’t help it, I do that with coffee all the time. My excuse, however, is that if I haven’t finished my cup of coffee my brain hasn’t turned on yet to remind myself that I haven’t had my cup of coffee…
Somewhat related: screwing lids on properly. I learned early on to always check this when at our home and at my in-laws’ place after and unfortunate incident of taking the orange juice carton and shaking it without realizing its lid was 100% screwed in place.
oh god, this is also a thing at my in-laws’ and my husband has unfortunately inherited the gene and we have a stain on the ceiling from shaking the ketchup to prove it. (Meanwhile, my mom, whose hands are beginning to crab inward because of her arthritis, closes *everything* so tightly I’ve hidden a jar opener at her house to use when I am there.)
I’m paranoid about glass-bottle ketchup lids in particular after my mom painted half of a Perkins (and most of herself) red, because whoever used it before her had just *put* the cap back on, instead of *screwing* it back on. It was an… eventful way to start our Disney vacation.
There is still baby amoxycyllin in weird places in my kitchen, because I didn’t put the lid on right (no idea why. Exhaustion, probably, it was the second ear infection in a 3 week period for the baby) and my husband grabbed it by the lid and of course knocked it all over the kitchen (today I can admit this was 100% my fault, but at the time I blamed it on him using the What-Kind-of-Psycho-Grabs-Things-by-Their-Lids argument. He’s really a saint sometimes).
ooh… I am guilty of this one and my husband HATES it.
I do this. My husband asked me if maybe I just don’t like the banging noise of doors closing, and I think he’s 100% right (although I don’t know why!) After he asked me, I noticed I do all kinds of things all the way up to the point of the noise. Maybe I grew up around light sleepers??
Yep, it’s the noise for me. So many cupboards that clank and thloomp and I just hate it. Same with the microwave beeping. I have to work myself up to it.
One of the reasons I want to build my own house is so I can have separate fixed glass windows for light, and operable aluminium louvres for airflow, so that I never have to deal with bumping blinds and thlooshing curtains in order to get a breeze through the house ever again. It’s going to be SO AWESOME.
My current roommate does this, and it is just one of many reasons why I hate him. I move out next week, and I am so excited to find out what happens once he realizes that I took my shower curtain, bath mat, and trash can.
it me
(It’s my way of protesting that all cabinets are really too high for me)
My husband will not push a chair in to save his life. Our apartment is too small for me to be constantly tripping over chairs, so between his desk and the dining table, i feel like I spend half my time pushing in chairs after he wanders off.
He also does the cabinet thing.
TRUE STORY, one time I hit my head against the corner of an open cabinet door so hard that it temporarily left a little indent in my head. The doctor said it was “scalp trauma” and I had weird pain/numbness along my scalp for a few weeks afterward, which let me tell you, is UNNERVING. Needless to say it now makes me extremely anxious to see people leave cupboard doors open. BUT habitual cupboard-leave-openers seem to have a REALLY hard time changing their ways no matter how sympathetic they are to my trauma! Even my mom forgets when I go visit her and leaves a trail of open drawers and cupboards in her wake as she cooks.
I have not suffered “scalp trauma” (ouch) but I’m a cabinet closer because I figure that that with my general clumsiness and fibro fog, the probability of my smacking myself in the face with an open door is constantly approaching one.
Guilty. My mom does it too. Maybe it’s inherited?
My husband leaves all drawers open by about an inch after he’s done with them. He says it’s because when he was a kid, he would get in trouble for “slamming” cupboards and drawers when he shut them too loudly, so he apparently adapted by shutting them most, but not all, of the way. Our kitchen cupboards fall the rest of the way shut when you do that to them, if he’s opened a kitchen drawer, or a dresser drawer in the bedroom, I can tell exactly which one. It drove me up the wall at first, but now I find it kind of endearing.
I have OCD compulsions to close drawers and clear unused time off the microwave, too.
On a somewhat related note, though, I didn’t know that taking clean dishes out of the dish drainer and putting them away into cupboards was A Thing until I was in my mid-20s. (When I finally had roommates, and they asked me why I never put my dishes away).
My mom and I had always just used the same couple of plates, bowls, forks (etc.), washed them, and took them out of the drainer to use again. So that was a light bulb moment for me…
UNUSED TIME OFF THE MICROWAVE.
A million times yes.
I can do similar tracking of my partner’s behaviour around the house – “the shower curtain is hanging out of the bath and the hair-catcher thing has been removed from the plughole: I DEDUCE you have had a bath!”. He also leaves kitchen cupboards open more than I would like, and is apparently incapable of rolling down the top of the bag of flour after making bread/white sauce/anything flour-containing.
I didn’t use to be as compulsive about closing the door/washing in the basket/ dishes done and put away after the meal until my late 30s when I starting living by myself in a bedsit with a kitchen that was 4’sq so if you didn’t clean up straight away there was no room to do Anything. And it was surprising how much *nicer* it was when everything was put away! So I kept it up.
Now I live w a man and two part-time boys. The dude and 1 boy leave cupboards open, the other boy closes cupboards and drawers but also leaves dirty cups in his room. meanwhile I just leave stacks of books throughout the house.
Today in (Feminist) History! [Archive]
On this day in 1960, the FDA approved the first commercially-produced birth control pill, Enovid-10, which was made by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois. “The pill” was initially commissioned by Margaret Sanger (the founder of organizations that eventually became Planned Parenthood) and funded by Katherine McCormick, a suffragist who became an heiress after the death of her husband.
Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in 1916, but commissioned the development of the pill in the hope of finding a better and more effective form of contraception. It wasn’t until the 1950s that two scientists, Gregory Pincus and John Rock, began to work on developing a birth-control pill, and clinical tests were initiated in 1954.
When the FDA finally approved the pill on this day in 1960, it was the first big official step towards greater reproductive freedom for women in America. Of course, this was only the first step– the original pill proved to be 10 times too high a dose and caused blood clots, and wasn’t refined properly until the 1980s– but it was still an important step.
Also on this day…
• In 1968, the death of Mercedes de Acosta, an American novelist, poet, and playwright. She had four plays produced, and published three volumes of poetry and a novel, and was also an activist, suffragist, and vegetarian. But she was perhaps most known for her lesbian affairs with numerous Broadway and Hollywood stars, including Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and Greta Garbo. She is rumored (without substantiation, but still) to have said, “I can get any woman away from any man.”
• In 1914, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential proclamation established the first Mother’s Day holiday, the idea for which is credited to either Julia Ward Howe or Anna Jarvis.
Putting a link to The Pill, in case anyone wants to listen with me in solidarity.
On year on Mother’s Day, my mom was actually visiting, and somehow it came up that she had never heard of Julia Ward Howe’s 1858 Mother’s Day Proclamation. We read it out loud. I was choked up by the end. (I was also like 5 weeks pregnant and hadn’t told my mom yet. Super emotional.)
Today is my birthday and I have always taken enormous pride in knowing that I was born on the anniversary of the approval of the Pill, ironic though it may be.
Did anyone hear them talking about Anna Jarvis on NPR? So pissed at the commercialization of Mother’s Day she tried to have the whole thing shut down only to end up in a sanitarium, where card-makers and florists paid to keep her out of circulation. Part of me thinks that’s a late April Fools prank, but it’s also a heck of a story.
Oh, now I need to find all my Bombeck books and reread them.
I need to buy my own because I really doubt my mom still has her copies. OH! I think I just figured out what I can tell the Burgomaster’s family to get me for xmas…
As a Young Woman (like…13 years old) i checked out all of Bombeck’s books from the library multiple times. They were my introduction to comedy and humor, and I am 110% not sorry.
I was about that age when I discovered my mother’s copies!
I’m sad the copy I used to read at my nana’s disappeared somewhere along the line (when my family was making fun of me for reading it and Miss Manners). Whereas I still have five hard cover Mary Higgins Clark books her neighbor gave her the last year of her life I can’t make myself part with, despite, you know, hard cover Mary Higgins Clark books.
We understand that. I can’t give away a silly book entitled ‘Love With Paprika’ My mother got a kick out of it. She died in 1962 and I love her every day of my life.
Like Abby Wambach, I am also a supporter of lesbian Hillary. I dunno, I just think it might be good for her, you know? She might find more happiness in life that way.
Who would you ship her with?
Any human on this Earth who is not Bill Clinton.
Warren and/or Albright.
I’m just imagining second-term Hillary (because unfortunately with where we’re at, it would have to be second term) announcing that Bill has moved out of the East Wing and that “Elizabeth and I are excited about seeing where this chapter in our lives takes us.”
brb trawling Archive of Our Own for Hillary/Elizabeth RPF.
omg Albright would be PERFECT
Aw, one of my 6th grade students came in to check out biographies of Clinton and Albright today and now I can only imagine she is doing research for her coffee shop AU
WOULD READ
Huma Abedin, who also deserves better than her current husband.
YES GIRL YES
Oh hell yes. I went to a Hillary rally a couple months ago and Huma was there (of course) and I almost fangirled as hard for her as I did for Hillary.
BEEN THERE. As in, my eyes continuously drifting to Huma at a Hillary event. She is just so beautiful and everyone says she is brilliant. I do whatever “she” tells me when “she” sends an email to Hillary’s list.
Just came down here to say this.
Diane Lockhart.
I would think this is perfect, if I didn’t kind of love her marriage with Kurt. Maybe they could go poly and welcome her in as a third?
I just sighed happily.
Emily Gilmore.
What’s really going to blow the Christian Post’s mind is when ESPN’s bio for Wambach when she’s on TV is “Lesbian Hillary Supporting Analyst”.
I’m pretty sure that everything I understand about humor as an adult can be traced back to a reading of a bargain copy of “All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned In Loehmanns Dressing Room” at an elderly relative’s house when I was twelve. Erma Bombeck showed me that the details of everyday life could be real and mundane and sometimes a little dark but funny as hell at the same time, and her writing has always stuck with me in a way that little else did at that age.
I’m so glad to read someone else here had a childhood love of Erma Bombeck. Pre-teen me would read my mom’s copies and laugh until I cried. I often wonder if my mother worried at my childhood humor or if she appreciated it.
ETA: Also, your comment about finding humor in the small pains of life makes me think she had a larger effect on me than I’d previously considered. Thank you for saying that!
Yet again, the Toast feels like home. Why did child/tween me love Erma Bombeck so much?? Definitely time for a re-read.
I am so happy to be among my people. I used to keep the issues of my mom’s Good Housekeeping with her columns under my bed.
Me too!
I really miss Loehmann’s! (I do not miss the dressing room.) You could find amazing stuff very reasonably priced (that you’d then have to try on locker-room style in a giant communal florescent-lit and mirror-lined funhouse). Bombeck new a goldmine for weirdness when she saw it.
I miss it toooooo. (To be honest I don’t know how to shop anywhere else, to the extent that most of my wardrobe is still composed of things I purchased there five or more years ago. Apparently surviving the unflattering mirror cavern is part of my fashion process.)
I also discovered Erma Bombeck around that same age–I don’t remember which book, but I went to the library and read everything else I could find by her. I didn’t realize it until now, but I think she really did inform my current sense of humor quite a bit. And now I want to grab a few copies at the used bookstore to see if Adult Me gets even more out of them than Tween Me did.
Me too! I read them at my grandmother’s house as a pre-teen and found them hilarious. Definitely need to revisit.
Y’all, I have never met anyone else my own age who also read the complete works of Erma Bombeck as a pre-teen. I feel so understood now.
I read all of her books too and once ruined a library copy by dropping into a bathtub. I brought it back to library without telling one and the librarian confronted my mother. My mom blamed me but the librarian didn’t believe it because what 12 year old reads Erma Bombeck.
Show of hands, who here is old enough to have actually been in a Loehmanns Dressing Room? (Everything she said about it is truuuuue).
Me!
I definitely remember laughing at The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank as a kid.
Heh, I have almost the same history with Betty McDonald. Mom lent me “The Egg and I” on one long family holiday when I was a tween and I read it, “Anybody Can Do Anything”, and “The Plague and I” at least twice. I don’t know what made me connect with an american housewife, but I suspect I just fell in love with her snark.
Philly-area Toasties! We are having a picnic this Thursday, May 12 at 7pm. We’ll meet at Schuykill Banks under Walnut Street. Hope to see you there!
Oh my gosh! Is there a Philly Toasties community I wasn’t aware of?? Is there a newsletter/FB group I can subscribe to? Either way, see you Thursday! Should I bring snax? I’m gonna bring snax.
There is! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/phillytoa… Feel free to bring snax and/or dinner 🙂
I finally started watching The Americans this weekend and am about six episodes in, so I am HERE for today’s roundup.
I am three episodes in and don’t know what took me so long.
Jeez folks, unless your seatmate is solving differential equations that look like “d[Bomb]/dt” and “in the limit as x -> kablooey”, just leave him alone, yeah?
kablooey
i am dead
<3
KABLOOEY
That is pretty much the noise that happens in my head when I look at an equation with any Greek letter more mathematically highfalutin’ than pi.
My favorite Greek letter is the squigma, sometimes known by pedants as “xi”.
Surely, you must admit that the zero is Muslim influenced.
(assumed response, don’t call me surely.)
By the way, I was being silly with the kablooey stuff, but seriously, mathematicians and scientists actually very often colloquially use “x blows up” to mean “the quantity represented by x approaches infinity”. Just a PSA in case paranoid airplane lady is reading. Talk of exploding letters is not necessarily cause for concern. 🙂
Sansa’s grumpy ears!
Isn’t this the second time she’s come home delightfully perfumed with eau de corpse, and you have heartlessly washed her? Those dead animals don’t roll in themselves, you know.
Yesss. Do you know what breed of dog she is? I am an adamant Cat Person, but something about the floofiness of those ears has melted my icy heart
She’s a mix, bred for largeness, health, and (possibly) floofiness!
I was wondering about that too. How big is Nicole’s backyard and why are so many animals dying in it?
“You’ll Be Back” is easily the catchiest song I have ever heard in a musical. I could sing the chorus after hearing it only once. Those “da-da-das” are a work of earworm genius
I just love it when a friend is relatively new to the fandom and I can point out that those songs are very much of the genre known as ~British Invasion~
When I first made my brother sit down and listen to Hamilton, we got to that part and he said “This reminds me of The Beatles… {long pause}… OH MY GOD.”
wha-…i….what….
Lin-Manuel, you glorious human.
The song is now stuck in my head and I am 1000% cool with that.
To be fair, math at that level IS terror.
And yet, didn’t I see sine in some of those equations? I KNOW THAT ONE! That story just keeps me shaking my head.
I’d also like to recommend this excellent series of Sadiq Khan tweets:
William Shatner(@WilliamShatner):
@SadiqKhan Khaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn!!! 👍🏻 Congratulations Mr. Mayor! Bill
Sadiq Khan MP Followed You.
William Shatner (@WilliamShatner):
🚨Go to Red Alert!🚨 Khan followed! 😱😏
Dave Gower (@Gowerly):
@WilliamShatner Are you absolutely sure, sir? It DOES mean changing the bulb.
I was waiting for some one to make that joke, then HE MADE THE JOKE HIMSELF.
I am not disappointed.
Yay for London! I’m pretty pleased with us (full disclosure, I took advantage of the AV system and put the Greens as my first choice on the basis that it was an indirect vote for Khan) and I hope this is a positive start. Also, did everyone see the “Khan’s put his wife in a hijab” shermozzle? Because it’s awful and dumb.
The one that picks out the wrong woman as Khan’s wife?
Yes – she (Sarah Joseph) handled it pretty well to her credit, and I think for most people it’s confirmed how bizarre some of his detractors are, but the fact that it happened at all is stunning…
Yes! And I saw Tommy Robinson’s name on it, and assumed it was just some neo-Nazi blog, but apparently it is actually a real right-wing American politics blog with a real readership? O_o
I mean, tomayto / tomahto at this point, really…
I didn’t vote for him (#WE4lyf.) but I’m still happy he won, I don’t know how much of a real difference it will make, since Labour is pretty much Tory-lite these days, but at least some of the more vindictive and nasty policies might not make it through.
Yay – I’m all the way WE too (where the everloving @ is the hashtag on a mac??)!
I’ve been canvassing these last couple of months and had the most fun with such a great group of women. I’m so happy that turnout was up and that I might have convinced one more person to exercise their right to do so. But mostly that we don’t have to deal with a racist apologist/ no really he’s just a nice guy that sort of came across racist but don’t worry it was just political expediency.
(jumping in here to say) speaking of turnout – most of my friends aren’t British citizens but they are Commonwealth or EU, and apparently they could have voted – but none of them knew? Which is alarming (I’m Commonwealth and now naturalised British too)
I’m Irish and I get to vote! I love whipping that fact out when people get racist around me (immigrant from a former terrorist country and I get to vote in your elections. Suck it.)
Oh don’t get me wrong I love it too! Just that people who’ve lived in London for years and plan to stay (conditional on referendum…) had no idea they could have voted? I’m not sure if they were uninformed or not paying attention. So maybe it was their faults.
Good on you for canvassing! I’d love to be more involved, I’m on all the mailing lists and I keep meaning to go to the Lewisham meet ups but I’m a bit shit like that!
You should go! It’s just a bunch of cool women and men who think reasonable things. I’m north but I’ve met lovely people from all over (in particular at the very low key election party on Friday).
Now is a good time to be involved to flesh out the manifesto, I think. There are some bits that need more work.
I have a few thoughts about the election in general including wondering why there was so little publicity about how many ballot papers there would be or how you should go about filling them in.
Yay WE but mainly; # is on the 3/£ on British Macbookie things, if you press alt-3 it should come up!
I was escaping London down in Devon this weekend and one of the main things that made it ok that I had to come back and resume Normal Life was the fact that some racists in this city must be really upset about the outcome and that gives me LIFE.
Also that Britain First fucknut turning his back while Khan was making his speech. Yeesh. I spent a very instructive evening last week reading out the more racist candidate statements in a variety of silly voices.
I’m interested to see what Khan will do, and hopefully Goldsmith will be sent to his room for a good amount of time to think about what he’s done. Seriously, that campaign was horrendous.
“Arabic, or some other terrorist code,” says the Washington Post, casually.
Algebraic equations can be terrifying for some, but that is not the way to handle it.
Every article that talks about this story as that embarrassing time a woman mistook an Italian man doing math for a Middle Eastern man doing Arabic is painfully missing the point.
Mmhm, how many articles have we seen where someone is quoted like “maybe your foreign-language phone call can wait til after landing?” or similar….
When I was in college, my Arabic professor warned us all not to bring our Arabic-language homework onto airplanes with us. One time, a classmate forgot, and ended up having a conversation with a little old lady who said it was so nice to see young men learning secretarial shorthand nowadays.
This is amazing.
Yes, this. All the coverage has really rubbed me the long way like “OH-HO-HO HE’S ITAAAAALIAN GUYS!”
Obviously that’s why he was so “elegantly casual.” :eyeroll: With “olive skin and an “exotic foreign accent.”
“He’s Italian, not Middle Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights these days.” Seriously, WaPo?
“or whatever”
I felt like that was the WaPo having a dig at the ridiculousness of racial profiling.
When I read that, I took it as tongue in cheek, as in they’re making fun of the woman who only saw a dark-haired man writing something she couldn’t understand and immediately jumped to “terrorist writing in code and/or Arabic”.
Yeah, that “She saw something so she said something!” bit makes me think they were taking the piss out of her.
Yeah that also jumped out at me.
Arabic! One of the most widely spoken languages. Just terrorist code, all Arabic speakers are terrorists, you know.
And of course, all terrorists speak Arabic.
While I totally support anyone who wants to be prepared for terries, doing math or even writing in Arabic ≠ getting froggy. Please wait for legitimate evidence before draxxing them sklounst, m’kay.
As if writing in Arabic is a Suspicious Activity that Good Citizens Should Report. Ugh.
I missed the Friday Open Thread, so I will just post that I have had about eight interviews; I’m fine; Julie Andrews is better than fine; I got more cards so I sent out more Toast Post this morning; and if you are located in Chicago or Evanston, I’d like to chat with you while I am doing this here job search thing.
chicago Toastie here! our FB group (“The Toast – Chicago”) is a great place for questions.
I already bothered the group a few weeks ago. I’d hate to do it again so soon!
I am located there
Basically, I want to talk to people who know things about job searching and who know things about keeping up your spirits when you are job searching! And local helps because I am better at talking to people when I can see them 🙂
I am also kickin’ it in Etown.
I know very little about job searching in our (sometimes fair) city, but I know where to eat if you need suggestions!
Seriously, I can hook you up with mosts kinds of food.
I am useless for practical advice, probably, but happy to be around for moral support/cheerleading/distracting.
My Indian roommate in college was passing time in class by writing in the margins of her notes.
The girl next to her asked “oh my gosh, are you writing in Indian?” and my roommate had to swallow her laughter and respond ” …I’m just writing the english alphabet over and over.”
ah, people thinking “Indian” is a language brings me such beautiful pain
also re : “naan roti” and “chai tea”
CHAI TEA LATTE
*twitch
Naan bread! :-/
This is fun: http://www.dirt.online/posts/whats-my-spirit-vege…
And my colleague (the one who’s admirably no-nonsense about getting the patrons out at the end of the day) played me “You’ll Be Back” last Friday so I’ve…lost part of my “Hamilton” innocence?
I am Nautic Brussels Sprouts.
I am as well! What a lovely description!
Idealist Wild Leeks!
SAME! Hello fellow leek! 😀
Me too! that description actually made me feel better about myself on a crappy day.
I spent more time trying to come up with a non-appropriative alternative to “spirit vegetable” than enjoying the fact that I am apparently an okinawan sweet potato.
Vegetable patronus? Would make dementors avoid you like toddlers avoiding brussel sprouts.
Haha, that’s what I suggested on twitter, but then my friend said “vegetablesona” and I couldn’t stop laughing. Just imagine people saying it seriously. “Yes, I’m an INFP Virgo, and my vegetablesona is a Wild Leek.”
I can 100% imagine a certain section of Tumblr using this in a serious manner.
Good point. Maybe Vegetable Archetype? (I thought it was slightly ribbing non-First Nations people who say “spirit animal” but obviously, even if that is the case, intent is not magic.) Anyway, I do apologize for having offended!
Oh, I don’t think you did anything wrong! I was more questioning the website itself, haha. It’s possible it was meant to be a joke but honestly, who knows with the internet! (Plus I mean, I’m white, so I’m not necessarily qualified to say it’s offensive…)
Beyond the title though it’s a fun site, and my potato super fits me.
I, too, got the okinawan sweet potato. Finding out that my spirit vegetable is a food I actively dislike feels like the universe is trying to tell me something.
RHUBARB! Hooray!
Bolero Carrot!
Sister carrot!
I cackled hard at the description/breakdown on the back, “Carrot would do well to take things less personally…”
So delightful! Thanks for sharing.
Me, three! Bolero Carrots for the win.
Ah, Ravel’s lesser-known work…
Belgian endive. This fills me with glee.
greetings, fellow endive.
Florence Fennel
What’s the most unhip vegetable? That’s what I am, because I quit the quiz after realizing I don’t even understand most of the questions
And now I’m clicking around on the website and it’s hitting like 75% of my hate-read buttons. I know it’s irrational but every time I see the phrase “urban farming” I want to slap someone in the face and yell “THAT’S CALLED A GARDEN, YOU CAN’T JUST RENAME THE CONCEPT OF GARDENING”
Ha, the slack someone a link question I had to read a few times. I opted for that because if my coworkers are sick I just avoid them, not buy them remedies.
Delicata squash! “Not to be underestimated as a friendly fool” — mwahahaha, veggies, fear my practicality and strong sense of duty!
Oh that was silly fun! I’m a wild leek, aka The Idealist. Sounds about right, and appropriate considering I just finished the last of the potato leek soup I made last week!
I am a Chioggia Beet? Wtf even is that.
Also, I am currently sitting in an open-plan office in Brooklyn working on a MacBook and even I rolled my eyes at the level of hipster in that quiz.
I think that’s the stripey beet! Looks sort of like those restaurant red & white mints.
I am also this beet. I do like beets.
Another Chioggia Beet (“The Protector”) here!
The description makes me go “awww”, but then again it’s 1/2 Barnum effect and 1/2 me having low self-confidence so anything positive said about me feels great, even if it is on a hipster vegetable quiz.
Florence Fennel!
Is someone able to screenshot the Neera post? If one isn’t a follower, one isn’t able to see it. TIA!
It was visible before, so I think she might have got freaked out by the attention and locked her account? But the story is available here:
http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/people-a…
Oh, that’s lovely, thanks!
I love that.
I just … don’t know what to do with the people who are basically victim-blaming Alberta for the fires — citing the oil industry as a cause. Like, WTF people?? An entire town has been destroyed!
What like… because global warming? If so, I hope those tools are accepting a proportional amount of blame, because chances are they have a car and use electricity and other consumer goods that rely on fossil fuels.
YUP. “Alberta has encouraged the oil industry and has some climate change deniers so therefore they really had the fires coming”
*smashes keyboard into a million pieces*
I’m not Canadian so I don’t know the particulars here, but I think a lot of people feel the need to have An Opinion on anything and everything that may come up in conversation and they’re not great at knowing when it isn’t needed. So you have a crisis like this and people who don’t know anything about the place or the people or the industry involved are going “well I heard half of an NPR segment about how such-and-such is bad, and now I have a provocative opinion on this tangentially related subject. Let’s talk about that instead.”
Those people are awful and all of the cruel victim-blaming will allow the right wing media to crush any measured discussion of how current forest fire trends do actually fit within a pattern of global warming.
I always feel like people whose area is overrun by the oil industry (substitute mining, logging, etc. as needed) are more the victims of that industry than anyone else.
And it’s not “karmic”, you have no understanding of that karma is, shut up!
And the “karmic” tweet came from a (former) dipper too, so disappointing.
There was this climate scientist on Metro Morning (I think?) the other day and he saying that of course forest fires in general are linked to climate change, but to go around lecturing about it while people are still fighting/fleeing/mourning is not just disrespectful, it also means people are going to stop listening to you and thus works against your purpose. So basically: shut up, help out, we’ll talk about that part later.
God, it’s so infuriating. I mean, sure, global climate patterns are making fire season a lot worse in a lot of places, but that’s a general problem and the people in Alberta are no more to blame than I am.
Yes, I saw someone snigger that it’s only fitting because oilsands mining causes climate change. No, mining the oil doesn’t cause climate change, BURNING the oil does. They’re not mining because they hate the forest, they’re mining because we burn oil. They’ll stop mining for oil when we stop burning it. If the people in Fort McMurray deserved it, than we all do. And if you claim that the mine owners who hide evidence that CO2 causes climate change deserve it, well, THEY don’t live in Fort McMurray. (Disclaimer: I lived in Fort McMurray for years and worked at the mine sites there.)
I’ve been hatewatching HGTV’s “Tiny House Builders” and thinking how annoying the host is and how it MUST be a scam because they never talk about building permits, and then over the weekend on my local Craigslist I found proof and validation of this: http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/for/5566435909.h…
THE PATHOS OF IT.
I vaguely feel bad for these people (not that bad, though, they clearly have gobs of land and horses and they wanted a yoga porch on their tiny house but didn’t think about plumping or zoning). But also, wow, the Deek guy who builds these snake oil shakes has got to know these things and gets away with charging tons for his quick shoddy shack jobs and workshops for others to learn how to make shacks that they will never finish or ever want to live in.
Tiny houses are a the scam of a the decade. I love/hate it.
AHHHHHH my SO and I just watched this episode this weekend and I was yelling the entire time. I just Dont. Get. It. Here’s your 16 sq foot kitchen with hot plate and dorm fridge! Here’s your “living room” with tiny love seat. Here’s your can-barely-turn-around-in bathroom! No thank you.
The “master” bathroom in my grandparents otherwise house-sized house was so uncomfortably tiny that there was basically no turn-around space. Can confirm that accidentally touching your naked butt to a bathroom wall is puzzling in its unpleasantness.
We have a half-bath in our (built in 1890 and so probably originally had no bathrooms) house that clearly started life as a broom cupboard. My husband and I are both tall and neither of us can actually sit on the toilet without our knees banging into the opposite wall. (I assume it was put in as a marketing ploy–easier to sell a 3-BR house if it has 1.5 baths instead of just 1! Never mind that the .5 bath is barely usable.)
Yes! This as well! That particular bathroom was just a cavalcade of knee-banging, butt-touching horror.
I was watching Luxury Tiny Houses (or Tiny House Luxury? something like that) and a couple was selling their HUGE home to live in a tiny house….with their three children. And I just. Do you think this will work when they become teenagers in the very near future? Do you think this will work now with such a large number of people? You will be “closer” to each other and you will soon hate one another.
Was it the one with the family from Atlanta moving to Montana???? We lost our goddamn minds during that episode.
Okay, I had to look that up. They want to move to Big Sky? They want to bring their tiny house into the snooty downhill skiing town? Oh that’s bound to go well. Also, just how good is the insulation in tiny houses?
Man I do love hate reading things about tiny houses.
Saaaaaaaame. Why is it so satisfying??
I’ve been watching the show because I like watching people make things, but goddamn is Deek annoying. I hate his hats. I hate his smarmy face. And I really like how the craigslist people admit that they never even set up or attempted to use the composting toilet. SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA, DIDN’T IT?
Wonder if it still comes with the matching doghouse.
I keep trying to put my finger on what exactly bugs me so much about the tiny-house phenomenon. The closest I can come to articulating it is that it’s like this weird disply of privilege–that people who can afford to live in a normal-sized (or even a large) house are instead using their money to obtain a living space that seems…intentionally cramped and impractical. Whereas there are plenty of people (myself included) who would love to live in a larger home, but can’t afford it.
Yes, and we already have a existing market of tiny houses–trailers. That’s what bugs me to no end.
And don’t forget that for many(/most?) tiny house owners, they are second homes, or weekend homes, or offices. (True story for someone I know.)
Yeah. It’s like, okay, if you love small spaces all that much, why don’t you just live in a teeny studio apartment and use the leftover money for your retirement, or your kid’s college fund, or your favorite charity. Or SOMETHING more useful.
I think they’re very like the ornamental hermitages and garden follies of the English Romantic period. Citing Wikipedia (“garden hermit”), but here goes. Emphases mine:
Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, garden hermits were novelties and eccentricities. Grottos had become more popular during the 18th century as places to withdraw for meditation, relaxation and reflection. With an increased focus on industrialism and production, contemplative garden meditation was viewed by some as an extravagance. The lack of personal free time in combination with an increase in disposable income, the popularity of “natural” garden landscaping and the rise of neoclassical culture established an environment in which the idea of garden hermits as novelty guests became popular.
In some early instances, hermits were simply represented or hinted-at, rather than personified; outside a folly or grotto, a small table and chair, reading glasses and a classical text might be placed suggesting that it was where a hermit lived. Later, suggestions of hermits were replaced with actual hermits – men hired for the sole purpose of inhabiting a small structure and functioning as any other garden ornament. Hermits would sometimes be asked to make themselves available to guests, answering questions and providing counsel. In some cases, the hermits would not communicate with visitors, functioning instead like a perpetual stage-play or live diorama.
In return for their services-in-residence, hermits would generally receive a stipend in addition to room and board.”
Clearly, the next step is hiring my prole self out as a live-in mock philosopher. Wonder if the stipend would cover my student loan bill?
Oh man, I am so in. I have extensive experience reading classical texts and not talking to people.
Anyway, my point is that the contemporary tiny house is basically an expensive diorama of a simpler, more contemplative life.
I NEED THIS JOB!!!
Yes but if I don’t construct a tiny house, where is Septimus going to live?
Septimus is an adjunct, you know that, right?
This exchange is making me so happy.
I did not know this was a thing. This is a real thing? Wow.
*furiously revising retirement plans*
Thank you for this beautiful historical perspective on my favorite pointless vaguely-appropriative rich people fixation, the tiny house.
How do I get this job?? I can hermit it up like nobody’s business.*
(* assuming Netflix is included in my hermit hut)
Yeah, it’s like conspicuous asceticism as part of a cycle beyond conspicuous consumption. There’s a great David Rakoff essay in Don’t Get Too Comfortable about it, “What is the Sound of One Hand Shopping?”
“Conspicuous asceticism” is exactly the phrase I was looking for.
What happens to the tiny house people that live in the path of hurricanes or tornadoes?
Ding dong, the witch is dead!
There was one of the tiny house shows where they built a house for people who live on the Mississippi coast and had their previous house destroyed by Katrina. But in that case, it wasn’t one of the mobile type tiny houses, and they had restrictions about building it on stilts and how big it had to be (I think they ran into zoning issues about the size at one point). http://tinyhousefor.us/tiny-house-spotlight/missi…
Okay, that is actually pretty cool.
Argh that show made me crazy. That one in the woods with all the windows? Is going to be cold as fuck and probably collapse into a pile of mold and glass within 5 years.
Just buy a trailer.
Poor people: living in tiny houses since forever.
There was no insulation! None! And then he cut a hole in the floor and put down a piece of acrylic like that’s a reasonable thing to do in a place with weather.
Hate watching this show is great recreation for me…
Toast! This is OT but it’s a bit time-sensitive so I don’t want to wait until Friday.
My sister-in-law just learned that a very close relative has advanced cancer. The precise prognosis is still unknown and there’s no real treatment plan yet. I want to send a card to this relative – who has shown nothing but kindness and love to my own family – but “get well soon” is clearly not the kind of card to send.
I’m obviously not going to write a damn treatise or anything but what kinds of things should I say in the card? “Thinking of you, love, askelade” is too brief. (I should mention that this relative-in-law is religious; I belong to the same religion but am much more liberal; and my wife & kid are not religious at all.)
Also any ideas for what I can do to support my SIL from afar are appreciated. I’m not geographically close and so I can’t babysit my nieces or cook dinner or show up with a pizza.
I’m so sorry.
I think a “thinking of you” type card would be good. Inside you could write that you heard about the news and tell them what you told us in a little more detail– they have shown you nothing but kindness and love and that you are so glad to have them in the extended family. I think it would mean a lot. Maybe add that you’re praying for them, if that’s a true sentiment, since it would be meaningful and appreciated by that person.
ETA: While you can’t show up with a pizza for your SIL, gift cards to local restaurants can be the next best thing. I would think phone calls so she can talk to someone about how she’s feeling could be helpful too if you have that kind of relationship (or could start one).
Maybe you can’t show up with a casserole, but could you ask them about buying them a subscription meal service for a couple weeks? Or a gift certificate to their fave Chinese delivery restaurant? How about buying them a housecleaning session?
Seconding buying housecleaning! If you can Yelp up a good cleaning service and buy them some kind of gift certificate that’s very helpful. My friends and I frequently send this kind of gift after someone has surgery/is very ill because they won’t have energy to clean for themselves.
Thinking of you can be the beginning of a conversation. So many people with terrible illnesses report that they get a lot of nothing; people who don’t know what to say end up not saying anything at all. Just reaching out in the simplest way can be huge.
I’d probably go with something like:
“Dear X – Just heard the news from Y, and wanted to say that we’re all so sorry and our thoughts and prayers are with you. Best wishes for the next few weeks, Us xxx”
If there is anything realistic you can do (“as you know, I have experience in wrangling insurance claims / filling in social security forms / translating Medical into Plain English, so please give us a shout if that would be helpful”) then definitely include that, but I vote for specific offers of things you have expertise in and can do from afar, not just generic “If there’s anything I can do…” And if you’ve got any time when you’re likely to see them in the next few months, I’d say that too: “We’re hoping to be in Place at some point over the summer and we’d love to see you, so I’ll be in touch nearer the time to see if you’re free”.
I’d keep it simple, though – when my mum died, we got dozens of cards, and as far as I’m concerned it’s genuinely the thought that counts. You read it, feel warmed that someone is thinking of you, and you don’t overanalyse exactly what they’ve said.
And we will keep our fingers crossed that the prognosis is good too!
I’m so sorry. I usually get one of these cards when I can’t figure out what kind of card to get: http://emilymcdowell.com/collections/empathy-card…
Gift cards can be good- especially ones for grocery delivery, restaurants that deliver, a cleaning or laundry service, basically anything that will take something off their to-do list. I’ve also sent small self care packages before, just little things like nice tea, a face mask, a paperback, etc that she may not be buying for herself to let her know you’re thinking of her.
If they are religious, they might really appreciate being told that you will hold them in prayer.
Bonus points for actually doing so.
Other commenters have excellent ideas about what to say in a card, but I just wanted to add that, having been in your SIL’s shoes a few years ago, I really appreciated people who were just present for me both during the illness and for months after the person died. Grief is a hard, weird beast. Sometimes I wanted to talk for hours about what I was going through, and sometimes I wanted to just wanted talk about anything but, and sometimes I didn’t want to talk to anyone at all. I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the friends & family who let me know they were available for whatever I needed, even if it was just to sit on the sofa with me and watch bad tv.
I agree with other commentators. Thinking of you is always appropriate – even brief, those expressions of support are great. Since your relative is religious, I think saying you will pray for them would be lovely. Although I am not very religious at all, I was touched by people telling me that.
Today all I have to do is write two short finals and glare at my students as they take their final and I am DONE for this semester. All I have left is my thesis. Eeeeeeee.
Also my bf has been walking around randomly yelling “you must be out of your god damn mind.” He’s as into hamilton as I am. We’re trying to duet “Satisfied.”
Oh also I will send out my toast post soon, I promise. Once school is over I can finally think.
sometimes when I am having a bad day at work, I put in my headphones and skip right to Cabinet Battle #2. Always makes me feel better.
I loved Erma Bombeck as a kid. We had “When you look like your passport photo it’s time to go home”. I LOVED IT. I still remember the whole bit about the continental breakfasts so vividly.
With the rolls! That and the bathing suit she made out of ball caps when the airline lost her luggage are the two strongest memories I have of that book which I also read as a wee young thing.
Also the part where they make them go to all the souvenir factories. That happened to me in Thailand and I was oddly thrilled- oh this free tour is a TRICK, just like in Erma Bombeck!
The most amazing thing about the Russian spy article is that the parents actually watch The Americans. That’s up there with Hillary Clinton visiting the set of Scandal for “People watching bizarro world fanfiction of their own lives.”
Also, I’m wishing so many good things for Alison Wright. She’s been incredible this season and brought real humanity to what could have been a thankless part. (Plus the fact that Ben Affleck loves The Americans makes me like him about 15% more than I normally do.)
Has anyone ever read about the Clintons’ reaction(s) if any to Primary Colors?
I can’t hope that lady who didn’t know what math looks like literally died of embarrassment, but I feel fine about hoping she was rather ill with it for a little while.
I don’t normally hope for passenger mob justice either, but I hope her fellow fliers recognize her and glare appropriately.
She went on a different plane, and has probably missed all the resultant kerfuffle. She’s not much of a reader, would be my guess, and she’s most likely telling all her friends and neighbors about how she thwarted a terrorist attack!
I’m pretty sure she’s going about her day secure in the knowledge that she was doing good. “Well, better safe than sorry, amirite?”
I had a rando take a pic of two contractors eating lunch in their van in front of our house and post it on our NextDoor community as an Urgent Alert because “two Hispanic men are casing the neighborhood.” When I called her on the obvious racsim and pointed out they were clearly just dudes eating lunch, that was the defense she used.
Uggggghhh. You are very likely right.
It’s not healthy for me to roll my eyes this hard. What if my mom was right and they do get stuck like that?
Yup, Next Door: where dude who lives next to a family with teen kids sees bikes in the back of a trailer and posts Brown People Stealing rather than Scouts Prepare for Saturday Trail Ride. Occam’s Razor.
screaming
As someone who knows very well how large the Hispanic population is in Houston: there’s no fucking excuse for this. You hire Hispanics to groom your lawns, cut your trees, fix your roads, and then you put up a OH NO STRANGER DANGER, THEY’RE EATING LUNCH alert? Oh hell no. Hang your head in shame.
We had a neighborhood Facebook group that was basically nothing but constant racist and classist panic about “gangbangers” and “drug dealers” swarming the apartment complexes. I think some people just gravitate to these forums for this kind of handwringing.
When we first moved to our neighborhood, someone else who had just moved told me about Nextdoor, and I thought it seemed like a cool way to meet our new neighbors. Then I read up on it online and realized that, in cities like mine, it seemed almost exclusively dedicated to racist alerts like these, and I decided to just introduce myself to people when we were both outside instead. Ugh.
I’m hoping that she comes forward with an apology.
Happy Birthday to Sir David Attenborough!! 90 years old and still going strong.
Attenborough could narrate paint drying and I would watch that.
*chin in hands*
*dreamy sigh*
Sometimes I like to imagine parts of my day narrated by Sir Attenborough, and it never fails to make me smile.
Has anyone heard of the book “Madonna in a fur coat”? The bbc had an interesting article about it, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36213246. It’s a classic of Turkish literature, a romance novel that also has a lot of revolutionary elements, it sounds like? Anyways, it is being/has been translated into english for the first time.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I’ve been looking for more Turkish authors to read.
excellent! I really hope someone makes a toast post about it when it’s available in english, because i am unfortunately never going to remember to look it up (I may have roped various friends into reminding me about books by shared-favorite authors, because I can’t afford the money or space for pre-orders and i don’t have the brain storage available for remembering them all)
So does that mean that Lin-Manuel Miranda listens to the Wailin’ Jennys?
Oh huh, I love them but I never made that connection before.
Yeah, I’ve never listened to Hamilton (I KNOW, I KNOW) so when I saw that line quoted as being from the musical I was super confused, since I knew I’d heard it before. Took me a few minutes of head scratching to remember where.
I KNEW I’D HEARD THAT LINE SOMEWHERE BEFORE, but by the time I was trying to figure it out Google was so swamped with Hamilton lyrics I couldn’t find it. Thank you, you have settled a niggling annoyance.
Sorry for the OT nature of this, but I need to get this out, and this is a safe space, so….Mr. Wren and I are getting divorced, after nearly a decade and a lovely tiny Wren. It’s all my choice, but I am still having a hard time (which I know is normal). UGH. This process is gonna suck, y’all. We haven’t told too many people, but yeah. We’re trying to be as amicable as possible (mediator rather than attorneys, splitting things pretty equally, shared custody, etc.), but it’s looney tunes around here right now.
So yeah….that’s happening….*searches in office for non-existent flask*
If anyone has any recommendations as far as what I need to know/things to watch for/just moral support, I’d appreciate it.
I am so sorry.
Even if it’s amicable, take a full inventory of all assets, and make sure the mediator is half on your side. This is now a business deal, and you need the best outcome for yourself and your baby Wren.
All the moral support! As a divorced child myself, all I can say is that doing it sooner, when you can still be (even somewhat) amicable, rather than later, after decades of tension and pain and recrimination, is by far better. It’ll suck for a while, but in the long run it’s best for all three of you. Someday it’ll be the new normal and Tiny Wren will flourish in the care of his/her two separate but loving parents.
You can do it! Internet hugs if you want them.
All the virtual support and toast hugs for you.
All the Toast hugs.
Take people up on offers to help when the news gets out. When my marriage dissolved, my congregation moved me and the kids; we ate at my mom’s all the time; I accepted offers to drive my kids places.
Big hugs. It gets better. So, so much better, you have no idea.
As someone who got divorced a little while back (albeit without any children which made it a bit easier) my biggest suggestion is that self-care is super, super important. Even when it is your choice, even when you know it’s a good choice, divorcing is tough and it comes with a lot of unexpected emotions and guilt. For me, for example, I felt a lot of guilt, and I felt like I had failed somehow. There’s a lot of societal pressure around marriage, especially for women, and hoo boy can that ‘I failed by not being a good enough wife’ guilt hit you hard. So yeah, self care is super important, and so is remembering the reasons you’re doing this. (If you’re like me, reminding yourself in a sort of mental list can be helpful especially. I have anxiety and my divorce also triggered a long depression and sometimes my mind would get all guilty and twisted up and I would need to remind myself of all the reasons why I was doing this.) And don’t set a timer for yourself on “getting over it” even once the legal stuff is over. Your feelings about it might last a long time and come in waves and that’s okay.
And also, *hugs*.
This is really wonderful, @burningupasun.
All hugs to you, @pjwren. I’m also going through a divorce (11 years married, my choice, no kids, trying to be amicable but goodness that’s difficult at times). I find navigating it as the person who chose this to be tricky — there’s a lot of pain and sadness and guilt *even though I know this is the best decision for me.* Media is full of “how do the dumped deal with their broken hearts and lives?” narratives, but it seems there are few tales of the dumpers that don’t include some extreme situation or stereotype.
What’s been helpful to me so far: Know there are no “should”s here (beyond taking care of yourself and Tiny Wren). Therapy. Having friend(s) who will receive ALL CAPS RANTS via text or email without judgment or commentary. Reminding myself to slow down in all decisions so the emotional anxiety isn’t the driving force. Talking with other divorced people — the light on the other end of this tunnel is really, really bright. Self-care. Being private about it on FB.
I went through a rough patch recently as I felt completely overwhelmed by how much change has happened in the last 12 months: where I live, my job, my friend circle, my relationship status. But then my therapist pointed out that that means a lot of change can happen in the next 12 months. That this process will play out, my financial picture will become clearer, my social life better, my days and nights easier. It stinks here in the middle, but there is hope moving forward.
I am also a divorced kid. The best thing my parents did for me was to never, ever badmouth the other parent to me. Even though, as I learned when I was an adult, my mom had a lot of cause. (Infidelity, not abuse or anything like that.) They both told me how much the other parent loved me, and that they still cared about each other but weren’t “in love” anymore. It was an age-appropriate explanation that I could latch onto until I was old enough to have a more nuanced understanding. (I was six when it happened.)
It was hard at the time but it would have been worse if they’d stayed married, honestly.
I came to say the same thing. My dad was an A grade b*stard (this was, unfortunately, evident) but my mum always emphasised the ‘he’s your dad part’.
I am so sorry – even if you chose it and it is the right thing for you it is still a hard path, and I hope it goes better than you hope and as fast as possible.
I’m sorry. Everyone I know who has gone through this says that it sucks, but gets a lot better. I hope you get to the better part as soon as possible.
*hands you internet bourbon* You’re going to be fine. If you’re not living apart yet, that’s going to be a major step and it’s either going to make you completely horribly miserable for a while or it’s going to feel like freedom. Just remember that your healing process is your own. In my case, I had been miserable for so long in my marriage that by the time it actually ended I’d already done all of my grieving, so I bounced back pretty quickly. So just do whatever you need to do, and as long as you’re still taking care of yourself and your wee one, don’t let anybody tell you you’re doing it wrong.
Hugs hugs hugs, all of the hugs and moral support <3
Sending many good thoughts your way. Take care of yourself.
I’m so sorry. I’m going through a divorce with two young-ish children and yeah, it sucks. It’s also good. It is so very both at once.
My recommendation, specific to divorcing with children, is do not let your guilt guide you in your conversations with them. Do not say more than you decided you should say because your child is suffering and you feel terrible. Decide what you are going to say. Stick with it.
Every late night conversation I have had with my son about the divorce has eventually wound its way to the fact that he would like a dog. Or at least a hamster. Fortunately, they have all gotten there before I start explaining why Mommy and Daddy don’t live together anymore in more detail than is really advisable.
Belated hug gif!
My recommendation is just to keep coming back to The Toast and talking out the process with us. Lots of intelligent advice-givers here for all problems large and small. <3
Maybe your kid is too young for this to really be applicable, but when my parents got divorced (I was in college), my relationship with each of them improved. Kids definitely sense when their parents are at odds with each other, and trying to please both of them at the same time in the same room can be stressful. From now on, most of the time your kid spends with you will be one-on-one, and they won’t have to worry about appearing to “pick” one parent over the other in front of both parents. Like “oh man, mom’s not gonna like that i agreed with dad’s opinion on that thing, better make up for it later by doing something favorable towards mom.”
Co-signed! Even young kids can feel the tension when something’s not right. You are absolutely doing the best thing for Tiny Wren.
Yup that is the biggest thing to watch out for. I really appreciate the fact that my dude and his ex kept it civil and focused on keeping things running for the kids so that 5 years later everyone is well adjusted and the two families just work.
My divorce was less than amicable, so no advice, but all the support to you as you move through these changes. It is hard, hard work, even when you know it is the right thing to do and even when you feel (somewhat) in control of the process. Always willing to lend a listening ear.
I’m late to this, but have we talked about Wynnonna Earp?
I don’t know, but I am here for it! Such a fun show! I have not read the 90s comic that it is based on, but I am intrigued by it.
I actually bought and read the source material (a new “complete collection edition” got released right after the show started airing *coincidence, i’m sure*) because I loved the first couple episodes of the show.
Ummmm…It’s a 90’s comic, all right. She spends her entire first run in a bikini top and cowboy boots. There’s a lot of “and Pam Anderson can play her in the movie, right?” going on.
I have not seen much discussion of it, but I’ve been watching and am pretty addicted! It’s total brain fluff, and the mythology is ???, but everyone is hot and snarky and that’s pretty much all I need sometimes. My biggest question, though – why is it set in Canada when the US Marshals are a major plot point?? I know Syfy films in Canada, but they happily pretend they are elsewhere in other shows!
I think it’s filmed in conjunction with a Canadian production company so they probably have to have it set in Canada to get funding? (Canadians, please correct me if I am not getting how Can con works). It’s also why Orphan Black is set in Toronto, I imagine.
They say that the Black Badges are a joint operation or something to make up for it. Their logo is stars and a leaf I think.
So, demonhunting is under the same kind of oversight as the Peace Bridge. Not promising.
Also, fellow toddler parents:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-intera…
(won’t let me hotlink)
I <3 Stephen Collins.
The Reddit post has been marked as resolved and now I am left wondering if they were upset by the sex (or by watching it with their son?) or by the bittersweet ending??? Someone tell me.
Yes! WHAT DID HE DO!
(Reading the replies, I’m imagining they all sat down to watch the movie and he got a boner and something porn related?)
Oh my god! I want that to be the case! I thought maybe his moms were just really conservative or mom-ish about the whole thing and lectured him about appropriateness, but that would be SO much better.
I saw it yesterday and so can fill you in. They were upset by straight depictions of lesbian sex as being fetishizing. They talked about how so many depictions of lebsbian relationships in media were disappointing or upsetting to them. So then they tried to find something else to watch on the son’s laptop and somehow discovered his porn history, which included girl-on-girl porn and then they were upset.
Oh, I feel so bad for him! It sounds like he was trying to do something so nice. At the same time, it sounds totally awkward for them and I don’t know how I would have dealt with that!
Yeah I definitely felt sorry for him because he said he picked out the movie because he wanted them to know he likes having two moms and has never felt like he was missing out on anything and they like to watch movies together as a family.
Per Google cache, they thought the sex scenes were too male-gazy and asked what other movies he had on his laptop to watch (he had downloaded the movie). They saw his torrent history, which had lesbian porn in it, and got upset.
TBH I’m of two minds about this but if I was one of his moms I might not just laugh off that juxtaposition of events, either. Even if you love your two moms you can definitely forget about female subjectivity. Porn can be a great way to be curious about things privately when you’re young IMHO but it sounds like they picked up on the “oh you might think there’s Moms and then Women (people for sex).”
Here is a link to the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=c…
This weekend I was fully evangelized into the Church of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and it is all I want in this life or the next.
Greg Serrano is a dark-haired Logan Echolls, don’t @ me
Oh my God, I love that show so much! I downloaded the entire first season from iTunes (they had it for free as a “For Your Consideration” thing), and I’m about eight episodes in and it’s so great and funny.
YESSSSS. I’m only three episodes in, but I’m fully evangelized, and I’ve watched/listened to “Feeling Kinda Naughty” about 50 times. Also: Greg is Prince Hans from Frozen, which is just like a nice little bonus.
Greg as Logan Echolls is an idea I didn’t know I needed, but will now think about a lot.
I’ve been going around singing “I’m A Good Person” under my breath more or less constantly.
Okay, the thing that I keep wondering about this whole “I’m writing algebra” thing is- so what if he was writing in Arabic? Like, are we really freaking out over anyone writing in a different language?
I would really like a story where someone is writing in some sort of not western script and gets asked about it and they are like, “well actually I’m writing my fanfiction epic thank you very much” I mean I would not like that story it would be terrible but still.
Or what if it was some kind of code? I invented a complicated cipher when I was in middle school and tried to get everyone I knew to write notes in it. Only my mom was committed enough to actually write back. People should be allowed to write weird stuff, even on planes.
I know this isn’t the point of this story, but <3 your mom. I want to be that kind of mum!
I mean, also, I’m not a terrorist but I’d think that if you’re gonna do a terrorism, you should be beyond the pen-and-paper planning stage by the time you get on the airplane.
This!!! What did she think he was going to do with a written note to pull off a terrorist attack? Paper-cut his way into the cockpit?? Make a paper airplane to throw to his co-conspirator??? Make a devastating speech??
These two comments are my everything today.
“Make a devastating speech?”
That always works for Captain Picard on “Star Trek”, so…..
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, in about” [checks watch] “twenty minutes, I’m going to hijack this plane.”
“WHAT!?”
“Yeah, I’m terrible at public speaking; I’m trying to get my speech down beforehand. You know, it’d be really embarassing otherwise, I’d be all like ‘You western imperialists who defile the name of imperialists… I mean, the name of Allah, uh…’ and everyone would be *looking* at me… Tell me, do you think ‘western imperialists’ works, or should I go with ‘godless westerners’?”
I mean, there were probably Arabic numerals in that equation somewhere, so in a way, he was writing in Arabic.
+1
OF COURSE that flight was going to Syracuse. OF COURSE (I say this as someone who grew up near there and hates that airport more than any other airport I have ever been to)
*siiiigggghhhhh* Oh Syracuse.
– Nicole’s article about Erma Bombeck was great. I think that I’d dismissed Bombeck as being someone that only middle-class moms could relate to, and didn’t know about her activism. That letter she received from the woman in prison was heartbreaking.
Also OT – my favorite uncle died after a long struggle with colon cancer, not unexpected but hard none the less. He was a supremely polite man, and endlessly helpful. To that end, he left some notes for his family to refer to when organizing his end of life celebration. There were lists of friends from various parts of his life, including work, and skiing and sailing, and some historical things, and a list of all the boats he’d owned, including the rig and length for each.
That right there was pretty much peak Uncle Tom. I am going to miss him.
I’m so sorry for your loss. My favorite aunt, who was really more like a second mom than anything, just passed away unexpectedly last winter, and she also was supremely helpful — all the antique furniture and heirlooms had attached notes detailing their histories and familial importance; all of her paperwork was in order; all important old family photographs had the names of the people in them written on the back. I can’t even imagine how much more difficult this whole process would have been if she hadn’t been so organized; her helping us in such a way was truly a gift. It’s made us all reconsider how we keep our own houses, I think — she always was an example, in life and beyond life.
Again, I’m sorry to hear about your uncle. My heart goes out to you.
I’m so sorry for your loss, and send you internet hugs if you want them.
Also–“a list of all the boats he’d owned, including the rig and length for each”–this made me fall in love with your uncle a little bit. Sounds like he was an amazing human being.
“You’ll Be Back” is the first song my older son geeked out over when he heard Hamilton, followed by “My Shot” but (this is a very blatant brag) when he & my younger son came together to write me a Hamilton-riff Mother’s Day Song, they went for “Dear Theodosia” and my younger son played piano, and the older sang and played strings and all in all I am less annoyed at their lack of planning that meant the #Hamiltome is back-ordered instead of in my hands, because they gave me this.
Got 12 seconds in before crying, A+ BOY RAISING CHAMPION MOM AWARD
It’s a darn good payoff to all those years of the Suzuki method and paying for private lessons, that’s for sure.
You made it about 9 seconds longer than me. A+ momming for sure!
Was gonna say something like “no YOU’RE ALL crying at your desks,” but what the what, no shame, I am totally gonna own up to tearing up at my desk over this.
The singing one (at college 1500 miles away & determined to make me miss him even more) FaceTimed as soon as he emailed the link to the song, so he could watch me bury my head in the piano-playing one’s shoulder and weep as I listened the first time.
I’ve bawled less dramatically on my million subsequent listens, but am still full of tears.
I just got a delivery estimate on my Hamiltome order on Amazon! Maybe you got one too? ^__^
Kid 1 used his own Amazon account to order it, so I don’t get to track it myself. But your story gives me hope!
How beautiful! Loved this.
Nicole, thanks for the morning cry at my desk. ERMA!
Toasts. Today I discovered that one of my best and most amazing lecturers from my time as an undergrad has passed away. He was old, and he made it far further than anybody thought he was going to (he was unwell when I was studying under him, over ten years ago, and nobody thought he would last long).
He was singular. He was an Cambridge professor, possibly also Oxford, and spoke as such, but he was actually Secretly Welsh and would go on long, ranting tangents about the rights of the worker in his plummy accent. He always wore a suit — but sometimes with sneakers. He kept his fluffy white dog in his office, where it gave precisely zero shits about any of his students — except me. It liked me. That was because he would give me lifts home in his car, and I would sit in the dog’s seat (front seat, of course) and so the dog, somewhat affronted by that, would sit on me. And then I won it over with pettings.
He liked Alice in Wonderland, and T.S. Eliot. He could speak nineteen languages. He was so ferociously, terrifyingly smart that the first lecture of his I attended, I could only understand what felt like one word in three, and I thought I was going to fail — but he was the kindest grader you’ve ever met, and when I tackled the first assignment with a left-field subject matter and a good deal of determination, he gave me 100%.
Sometimes you are lucky enough to be chosen by this kind of teacher to be their friend; for whatever reason you match them and you get to be more than just a student. This didn’t happen with me — I charged in like a small, determined buffalo and decided he was going to like me, come what may. And despite the fact we both acknowledged that I had Decided he would be my friend, and given him very little choice in the matter, he did. We studied The Tale of Genji together. He lent me books. One time after introducing him to the idea that perhaps gay Harlequin romances were actually for the female readership, I had to try and explain the concept of lesbian porn to him (that was awkward). After I left for a year, when I came back his dog got up from under his desk and walked straight into my knees and he was delighted and told me that dogs knew good people when they saw them.
He’s gone now.
I shouldn’t feel too bad. I saw him a few years ago, when he was still cheerful and teaching, and me and his assistant/PhD student went on a university-wide hunt for his glasses because he’d left them in his coat pocket, of that much he was sure, but he wasn’t sure where his coat was (it was in his car). He told me I should write. I wish I had seen him more recently, but I know he had a family he loved, and many more students than me who I’m sure visited him in my stead. I wish I could have seen him, but it would have been for me, not him, and that makes it a little easier.
But still, he’s gone, and I can’t undo that or buy even one more minute with him, and I know I will never meet anyone quite like him again.
And oh Toasts, it does hurt.
What a beautiful eulogy. I’m glad he lives in your memory, and that you’ve written about him.
Thank you. It’s the only thing I’ve written about him so far, might be the only thing I will write about him. I don’t know. I just sort of want to stick a marker in the world and say “he was here”, even if just a little bit.
Oof. I’m so sorry. There are a few beloved teachers of mine who are getting on in years, and I can’t even imagine them being gone. He sounds like a remarkable person, and the way you write about him is lovely.
I’m so sorry for your loss, but thank you for telling his story. He sounds like a wonderful person.
All of the hugs. And, oh, it sounds like a privilege to have known this person.
It was such a privilege. I was so lucky to have lived in this time, and in this place, and to have met him.
RANNELLS: You say… I only hear what I want to… DAMNIT!
Mathematician here. Some friends of mine knew a grad student in math who studied a field called algebraic geometry. There’s a basic operation called “blowing up” — the analogy is to blowing bubbles (for example, you could replace a point in a surface with a hollow sphere). So anyway, this guy was flying home from a conference with another grad student, and as they were waiting to go through security, he was talking to his friend about blowing up points in a plane. He missed his flight.
That’s a fair cop.
omg I love Alison Wright. She took a character who seemed destined to be a pathetic, irritating sadsack and made her SO intensely human. (I mean, good writing, too, but she really elevated what was on the page in the early going, too.) I’m so impressed with what she did, I love that so many other people love her, too.
Also, I am dying of anxiety a little, the dissertation defense is in 2 1/4 hours and it has been a mad scramble of a morning getting that ONE LAST FORM signed and turned in.
Hey, good luck! You’ll be great!
I am here for the Alison Wright’s Martha adoration. I just about cried when she got in that plane.
There is a really lovely comment on Nicole’s article in the Guardian:
“Grew up in a house that also adored her.
My mother was nursing the night shift, raising five children of her own, being a foster mother to at risk children, renovating an 1850’s farm house (sans the benefit of any manuals or HGTV…. it was all trial and error and self taught) gardening and canning, making our clothes, founding both a historical society which still flourishes and a democratic party in a town that had been run by Republicans for more than 100 years.
She rarely had time to laugh, but once a week when Erma’s column came out, our house rang with my mother’s helpless laughter, and without even hearing the column yet, we’d all join in and then roar again when we read it for ourselves; my father swore Erma lived in our house or knew my mother intimately, so similar were their world views.
I could never pick a favorite column, but one I remember is about Erma’s rising excitement as she launches her first yard sale. By the end, she’s slapping price tags on things they need and want –the TV, the couch– and finally, in a fit of euphoria, the family dog and kids. The youngest child cost 5 cents.
But it’s one of the rare “straight” things she wrote that has stayed with me. When she knew she was dying, Erma wrote a column in which she urged other women and especially mothers to take care of themselves, but it was quintessential Bombeck, not raw sentiment. She noted: If someone gives you a decorative candle or good soap use it; dammit, who are you saving it for? If you’re sick, for god’s sake stay home in bed, the world won’t miss you and you’ve earned it.
But the world, my world, does miss her. She made my family laugh over nothing and some of my best memories are of those days in our Victorian kitchen when we saw a gentler, funnier side of my mother, one that she might never have shown without Bombeck’s ingenious prodding.
————
Sincere thanks to the author for bringing back such good memories. Lovely to hear Bombeck’s name and revisit her humor. She was a class act…”
I saw this too, immediate tears.
Relevant to Toast interests: Sock Dreams is having a 25% off everything sale TODAY with code TheSaleIsAFoot.
(I just placed my 3rd Sock Dreams order in two months. But I can quit anytime.)
BLESS YOU.
*buys all the cotton tights*
Yay impulse buys!
Yessss, thank you! You should be getting a commission for all the Toasties you are sending to Sock Dreams today.
I ordered 5 pairs of socks. Only one is going to be a gift…
Today I learned that Ben Affleck is making a movie called The Accountant. And based on the IMDB blurb I AM SO FUCKING IN. FORENSIC ACCOUNTING.
Please tell me there’s someone else out there that would think this is cool.
I knew someone studying to be a forensic accountant, and she was really whip smart, so I’d totally watch a movie on the subject. On the other hand, most of what she did was look at spreadsheets, soooo maybe it wouldn’t be that exciting?
I have a degree in accounting and I remember when I first heard of the concept of forensic accounting. Talk about taking something like looking at spreadsheets (I do it all day, not exciting, not great movie fodder) and actually applying it to something cool like discovering fraud!
It’s going to be sooo simplified that all the forensic accountants will be crying. Forensic accounting equivalent of “if we can catch the monkey it’ll take us 24 hours to develop a vaccine and synthesise enough of it to save the city”.
OH I am in. I just saved one of my clients ONE MILLION DOLLARS by being the only one who actually looked at the numbers on this one spreadsheet.
That is SO GREAT. I too am in the business of the care & feeding of spreadsheets and it’s hard to explain to people how much I like it. They’re telling a story!
THIS IS VERY COOL.
I have a grad certificate in Forensic Accounting. I’m in for this.
I am just a bookkeeper, but I am SO ON BOARD FOR THIS. I didn’t save a million dollars, but the stupid state auditor had us in arrears of 35k+ and I got it down to less than $800
When it comes out, will you write A Forensic Accountant Reviews The Accountant for the Toast? Because I would loooove to read “that’s not how it actually works, it’s way cooler and more complicated and it works like this!”
That sounds great! I’m no good with numbers but find forensic accounting fascinating.
new unREAL trailer for S2! http://www.whosay.com/status/constancezimmer/1208…
OT, but I need to brag because I AM AWESOME AND AMAZING AND SUPER PROUD OF MYSELF.
I ran my first half this weekend in 20-30mph gusts for over half the course. It sucked. I was going to be happy to finish. My goal time was 2:30 without taking the wind into account.
I FINISHED IN 2:29:19. THAT’S RIGHT I BEAT MY GOAL DESPITE BEING NEARLY BLOWN OFF THE COURSE. I AM A BEAST and celebrated by drinking some beer, eating some pizza, going home, eating more pizza, and going to bed at 8:30.
Last year I would have laughed at the idea of running a half marathon. Now I’m going to start training for a 2:15 finish time.
You are amazing!!!! Congratulations on a killer time, what a warrior you are!! Toastie Runners 4eva.
YOU RULE
Woohoo!!! You’re awesome, and this is really inspiring!
Dude, Buckingham Palace can’t get their hands on a Koran? The Mayor Elect has to provide his own Koran? That just looks sloppy as hell, Palace staff.
But I bet they have that $800 fish fork from Friday’s Bargain Bin.
In several different patterns.
People in Calgary keep wanting to remind people that they elected a Muslim mayor FIRST 😛
My little Virginia town’s had a Sikh mayor for the last several years, if we’re all proving things. 🙂
Heh, when my parents visited Calgary they met someone who told them that “the Hindus and the Muslims” were taking over City Hall to “run things their way”, which included isolating off one-quarter of the town so only Hindus and Muslims could live there. So I’m explaining to them that that’s not true, while wondering if I should also explain that Muslims and Hindus are not the same thing. I decided against it.
I don’t think it was recent: it was when he was appointed to a Privy Council in 2009. (Which kinda makes the story even more awesome, in that instead of “leaving it there for the next person”, it’s actually, “Nah, I’ll be back.”)
I retract nothing but the “Mayor Elect” part of my comment.
I’m a little late, but have we discussed Chris Hemsworth baking his daughter’s dinosaur birthday cake?
oh my gosh, that is adorable
*swoon*
Perhaps it’s because I’m not currently in the US, but for as much as I’ve seen people talking about Hamilton online I have yet to hear a single note from any of the songs.
Oh you can just start here!
The rest of the songs are here.
(whispers) Me too.
Re: “The Americans” and the illegals program — My mother had a little sister who died when she was three days old in 1952. Ever since finding out that these spies used the names and identities of dead children, I’ve wondered whether there was a Marsha Thomasma out there who was really a Russian spy.
(My grandmother went on to have three more kids. It’s amazing to think about how different things were not too long ago, both the expectation of having a lot of children (they weren’t on a farm or anything, and they weren’t compelled to have kids for religious reasons) and the fact that infant death was more common. This is all still within living memory!)
Re: your second paragraph–it’s so strange, isn’t it? My mom (born 1948) is the oldest of seven, all spaced about a year apart with a larger gap between her and the next oldest because of a stillbirth and an infant death. It’s so easy to forget that birth control was not reliable in the 40s and 50s–not even for nurses like my grandma who had access to things that regular people couldn’t get. My grandma was basically pregnant or recovering from childbirth FOR TEN STRAIGHT YEARS, y’all, and that makes me cringe. The only reason she and my grandpa didn’t have more kids is because the final pregnancy (twins) involved a c-section delivery where she also had a hysterectomy.
Oh man, THIS. It’s so insane to think that in terms of just human history, contraceptives only became a thing, like, five minutes ago. I love my IUD with all my heart and can barely fathom a life where you could so easily and quickly get pregnant and not have [safe/legal] control over it. What a time to be alive, etc. etc. etc.
Erma Bombeck < Peg Bracken
I got my last Toast Posts mailed out this weekend! Yay, mail!
Good work! I have been planning on doing mine for like a week, and then I got sick this weekend. Now all I can do is writhe in guilt. Sorry Toast Post matches. They’re coming, I swear!
I was going to do write mine this weekend, but then my parents were in town and I was exhausted by the time they left. I have all the envelopes addressed though!
My friend’s dad and aunt were in a similar situation. When their father defected to Poland in 1950, the Canadian government stripped stripped the whole family of their citizenship. Both children were born in Canada and had never lived in Poland. I think they got their citizenship reinstated in the 90’s, but my friend, who by birth should be a Canadian citizen, is not. She’s moving to Toronto next year for a job. I’m very curious what will happen if she decides to apply for citizenship. Could she just walk into some office and say, “Make me a citizen!” I feel like that should work.
OT (as usual for me) but I am trying to make decisions re: Writing and Grad School so I figured you all would be of great help. I’m in the southeastern US and identify as female, if that helps at all.
I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Not a BA, but a BS through my university’s school of engineering. I also applied and was accepted to that university’s (Northwestern, for context) creative writing program, which was a Big Deal in the liberal arts sub-college-thing there. I didn’t have the spoons or funds to do a cross-school double major, so I turned the writing program into a minor. The only difference between the major and minor is some number of fairly standard English lit courses, as well as the other “distros” of the BA program: science, math, foreign language, etc.
I have a full-time job in software project management stuff now. It is great! I don’t want to quit it, ever. But I want to keep studying writing. I want that structure and I want Expert Types looking at my work. But I don’t have a manuscript ready to workshop, a la the Stanford Certificate Program, and I sure as heck cannot afford to quit my job and move somewhere with a Good MFA Program (…whatever that consists of). Even low-residency programs seem terribly freaking expensive for so much distance learning. Non-degree courses are not really an option here.
What would you do if you were me, Toasties? Look at a program like the University of Edinburgh’s distance MSc in creative writing (even if my degree is in another field)? Would it even be worth the application fees to schools if I’ve only taken seven courses, despite the ~prestige~ of my creative writing program? All my friends either 1) have English degrees or 2) do science and have little to no inclination toward this kind of thing.
I would appreciate any advice one way or the other.
I did an MFA at a small Midwestern university in creative nonfiction and am currently doing the submissions grind while working non-lit-related dayjobs. I don’t have a ton of advice, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think your undergrad major should be a hindrance if you decide to pursue an MFA. Far and away the most important factor in MFA admissions is your writing sample. Plus, seven undergrad courses sounds like a lot to me.
I know about some prestigious MFAs in DC and North Carolina [edit: I say “prestigious” because “good” feels like a value judgment I’m not positioned to make] but that might be too far from you to be useful. Poets & Writers publishes a list of programs every year (it’s not exactly a ranking, more like an evaluation where the schools get scored on a bunch of different axes and you see how well they do in each) if you’d like to learn more about schools near you. I think the prestige of your MFA matters if you want to teach writing, but if you want to stay in your software career and want to do this simply for training and not for the credential, then the most important thing is finding a school with a teacher or two you could learn well from. My school always does poorly in the ranking because it doesn’t offer funding, but it has all evening and weekend classes to accommodate working adults, and that ended up being a much better deal for me than going to a partially funded program that wouldn’t allow for me to work full time.
Okay, so, I got my MSc in creative writing from Edinburgh (the residency track, not distance). Here is what I can tell you With Authority:
It’s bullshit.
Look, I loved the year that I spent there. It was the best choice of my life, but I was looking to radically change industries, get out of a job I hated, and get close to a man I loved. The most valuable thing I got out of it wasn’t the critiques from professors (though I can imitate their styles, and would gladly critique a short story for you exactly they way any/all of them would), it was the connections – the community of other writers, the networking chances, all of that.
Instead, in your position, I’d focus on just…writing. Write a lot, write strange things. Let yourself fail. Put everything in a drawer and look at it in 3 months and in 6 months and see what changes you would make. Find a few friends who also write and edit for them. Take short stories you love and rip them apart (I will happily send you exercises that we used in class).
None of this is stuff you need to pay for. I’m in a crapload of debt that I don’t regret, but if you’re looking at paying for a distance ed program, I will stand on my chair and give you the “I got the same education for whatevertheheckamountitwas in overdue charges at a local library” speech from Good Will Hunting.
I was going to say pretty much this exact thing, but with less authority. 😉 I have 2 (soon to be 3) degrees in sciences, and I have never studied creative writing formally, but I worked for several years as a creative writer in the entertainment industry. Those MFAs are 100% unnecessary, and very, very expensive. Also, frankly, I am sick of reading Books By MFAs. I like to play a game where I go into bookstores, randomly pull out books in the “literature” section, read a couple of random paragraphs, and then guess if the author has an MFA. I’m usually right. Those programs privilege a certain type of writing about certain types of subjects. I’m not trying to disparage people who have done them (there are a lot of truly great writers who have studied formally) but again, I think those programs are very unnecessary.
I second the advice above: write. Write lots of stuff. Find a writer’s group or circle of friends you trust to review your work. Read lots of books and short stories and analyze them. Read writing criticisms by reviewers you trust.
Iowa (The University of Iowa) has some (at least 1, perhaps soon to be more) creative writing MOOCs. Free and accessible and allegedly great. (Iowa is supposed to be THE creative writing place, at least we say so frequently and loudly.) http://iwp.uiowa.edu/iwp-courses/distance-learnin…
That said. I second what others are saying. Write a lot, and read a lot. Find or make a writers group.
Shirley Jackson’s son Barry insisted that his mother was nothing like Erma Bombeck.
I just read Nicole’s Erma Bombeck piece and despite not knowing a lick about Bombeck (other than remembering from my days at B&N that she was prolific) I enjoyed it. A couple parts of it hit on an idea that I always come back to, and it’s that so many of us end up hating ourselves because we know all the terrible things we’ve thought, said or done (especially thought). Some so terrible that we’d never share them and through that fear, never gain the comfort of knowing that others think, say and do these things, too. That ignorance, not being sure whether our thoughts have crossed a line, I think can and does lead to shame and self-hatred.
It sounds like Bombeck may have helped alleviate this problem for some, and interestingly enough, I’m fairly certain The Toast provides a similar relief for people now.
I am so relieved by the result of the London election. I was on holiday when it took place (having been a responsible citizen and sorted out a postal vote), and asked my partner if he would consider just not returning to London if the results were bad ones. (“Well, you’ll be sorry if somehow the UKIP candidate wins and we’re returning to what has become known as “The Terrordome”.”)
I cannot believe the children of the Russian spies lost their citizenship. They were born in Canada! They had no personal connection to Russia! (Laws which strip people of their citizenship are always alarming. In the UK, until some point in the 20th century women who married non-UK citizens lost their British nationality, even if ther husband’s country didn’t confer citizenship automatically on marriage. Have fun being stateless!)
Reading comedy about kids while still one yourself can offer a fascinating bridge between the two solitudes of parent and child, the latter solitude generally being notable for its solipsism.
One of my favourite things to read as a child was my parents’ copy of Father’s Day, a book of newspaper columns about family life by the writer Hunter Davies. I have no idea why, but I loved it.
Losing your citizenship is scary. Those kids list their Canadian citizenship because technically they never had it. Children with parents who work for foreign governments aren’t eligible for birth citizenship. It’s so crazy that people would have children and raise them in ignorance. I suppose this must happen all the time. Thank goodness they have Russian citizenship; if the Russian government had feigned innocence, they’d be even more screwed.
In a different way, may I write about my afternoon? I learned that people are selling heroin and anything in my neighborhood. My next door neighbors are much younger than me and are who told me about this. I called the vice police today. Not for those who buy, but for those who sell. I have also mentioned around the place that I have done this, so that some users can go underground. This has already been done. What would you do in this situation?
Relevant to our interests: #StarringJohnCho http://www.avclub.com/article/twitter-imagines-wo…
I was all over that this weekend. So far the best one I saw was a John Cho + Southpaw – it was fantastic!
oh sweet Creighton University, I also thank thee for their "Applied Math" or whatever course which taught the same things. It made me not hate math.
brb trawling Archive of Our Own for Hillary/Elizabeth RPF.
I just sighed happily.
Me!