YES, exactly. I teach college, and I will remember the unusual names in a minute — or the names of students who look or are in some other way distinctive. It's the huge crowd of suburban white girls with straight shiny dark hair or long wavy highlighted hair named Melissa and Marissa and Adriana and Ariana and Nicole…

I brought my friend a nice beer in the hospital after she gave birth and she was so happy to see it. There's just something about a beer that seems very restoring after a grueling and emotional ordeal!

It's really a pain in the ass because during the first trimester, you're mostly not telling people, and yet you feel exhausted and possibly nauseous and brimming with your secret and you can't tell anyone why you can't drink and are avoiding sushi!

That's good to know, because that's about what I've been doing. Nothing during the first tri and then a little three-to-four-ounce pour every week or two. Two small pours during one horrific week. And always with food in my stomach. I still feel manage to feel guilty about it, though. :(

I never watched Tale Spin, but Duck Tales (WOO OO!!) is right there at the tip of my brain, just waiting for a chance to come out.

I'm pg and have been SO horny but I genuinely don't want to have sex because I have pelvic bone pain and it just feels wrong. So I just help myself out. Every day. :)

No, I don't think a lot of Thais have peanut allergies. I certainly believe there is something about highly industrialized life that makes allergies and sensitivies and such more common. I'm just leery of reversing that statement: that life in less-industrialized places is always safer. Part of life in a less…

Or it could be that allergies exist in all human populations to some extent, but sometimes people just die and no one knows why.

I absolutely could care less about home appliances/fixtures but I totally drool over the Kohler faucet that you can bump on with your elbow or the back of your hand. Genius! All faucets should be like that!

I love the Method stuff!

I wish it wasn't so hard to find non-antibiotic hand soap. I mean, it's not impossible or anything, but frustrating when there's a million antibacterials on sale for $1 each and the regular non-antibacterial for $4.

I got "hypnotized" at a Renaissance Fair once, as part of a group of five or ten on stage, and I totally faked it. I'm not easily hypnotized (that was the second time someone has tried), but I didn't want to look like a jerk so I just went along with it. Who knows how many other people fake it? I don't think I'd have…

Pregnant art is awesome, as long as you don't post it on Facebook or blingee it. :)

I am pregnant right now, for the second time, and the craziest thing I've ever done is do a belly cast last time (just because I wanted to preserve the awesomeness of my enormous belly and boobs. I painted it pewter so it looks vaguely like statuary and I keep it in my office and regret nothing!). I would never ever…

I wish MY aunt would take me to BevMo! I'm on the East Coast and we don't have them around here. :(

I used to work at a coffeeshop with a big counter where all the bakery goods were displayed, and you cannot believe the number of people who let their babies poke the food or lick the plexiglass that was supposed to protect the food. I actually had a woman harangue me about the uncovered baked goods, because she saw a…

At the natural food store once, I saw a toddler blissfully churning his hands in the self-serve buckets of olives and fresh mozzarella. His mom was standing three feet away and could barely rouse herself to say in a very mild voice, "Please don't do that, Neville." And then she got attitude when the staff stopped him,…

I have no room to criticize; I spent high school wrapped in a sweet fog of Vanilla Fields.

Years ago my roommate and her sister, from New Jersey, were gushing over the Yankee Candle called "Midsummer Night," I think. "It smells like HOT GUYS!" they said. Eventually a male friend, also from New Jersey, smelled it and informed them that what they read as the essence of NJ manliness was in fact a knock-off of…

One of my most minor but intense pet peeves is when adults use "witch" as a euphemism for "bitch." If you're going to write a whole crazy book about how his wife was meeeaaaan and that's why he was forced to cheat on her, just own the word "bitch." "Witch on wheels" sounds like someting you come up with in fifth grade.