I mean...I'd be way more concerned if his favorite meal was live porcupine, tbh.

Did you get a chance to see Anne and Nancy Wilson's performance at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Led Zeppelin? I felt so smug when they went on, because the whole time all of the kind of disappointing singers leading up to them were singing, I was saying, "They should have just had Heart perform." They made…

I'm more of a Lez Zeppelin girl myself.

For a second I thought, "Oh my gosh, we are related!" until you got to the French Canadian bit. Czech American on my dad's side, and it doesn't freak me out anymore like it did when I was a teenager.

Word.

I have a pretty good idea as to why he listened to her—listening to her talk to the interviewer, it's pretty obvious that she projects this absolutely remarkable sense of gentle calm. Every once in awhile I meet someone with a gentle soul like that. Everyone seems to know it when they see it. My dad's a little like…

Whatever they pay your cousin, it is not enough. That's an extremely valuable service right there, and I commend her for it.

So s/he bought you dinner? S/he says s/he loves you? S/he's got a lacrosse scholarship? Nice boy/girl from a nice family? Doesn't matter. What matters is DO YOU REALLY WANT TO? And do you know how to while minimizing the risks as safely as possible?

Oh, you can be sure I have a real problem with the list. I just didn't express that clearly in my original post. Mostly I'm just wondering if there's a way to tell young women (and young men, for that matter) that it's okay to not have sex sometimes because sometimes you don't want to have sex, and that if you do…

Right, I get that. I guess my musings just weren't quite clear on that point—I went to a school district that relied on abstinence only curriculum, and though I had enough sense to recognize that what they were talking about was largely bullshit, I didn't really have enough life experience as a young adult to parse…

I think that there's a place for teaching people that you don't always have to consent, though. I guess I sort of internalized the notion that if I slept with one guy it shouldn't be a problem to sleep with another, which led to me having a lot of sex that I regretted later on. Not as in I had sex and then felt…

I mean, it's not always clear what else is going on in a person's life, just by looking at them. Yes, if you're eating more than you're burning, then you're going to put on weight. But for a lot of people, cheap fresh food isn't available. I think about how I eat now that I live somewhere where I can get really…

You pretty much nailed it. In particular I think it's the instrumentation, the rhythmic hook, and the melodies that are causing everybody to raise their eyebrows. It's fine if every song in a genre has the same chord progression. The blues has a strong and hilarious tradition of this. And anyway, just thanks to…

No prob. :) I grew up in Kansas and I've been trying to explain to my well-intentioned by also very racist neighbors for ages why the shit they say and do is indeed actually racist, and then why it's problematic that it's racist.

I guess the main thing is context. African Americans have been ridiculed in entertainment for over a century, basically—I'm thinking back to minstrel shows, black face, and how black people have been portrayed to whites (and by whites) until fairly recently. A good(ish) example of a white person satirizing Obama…

Kansas neighbor here. I dated a guy from STL for awhile, and on a drive down to Arkansas once, I was horrified by the number of Confederate flags I saw. Until I remembered that you see quite a few in north-east Kansas, too, especially around Perry/Lecompton. Maaaybe unsurprising, since that was kind of the nexus of…

I've done it before, ha. I think because he's been living as a bachelor for a long time and because he travels a lot for work, he's not had much opportunity to nest. So I feel like the noises he's making about finally decorating his place and getting his parents to ship him his cookware are a good sign that he's…

The grad students in my department just concluded a study on the amount of funding we receive versus the cost of living in our city, so this post just makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. Bitterly. To the point of sounding unhinged. Either because it's a fantasy, or because it's true and I obviously applied to the…

That's what I was thinking, with the dinners. I won't even bother to humble-brag about it—I'm a really damn good cook. I just don't get the opportunity to cook for him as much as I'd like. Maybe I just need to communicate a bit more forcefully. What I hoped would be a 20-minute jaunt to the grocery store to pick…

It's hard to say. I think it's probably a mix of chivalry and the way he's seen affection displayed before. He's actually said before that as a British man, he insists on being chivalrous with regards to paying for dates. From his stories about his parents, it seems like his dad tends to surprise his mom with things…