see, my father did this the easy way — put a hole in the condom, because he knew my mom didn't want to get pregnant. And he wonders why I think he's an asshole. As he sees it, he's the bastion of family values and I owe him my life. But, according to him, my mom didn't love me enough, so I try to win her approval, etc…

I'm in the middle of Sandberg's book, enjoying it and all that, and was thinking of writing her personally. (Or her secretary, I suppose.) My sentiments would have been just about the same as yours.

Haa... for me it depends a bit on how good the speaker's command of whatever dialect they've got is. A speaker with a strong German accent who is trying for North American English? I can deal with it. A close-to-convincing Brit accent? That too. But the combination of super strong German accent and British…

The British accent is pretty standard in Germany, through it is losing ground. It's not just people who learned English in England.

It really depends on which country. A lot of them regularly dub every foreign movie or tv show. They evidently do find subtitles a distraction.

My hands are waving in the air.

It depends, I think. Like others here, I think that with certain friends, you might just want to cool it. I travel a bit for work, and it often has fun parts mixed in with the business — well, I find it easier to mention those trips offhand to people in the same field, since they're likely to do the same thing. I tone…

That's actually really good of her to share, because here I have been thinking all my life that going to Spain to launch a perfume once in a while is incredibly difficult, back breaking work, much like coal mining or working on an oil rig. It's good to know that working once in a while — as opposed to say, models who…

A long time, longer if they go to grad school and pay for it themselves.

Ha! So true. Then again, our plumbing makes LIFE. (Imagine that in a really booming voice.) I'm still in awe of the whole thing.

They're becoming best buds with people who are going to be president of the U.S.

Thanks, I know how to do those steps. But until the drugstores in my area open again, I think I'll stick to worrying.

Really? That's good to know. I'm so freakin' sick of all this period weirdness. Okay, the pregnancy-caused no period is fine. Then tons of bleeding. Then normal periods. Then I try that stupid pill you can take while nursing, and have a month of mostly period. (What a great form of contraception — constant bleeding!…

Okay, so I have a 14-month-old, I've just taken the first month of the usual pill, and I'm in those no hormone days when my period is supposed to come. And it hasn't come yet — though really, it's only been two days. But I am freaking the fuck out that I might be pregnant again, especially since I was queasy two days…

I love this comment so much. Yes, I am sad — my father wasn't as difficult, at least to me, when I was a child, but since I've been a teenager it's only gotten worse and worse. So to some extent I'm mourning the father I haven't had for 15-20 years. (And realising how screwed up a lot of what went on in my family…

You're fortunate. One of the sad things about having a family member who behaves like that is that certain things no longer seem like fiction.

Thanks, that sort of what I wanted to say. It's not a kind of crazy that as many people know about or recognize, but it causes a ton of damage... and in my father's case, it has its moments of sheer lunacy too. He broke off contact in the fall (nicely timed a few days before my birthday), then I decided to be the…

My reaction as well. I've done a bit of reading on this stuff online (as a cheap form of self-therapy), and you do have to go through a long process as the child of someone like this. They're not so bad with kids, because kids can be adoring, but once the kids develop their own personalities, these people become truly…

These people can make life quite impressively miserable for those around them...

Watched the episode today, and she especially seriously reminded me of my asshole dad, whom I've gone ahead and diagnosed as a narcissist. The delusions of glory and excellence, the paranoic fantasies, the complete inability to take criticism and brutal screaming rages caused by any comment that is not total ass…