I once tripped over my own feet, while halfway down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I landed in a heap at the bottom. But I was eight years old and made of rubber. The only injury was to my pride.

I once sat awkwardly on my leg, and did not notice for several hours. My leg fell asleep so hard that I was limping for a week.

Yeah, me too. I figured Aunt Jemima was like Colonel Sanders - there was a real person behind the mascot. Maybe she made it to Canada on the Underground Railroad, which would explain the maple syrup thing.

I think any sort of “glamour” profession has the same issue. It’s supply and demand. If there are a hundred preteens who believe they’re going to do X when they grow up for every job that will be available for them, there’s going to be a selection process. The person who worked unpaid internships for only three years…

Agreed. The point of having public health experts is so they can tell the front line healthcare workers what to do. The ER docs are winging this one; they aren’t that much better trained than the rest of us.

I am the cheapest bitch on the block, and I’m still having a five-figure wedding. Getting married next month, in a major East Coast city, though we live on the West Coast.

I had OCD since I was self-aware enough to notice. Diagnosed age 5. Had it until my late 20s, when I was diagnosed and treated for another autoimmune disorder, and then the OCD went away.

The guy in the office across from mine has about 1.6 hands. I’ve got no idea what happened. He’s never said anything, and I haven’t asked. I’m from the post-HR generation, I’m not saying anything about my co-workers’ bodies unless they are literally on fire (or the equivalent).

That said, if I did ask, and he fed me a…

My take on Moby Dick, and other “difficult” works (Infinite Jest, anything by James Joyce, etc), is that they aren’t really meant to be read as books. They are a literary ink blot, something that literary minds can take as a starting point for deep musings about the human condition. As an ordinary human, I’d much…

In eighth grade, there was a class project: read two books by an author, then write a short piece in the style of that author. I was a pretentious little swot, and I’d heard Tolstoy was difficult, so I volunteered for Tolstoy. Then I forgot about it for awhile. And then I read War and Peace and Anna Karenina over a…

I recently stayed at an AirBNB in a touristy area. They had a cabinet for partly used personal care supplies - shampoo, sunscreen, etc. Maybe you could take that approach? The workers would probably be happy to use up someone else’s shampoo rather than buy their own; it doesn’t go to waste, and you don’t have to think…

There are puberty blockers, and those are reversible. The effects of the hormones you are exposed to during puberty are not fully reversible. There are skeletal changes, and in the case of testosterone, extra facial hair (plus male pattern baldness with long-term exposure). That stuff is permanent. Fat and muscle will…

It’s not hard to fact-check this stuff if you’re actually looking. But there’s no way they can check every last person who applies. If you have the brass gonads to lie about something a twenty-second Google search could disprove...college admissions may be your game.

I used to work in a Level 3 containment facility. There was simian herpes work being done in the same facility, and hats off to those crazy bastards, because yikes.

I was that person. Work was what I was good at. It was all I was good at, TBH. It was where I found meaning, and community, and purpose.

Dulles is my hometown airport, and it used to be easily at the bottom of my personal list. But they’ve finally finished the renovations, and it’s now...kind of mediocre. Huge improvement.

Yep. SFO is totally fine...in the afternoon. Early mornings are a crapshoot at best, because fog. It’s also far enough south that transit time to SF proper is an issue (there’s an easy connection to both SF and San Jose, but it’s still slow-ish due to distance).

I know someone in her 30s who got bored with her marketing job, went to a bootcamp, and is now a front-end web developer. It’s possible, though she did have a programmer husband to help (with the work, and also the finances).

Probably not, TBH. If you want to roll your own Wordpress server, you’re likely to wind up staring at code of some sort (usually while swearing, trust me). But there are enough ways to trade money for convenience on that point, you really don’t need to handle code if you don’t want to.

I never named it, but I thought of my OCD as a dog. And I’d talk to it that way. (Ssst. No. LEAVE IT.) There’s no point in being mad at a dog; it’s not making doggy mischief AT you. But if you want your dog to behave, you do need to give it consistent training, or else you’re going to get dragged around like a human…