Also, dreams that I have to take my nursing boards again, or that my BA is being revoked because I didn't actually pass that statistics class.

Oh, my god, wedding stress dreams. These are the worstestest. I had them ALL THE TIME up until actual wedding day (forgot to invite someone, nobody showed up, dress emergency) and then a few times afterwards. The last time it happened, in the dream, I actually said out loud, "We already had the wedding. This is…

You guys, you got it all wrong. She heard they were auditioning for this job.

About a week ago, our family of Toulouse geese was snoozing underneath a window next to where I was sitting. I kept hearing a mysterious noise, and finally realized it was someone snoring; it sounded remarkably like how Big Bird snores.

Or watching me parallel park.

By any chance, did you just come through a wormhole?

I've always thought that's what I would tell kids: I'm not telling you not to do this for moral reasons, I'm telling you because you don't want to find out that it's the one thing on earth you'd throw your grandmother into the fire for.

DUDE, heroin is totally having a resurgence in the small Vermont town where I work. WTF????? I assume this is some weird fall-out from the war in/on Afghanistan. Because the folks being caught with it don't seem to be doing a retro, Billie Holiday redux thing.

Also, the timetable is different, but some promising new studies, just in, are suggesting that perhaps smoking cigarettes is not...specifically...too good, as ideas go.

Questlove is in my top 5 "humans I don't actually know but for whom I have boundless love" category, and this story broke my heart. He's always sort of reminded me of my (white, tall, big) husband, mostly because my husband used to work with Questlove's mom (at Whole Foods, in Philadelphia) and SHE said he reminded…

You know that saying, which my mother quotes often, that by the time you're 50 you have the face you deserve? Chris Brown is starting to look really, really hard. Like he might get his deserved face before the half-century mark.

Hard to say. I am pretty sure, however, that if he would have just played up the contrition a little more (not that stupid nonpology where he wore the dumb sweater) and, like, I dunno, gone to rehab for a few weeks or something, people would have had a different take on him. Americans EAT UP the redemption story…

Well, color me impressed. Your command of English idiom is fantastic.

Resende Costa

Why is your English so ridiculously good?

I'll have to reinquire as to its name. It's on the tip of my tongue, but not quite there.

My parents were in the Peace Corps there, '67-69, in a tiny town in Minas Gerais, and as a result, I have felt a lifelong affiliation with Brazil. Never been, unlikely to go soon, but still. Are you there for the duration, or a short-timer?

Don't I remember that you live in Brazil? Or did I dream that?

OH MY GOD SNEEZING AND HAVING RESULTANT BACK PAIN YES YES YES.

It sounds like sour grapes, but I am very grateful (now that I am middle-aged) not to be a beauty. My grandmother was, and my mom and I always speculate that it kind of ruined her life.