Thanks for this—I got to see Queen live for the Hot Space tour. Awful album, but they were unbelievable live. Everything people say about Freddie Mercury as a showman is absolutely true, and it's the only big-venue show I've ever been to that felt like everyone was together.

Okay, I’m coming late to this, but I want to echo what PocoPuffs said and add a few things. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until my mid forties (weird childhood, plus balance issues). I now absolutely love it. I agree that getting a friend, or friends, to help you along is a good start, and not to put pressure on…

Yes and no. I ghosted a friend years ago—she deserved it, absolutely and utterly, because of years of manipulative, obsessive, even abusive behavior towards me which culminated in something ugly—but I'm pretty sure it hurt her too. I don't think "who hurts more" is the point, actually. We had a poisonous relationship,…

Can I print this and put it on my office door?

Hell, I don't have those feelings for my students, and most of them are are actual, bona fide adults (I teach undergrads). My role is incompatible with desire. I don't feel bad for her, despite the obvious mental illness—she has done too much damage on too many fronts.

Hear, hear! I like this—I like your style a lot, but it isn't mine, except at the core (self-care and wearing what you like, what makes you comfortable). And the core is the point, isn't it, at any age? I think it's sad that we decide to "let" older women do this, because comfort is anathema to the fashionable when…

I went to a good colourist. I used to have hair dyed dark brown, and just got tired of maintenance. My colourist gave me almost-white highlights to ease the growing-out process, and I had highlights added every few months. It felt awkward, particularly at first—I've been every hair colour but blonde, and the…

I think that there's something going on with wealth/class too—both my partner and I grew up with struggling single mothers; we're now financially fine/have gotten educations and jobs beyond childhood expectations. We both grew up knowing that we had to do crap, and that sometimes it wasn't fun or creative or…

Also worth looking into—sons of single mothers. More all over the board about discipline of all sorts than military guys, of course, but as a rule, single mothers don't have time to cater to their kids, and the earlier that a problem dad (if he's a problem) is out of the picture, the less likely that sons will follow…

"But in my experience, seeing a man run a vacuum isn't sexy per se. It's the mindset that's sexy—not that he can't wait to be rewarded for his troubles, but that he doesn't want someone he loves to be overburdened with extra bullshit (bullshit that is just as much his responsibility to begin with). "—this is the core…

Yep, I think that there were a lot of bookish girls coming of age in the late seventies/early eighties who got a wonderful mix of sex and history through books like these, and got something valuable out of them when there wasn't much else available in pop culture. I loved the history too—and if you want really…

Yeah, I think that she was really trying to do something thoughtful, at least in the early books, and while at the same time coming up with plot devices that would allow her heroines to get a lot of sex, with a lot of gorgeous partners, and let them do it without judgment (she's got amnesia and doesn't know she's…

Hell yeah—the food descriptions, and the descriptions of clothing and real estate, were almost as graphic as the sex. There was something to turn you on at every page, practically.

Absolutely important points—and there were opportunities in those seventies and eighties historical romances to really overtly question contemporary attitudes towards rape. Small's books were troubling in that they showed graphic rape as pornography—the rape scenes were often as vivid as the consensual sex scenes,…