I hate that guy too. Give me someone who can sit still doing nothing for a few hours and not be bored and then I’ll feel respect. It’s proof you have so much going on inside your mind that you can endlessly occupy and entertain yourself.

But—it ends with “rat.” At least make the elementary school bullies spend a little time thinking up mean variations of a name. I think the kids with that name will be “monster rat” from first grade on.

You’re welcome to it. I probably stole it from someone else but I don’t remember.

Wishing you peace in whatever decision you make.

My mother has some issues and that often puts me in the bad-mom story section, but in this case I think it works the other way. When I was in Girl Scouts one of the leaders of my troop quit, and they had no one to replace her. I asked my mother to do it. I desperately wanted her to because I felt like it would make us…

Sounds like a dick-billed platypus.

Don’t know if it will help you, but one of the things I do when I start to spiral into guilt is to ask myself, “how could you make Mom happy?” I run through all the weird scenarios of what she THINKS she wants me to do, but it’s never enough. If I called her all the time, went to see her, etc., it would just enable…

For those who may have suffered emotional neglect rather than physical neglect or abuse, here’s a great book on how to articulate the problem and begin recovery, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

“In a startling upset, Maru, a Japanese cat, has won the American presidential election. He will begin his administration by having each precinct’s ballot box brought to the Oval Office so that each day he can rule the country sitting inside a different box.”

If those are the standards I’m pretty sure there’s some taciturn serial killer out there who could get a lot of things done too. Probably will even bring his own instruments.

Yeah, tell Gaga hi from all of us.

I think 20% works for everything everywhere. Then if you have a regular stylist it’s good to give a check for Christmas/winter holidays—that one I always have to look up in terms of percentage, but what I give is about half of what I pay at a regular appointment.

Every stylist I’ve ever been to LOVES photos of any kind because if you don’t know “stylist language” you can say the wrong thing and then they do the wrong thing and feel bad. I found this out with trying to use terms like “chunky” vs. “edgy” vs. “layered”—I just don’t know what all those things mean to a stylist.…

You’d think there would be ID of some kind in the purse that would allow the salon to call the cops on her.

Man, we need to synch up stylists and clients on this issue. My stylist is very chatty and I swear I know everything about her life, her mother’s life, her sisters’ lives, her nieces’ lives... I am a giant introvert and I leave the salon exhausted. But, same thing, she does a great job and I don’t want to try to find…

I think the problem is that none of these positions regarding the moral standing of the fetus can in any way be proved. I don’t think there is a nationally agreed-on legal definition of “a person,” and even if there were it would likely be tough to prove whether a fetus of any stage except shortly before birth might…

I know that as a respectable woman I NEVER go near anything that could be used to make a box, and so no one has ever kidnapped me and put me in one! So obviously she is the real perpetrator here. It even says she helped to make the box. That poor man was just putty in her hands.

Wow, good to know. I thought it was the lack of yummy chemicals that made their fries so bad. But yeah, “gummy” is a good word for them.

Or... you combat racism by publicly shaming people for being racist and letting them know that’s not socially acceptable. In my life I’ve seen that be far more effective than education. Education usually does not solve the problems of a sense of entitlement/cultural superiority, lack of empathy, and resistance to…

Tell him if he ends the word with “lay,” that’s what he’ll get.