But seriously. I don’t understand the point of taking all of the fun out of life just to have to endure a longer life without fun. What’s the point? I am genuinely baffled.

I’m on the fence about aspartame, but I love Fresca more than life itself. It’s the diet soda that no one realizes is a diet soda. Pure grapefruity deliciousness in a can. If I have to worship at the altar of aspartame to get my Fresca fix, I’ll do it.

I have no idea if Beneful is indeed the cause of these pet deaths, but using the claim that "Beneful is a high-quality nutritious food" as a defense isn't a smart move. Anyone with a basic knowledge of canine nutrition could call bullshit. You might as well feed your dog a bowl of corn for all the nutritional value it…

YES. I <3 this comment so much.

What about people who occasionally masturbate but have absolutely no interest in anyone else's naked body touching theirs? You don't have to be totally devoid of arousal to feel like the odd person out. Arousal is like a chore that has to be taken care of from time to time, and it's completely unrelated to desiring…

What about people who occasionally masturbate but have absolutely no interest in anyone else's naked body touching theirs? You don't have to be totally devoid of arousal to feel like the odd person out. Arousal is like a chore that has to be taken care of from time to time, and it's completely unrelated to desiring…

Then what is making these people feel like they don't fall under the "normal" umbrella? Something about their experience of the world leads them to feel that their interest in sex is unacceptably low by most standards. Isn't that the important part? It doesn't matter what someone else thinks after reading 3 sentences…

Just a factual interjection: "female" has been used as a noun since the 15th century. It is in no way limited to use as an adjective. An excerpt from the Oxford English Dictionary:

I get this. But I write about gender in literature, particularly masculinity, and differentiating between "Man" and "male" is essential to what I do— and naturally bleeds over into a distinction between "Woman" and "female" at times as well. Manhood and Womanhood are mythical teloi that I don't think anyone ever…

I super agree with everything you wrote. Everything completely depends on context and the employee/boss dynamic. There have definitely been moments where I just didn't have the patience to deal with a complaining customer or the power to solve the problem and volunteered to get a manager just so I could extract myself…

I definitely tend to err on the side of no escalation except in cases of discrimination or where the customer is being cheated out of money. I just don't see why it's worth being a difficult customer to, using your example, sit in a particular place. But I really hate conflict. I don't necessarily think everyone…

I wonder about stories like this sometimes. I don't doubt that you had pleasant interactions with the server and manager and that you tipped. But as a former service industry employee, almost every time a customer got a manager involved to deal with a complaint about a store policy, even if the interaction was polite…

I think that the Outlander wedding episode should be the gold standard by which all future sex scenes should be judged. Never have sex scenes been done so well or been so integral to a story. Tasteful but realistic, and with an equal share of nudity between the male and female characters.

Reading this makes me want to join his website's network immediately.

I thought fights also broke out at the Monroeville mall in Pittsburgh.

I definitely have a retail voice that is totally distinct from my casual and professional voices (which tend to be similar). My retail voice is higher, cheerier, chirpier, and feminine, though it's not a conscious affectation unless I'm in a bad mood and pretending to be happy. I just suddenly speak a little higher…

Wow, I had no idea so many people peed in the shower! I never have (wait... maybe once? but I don't think so). Nor do I have the problem people keep mentioning here of a running shower causing the need to pee— I think it's just that those people who pee in the shower have become conditioned to associate the…

Just stopping by to say that I grew up on my mother's 1990s historical romance novels, and I think that steady diet of feisty women taming roguish men forever impacted my taste in entertainment. I haven't read a romance novel in about a decade, but I always enjoyed the raunchy bits as a teen. Nowadays, as an English…

I usually think of Lancaster as more Eastern PA, but otherwise I support this statement wholeheartedly. I grew up 45 minutes Southeast of Lancaster and recently moved to Pittsburgh. Two totally different places.

And as someone from rural PA, I resent all of the assumptions made about me here, even though I understand…

Okay, important point: the french fry thing is Pittsburgh only. That is not a Pennsylvania thing. I am a born and bred Pennsylvanian and I never heard of Pittsburgh's weird food practices until moving to Pittsburgh. French fries on a salad would be completely unacceptable in my hometown.

And beer isn't that expensive…