Puberty is the problem. It helps male skaters, but for female skaters, they wind up with a body that doesn’t rotate as fast, with a different center of gravity. So, the message that puberty and physics is sending to girls, is:

Read Prairie Fires. It’ll blow your damn mind. It’s must-read stuff for anyone who’s read the Little House books.

Personally I would like to see U.S. figure skating sync the age qualification with world figure skating.

I suppose my instinctive reflex to cringe when I hear the way we describe these adolescent athletes, is a result of my subconscious processing all the stories of the horrors these poor children endure in order to excel, and reacting to it.

This article yesterday about Gracie Gold and the problems she had to overcome pairs nicely with this article. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/sports/gracie-gold-figure-skating-.html

Problem solved.

I mean, it *does* seem like a forced narrative/made-up feud (and really, who cares?), but Meghan Markle is all about animal rescue and is scritching a pibble, so I know EXACTLY where my allegiances lie.

Yeah, it turns out that I’ve been Marie Kondo’ing my life every few years for the last 20 years or so every time I’ve moved. :D 

I get creeped out by houses that look like a rent-a-home catalogue. It feels to me like they’re inhabited by alien body snatchers who had to throw together a convincingly generic “human” abode in a rush so they could fool thier human neighbors, so they just went to one store and bought everything that matched. Bonus…

You’re getting my old crap!

I’m resisting this with every fiber of my being... I’m a messy person (not dirty, just not organized) and seeing a super-tidy place makes me a bit anxious...like the place isn’t really lived in. Go ahead, people, judge me. Avert your eyes from my stack of books not in a bookshelf. Your disdain, feeds me.  Am I not…

I think the problem is that you’re judging this by the wrong goalposts. In Great Britain Kate could have been as rich as Bill Gates and she’d still be considered a social climber for marrying Prince William whereas the poorest of aristocrats who did rhe same would be considered as just doing what was expected.

Sneaking in a correction here: her parents are millionaires and have been successful for most of their children’s lives. However, they are rich and common, but not poor. Most of the looking down by the Royal peer group is mainly because the family are not, say, landed gentry.

She may have grown up among the wealthy and privileged, but make no mistake: the family are Nouveau Riche, untitled, with no immediate landowning forebears. It may seem insignificant to the general, non-English populace, but at these castes, it matters rather a bit.

Queen tries to tell everyone to get along and be nice to each other and people respond by being nasty and petty.

She worked as a mechanic in WWII. I’m reasonably sure normal rich people don’t do that. Count yourself lucky you have a Queen, figurehead though she may be, who’s had a strong sense of duty from the get go. 

Until someone calls them out for not being journalistic. Then they’re “bloggers”or some shit.

Everyone’s getting engaged or married and I’m just sitting over here not giving a shit while all my married friend’s relationships slowly implode over some dysfunction or another.

Those kinds of choreographed dance parties are VERYYYY common in Indian weddings. In the dozens of Indian weddings I’ve been to, I don’t know that there’s been one WITHOUT choreographed dances, regardless of how humble or ostentatious the wedding was. 

She’s an A-lister in India, which is where the wedding was, and which has a population 3 times that of the US. Their big stars are Much bigger than our big stars.