RANDOM TANGENT: I think I say the opposite, usually… "ooh" to express the excited surprise of learning the thing that I hadn't realised until just then (btw, I'm writing the most poorly constructed sentence of all time right now, aren't I?) and "oh" to express something like… strong feeling without surprise. My "I…

I had a ruptured eardrum when I was six or seven. I am now very, very, very, very old but I still shudder when I think of it.

That dune-crawling one is fucking brilliant.

Thank you for teaching me a v handy Spanish word.

A colleague (in her 40s, v long-term relationship, no intention of marrying) once decided to solve the "what do I call him?" quandary by referring to her boyfriend/partner/bloke as her jeff, because his name was Jeff. We tried to make it catch on for as many people as possible; many men in our circle who weren't…

I got married in America and we had only one bridesmaid and one best man, and lots of people were really confused. (And I walked in *before* the bridesmaid, and the caterer told me that was "totally wrong". The caterer was a dick.)

Ahhhhhhh braces. I was totally scouring the picture for a man in suspenders (English meaning) and then I realised it was just braces and was disappointed.

He really, really does.

Clarification: I know taxes pay for schools and shouldn't use the shortcut of saying some are "paid" and some are "free", but when I'm considering my own options it does feel that way… obviously everyone's situation is different but it seems as though I could have a kid in my county and be less financially wrecked…

Yes! There is so much goodness there. My life really was not at all stereotypically LA (I don't know how to drive, for a start). There's so much really normal great stuff there that I think sometimes people don't consider, like museums, as you said.

I was always really proud when LA haters would come to town and fall in love with it. Some of my friends even ended up moving there from London, like I did, although they were dreading even visiting at first.

I love it too. It's strangely really foreign to me because I'm from somewhere very different, but simultaneously feels more like home than anywhere else. (I moved there at 20, so of course my time there was racked with upheaval and weirdness, but also brilliance. Lots of brilliance.)

I lived there for nearly eight years and was very ready to leave when I did, but I also miss it and want to move back in future.

I lived there for eight years and I really loved it. I was ready to leave when I moved back home, but I miss it very much. I will probably move back there at some point (although the medical costs/lack of maternity care/lack of holiday time/earthquakes terrify me).

I lived behind a strip club in West LA, and my office had another strip club on one side and a high school packed with the most beautiful and stylish teenagers I'd ever seen on the other. My office building had a gym and a snack shop on the ground floor; the strippers would work out in the gym and the glamorous high…

I'm so glad it's helpful! (I hate covering letters. My manager recently pulled out my covering letter for when I applied for my current job, and cruelly taunted me with it. Oh, the cringing.)

Fuck, now I've done that stupid thing where I laugh really loudly in the middle of my crowded office and people want to know why and I have to confess that I'm spending the final two hours before my deadline LOOKING AT PICTURES OF A TALL SWEDE.

I had an unpaid internship that was obviously going to be like that the whole time, so I quit after three days and went back to my really great paying job at a magazine, a job I got after being their unpaid intern for a while… I'm glad I had both good and bad unpaid internships, so now I can be a good intern manager…

That's gloriously bad!

When I was an intern, we had a fellow intern who wanted me to take phone messages for him. INSANE.