What’s been so hard for me to explain is the mental effort involved in 1: stopping what I am doing to answer him, 2: running down my mental checklist of tasks to find one to give him, and 3: directing him when he invariably comes back with a question.

Your wife doesn’t care when her computer breaks? Because that’s what you’re saying there. You don’t care where the cheese grater goes, she doesn’t care if her computer breaks. Or did you mean that you have the knowledge to fix it and she doesn’t? And she obviously cares about the new outlet if she wants one wired.

Not giving a fuck = not doing the emotional labor we’re talking about. Would it really be that hard for you to remember that the cheese grater or whatever goes in the bottom drawer? Especially if you’d taken it out of that drawer to use it the night before?

I sent my husband that link and asked him to read it. Guess what I’m going to have to ask again.

I don’t think you’ve understood what I was saying. I was saying that my husband, a man who cooks frequently, cannot seem to find where anything is kept in the kitchen. And when he unloads the dishwasher, he puts things away in random places or has to ask me where they go. Despite the fact that he’s often just used…

I’ve noticed that when I do it, it’s a way of sharing ownership of something that I know is not actually my job. Like, it’s too “aggressive” to say “Jane, you need to make sure that the Widget is properly cleaned.” So it comes out as “We need to make sure Widgets are cleaned after every use.” To just tell the other…

Right, because men fixing a car is totally not a stereotype.

oh my god, the “WE need to do” when what he really means is “Can YOU do this for me?” is such a peeve of mine. I call him on it, but it sounds really bitchy. And, it doesn’t even work. The conversation goes like this:

lol my husband hasn’t put new tires on his car in possibly a decade. I have no idea how they’re not just shreds of rubber. I’m not even sure he knows how to pull a dipstick. And he changed batteries in the smoke detectors ... after I asked him to ... and they’re still sitting on tables in their respective rooms…

Oh, you said that so much better than I did.

I am always baffled that my husband, a man who does an equivalent share of the cooking, never seems to know a) where anything is in the kitchen, and b) where to put it away when it is clean.

If you can suggest a way to say “No, you need to find a birthday present for your own sister.” without it sounding like “I don’t care about your stupid sister.”, well, I’m all ears.

The best part about that clip art? We’d spent 2 hours hiking through an arroyo in 100-degree weather taking pictures of the actual trees. And then they pulled random photos off Google.

Yeah, I’m with you. I never got the “ha ha old people don’t get technology!” thing, because my dad was an aerospace engineer. I swear even his toaster ran Linux.

You know, I wonder if part of it is the schools and the equipment they have. My daughter’s high school gives every student a school-issued laptop. But it has IE on it, and you can’t put a different browser on. Google Docs really does not play well with IE. So she really only knew how to use the programs they gave her.

Broken Harbor,I think, manages to do what fizzled in In The Woods: a mystery that appears to be supernatural but is ambiguous. In The Woods just flat drops it, and that’s what pissed me off “Oh well, I guess I’ll never know what happened to my friends!”

There’s so much wrong with it, I swear it’s like a PSA on “how not to do a Powerpoint”.

I loved In the Woods, about 75% of it. The ending pissed me off, though. I thought Broken Harbor was the best of the series.

OH MY GOD you guys, I have got to show you this Powerpoint that a group I was in made. They were all about 10 years younger than me so you think they’d have learned to use it at some point. They jammed an entire two-page paper onto 5 slides, in neon cursive font, over a watermarked clipart background. I had to put my…

The only problem is that I have to teach people how to use it, because apparently no one does?? And it’s not just people older than me, it’s brand-new college students who are supposed to be like, super tech-savvy.