I bought a big orange hard shell suitcase in the Datong luggage district and managed to fill it with shit I bought over the course of two months. Most of it was belated Christmas presents (including a lot of otaku for my obsessed nieces). Professor Swan (who was there on partial sabbatical, the reason for our…

Definitely a typical real estate practice. You want potential buyers to be able to envision themselves living in the house and putting their belongings in different rooms, and having the owner’s personal stuff sitting around makes that harder.

And Stephen Fry. Please, not him.

I could have used the sock thing last week when I pulled a lower back muscle and experienced exquisite pain trying to bend down to put my left sock on (it took me five minutes and a lot of swearing). We are temporarily abled.

I could have used the sock thing last week when I pulled a lower back muscle and experienced exquisite pain trying…

He “sinned with” her? She was 17. Fuck evangelical Christianity.

It’s a former wire fraud convict named Jonathan Lee Riches who spends his time clogging up the legal system with frivolous lawsuits. He probably does have some kind of mental illness, but it’s pretty clear that he’s doing this on purpose. The Guinness Book of World Records named him “Most Litigious Person,” so, of…

I like white walls, but paired with bright primary colors. I think my inner elementary school teacher must have decorated my living room.

Sigh...if one has only a handful of memories to hold onto, that’s a lovely one.

I stopped cooking for my church’s college-age group after making a vegetable cobbler (with roasted vegetable stock) with a crust that included heavy cream after someone asked me what was in it, then dumped her portion into the trash can while deliberately maintaining eye contact with me all the while. What a lovely…

This was meant for the post above re: Kirsten Gillibrand. Simple error. Your unnecessary mansplaining condescension, however, is duly noted and will be addressed appropriately at a future date.

And God forbid she should change her mind about anything. No, politicians—especially ambitious female politicians—should hold the same views they held decades or even years ago.

Pretty! Wonder if my Asian grocery has those.

What are “overnight oats”? I got a rice cooker for Christmas and it has a setting for steel cut oats, but that only takes an hour in the morning.

You know what monsters I’m fucking tired of? The cookie monsters. “Not all men! Not all men! Lookit me, I’m an ally! Where’s my cookie and pat on the head?” And yes, all Al Franken apologists fall in this category. The Democratic Party was poisoned from the inside out by closet misogynists last year, and it’s still…

“you can go fuck yourself with an artisanal, fair-trade, ethically-sourced cactus.”

Yes . . . I still have stacks of letters from 1989-1991 tied up with ribbon that Professor Swan sent to me over the summer and during his first quarter of grad school. (Somewhere, in the closet in his office, he has mine, written on actual stationery). He had email, but my access was limited, and at the time email…

For you, I’m glad it was worth it. Sounds like you did some things you needed to do for yourself. It also sounds like a lot of men these days are douchebags. Or maybe they always were, and ghosting was always a thing, and we just didn’t call it that—instead, we called it “What did *I* do wrong?” I prefer “ghosting.”

Those sleeves actually look kind of restrictive for cello-playing. There’s a reason why so many concert musicians go sleeveless if they can get away with it.

Sue Grafton isn’t trendy enough for this website. I don’t think most of the writers are even old enough to know who she is.

It was the height of fashion in my upper-middle class, heavily Anglophilic suburban Philadelphia high school. And my spring concert dress (I was our high school choir’s piano accompanist), which was somewhat inspired by it, looked like an extremely frothy granny nightgown (the chest ruffles kept flipping up and making…