Just jumping in to say that I got into a Wikipedia loop the other day learning about Linguistics- not least because the phraseology is so beautiful! Fascinating field.

One of my students, a girl from the Middle East who had come to the states to get her biochemistry qualification, had a mini-breakdown in class over an exercise on Chaucer. It was right at the beginning of the semester and it was a very rudimentary “Pull a quote and explain how this relates to your experience of the…

I have three arts degrees, each more specialized and impractical than the last.

It’s honestly just such a weird message for a toddler. Like, can we give them a few years before we wade into the debate about whether education should be viewed as a vehicle for personal enrichment or a tool for getting the best job possible? Who is so passionate about said debate that they want it on a 2-year-old’s…

What you’ve said about the UK’s education system rings true to me, and I say that as a product of it. But the UK is culturally very different to mainland Europe, and our education system is very different too. The intellectual cramping you’ve spoken of is why so many British students and schools are now opting to take…

Yeah, until recently I worked in a medical clinic in a small town in the Midwest. The 4 colleague I worked with most closely believed: that the government was deceiving the public about the spread of: Ebola (utterly terrifying to realize medical personnel were unable to comprehend an infection pattern), that evolution…

Learning a musical instrument at an early age seems to be tremendously useful for everything, as does learning a second or third language.

It’s not the worst one, but I don’t buy for a second that someone spontaneously compared her cat to a famous human. This is someone who’s been dying to be in Double Creature and has been trying to think of a suitable celebrity for months.

To be fair, I don’t know that this is a permanent characteristic so much as a trap most people fall into at some point or another. Gwen spent her “prime” years being a super-cool alt-idol married to a very handsome man, so maybe this divorce has pushed her into a place of insecurity she didn’t have to deal with before.

According to the CDC, around 20 in every 1000 pregnancies are to women in the 40-44 years range. And on this website it says “fewer than 1 percent of women ages 40 to 44 have babies. The chance of becoming pregnant during any one month drops to only 5 percent after age 40.”

I’M FEELING MY FEELING 2 RIGHT NOW LET ME HAVE MY FEELING 2.

1. Asleep

YES, I was reluctant to post that, because it’s totally beside the point, but while the 16 year-old Hale is lovely, she also looks like a prototypical white teenage girl, not really that memorable. The grown-up version has style and character.

I’ve often said I would very much like to retire and be a nun, only without the religious devotion, early mornings, abstaining from society, alcohol, rich food, and sex. Basically, I’m looking for a secular boarding house for altruistic and slightly batty old cougars.

Don’t some women become nuns later in life? I think that’s actually pretty common now. I couldn’t ever be a nun, but I can kind of see the appeal, certainly in a more active community as you’ve described. Especially for women who are widowed or whose children have all grown up, this kind of immersive, secure community…

Honestly the band is the least of it. Flat profile and worth about a fifth of the engagement ring. It’s mostly habit- I find I go through cycles of wearing it always, then I’ll take it off an revert for a few weeks before I remember to put it back on.

I think I wear mine 50% of the time, tops. Between taking it off for gardening, cleaning, putting on hand lotion, etc. etc. Husband leaves his in the drawer at work a few days out of every week because it might catch on equipment. I think it’s because while we like our rings, we are not natural ring-wearers.

In all fairness, I nearly had a breakdown when I thought I’d lost my ring a week after we got engaged. It was too big, and it slipped off in a drawer when I was trying to un-jam it. I only realized it was gone an hour later and thought I’d left it in the toilets at our office, because at that point I had to take it…

I think almost all people live in this happy medium. My husband hates the term “furbaby” with a firey passion. He didn’t like me telling our dog to go to her “dad” for example, because he didn’t want us to go around anthropromorphising her, and was very cool about her in public. Then she died, and he was DEVESTATED.…

Jumping in here to agree with abidabi’s reply. I’m absolutely not an expert, but from my experience of other people’s pets and working at a rescue shelter, working breeds tend to be extremely high-maintenance in terms of things like stimulation, which can be very hard for typical family environments to supply. We get…