I’m sorry. I believe the correct answer is ‘who’s on first.’ [ducks beer bottles. Gets yanked off stage by comically long cane]

Except that I once had the misfortune to be in a car with someone from Michigan the first time she saw an actual ocean. We had to pull over because she would not stop raving about it.

I’m just going to leave this here. Pansy Division is almost always appropriate.

MIA always gives me the impression that someone has lazily copy-pasting two separate conversations on top of one another. Like, I can’t ever figure how she got to topic B from topic A.

I suppose—forgive me for not making myself clearer—that you may have missed my point. Even granting that the bookclub was being too loud (and it’s a wine train, not a college seminar) the response of the employees was disproportionate to the ‘offense’. One is, at most, a social faux pas, which even delicate…

As a deeply reserved person—like, cork lined room levels of austere—if I have to choose between “rowdy bookclub at the next table on a wine train” and “rowdy bookclub humiliated and thrown off the train into the waiting arms of the cops” I will pick the former every time. I can tune out loud laughter. I can’t tune out…

“It all ties to a god or a spiritual advisor”

You and I must be interpreting the bathroom door symbols differently.

I will look for that! Speaking of Jane Eyre, have you read Wide Sargasso Sea? If so, is it good? I’m really curious about it, because Bertha Mason is one of my favorite characters in literature.

While nothing would make me question your judgement about the fountainhead (ugh), I might suggest giving Austen another try. “Jane Austen and The Moralists”, a really short, pithy essay by Ryle is a good way to see your way into the moral complexity of her world, and I usually recommend it to people who aren’t already…

The real question: where’s the clitoris of discernment?

I’m always dubious of things like this because Austen is so ridiculously special to me that just by inviting the comparison, any author, no matter how talented, is going to fail. Like, is Sittenfield going to capture the implicit conservatism, moral sentimentalism, and acerbic wit of Pride and Prejudice? Am I going to…

I was going to say, being forced to give birth to a child that will go through life being ignored by Ted Cruz and the GOP. Yours works better.

That is one f*©{€d up looking chicken wing. 1/10 would not eat.

Truly, you are a painter of words (.gifs).

Is Bernie the baked potato? Is the potato Trump? Are potatoes a stand in for inchoate populism? That’s rude to potatoes! I NEED CONSISTENCY IN MY VEGETABLE METAPHORS!

I unabashedly love country music, and am a proselyte for the virtues of the genre. I mean listen to this; you could practically write a dissertation on the rejection of Weberian Protestant Work Ethic:

Who’s going to write a slightly ponderous essaylet about it though?

“Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean you have to eat it”

Nope. A very wise woman once told me, add a splash of vinegar to almost anything to make it better. Tobasco is clearly the superior hot sauce.