I once made the mistake of going into a sketchy public ladies restroom in downtown Boston. There were three stalls. The first stall had pee all over the seat. The second stall had pee and feces. I tried the third stall thinking "Well, it can't get worse." The third stall had urine, feces, and period blood.

First scene, first episode, Ted and the kids talk back and forth to each other.

Yeah, I agree there's something big coming, and it may be that the mother is dead or dying. I just hope not because I think it wouldn't be a very good twist.

They didn't say anything all that final, though. It was all significant looks and red eyes and one accidentally poignant phrase. I could easily see someone responding to a "probably not fatal but maybe" cancer diagnosis that way. In that I have seen people respond that way.

Then that makes Ted pretty damn heartless. Can you imagine your father sitting you down when you're a teenager, telling you he's going to tell you a story about your beloved dead mother whom you remember very clearly, then telling you about dozens of other women he banged before her with LOTS of focus on the woman he…

The problem is if this is the case, the mother loses. The one thing she said she was worried about is that Ted will get lost in his stories. If it plays out that she's dead and he's using stories of sex with other women to cope, then he's lost in his stories. And if the whole series is a love note to that way of…

I've also lived through people dying of cancer, and sometimes those conversations happen before the test results. It just comes down to personality.

Fair enough. Reacting weirdly in real life is entirely different. I've done some jerk things when grief was involved, too, like I'm sure everyone has. I should've kept my point to the confines of the show.

He hasn't told them these stories before - the whole set-up is that they don't know how Ted and the mother met. They always react with surprise to the twists and turns, they believe him when he pretends the mother was a stripper, they initially think the story of how he met Robin is the story of meeting the mother.

Maybe that'd be realistic behavior. MAYBE. The mother would've died when they were like, 8-10 years old, so it's not like they wouldn't vividly remember her. I think that'd be a more realistic response if she'd died when they were too young to have memories of her. But either way, I still think that's a serious…

I like Milloti enough that I think her episodes are worth watching because of her, even if you no longer care about Ted. I'm sure many disagree, I've just been very impressed with how she's managed to make a character with very little screen time and MPDG tendencies so damn winning.

In their AMA, Bays and Thomas said they wanted to use The Mother sparingly because they wanted to keep her special. They didn't want people to get sick of her. They also said this may have been a bad decision, which I agree with.

Right?!? "Oh, hey, I have evidence that Bates murdered a man. So that answers that! Anyway, don't let this affect how you interact with Bates."

I plead the 5th.

I did find a year-old ticket stub in a pocket I rarely use in my winter coat last week. This may say bad things about how often I wash coats. Anna's probably more on top of that.

The time lapses especially drove me crazy in season 2. I started out really rooting for Branson and Sybil, but by the end I was like "SYBIL IT HAS BEEN LITERALLY TWO YEARS SINCE HE LAST SPOKE TO YOU GET IT TOGETHER GIRL."

I am in your head! Turns out you took a bunch of drugs and slid into a parallel dimension where you're known as Lurky McLurkerson. I'm the you from the original dimension trying to communicate with you. #philipkdick

As a big sci fi fan (particularly that wonderful era in the '60s and '70s with all the "what do these wild premises say about humanity" works) I feel ya. I would've liked "Her" a bunch more if it did embrace being science fiction, hence much of my frustration that Jonze refuses to comment on that part. I thought it…

Well that's an… interesting point of view. Interesting? No, I'm looking for "profoundly stupid."

For fuckssake. Isn't that, like, one of the first things you ask about the Holocaust as a kid? "Couldn't they just convert?" A grown-ass woman who is writing articles for a name website genuinely has no clue that didn't work?