Are transactional relationships necessarily bad/unethical?

No. No. No. If you think you've gotten away with this in the past, pour out a Bloody Mary as penance for whoever dealt with the clog from hell and/0r beach trash of yuck that you passed on to them.

"I'll do anything for an A, Prof. Anything!" said the lithe undergraduate.

It's perfect if either one of them could be the TA; makes reader identification twice as easy.

Well, I'm glad your experience has been different, since mine is kind of depressing. The closer to professional farming, the more willing to do it the way that turns a profit, IME. Slightly back-to-the-land hippies and environmentalists are likely to be in the `happy meat' camp, and that's how I was raised, but I…

I'm not sure increasing empathy helps most people get sensible about meat, though. The mindset of `treat them well and then eat them up!' is internally contradictory for more people, IME, so there are a few more vegetarians (or people who quit eating just the one species) and more people who compartmentalize to avoid…

Look for something fun that you don't do because, where you are, it isn't a White Thing? That's just checking for the invisible fences and choosing to cross them. (Does work better if the divisions aren't too painful where you are.)

Blithe Spirit!

woke up like that? That's a very sexy thought, and I'm not normally sexually attracted to women.

Aw, I like a world in which anyone can be wacky and experimental in youth and then age into elegance. At least, I like it better than one in which tastelessness is exploited and then punished, because then all the old women we see are the studio creations, and that's nothing to look forward to.

Oh, I'm glad the bees were saved. When they're dying in droves in the fields, we don't want to waste the ones in Queens.

When I was a teenager my mother and I both worked in nursing homes (she was a nurse, I was an aide). She made me promise to push her off a cliff if the alternative was nursing-home care. She's since rescinded the promise, thank goodness.

You and Spiderwoman.

Wouldn't the wave pull off the underwear too?

It's the Star-Bellied Sneeches all the way down.

I had trouble in a cheap apartment because anything with *any* kind of impact made the whole building shake. And I needed simple aerobic workouts, which were too impact-y. Maybe I could have done it at noon without getting thrown out, but it was still unpleasant.

It's hard to do definitive research on something as nebulous as will-power, so that's ongoing. But I think the real sting is that there's massive ideological will to not believe that bad life chances are _really_ hard (because that would be uncomfortable for people with a strong Just World Fallacy, or just for lucky…

The S-bend corset was supposed to make you lean forwards all the time, and the pouter-pigeon-front poofed out in front of that. Here's a great collection of drawings and pictures of that style and contemporaneous ones:

Suddenly Pinterest has meaning and purpose in this sorry world.

I'd try for something like the opposite of suspension — you're bored enough to try drugs? Okay, heavy tutoring for you, you're going to learn calculus! Although I'm not sure I want calculus to be a punishment. Latin?