It kind of depends on what part of the country you’re in (I live in the south), but it’s more like “fuh” or “feuh”. But then it also has a tone (Vietnamese is a tonal language), so that makes things more complicated. The best way I can describe it is that you would say the word like you’re asking a question. So,…

Phở pho sho! It’s so phởcking good! (Sry I live in Vietnam and we LOVE phở-related wordplay.)

It’s so interesting, I have heard a few people talk about how much they love the third book, but it was the third book that made me stop reading the series. I was SO uncomfortable with the portrayal of Yi Tien Cho and the black characters in the Caribbean, plus Gabaldon’s frequently evident fatphobia. And then I…

Eating two dozen macarons is NEVER a bad decision.

I feel like what he actually said was even worse than a “sorry if I offended anybody” - it’s a “sorry you took my comments the wrong way,” which basically blames people who are offended by his comments. Ugh. This dude is the worst.

This feels relevant right now:

I’m a HS teacher and they just sent us a new dress code for this school year. It’s completely draconian - skirts below the knee, no sleeveless blouses (we live in the tropics), no shoes without a back, no makeup, hair or nail colors, no piercings apart from 1 pair in your earlobes, no “gaudy” jewelry, etc. A lot of…

I am having such a strong reaction to this story. Just imagining how deeply uncomfortable and mortified that woman must have been makes me want to throw up. And like, maybe I am assuming the worst about French male cops, but I am also imagining them taking enormous perverse pleasure in this and it makes me feel even…

Yeah that line and this one:

You win the comments section!

Japan actually doesn’t surprise me at all - huge sections of South and East Asia still use the death penalty on a fairly regular basis, including highly developed, post-industrial countries like Singapore and Japan. While I personally find capital punishment to be completely abhorrent, it does make some sense to me…

I am upset about two things.

Yeah I don’t get it either. I teach high school and while I really like my students as human beings, I also find teenagers to be pretty repellent. They are basically sentient ids who smell weird and take themselves too seriously. Which is hilarious and makes them really funny/fun to teach. But any relationship with a…

A friend of mine criticized safe spaces recently, but for a really different reason than Bloomberg. I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate her view, but I found it really interesting because it wasn’t a perspective I’d considered before. She said that she saw safe spaces as being problematic because she…

Phrases like “I think” and “I feel” are ways of saying implicitly that you understand that your viewpoint is not universal truth; that you understand that others may have differing opinions.

Do you understand LIFE?

Unacceptable that he’s playing Haldiman... I thought for sure he’d be Scott “me underwears” Holmes.

I guess I can see how it might read like that, but I think of it as a win-win - if you become friends, that’s awesome in and of itself because hooray new friends! If you become friends and eventually start dating, that’s awesome, too, in a different way. But the majority of my relationships have emerged out of…

I smoke socially because sometimes I’m out at a bar and I start to have a little introvert crisis and it’s a REALLY good excuse to remove myself from the group and go take a break from interacting. If you just tell people you need a break from social interaction they think you are weird. If you say you need a quick…

Natural deodorants are SUPER expensive! That’s why I started making my own. The recipe I use is here. It’s super easy and inexpensive, and you can substitute ingredients if coconut oil or baking soda irritate your skin. Definitely worth a try :) I know the research on aluminum/antiperspirants is a bit dodgy, but I…

Natural deodorants are SUPER expensive! That’s why I started making my own. The recipe I use is here. It’s super…