My list of Facebook friends and people I follow on Twitter leans heavily toward the portion of the political spectrum ranging from "just to the left of Barack Obama" to "somewhere to the left of Leon Trotsky". (I would define myself to be trying to be as radical as reality itself.) I also get some less direct exposure, via those media, to people ( Read more... )

Background info for the perplexed: Sister-in-law is my brother's wife, who is enrolled as a full-time student in a Physician's Assistant program--and yet, as you'll see, she refers to herself as a "housewife." My sister is finally on track to graduate college by the end of this academic year--which just happens to coincide with the due date for her ( Read more... )

How to be the epitome of classiness:

1. Post a Facebook update blaming your 83-year-old father-in-law, who is about to go into surgery to repair a broken femur, for forcing you to spend a Sunday afternoon in a hospital.
2. When your son--who logged onto Facebook hoping to find useful information about his grandfather's condition, and found this instead-- ( Read more... )

[spouse]: You can rake and rake and never win.
dobrovolets: Why the talk of winning? The trees were here first.
[spouse]: The point is, you saw how much I was doing. Now that area of the yard is a little more tidy.
dobrovolets: The point is, using battle metaphors with reference to nature is what got Western civilization, and therewith the whole planet, into the fucking ( Read more... )

Earlier today my mother posted an FDR quote on Facebook: "Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting."
So naturally I replied, "Spoken at a time when most black people didn't have the legal right to vote." Given that several members of ( Read more... )

Draw the line:

• My shrink was the first person to say "Happy Birthday" to me today.
• Not only did I go to work, I stayed there an hour late.

The top item in my FB newsfeed is my father sharing a link to a Jezebel article about that cretinous Congressman from Missouri (the "Show-Me-It's-Legitimate-Rape" State), with his comment, "THESE ARE THE MORONS THAT WE LET RUN OUR COUNTRY AND LIVES , I dedicate this to my male friends , this concerns our wifes,daughters, mothers so get involve."
You ( Read more... )

Writers: Have you ever written an introduction that was so kick-ass that you paused, re-read it, and panicked, thinking, "Oh shit, how is the rest of this piece going to live up to this?"

I need the name of a child actress turned rebellious teenager who nonetheless was not published doing full-frontal nudity. (This is for a near-future SF story whose opening paragraph came to me in a dream. Alas, in the dream it involved Drew Barrymore, whom the internet informs me has shown her vulva to the world.)

When my parents finally became homeowners, mowing the lawn became my household chore. And it seems that now that [spouse] and I are homeowners, it has become mine once again. So here's a quick comparison of what it's like to mow the lawn in Maine as compared to Florida:

• It goes much faster when cutting soft grass, as opposed to the crab grass that ( Read more... )