You guys! My Dad has started going contra dancing at the local community center, and is apparently quite the sought-after partner!

That's excellent news! I am very pleased for your Dad.

I really wish that people would embrace the notion that one's reproductive choices are one's own business.

Why do you hate America?

Because it's a little too obsessed with my womb.

Most of my issues revolve around the fact that I'm not Tina Fey. WHY AM I NOT TINA FEY?

I bought Bossypants yesterday and OMG--I laughed until I cried. And that was just in the first 25 pages!!!

Brilliant. But you're awesomely funny, too, Allyson!

Oy. My college-age niece does not know about ctrl-A, or how to select multiple files at once.

I didn't figure out lots of word shortcuts until after law school. I think I was 24 before I got ctrl v/ctrl c.

Well, who doesn't?

I swear, when I was Mary Poppins last Halloween I was completely taken aback by how totally batshit people went (teenage girls screaming with delight when the umbrella opened). I mean, in a good way, but I was profoundly unprepared for how intense they were. I'm gonna do better this year. I have to, in order to do proper honour to her and her creator. Being Mary Poppins is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Having been both a person who didn't want kids and hated the assumption that I did, and a person who desperately wanted them and was certain I never would, I tend to keep my mouth shut and try not to get nosy about the status or plans of any uterus not my own. (I did break down last year and ask my baby brother and his husband if they'd ever thought about parenthood, but I bracketed it with a note that I'm sorry but big sisters are just nosy this way, and also that they are excellent people who would make good parents or non-parents and are awesome either way NO JUDGING I SWEAR. And yet I still feel bad about it.)

I've given the chapters in my sciencey book randomly hip hop names. "Me and Chuck D" is about the Elevator Incident.

Sure Shot is the piece I'm working on about Yauch, cancer, and alternawoo medicine. Which is getting unwieldy.

awesome either way NO JUDGING I SWEAR

I sometimes have to pull this out with friends, because I can't stand not to ask. Luckily, I haven't stumbled across infertility I didn't know about (yet). But I do know it's wrong!

I'll bring it up in casual conversation "you guys think kids are in your future?" because I think it's part of getting to know someone. But I pay real good attention to the kind of answer I get, and I do not push for more.

It can be a strange thing, conversation and the getting to know people, deepening friendships, etc. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, because I find myself, so often, at the end of an evening or time spent with a "friend" wondering why they spend time with me when they don't ask me a. single. question. They just do all of the talking and never ask for my opinion or about my experience or anything.

I miss going to diners and talking for hours where the conversation actually has *two* parts to it and the other person is genuinely interested in what the other has to say.

Anyway, all of that is to say that sometimes people aren't trying to be rude or incredibly nosy. They're just trying to get to know you better and are interested in your life and experience.

ETA: That was way more about my current personal feelings about friendship in general, and missing some really key people in my life who've moved away in the last few years. Didn't mean to dismiss the intense rudeness that can be people who insist on interrogating uterus activity.

Most of my issues revolve around the fact that I'm not Tina Fey.

Most of mine revolve around the fact that I didn't have M.F.K. Fisher's life, minus the husband dying of a horrible disease.

I once got everything together but I forgot where I put it. (I'm here all week. Try the veal.)

Oh, I want to be Miss Marple too. I guess it's my goal for when I am old.

I think I mostly feel bad about the fact that I'm not a good employee. Even with not being able to visit LJ and DW and b.org on the work computer, I spend a lot of time fucking around at work. On the other hand, I get shit done. So.

I want to be Trixie Belden. ETA: Or perhaps Hercule Poirot.