Nancy's Musings

Quick Background: Some guys out in the luscious dating world are like, "just ask!" and others act like with each question you're moving towards their tonsils with a tongue-depressor. Some are both. I 100% understand not being ready to have objective conversations with relative strangers about sensitive subjects. I'm not like that myself (to everybody's frustration). I just think that it's smarter to control what information you give out about yourself, instead of giving the impression that you're trying to prevent people from getting to know you when you've ostensibly entered a social situation where everybody is supposed to get to know you. I used to do the thing. I don't do the thing anymore. I do other things which are worse.  So I've decided, as a writer, to come up with 25 different responses you can choose more or less at random to maintain your information boundaries without implying that the person you're talking to isn't worth ...

"Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out." - Going Postal    Lots of people are having a really bad day for lots of reasons. I'd love to give you specifics, but there are simply too many. If you glance at the news, I'm sure you'll find something that will truly piss on your pancakes too, and then you can join all the people having a bad day. My dad called this morning, just before the internet crashed, and we talked about bad days. I mentioned hope in Christ, and he pointed out (as I have done so, so many times before) why that doesn't really answer for the emotions of the moment.  I didn't point out the irony of our sudden role reversal, but I have been wondering what I meant by it. I think most hope is false: the delusional belief that something  will go right . It won't, you know. In The Wee Free Men , Terry Pratchett points out that "If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . ...

  In literature, the female reader is no longer separable from the appearance of reading, although the relationship between the act and the appearance of the act has been varied and stretched at different literary moments. Outside of books, women express anxiety that their reading (whether for pleasure, or only because they seem to be enjoying themselves) appears idle, or even transgressive, to an observer. Jane Austen, whose popularity remains strong in the twenty-first century, wrote images of reading girls and women that today have become shorthand for the performance of a certain kind of femininity, and a middle-class, educated leisure. And yet, her most popular heroine among mainstream audiences, Elizabeth Bennet, insists honestly that she is “not a great reader.” As the scene unfolds in Pride and Prejudice , Elizabeth is attending to her ill sister, and enters the drawing-room where the rest of the guests are. She finds them playing cards (26), but declines the invitation t...