EssieMay

Would Charlotte's father have approved of her becoming a governess? Definitely not. Her future would be one of poverty. She would never have children. She had stepped from a leisure class into a working class. Rather than managing a household of servants she became one. Another poster said quite well that becoming a governess was one of the options available to an educated woman who was unmarriageable. Whether this was due to lack of family connections, no dowry, an unfortunate appearance, or she had simply aged out of the marriage market and her family could or would not support her, it was not a happy choice but one of necessity.

She is a gentleman’s daughter, not titled aristocracy but a landowner with modest wealth. He likely had tenants and hired hands who did the actual labor of farming and raising livestock. She received a decent education including French, piano, and the classics. She is very much on par with Elizabeth Bennet and her family would have aspired for her to marry into another landowning family or perhaps minor aristocracy. Her life’s work would be producing heirs and managing the household, not milking cows or threshing wheat. For any woman to not marry and to depend on her own skills to earn a living was a very risky proposition in that era. She would have been paid very little and been at the mercy of a master who had none of the civil or religious obligations of a husband.

That sounds like something to do with the digestive system, like she’s cr*pping herself.

Getting in the way of his goals!?!?!? What would those be? Being a godly man, demonstrating Christlike leadership of his family through love, kindness, self sacrifice? There are mass murderers with more compassion than this angry, little man. It’s like polygamy is his only religious principle and he’s failing at that.

Because people are different. Different biology. Different personalities. Different vulnerabilities. Lexi strikes me a somebody who is coping with the chaos in her life by being the good kid, maybe a perfectionist over achiever, good at school because at least she’s getting some positive attention there. It looks like she’s succeeding but she’s every bit as damaged and suffering. I really saw this in a family I knew where both patents were alcoholics. The kids were all messed up in really different ways. One was Mr. Denial, happy go lucky, charming, everything is fine here, completely shut off from his emotions. One was Ms. Fixer, taking care of everybody else, cleaning up all the messes, smoothing things over. Her twin was the designated feck up, the one who got in trouble and was blamed for everything that went wrong.

I never thought I’d see the day when I was in complete solidarity with Ann Coulter. I was right there with her when she exclaimed, “I hate these people!” after hours of a champagne-fueled schadenfreude party and listening to yet another call in which Monica and Linda debate the merits of Lean Cuisine. These were smart and accomplished women who appeared to form the better part of their relationship on the basis of dieting, except for the treachery part of course.

I was profoundly glad they did not. Although she was no longer a child, she was perhaps the only person in this foul mess who has no culpability and should be left in peace.

Same. The portrayal is mostly vapid and whining with a soupçon of spunk (pun intended). The farewell speech at her going away party didn’t seem to match the character we are seeing but did match the real Monica who is and was bright, articulate, and likable. This character does not seem like she has the intelligence to become a White House intern. Portraying her as weak and ineffectual amps up the victimhood but it’s less interesting than the real person.

Totally agree with you here. I was disappointed in her. I could have managed some kind of discussion along the lines of . . . I’m willing to explore this relationship more and see if we can resolve the obvious differences in our standards for sexual conduct but I most certainly will not entertain becoming engaged to be married until that issue is resolved. More cynical me says her standards were important enough to put them out there but not when they became inconvenient.

I just don’t get all this outrage about Madison “telling Peter what to do”. It wasn’t some kind of disingenuous attempt at manipulation or a childish ultimatum over a trivial issue. I won’t date people who smoke because I have lung disease. It’s a hard line for me, no compromise like smoking outdoors only. I’m entitled to have that limit. I’m even entitled to have a crazy limit like refusing to date people who eat corn on Tuesday as long as I’m up front about it and am willing to accept the consequences of having to walk away from some otherwise decent guy. It’s just so sad that this perfectly lovely young woman has politely expressed her genuine standards for the man she wants to marry and she’s being treated like a manipulative beach. Any one of these girls would have said they would not date a troll. We all have standards although some of them are clearly very low.

So what’s up with Victoria’s house? That was Southern California? Where the heck can you get a house with a nicely landscaped back yard with a pool - did I really see that? - on a truck driver’s salary. I can’t imagine he cashed out his lackluster athletic career with a big pile of dough. And Sergio’s place in NYC was quite posh, bound to be $$$$. Doesn’t quite add up. And Sergio . . . “This is going to be such an important collection for humanity.” Dude really is a pill. I want to give him credit as overcompensating for some really painful sense of inadequacy but dang it’s obnoxious.

Even more than I don’t want you to sleep with other women mere days before we’re engaged, I do not want to be engaged to the sort of person who is capable of that. I don’t want a man who opts out of free whoopee because he doesn’t want me to be mad. I want a man who is so deeply into me that it doesn’t even cross his mind that it might be worth it to let little peter sneeze into a couple more crazy bitches just for fun. Soon enough there will be laundry to wash, bills to pay, and toilets to scrub. The totally obsessed with each other phase ends, and that’s cool because it’s replaced with something solid and sexy in a whole different way if you do it right. But if you’re not enough into me at this stage, when we’re supposed to be crazy gaga for each other, it doesn’t bode well for the future. I realize that The Bachelor and reality TV is not where that happens, but I totally get where Madi is coming from without any moral or religious themes. If you’re doing that shit, you are not into me that way that I want you to be so hope you enjoy the sneeze.

Has anybody said it yet? This Bachelor is just a f**k boy. Body of a man, emotional maturity of a thirteen year old boy, not even decent boyfriend material for at least another ten years. “Wait, what, you don’t want me to have sex with other girls? I’m so surprised. And that’s not really fair because, like, I really want to have sex with them. And like I really lovvvvve you.” At the final rose ceremony he asks F1 to go steady and presents his letter jacket.

I will give Nancy props just for knowing what adaptive clothing is.

In defense of tie dye, yes it can be the garish festival t-shirt crap but it is one of a wide range of resist dying techniques like shibori and batik. I don’t think a clothing designer needs to master these techniques, but they should have an absolute command of color theory and be able to apply it to their design. That’s part of what differentiated the successful designs, the use of sophisticated color pallets versus dumping a few primary and secondary colors straight from the bottle.