Chaos Theory

Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups

Pictures say it all.

4 Surprisingly Positive Things I Learned Working In Retail

"In order to do my job correctly, I have to smile at you, even if you're being a complete jackoff asshat. If you've never thought smiling could be a hateful gesture, you've never dealt with someone yelling at you about a 30-day return policy on the 31st day."

Francesco's had a policy that literally barred us from confronting or even acknowledging shoplifters. We were supposed to discourage them by offering absolutely excellent service, which basically amounted to me stalking you through the store under the belief that you wouldn't look me in the eye while blatantly shoving a sweater in your bag.

You really learn to let go of the concept of Wrong vs Right in retail, mostly as a side effect of being paid very little. The whole joke is that you could absolutely look me in the eye and steal a sweater, and there isn't a damn thing I would do about it. One, I don't care. At all. It probably looks great on you, and you're cold. Two, my employee handbook has sanctioned this not-caring, due to the threat of a lawsuit. Three, life is fragile and out of my control, so I'd rather not get involved.

But in a slightly different direction in this whole Choose Your Own Shoplifting Adventure, let's say that you buy the sweater. Let's say that you buy the sweater from a fairly nice place, which we're going to call Nordstram's. Let's say that you buy the sweater and then, months later, you really need $50 in cash. You can go back to Nordstram's and, if you're bullheaded enough, make them take the sweater back (even right off your sweaty back) for cash, because their return policy is a joke and not one person you're dealing with gets paid enough to care."

Dude, that was a Good Wife episode.

"Yes, it pains me to admit it, but I have gone to work intoxicated. Who cares? Certainly not you, with your deeply vague questions and desire to steal $30 sweaters. At a managerial level, you probably get paid enough to convince yourself that life has meaning, but on a sales associate level, you need a little help from some random cheap Russian vodka. Being helped by drunk, bored people isn't even that bad, really.

You can't deal with people day in and day out without a little bit of help, which is why the service and retail industries are so full of drunks that they might as well be a much more delicious and fashionable AA meeting."

"We can have one last wonderful trip before we wipe everything we’ve shared out of existence.”

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death

Why Jessica doesn't just kill Kilgrave

"Defeat Kilgrave" is not her primary goal. Her primary goal, although never explicitly spelled out, is:

-Feel good about herself again, after being raped and unimaginably violated and made into a murderer.

And she doesn't have any idea how to do that. And much of the rest of the show is various explorations of different ideas about how to come to terms with having been raped and violated and forced to kill, how to feel good about yourself again after that. And there isn't a simple, good answer for that, and the show doesn't give her one."

No fun for white men

Why is it always a white guy?

(That the “someone” is always a man seems to escape everyone’s notice, as if it’s simply the most normal thing in the world for men—and not women—to react this way.)

In my research, I could find no cases of working women coming into their workplaces, packing assault weapons, and opening fire, seemingly indiscriminately. It’s not that they don’t get depressed and enraged when they get downsized, laid off, or mistreated, their wages cut, their pensions slashed, or their benefits reduced. Some had brought a handgun and often carried over a domestic-violence dispute into the workplace. They just don’t go postal.

Inside the suicide epidemic raging in the bastions of middle-class privilege

"Look at this show in a slightly different way, and it becomes a horror movie."

"The Grinder belongs to my favorite TV subgenre: shows about people who are stuck in TV shows and only gradually realizing they are stuck in TV shows.

What The Grinder alters about this formula is that most of its characters were leading a perfectly normal life before Dean Sanderson (Rob Lowe) re-entered their world, forcing it to conform to TV logic. That's led to a lot of good jokes, but also some raw, terrified desperation.

Dean, who's looking for purpose in his life, decides that he played a lawyer for so long that he could probably be one in real life, and it's here that the show takes flight.

See, Dean isn't entirely wrong. As it turns out, he can use an actor's charisma and charm to win over essentially everyone he comes into contact with. It's as if he knows a very important secret: If you insist something is true long enough and sell the lie with enough force, people might start to believe you. Dean's success in this regard drives Stewart up a wall, as it often seems he's the only one who can see how ridiculous the whole scenario is. But celebrity has its perks, and one of them includes bending reality just a little bit."

Screw gratitude

Jane Austen called BS on this tyranny of the status quo 200 years ago.

Cabinet Battle #1, explained.

Done over at vox.

The election of 1800: even crazier.

The evil gift guide

"This holiday season, be sure to gift the nemesis in your life what they truly need: a cursed artifact that attracts unending waves of undead horrors, each more powerful than the last."

Hahahaha, yes, good point.

"I wanna know what happened in this subway that made this sign necessary"