Watching someone die in real life isn't like in the movies, because you can't make a movie that's four days long where the entire "plot" is just three women crying and eating candy while a brusque nurse absentmindedly adjusts a catheter bag and tries to comfort them with cups of room-temperature water. My dad lost consciousness on Saturday night, but he didn't die until Monday afternoon. All the hours in between, we just sat there. Waiting. Each breath got slower and rougher—I use a French press now because I can't bear the percolator—and we sat and listened to every one.

Sometimes a team of doctors would come in and loom over us with well-rehearsed concern. "How are you doing?" they would ask. Oh, you mean besides sitting here on this plastic hospital chair listening to the world's best dude struggle for breath for the past 36 hours, UM, FUCKING GANGBUSTERS, I GUESS. "Is there anything we can do?" Well, apparently not, considering this whole long-slow-death thing that's happening in this room right now. But you're the doctor. You tell me.

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People benefit from racism—hell, I benefit from it every day—and things that benefit powerful people don't just suddenly get "fixed" and disappear because Halle Berry won an Oscar or whatever. Modern racism lives in entrenched de facto inequalities, in coded language about "work ethic" and "states' rights," in silent negative spaces like absence and invisibility, and in Newt Gingrich's hair. And in irony.

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I am the target audience for The Hobbit. I just want to make that clear. Because The Hobbit...is terrible.

It's the kind of terrible where I love it, and the kind of terrible where I will probably watch it 700 more times before I die of rickets because I haven't left my hobbit hole in nine years (for this is what I must do with all wizard-related materials), but it is TARRAHHBUUULLLLLL nonetheless. Here are the reasons why, in chronological order according to how soon in the movie they annoyed me.

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A new study has uncovered some surprising effects of the hormone oxytocin (you know, that stupid orgasm chemical that gives you love feelings) on monogamous heterosexual men. When dosed with a nasal spray of oxytocin and then introduced to a sexy laday, the monogamous men were all, "Ugh, GAH-ROOOOOSSSS" and then pushed her into the garbage. Or something kind of.

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And that's why our culture's nudity taboo is STUPID. And it's not stupid because I'm some latent nudist who wants to go out and run around flapping my bunz all over town. I profoundly don't. Nor do I particularly want to drink in the sight of grampa's freshly buffed testes while standing in line at Starbucks or whatever. I'm fine with people keeping their clothes on in public 99% of the time. But the issue here is twofold: 1) When people's clothes come off—in public or private, whether by accident (Janet Jackson) or on purpose (Kate Middleton)—we react like fucking maniacs; and 2) This taboo is gendered and unfair, and women bear the brunt of it.

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The protein of the future is bugs. Because bugs, you see, are the only sustainable protein we've got left. Meat farming is disastrous for the environment. Growing enough corn and finding enough fresh water to feed all our livestock is double disastrous. Cows fart big hot farts all day, which sail straight up to the North Pole and melt as many yeti dens as they can find with their fart heat. We're cutting down rain forests to plant cows. It is RIDICULOUS, and I say this as a complete cow-eater. I am part of the problem. Lucky for us, science is on it. On a one-way Greyhound to BUGTOWN.

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I cannot even imagine being that same fat kid in 2012—having to put up with all the misery and the shame and the tunics (SO MANY TUNICS), along with the added pain of knowing that the government officially considers you an epidemic. You're a "problem" that needs to be "fixed." Newscasters with knitted brows talk about you in the abstract like your butt is a crime wave or a natural disaster; they show bodies that look like yours with their heads chopped off; they tell you that this body you have—the one that grew around you out of nowhere, that you're just getting used to—is bankrupting the nation and mowing down future generations like fucking tuberculosis. Tu-pork-ulosis. Whatever.

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Today's gif parade is brought to you by this column from Fox News Opinion, in which one Steven Crowder explains that he's better than you because he didn't put his penis inside anything for hella years and then married a stranger. Take it away, Steve!

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HA. That is just about the truest shit that I have ever heard. I (and, I suspect, pretty much any woman) can access that feeling really quickly and vividly—when you find yourself in conversation with a circle of men and, against your better judgment and all your feminist impulses, you just turtle up. You retire. You forfeit, because their lungs are bigger, they're groomed for assertiveness since birth, and you're groomed to assume that nobody will take you seriously anyway. You wait for a pause in a room of interruptors. Sigh. I do it like crazy, and I am a fucking loudmouth feminist yelling machine.

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