From My Orbit

As always, originals can be found here!

LW#1: Oh dear lord tell me you are a fake LW. Please tell me that.

I really hate people who say they aren't sure if they're attractive or not. By what standard are you measuring yourself? The standard where Megan Fox is at one end and Phyllis Diller on the other that is basically a measure of whether you are up to code in the beauty standard department or the one where personality is involved? Because those are two different things.

Also, don't take this wrong, but ugly and plain people hook up All. The. Time. I have babysat for their kids, in fact.

Even Froggy went a-courtin'.

Okay, and the other thing I object to is your thinking flirting is "wrong" for the "unattractive woman." Flirting is *human* not for a special class of beauty code compliant women and men! But I'm giving you slack because you (and maybe your friends?) seem to think all flirting entails is sexyface and leg-touching and suggestive licking of ice cream. If you do it right, winning a game of Trivial Pursuit can be flirty (well, it works for me).

So moving on, your friends tell you to telegraph your interest, but you think the plain ugly ducklings of the world should shy away from potentially appearing as if they have needs or rights to join the great game of courtship. Eff that noise.

Maybe an attitude, wardrobe, hair and makeup adjustment won't make you think you're more attractive, but I think someone needs a little perspective and maybe a brow wax when I read your letter. Oh, and there's no "objectively attractive." My husband thinks I hung the moon. He also doesn't see the appeal of Angelina Jolie. A relative of mine married her cousin, and he had worked for Greta Garbo. His comment on his wife, "Yeah, Greta was all right, but my *wife,* (insert sigh) she is really something." If you ever saw a picture of this woman, you'd not be wrong to think, "ORLY?"

I also think you need to figure out why you're so anti- putting yourself out there. Yeah, someone turning their nose up at you is not fun (it has happened to the hottest of us), but it's part of life and ultimately they're doing you a favor. You never get to fail in love with your "I'm too middling to mate," but you never get to fall in love, either.

Don't dress it up as your checking your genes out of the human swimming pool for humanity's sake. You are as deserving of love and sex as any other person out there, and quite possibly more. You don't have to act like a Stepford robot, but you do have to put yourself out there.

LW#2: Go ahead and do what you want. This woman has hosted seven *terrible* Thanksgivings by ANY standard, and you need to introduce some balance. Just tell her, "I feel bad that you do this on your own every year, and I want to give you a year off." If she objects, say, "It'll be different, sure, but there'll be a lot of fun people there, you'll have a blast."

If she's a control freak (and with the insta-clearing she sounds like one) she may feel offended. But you know what, you can't control that! And you shouldn't let that control you!

So go for it! Thanksgiving is the best of all the holidays, because although there are expectations there are no gifts and there IS stufing/dressing! There is no reason it should be awful for you! Exclamation point!

Plus, you'll be having too much fun to be worrying about her if she stays home and does her rigid thing with the weird TV-blasting in the background.

Also your husband? He needs to be the buffer of his family's wrath, if that would actually come down on your head. Just sayin' he has a role in this.

LW#3: Oooh, bind-o-rama.

This is a real problem.

Okay, first, start looking for another job. Because this is for sure going to impact your employment, either if you talk to your boss or if you send an anonymous letter to the insurance commissioner or the company.

Second, I would make sure you knew this was happening on a broad scale, and had documents xeroxed or whatever, before you acted. I mean, seriously. And I would not approach the boss about this, because you don't know what is happening with his awareness.

Third, I'm sorry this happened to you. Perhaps it's my own personal work experience, but there is not always satisfaction or justice in doing the right thing for the right reasons. And in this economy you may just want to keep your head down and do your job and get an escape hatch before you blow the roof off, because I'm telling you right now, what you're setting yourself up for is possibly a world of suck.

Oh, and forget Prudie's weird decision to drag in the healthcare debate. I'm pretty sure we won't have dental, anyway. And this isn't about "medical waste," this is about fraud.

LW#4: OMG.

Either your husband is a long time insensitive jerk and you came to a point where you had to ask the Internet Lady if this is too much, or this is a one-time thing.

Some people can't handle emotional stuff, painful emotional stuff especially, very well. The funeral was obviously a big deal, and he'd probably overloaded his circuits if he's one of those people. Your circuits were certainly fried, and the way you cope is to talk about it. The way he coped is to bury it.

Men are masters of the non-reaction reaction. They're basically told from birth to be pokerfaced at all times unless they need to bluff. Seriously.

On the other hand, if he routinely brushes you off and tunes out your coping mechanism of talking it through, he's a deeldoh, as the LOLcats would say. And, special to the Internet Lady, if he tunes you out for a ballgame during a genuine emergency, he's a vurry beeg deeldoh.