"There’s a strain of rabies where the animals get very, very friendly..."

"... [a] family saw a raccoon that kind of showed up on their front step and he was sick and he was so cute and wanted to be petted. And you know when raccoons aren’t barring their teeth they are pretty cute."

Said a health official quoted in "Outbreaks of rabies seem to be rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance shows/The CDC's rabies team says it's tracking 15 different likely outbreaks from New York to Oregon" (NBC News)(citing 6 deaths from rabies in the U.S. in the past 12 months).

"The family petted and fed the animal until it died. They called animal services to pick up the body 'and thank God they did, because when they sent the brain out to be tested, it was positive, and so the whole family had to get vaccinated.... Oh, my gosh, they never would have known if they hadn’t called animal services.'"

"A substantial portion of PETA’s suit focuses on the French bulldog, the most popular dog breed in the United States in 2024 for a third straight year...."

"The Frenchie’s squat body, wrinkly face and batlike ears have helped make it a must-have, Instagram-ready pet for pop stars, pro athletes, online influencers and others who are able to pay the $4,000 to $6,000 or more it can cost to buy one as a puppy.... In its suit, PETA, a self-described animal liberation organization, says the French bulldog standard endorsed by the kennel club requires several deformities, including a large, square head and 'heavy wrinkles forming a soft roll over the extremely short nose.' Such features, the group argues, result in nostrils that are too narrow to allow for normal breathing and several other abnormalities that can obstruct a dog’s airflow. Veterinarians have warned that the big heads, bulging eyes and recessed noses that make Frenchies appealing also create what Dan O’Neill, a dog expert at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College, calls 'ultra-predispositions' to medical problems."

From "American Kennel Club Harms French Bulldogs’ Health, PETA Says in Suit/The animal rights group argues that the standards the kennel club promotes for several dog breeds, including America’s most popular one, cause physical deformities" (NYT).

What's the legal basis for a lawsuit and for standing to sue? Let's read the complaint, here. Go to paragraph 120 to read the cause of action. It has to do with requiring the AKC to follow its own bylaws (which include a primary objective to "advance canine health and well-being").

By the way, PETA doesn't need to win this lawsuit, only to convince people that it's socially unacceptable to acquire a French bulldog: To be part of the market for this breed is to be part of a system of deliberate cruelty. What the human perceives as cute, the dog experiences as suffering. Once you know that, the dog ceases to be cute. At the very least, you lose the ability to enjoy your public image as an adorable dog person. 

Is there any alternative interpretation I should consider?

pic.twitter.com/eYTt40ahVq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2024

I'm assuming this clunky labeling is correct. But why would Musk want his effort to be represented by a dust storm and the bloated government to be represented by an orderly suburban neighborhood?

Musk seems to feel comfortable — and amused! — portraying his worldly efforts as divine retribution. 

I remember, "it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord."

The dog is cute, so that takes the edge off, but Satan would take the edge off. Ha ha. So amusing. Destruction! 

"Immediately I knew that’s not a wild rat... It had a shorter, rounder nose, its ears were on the side of its head and it was white. … If you know rats, you know rats."

Said Elm Dylan, quoted in "A waterfront park is overrun with rats. Rescuers are trying to find homes for them. A group of volunteers believes the rodents at Harbor View Memorial Park in Portland are domestic, not wild, and is working to rescue them and find foster homes" (Portland Press Herald).

The rats must be saved... because they are white? White rats, unlike brown rats, are perceived as pets.

"The only way [oak trees are] going to move with the shifting temperatures is with the animals... Will personality affect that? Will there be individuals who are more likely to help?"

Said biology student Ivy Yen, quoted in "Meet the Mice Who Make the Forest/Scientists are unearthing a quiet truth about the woods: Where trees grow, or don’t, depends in part on the quirky decisions of small mammals" (NYT).

Although researchers already studied the ways that animals move seeds across landscapes, the possible role of their personalities had gone largely unexamined.

"Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates met at work. He was technically her boss. He ran Microsoft..."

"... and she began working there in 1987 as a product manager the year after she graduated from college. Throughout their relationship, the two have played up the cute aspects of their office romance. He flirted with her when they sat together at a conference, then asked her out when they ran into each other in a company parking lot, according to Ms. French Gates, who described their relationship’s beginnings during a public appearance in 2016. Long after they married in 1994, Mr. Gates would on occasion pursue women in the office.... Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm that manages the Gates’s fortune said those incidents, and others more recently, at times created an uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr. Gates was known for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office.... Some of the employees said... he did not pressure the women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women the space to refuse his advances. Even so, Mr. Gates’s actions ran counter to the agenda of female empowerment that Ms. French Gates was promoting on a global stage. On Oct. 2, 2019, for example, she said she would spend $1 billion promoting 'women’s power and influence in the United States.'"

From "Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior/Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee" (NYT).

Imagine spending a billion dollars to promote a message — to bullshit the masses — while you are blithely violating that message within your personal business realm, where people are trying to make their own little living. What royal hypocrisy! 

I don't know the facts first hand, and maybe none of these allegations against Bill Gates are true, but it seems that Melinda Gates — Ms. French Gates — is wisely choosing to disengage her reputation from his. She wants a feminist message? She's got to lop him off.

AND: It's so interesting, these marriages that begin in a workplace setting. Do they not originate in interactions like the interactions that become the evidentiary basis for claims that there is a discriminatory hostile workplace? But the success of the relationship makes all the difference. This one interaction grew into a marriage. I think of all the professors who are married to former students. That seems so nice for the lovely couple — we participate in the playing up of the cute aspects — but what's in the larger picture? Was it just that one magic student who was perceived as wifely material? We gamely presume so, we with our enjoyment of cute aspects.

"Some fun fact about these little creatures: In Vietnam we eat them"/"How dare you come here and say that. Oh nonooooooo."

"those were delicacies in someplace in VN,some are just plain street food,some are expensive high class dishes, I’m sadly have to announce to you that." 

 From "A Little Vietnamese Mossy Frog" (Reddit).

ADD: There's a truly adorable photo at the link, which is the reason I'm blogging this. Please don't think I'm blogging this to attack the animal-eating choices of people in a foreign country. Unless we're vegetarians, we eat the animals we're used to eating, and we don't give a reprieve for cuteness. We eat lambs if we like lamb. 

Here's video of a lamb dreaming, presumably not of becoming a chop.

"I want a dog that doesn’t know it’s cute."

An overheard line, reported in the NYT's Metropolitan Diary.

I'm no dog expert, but this one is easy. The way a dog knows it's cute is that the people continually tell it it's cute. The same thing happens with children too. If you don't want to find yourself living with a dog/child that knows it's cute, you need to keep a straight face about the cuteness. That will preserve the cuteness of the cuteness.

"... a cute amount of sun damage..."

"In 2019, faking freckles is nothing new. It’s a great way to distract from pimples or make it look like you’ve been getting a cute amount of sun damage without actually putting your skin in harm’s way" (New York Magazine).

As a person of discontinuous color, I have special entitlement to opine on the "freckleface" trend. These wielders of eyebrow liner did not go through a childhood of teasing and know nothing of the burdens of passing through this cruel world with a natural freckled face. They show up belatedly and take only the part of it that's deemed "cute" — just the right amount of freckles and in the chosen places and only while it's trendy...



Am I supposed to say thanks for upgrading something I would never have chosen for myself?

"The actor who played Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars franchise has revealed how the vicious backlash against the character left him close to suicide."

BBC reports.

At the time [Ahmed Best] was 25, and it was his first major film role.... Jar Jar Binks quickly became the most hated character in the Star Wars universe, and critics branded Best's cartoonish portrayal a dumbed-down exercise in child-pleasing - or worse, a racist stereotype with a misplaced Caribbean accent.

Best did not name the Star Wars films in his emotional post... "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It's still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know."...

Actor Frank Oz, a puppeteer who voiced the Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), declared that he "LOVED Jar Jar Binks", adding, "I just will never understand the harshness of people's dislike of him. I do character work. He is a GREAT character!"

I stopped watching "Star Wars" movies after "The Empire Strikes Back," but it's easy enough to find clips of this character who's obviously just supposed to be very cute:



Poor Mr. Best went all out with the cuteness assignment, and then (it seems) people got squicked out by their own racial stereotypes that were stimulated. That or they just got irritated by the overuse of cuteness.

But cuteness is a big part of the "Star Wars" formula. Here, Vulture ranks all of the non-human creatures one "Star Wars" movie ("The Last Jedi") in order of cuteness. There are 10 species on this list, so the straining for cuteness is very obvious. Vulptices are ranked #1, beating out Porgs, because "the Porgs are more conventionally cute, they lack the dreamlike majesty of the Vulptices." Whatever! Don't kill yourself over it.

"Dolly Dingle's Little Friend Joey."

This is an image I found while doing some research on the Campbell Soup mascots, the "Campbell Kids," which I talked about in the previous post. The creator of the Campbell Kids was Grace Drayton (1877-1936).

She is considered to be one of the first and most successful American female cartoonist.... In 1900 she created two series for The Philadelphia Press called Bobby Blake and Dolly Drake. From 1905–1909, she was a member of The Plastic Club, an arts organization in Philadelphia....

The Plastic Club! (Must go back and study more about that.)

The Campbell Soup Kids and Drayton's other children characters were drawn in a cute cherubic style often with round faces, plump bodies, and rosy cheeks.

In collaboration with her sister, Margaret G. Hays, Drayton published The Adventures of Dolly Drake, Bobby Blake in Storyland, and The Turr’ble Tales of Kaptin Kiddo. Drayton designed the popular Dolly Dingle Paper Dolls which appeared in the women's magazine Pictorial Review. She also created syndicated newspaper comic strips such as Toodles, Pussy Pumpkins, Dolly Dimples, and The Pussycat Princess....

I'm fascinated by these old cartoons and looking for images. Not all these search terms work, however. Notably "Pussy Pumpkins." ("I Put Pumpkin in my Vagina Because It’s Fall and Why Not.")

Strange to get randomly drawn into the work of Grace Drayton today after just running into Rose O'Neill (the creator of the Kewpie cartoon character). I'm reading about Drayton today because Frank Bruni was talking about Campbell's Soup ads in the NYT, and I was reading about O'Neill yesterday because "Kewpie" came up as an answer in an old acrostic puzzle I happened to do.

O'Neill (1874-1944) was Drayton's contemporary. I don't know the extent to which female cartoonists  were channeled into drawing cute children. (The great Windsor McKay was drawing Little Nemo in the same era, but Little Nemo didn't have the hyper-exaggerated cuteness of Kewpies and Campbell Kids.)

Here's Rose O'Neill:



And here's Grace Dayton:



And here's Little Nemo:

"I'm torn on how this video affects my view of Jeb Bush. On the one hand, he didn't remember the name of the Back to the Future trilogy..."

"... but on the other hand, at least he's apparently seen it (and has taken Doc's warnings seriously)."

Writes my son John, linking to the video where Jeb Bush picks out an email of his to answer, one where he's asked whether, if he could go back in time, would he kill baby Hitler, and Jeb says, "Hell, yeah, I would" and — "Even if he was cute?" — "Ya gotta step up."

"This shows that in China now we’ll try almost anything that we see on the Internet."

"Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway."

When the trend started a few months ago, it was usually just a humble bean sprout clipped to the hair and erect like a little green flagpole.... Now heads are bristling with clover, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lavender, mushrooms, chilies, cherries, gourds and pine trees....

The most common explanation on the streets was that the floral fascinators just looked cute — “meng meng da,” in a cloying term made popular on the Internet.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said: "Should I wear my deely-boppers in a show of support -- while playing with my klick-klacks?"

Oh, yeah, deely-boppers... That name always bothered me. I think of Dealey Plaza. But what were klick-klacks? Hmmm...

A warning about that "tidying up" book.

I recommended the book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," by Marie Kondo, and I see that 40 or more of my readers bought the book. How are you liking it? My recommendation was based on the nicely motivating advice in the first third of the book. And I liked the clear sharp writing. Now that I've finished the book, I do feel that it's necessary to alert you to the weirdness that becomes quite pronounced toward the end.

On page 159, 79% of the way through the book, the author reveals: "I once worked as a Shinto shrine maiden for five years." Interesting use of the word "once"! 5 years is a long time period, not a one-time instance. A page later she talks about the effectiveness of Shinto charms. (They expire after one year, we are told.) On page 188, 92% of the way through, she tells us that when she goes to a client's home she "greet[s]" it by "kneel[ing] formally on the floor in the center of the house and address[ing] the house in my mind." She says: "I began this custom quite naturally based on the etiquette of worshipping at Shinto shrines."

When is it okay to think it's cute that your kid stands on the dog to reach the counter?

Sarah Palin thought it was worth posting on Facebook, but why?

1. As she presented it — it showed her child Trig overcoming an obstacle — "a lazy dog blocking his way" — turned the negative into a positive, using the dog as "his stepping stone." Pure sweet inspiration, a boost for all of us.

2. She predicted she'd get criticized, and like clockwork, PETA was there: "It's odd that anyone — let alone a mother — would find it appropriate to post such a thing, with no apparent sympathy for the dog in the photo." And Palin fans love the action when some lefty organization takes a shot at Sarah ... or, better, Sarah and Trig.

3. She had an ace in the hole. When the predictable criticism rolled in, Palin played this Ellen DeGeneres Facebook post from last summer:

Post by Sarah Palin.

The best of vocal fry.

Don't take the poll without watching the video!

Vocal fry — yes, no, maybe?

Yes! It's sexy and adorable.

It's sexy and adorable if you're sexy and adorable and don't overdo it.

Leave it to the experts. The chance that you'll hit the Drew Barrymore sweet spot are close to nil.

No! It's horrible! For anyone, including Drew.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: My original post on this subject came in 2007: "Voice lessons":

Lately, I've noticed a lot of young women speaking in a strangled voice that seems to be produced by a laborious effort to bypass the larynx altogether. They sound as if they are damaging their throats. Are you noticing this trend? Can you tell me how it got started? Is there some celebrity they are imitating? It sounds a little Winona Ryder to me, but there must be some stronger role models affecting young women. Also, is there some way to get them to stop? It is worse than Valley Girl intonation.

The first comment was: "This is a very strange observation. Do you have a link so that we can hear this strange vocal pattern?" And I said: "Sorry, I'm just overhearing it in public places. It's driving me crazy. I feel like walking up to strangers and telling them to cut it out." (Then there were some updates, with clips, and some expert opinion informing me that this was called "creaky voice... laryngealisation, pulse phonation or, in singing, vocal fry or glottal fry.")

"Why Don’t We Eat Swans Anymore?"

"[R]oast swan was a favored dish in the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, particularly when skinned and redressed in its feathers and served with a yellow pepper sauce," writes Monica Kim in Modern Farmer.

Swans have been the property of the Crown since around the twelfth century, but Edward IV’s Act Concerning Swans in 1482 clearly defined that ownership. To this day, Queen Elizabeth II participates in the yearly Swan Upping, in which the royal Swan Master counts and marks swans on the Thames, and the kidnapping and eating of swans can be considered a treasonous crime....

“Nobody has ever requested swan,” says Mark Lahm, chef and owner of Henry’s End in Brooklyn. Lahm’s restaurant is one of the few in New York to focus on wild game and has claimed to serve every meat imaginable: bear, turtle, kangaroo—everything, except swan. “Swan is not an animal that is hunted and besides it has the ‘cute’ factor going for it,” Lahm says. “I cannot imagine it on my menu.”

But there are places in the United States where swans are considered pests, threatening other native species of birds. And the Queen is irrelevant here. Would you eat swan? If you want to know how it tastes, it's "delicious — deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent."

"Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves."

"Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name 'Mouse.' This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Obviously, Mr. Mouse is simply a man with a loving wife, Mrs. Mouse (a female human), and a normal Homo sapiens existence, just like the rest of us. He even owns a dog called Pluto! How many mice do you know who own dogs?"

Reaction to "Hello Kitty is not a cat..."

ADDED: There! This is the post that pushed me over the line to make a Hello Kitty tag. Going back into the archive to do the necessary retrospective tagging, I find 4 other posts:

1. January 3, 2006: "Cute!" looked at Natalie Angier's "The Cute Factor." She said:

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards....

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening."

Watch out for cute.

2. June 24, 2007: "Is it wrong to tattoo your dog?"

On the positive side: The dog was under anesthesia. On the negative side: It was a tattoo of a cat, and not just any cat -- Hello Kitty.

Yeah, I need to update that, with the news that Hello Kitty is known to be not a cat, but a little girl. Good news for that dog. Also at that old post: links to the Hello Kitty Hell blog and the Hello Kitty text, which I might want to re-take to try to get a better score, i.e., better than self-centered and evil.

(From the anti-Hello Kitty blog, Hello Kitty Hell, found via Metafilter.)

(And take the Hello Kitty test, which is cute and which told me people must think I'm self-centered and evil.)

3. July 17, 2013: "Does anyone in the Bible ever say 'hello'?" Somehow the last paragraph of this post is:

"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.

By the way, I put my fascism tag on this post after writing about the 2006 post.

4. April 25, 2014: "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist." Someone at Vox had written:

"RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!!," Avril tweeted. "I love Japanese culture...." In her defense, this kind of makes sense. Japanese pop does have a pretty camp vein running through it, one that "Hello Kitty" apes.

And I said:

"Hello Kitty" apes? I love those 3 words together, because I can picture "Hello Kitty" Apes... just like I can picture "King Kong" Kitties, but do not market a product called King Kong Kitties. That would be racist.

King Kong is not an ape. He is a... I want to say: He is a little boy. But I google "is King Kong fascist." That turns up a lot, including a book called — I know — "Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity," which quotes Theodor Adorno:

"While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber."

AND: I considered googling "Is Mickey Mouse fascist," but switched to "did Hitler like Mickey Mouse." I found many references to the Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a graphic memoir about his father, a Holocaust survivor, in which the father's memories have the Jewish characters drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. The second volume of "Maus" begins with a quote from a German newspaper article from the mid-1930s:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

ALSO: Here's "A Guide For the Purrplexed/How Maimonides explains the Hello Kitty controversy":

“Know that likeness is a certain relation between two things and that in cases where no relation can be supposed to exist between two things, no likeness between them can be represented to oneself,” the old master wrote in his Guide For the Perplexed. “Similarly it behooves those who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator—namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense. According to what they think, the difference between these attributes and ours lies in the former being greater, more perfect, more permanent, or more durable than ours, so that His existence is more durable than our existence, His life more permanent than our life, His power greater than our power, His knowledge more perfect than our knowledge, and His will more universal than our will.”

And that, of course, is wrong, because God is nothing like man. He hasn’t a face or a temper or anything else we might recognize....

To paraphrase Maimonides, it behooves those who were outraged this week over Sanrio’s revelation and who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of Hello Kitty—namely, that She is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Her and to us in the same sense.

Drug lord Pablo Escobar created a terrible invasive species problem in Colombia: Hippos.

"He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos - three females and one male."

When Hacienda Napoles was confiscated in the early 1990s, Escobar's menagerie was dispersed to zoos around the country. But not the hippos. For about two decades, they have wallowed in their soupy lake...

Here, conditions for hippos are idyllic. The river is slow moving and has plenty of shallows, perfect for larger animals which don't actually swim but push themselves off banks, gliding through the water. Moreover, the region never experiences drought, which tends to act as a natural brake on the size of herds in Africa....

Colombian people, [one veterinarian] believes, are more vulnerable than Africans because they see hippos as cuddly, "floppy" animals...

"My father brought a little one home once," an unnamed girl told the paper. "I called him Luna (Moon) because he was very sweet - we fed him with just milk."...

Of course, hippos are deadly. They kill more human beings than any other wild mammal.

But there are 5 animals that kill more people. Try to name them in order, then look here. I thought the "wild" in the phrase "wild mammal" was a clue that dogs killed more people, but domestic dogs are 10th on the linked list.

ADDED: "11 Reasons Hippos Are The Most Awesome Animals Of All Time."

"But if you’re around anyone acting whimsical for long enough, the charm morphs into a grating artificiality."

"I was no exception. I began to detest being around myself. Whimsical’s less popular synonyms began to hold more truth. Capricious. Freakish… Odd. Bizarre. Another possible synonym: phony."

Writes a San Francisco barista named Lucy Schiller who has tired of the emotional labor entailed in playing Amélie for coffee-drinkers.

Alas, whimsicality was the name of the coffee-making game, at least for a young, unsure woman. It disarmed terrifyingly angry or brusque customers. It endeared you to them by summing you up in a palatable way – you were dependably off-kilter and smiley; people looked forward to seeing you. They thought of you as their special barista, and the more charmingly odd you acted, the more you occupied this nook in their brain. You got pretty good tips, and you felt, in an otherwise frighteningly vague time, appreciated and talented. But that took its toll. Eventually my smile hung rather thin. I found myself regarding my attitude like my cell phone bill, hoping that some bubbliness – another word I detested – would rollover into these increasingly embittered months. And I felt like [the] flight attendants [in Arlie Russell Hochschild's "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling" (1983)], who “spoke of their smiles as being on them but not of them…the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly.”

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

I adore this article immensely. I came out of college with some ideas about jobs that seem crazy now: I really thought that working as a college radio DJ, a clerk at Cult Cineaste Video Store, a guitar player, or a TA in English Lit were so obviously preferable things one could do that it was perfectly reasonable to close the doors that were opened by my boring Computer Science degree. Why the hell did I believe that? It's almost incomprehensible to me now! And the author of this article nailed it ... the need to feel like you "belong" to the inner circle of the place you live, as judged by your peers, just like you really belonged at your college by your Senior year.

There's also a word unspoken throughout, but it matters: love. What her job required was nurturing the smallest bits of love in the people she served, doling out pinches of the fuel for attraction and affection.... "But it took its toll," she says, rightly. Making everybody love you 5% plays hell with the way you negotiate real love, of friends, of work, and even of the customers whom in another job you'd have normal human inter-relationships with.