*disdain

Anyway, she sucks, she won't change, glad I stopped talking to her.

She has a real problem with my age, for some reason, and decided shortly after he and I announced our engagement that I'm her age (and thus old enough to be Mr Novel's mother).

Mr Novel's parents are older than my parents!

I realized what she'd actually been trying to do about two years after the fact. At the time I was just annoyed that she was tagging me in pseudoscientific bullshit and wanted to nip it in the bud before I was drowning in "helpful" articles about leeches and ear-candling.

I used pull-quotes from the article, and outlined how to check claims like that. I think I may have included a helpful list of legitimate sources for health information.

Weirdly, she was the one who got defensive.

My MIL was trying to passive-aggressively shame me for my age, but I don't do subtext. So instead of the defensive or angry response to her Mean Girl BS she expected, I wrote a comment kindly letting her know how to tell that an article like that is BS.

I spent so many hours in a Panera during university and grad school. Start with a coffee and french toast bagel, pick two for lunch, more coffee and a snack...the best.

And for whatever reason, in my field people worship that dumb asshole and every fatuous word that drips out of her folksy, overly-Christian little mouth, and I CANNOT.

But it turns out the director (new job, remember?) ALSO HATES HER. Yay! We're reading ACTUAL BOOKS!

It would be interesting to watch military discipline melt down in the face of working the till at a retail store.