Picture this: You’re at a party. Everyone around you is talking about how lame the party is, saying they would rather be anywhere but there. Suddenly, without warning, you stand up and perform an amazing magic trick, and nobody can believe their eyes!

Could you imagine getting that kind of recognition? Having the power to, at any time, swoop in and steal the entire show? Well, you’d better start imagining it, because today I’m going to reveal my most amazing, show-stealing and “Oh-so astonishing!” magic tricks. FOR FREE!!!

Amidst the glut of über-chic boutique eateries crowding the labyrinthine streets of Manchester’s resurgent North-West district nestles the new venture of renowned gastronaut Harley Figgs-Baumgartner. In keeping with its so-trendy-it-hurts postcode, the restaurant plies its trade under the near-unpronounceable moniker of Xtcokpøt, and spreads it tables over seventeen floors in a tall cylindrical building, converted from an industrial chimney.

After all these years of suffering under a hopeless crush, I’ve finally gotten my heart’s desire. I am literally (sort of) sleeping with John Stuart Mill. And let me tell you, darlings, People magazine needs to make up a new contest, because he is the sexiest man no longer alive. Or at least he’s the sexiest moral philosopher no longer alive. For one thing, he is HUGE—485 pages, not even counting the extended bibliography and prodigious notes. Now like most women, there’s nothing I like better than a long, slow read. But it’s not just the size. From the first time I read the Autobiography, On Liberty, and of course On the Subjection of Women, I was sure JStill was the only man who would ever really get me (except maybe Captain Kangaroo).

At the risk of sounding like a bitter, barren old shrew, your kids aren’t that cute. I can tell by the way you’re smiling and applauding them that this is their first time throwing their own garbage away in a public trashcan, but I don’t need to be a part of this milestone in your child’s life. Please save the lessons and the exercises for home or the classroom and keep them out of my local Panera.

Through Windex streaks in her bedroom alcove, I spy boys on skateboards careening, screeching axels off the coping of the curb below the house; boys hurling themselves, inverted, with spaghetti-like arms, macaroni torsos, profanities ripping the autumn air like a flock of hawk-chased crows drunk on ornamental plumbs…