If Misty Copeland were your girlfriend, you'd be able to hold a wall sit for eight minutes without shaking.

If Misty Copeland were your girlfriend, Lululemon stores would close instantly the moment you walked past them. They'd just drag down the curtains and put tissue paper over all the clothes and walk out into the afternoon together, eyes blinking in the sun.

Ooh, what are you making?
--Enemies.

C'MERE YOU GRUMPY OLD SAINT
no
C'MERE AND LEMME CUDDLE YOUR FACE
no i came to the desert to be alone
IF I DON'T GET TO CUDDLE YOUR SCRUMPED-UP LITTLE OLD MAD FACE IN THE NEXT FOURTEEN SECONDS I MIGHT DIE

Yes, it may not feel like that long ago, but the 1980s now count as history, so we’re taking a leap back of about 35 years, meaning that a whole bunch of people reading this just reared back and went, “Oh my god, it was THAT long ago? I am old, oh god, I am old and I need wine.”

You are sitting at a sunny French café, but there are shadows in your heart.

You have escaped disaster, and things have for the most part ended well, and yet you cannot shake a sense of dread and foreboding.

Someone is crushing your spirit. You try as hard as you can not to inconvenience them while they do it.

My daughter loves her visiting gran, and also you usually only see her buried underneath a writhing dog with her feet poking out.

One of the very best parts about writing this column over the last three years has been the questions and comments from readers. Along the way I’ve usually incorporated questions into future columns, but now that the end is nigh, I thought it would be fun to dedicate a whole column to answering the backlog of questions I’ve gotten. So, without further delay, the AMA version of Watching Downton Abbey with an Historian!…

I grew up in Utah County, Utah, where the population is 75% Mormon. My family was staunchly LDS and I was a good, card-carrying LDS girl until I was 22, and then I formally left the church (submitted a letter in writing to have my name removed from the records, although I am certain they just moved my name to a black folder in a filing cabinet that's on fire).

Men say “please” and “thank you” out loud, while a polite woman will always do so only with her eyes.

ANTHONY THE GREAT : let's all move to the desert
there's more God where sand is

Growing up is just a cumulative series of realizations that don’t stop until your brain does. I realized I was an atheist when I was fourteen. I realized I was asexual when I was nineteen. And I only started to realize the connections between the two when I was 28.

Alexander Chee: I wanted it to have some of the feeling of a fairy tale, but also some of the feeling of the autobiography of a celebrity from that time. Like the autobiographies of Sarah Bernhardt or Cora Pearl or Celeste Mogador, but if they were a little bewitched. Like a story from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber if it ran off to hide in the autobiography section.

Sansa will miss Matt and Jaya, her beloved friends.

Next time you feel like you've been banging your head against the wall and it's time to give up your dreams and passion projects, do what I do: read a list of famous "late bloomers" to convince yourself that you still have time.