Katie came with a record player. I had planned on buying one for myself just about the time we got serious, so when we moved in together, hers became mine, and I was Don Hall-excited about it. I could finally dust off my vinyl collection and give the old discs a spin. The first one I chose was my original pressing of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. At about the third track, the Paul McCartney duet “The Girl is Mine,” Katie asked, “Who is this?”

“Who is this!?” I responded, astounded and slightly confused. “It’s Michael Jackson. It’s Thriller — the second best-selling album of all time.”

“Oh, I don’t like Michael Jackson.”

I immediately questioned our entire relationship and my taste in women. “What!? How can you not like Michael Jackson?

Few things are funnier than a hysterical person. The R. Kelly interview on CBS This Morning was the best standup comedy I’ve seen since watching Nanette.

You don’t need balloons or cupcakes to be excited about learning your baby’s sex. And yes, it’s a sex. It’s never gender. Gender is a social construct, and for even the most pro-life pro-lifers out there, an unborn child/fetus/uterine turd cannot, by the laws of science, be socialized. Talk to it, play music for it, fine. You can’t make it like pink or blue in the womb. If you need to be surprised about your baby’s sex, listen to what your OB or midwife tells you during pregnancy, or at the time of birth. Getting all geared up over the sex of a child is exactly why we have sexism. So, please, for the sake of our future, knock it the fuck off.

…that when outrage becomes so normal and monotonous that the expression of it is merely annoying rather than inspiring, perhaps a step back is necessary. I’m not tone policing, I’m tone suggesting.