Anyway, Joey sneers that she's sure his hard-as-nails routine earns him respect and that she'll learn a lot from him, but after today, she wishes he'd negged her from the class when he had the chance. Flip-Flops flippantly (see what I did there?) responds that he thought she'd enjoy the spotlight: "I don't single people out that often." Joey stalks closer to snap that, whatever he thinks, she's not an idiot, and she doesn't think the twenty minutes he spent mocking her qualifies as "modern comp lit." As she rants, Flip-Flops leans his chin on his hand and appraises her idly while totally not listening to what she's saying, but she doesn't care, asking sarcastically if "today's total evisceration" means she's off the hook for a month or two, or if she has more of it to look forward to. Flip-Flops doesn't know; the class is about to read "the poignant ramblings of Joyce and Woolf, and [Joey's] work provides such a marked contrast." Wow. Harsh. Good line, though. Joey, almost smiling in sheer disbelief, starts to walk away again, but Flip-Flops kind of sighs and says, "Hey Joey. You do fancy yourself a writer, correct?" "You could call it a hobby," she snips. Flip-Flops patiently reminds her that, in addition to neurosis and self-doubt, writers also "have to endure public humiliation every once in a while." Well…okay, I see his point generally, but it doesn't apply here. It's one thing to learn to take criticism when it's writing you've actually worked on and submitted somewhere -- a class, a literary magazine, whatever -- for critique. But a diary, or a letter? Filleting that kind of thing publicly is off-sides, and it's not a matter of Joey taking it like a man. Maybe she does need to toughen up, but using private correspondence to Teach Her A Valuable Lesson about that is inappropriate, period, and that's not a distinction the writers of the show seem to get, possibly because their own work stinks.