About a hundred years ago, I was scooping vanilla ice cream at a friend’s house to go on top of some blueberry cobbler she’d made. My hand slipped and a perfect scoop flew to the floor. Two seconds later, her dog ate it in one bite. We laughed about this until a few minutes later, when the dog barfed up a giant pile of dog food with the scoop of ice cream sitting on top. Last night Lulu barfed up a pile of dog food that had the same proportions of the long-ago dog barf pile, and I found myself thinking I would be able to clean it up much more goodnaturedly if it were barf a la mode. Instead, I had to keep saying SPIKE DON’T TOUCH IT’S YUCKY while I went to get paper towels. Then as I cleaned it up, he kept saying MOMMY DON’T TOUCH IT’S YUCKY.

Question: is it sadder to eat fast food in your car, or is it sadder to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then barbeque potato chips out of the big bag (not the individual-sized bag) in your car?

If you read Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher and loved it, you probably think that watching the HBO special is going to be equally awesome. You would be wrong. There is something about the in-person Carrie Fisher that sucks out all the charm of her on-page persona. I don’t recommend it. She ruins her jokes with weird cadence and knowing eye-rolls and I wish I’d never seen the damn thing. Read the book instead.

However, in happier HBO news, the documentary Public Speaking, which is about the writer/non-writer Fran Lebowitz, is fantastic. I have not read Fran Lebowitz since I was in college and read Social Studies. That essay about how much she loves smoking kind of made me wish I was a smoker. She writes something very simple like, “Smoking is fun. Smoking is cool,” and while this is what tv and movies always wanted us to think about smoking, this was the only thing I’d ever read that said it outright: Smoking is cool.

I picked up her first book, Metropolitan Life, at the public library at lunch. Here’s a very Fran Lebowitz paragraph:

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive–you are leaking.

Also: you think I’m going to make my silly goal of 100 books this year?