One time I was yapping to a friend about something I had written about on my blog, and she said, "I didn't see it. Was it in one of the sidebars? Because I don't read those." Fine, then, here are a bunch of the entries from the "I'm Just Saying..." sidebar, because it's getting far too long and I'm an anal-retentive editor. Cutting is what I do. (These don't really have anything in common other than I thought them and I didn't think they warranted more than a line or two.)
• If you own quirky underwear, get rid of it. Because one day you'll have no other clean underwear left, and you'll put it on, figuring no one will see it anyway. Later, when you drop trou in the gym locker room, you'll realize that you were wrong.
• I still can't believe that I went to an elementary school, John H. Eader, where the mascot was the Beaver. We were the Eader Beavers. (It was later changed to Eagles.)
• I may have to go back to work if only to stop people from using two headline clichés. The first is deploying "Inc." to indicate that the story is about the business of a subject ("Oprah Inc.," "Marijuana Inc."). The other is adding "Oh My!" at the end of a series of three, riffing off The Wizard of Oz ("Zombies and Aliens and Darcy—Oh My!").
• The instructions for McCann's steel-cut oatmeal include "Do not overcook."
• Whenever the recent Star Trek movie got a little tedious, I found it entertaining to imagine it with dogs instead of people.
• Skip intro. Always.
• If you're not 100 percent certain of a loved one's eye color, don't bring it up.
• Today, while walking the pug, I inadvertently made eye contact with Christy Turlington—until she looked away. Couldn't handle it.
• Upon a second viewing, Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex was a truly awful movie.
• Have you tried to find a small bag of tortilla chips lately?
• Cinnabon is a lovely name for the right kind of girl.
• "She has a dirty mouth, a smoker's voice, and a closet full of Armani." —The New Yorker's Lauren Collins on Nora Roberts.
• Heard at a dinner party: "Richard Widmark loved all my brother's dogs, but especially the Pomeranian, Gidget."
• I used to think that it would be a shame if someone asked me to act in his movie because I would have to say no, what with my job and all. Now that I'm available, however, no one is asking. [Ha!]