May I be excused?

It's 4 p.m. and, no, you can't have a cookie. Or ice cream. Or potato chips.

Why not?

Mom and Grandma both say "because you'll spoil your dinner."

It's a truth that's been passed down through the generations since the invention of between-meal snacks. Eating before dinner makes you un-hungry for dinner and then you get in trouble and end up having to sit at the table through The Cosby Show because you're still trying to clean your plate.

It's interesting to pause and note that between-meal snacks were a factor in instigating the French Revolution. The aristocrats spent a lot of their free time (and all they had was time) bragging to the hungry masses about their fresh croissants and assorted pastries. The rest is history.

Anyway, it was bound to happen that some ambitious and shady American doctor would eventually put a name, label and price on the dinner-spoiling industry. As seen on TV, that doctor's creation is the Full Bar.

Advertised as being "inspired by weight loss surgery principles," Full Bar is supposedly a natural way to help you lose weight by making you eating less. Brilliantly, the product's Web site notes that "when you feel full, you eat less." So, if you fill up part of your stomach before mealtime, your stomach will fill with less food at mealtime.

If I was at all a responsible kind of person, I would have put that whole paragraph in quotes, except for the sarcastic bits, but I'm simply laughing too much to bother.

A minuscule amount of research as uncovered three facts about Full Bar:

1. It's made of natural ingredients, which include puffed wheat cereal and sugar.
2. Full Bar contains no nutritional value, appetite suppressants or fat burners.
3. 24 Full Bars will cost you $50. Plus shipping.

It seems that we've had this whole "weight loss" phenomenon all wrong! It's not about how much you eat, or even what you eat. It's not about ingredients or will power or calories or carbs or sugar or vitamins or exercise. Turns out, it's all about timing your eating properly. Would you believe that if you eat one of these expensive non-nutritional snacks 30 minutes before you eat dinner, you won't be as hungry for dinner?

Of course you believe it! You were raised to believe it.

Mom, Grandma and the French have been right all along. They should get some royalties out of this.

So, I take it back ... Have a cookie. Have some ice cream. Have a Full Bar. Knock yourself out, and watch the pounds melt away.

Hello Again

Until the advent of Facebook, I always assumed that once a friendship died there was no going back. At least not until the next reunion. Even with Facebook connections, I still carry that belief. What is "friendship," really?

I don't know ... Whatever ... Anyway ...

This weekend I swallowed my pride and took the initiative to rekindle the long dormant embers of a friendship that has been cold for too long. And as luck would have it, the library system welcomed me back with open arms, provided I show proof of residence.

After a mere 30 minutes of taking in that book-y smell and perusing the shelves and shelves of available fiction, I proudly exited the library with my head held high, two books nestled in my arm and a brand new library card attached to my key chain. What'll they think of next?

Apparently pride is quickly regurgitated.

Why did I take this long overdue step? It's essentially because I'm a gigantic nerd (not that only nerds own library cards, and not that there's anything wrong with being a nerd) and I spent several hours one night last week researching and compiling a spring/summer reading list for myself.

For some reason, I've been missing that piece of paper we used get at the end of the school year that had very intelligent-sounding literary suggestions. And then there were the various syllabi that literature majors are handed from term to term with even more intelligent-sounding explorations. And then there's my obsession with lists and words. And, as Debi can attest, lists of words.

So, now I have a list and a goal and a resource and all is right with the world.

Interested in comparing your nerdiness to mine? Here ya go:

• The Things They Carried (O'Brien)
• A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines)
• Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
• Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row (J. Masters)
• The Diary of Sam Pepys (Pepys)
• Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys)
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia-Marquez)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)
• Einstein's Dreams (Lightman)
• Winnie the Pooh (Milne)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
• The Gone-away World (Harkaway)
• Narrow Dog to Indian River (Darlington)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (Spark)
• The Four Corners of the Sky (Malone)
• The School of Essential Ingredients (Bauermeister)
• Dune (Herbert)
• The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Larsen)
• The Servants' Quarters (Freed)
• Road Dogs (Leonard)
• Woodsburner (Pipkin, Talese)
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers)
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Roach)
• Pirate Latitudes (Crichton)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

I wrote a haiku about retainers.

Resigned to my fate,
I haven't gagged much today.
Ask me tomorrow.