… is online here, and it is not struck through, although there are some formatting problems with it.

I liked the second question a lot. For one thing, I am in a similar situation, or was until recently — I was cheating on my pizza guy, and I think he knew it. I felt terrible — he’d been our pizza guy for years — but the new place was simply so much better. If we got pizza there for takeout, we’d take a roundabout way home so we wouldn’t walk past our pizza guy’s place and risk him seeing it. Now that pizza is in the “rare treat” rather than “basic food group” category I suppose that one’s solved itself to a degree.

Also, I liked the second question because it gave me a chance to recommend a little Theater of Everyday Life. There’s ways of bringing a little humor and improvisational creativity to one’s more mundane interactions, and it’s often a good idea to do so.

Has apparently been cancelled. No word yet on what it will be replaced with.

Forsooth! Three thousand years of history,
Traditions beauteous from Moses on:
Thou speakest damnèd truth, and speakest well,
I am a man to live in bygone past!

–Sir Walter of Poland, “Two Gentlemen of Lebowski,” by Adam Bertocci.

Obama may want your mamma to go back to school, but if she looks like this I bet most community-college teachers would be terrified of the prospects:

The only thing better would be if this turns out to be a picture of the person who writes the teabag tags.

This will be a quickie, followed perhaps by a long leisurely, after I’ve heard some of your thoughts. Ellen Goodman, who will be retiring from the Globe shortly, wrote a recent op-ed about shame:

If, as anthropologists say, shame comes from a violation of cultural norms, it seems to have found its match in a newer cultural norm: fame. Notoriety isn’t so notorious anymore. If Hester Prynne were around, she wouldn’t be the subject of a novel, she’d be the author of a tell-all memoir with cellphone pictures of a buff Arthur Dimmesdale.

But enough about sex and shameless. How about money? While Dupre was making her debut, eyes were turned on Wall Street bankers. As President Obama said on “60 Minutes,’’ “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers.’’ The bankers who were too big to fail took the TARP money, ran, then paid much of it back so they could return to their boffo bonus ways. They are the latest incarnation of CEOs who get paid for nonperformance and masters of the universe convinced they deserve to be on the right side of the escalating pay gap.

When 12 bankers were invited to the White House woodshed Monday, three didn’t make it. Bad weather delayed their flights. Well, I have one word for those bankers: Amtrak.

The impetus for this article was that Ashley Dupre, the sex worker in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, has been given an advice column in the New York Post. To be honest, I have no problem with that. There are no professional certifications to be an advice columnist, and on her first couple of outings, Ms. Dupre doesn’t seem to be doing a half-bad job. I can’t imagine, aside from base prejudice, why anyone who gave it more than a moment’s thought would think a sex worker wouldn’t make a potentially excellent advice columnist.

But although I disagree with Ms. Goodman’s assertion that Ms. Dupre ought to be shamed (presumably by consigning her forever to the profession that she ought to be ashamed of belonging to in the first place?), I do think she’s on to something about those bankers.

But I think she only got half of it right. While bankers, fame pursuers of the likes of the balloon boys’ family and the White House gatecrashers, and Boston drivers, bikers, and pedestrians all seem remarkably immune to shame, contemporary culture does shame many of us.

How many of you feel ashamed because of your weight?
How many of you feel ashamed because you aren’t model-beautiful?
How many of you feel ashamed because you have lost a job?
How many of you feel ashamed because you are not rich?
How many of you feel ashamed because you haz a sick?
How many of you feel ashamed because you “aren’t doing anything” with your degree?
How many of you feel ashamed because you don’t have a degree, or don’t have one from the “right” school?

I’ve finally identified the emotion I feel when people ask me if I’m going to go on “Oprah.” It’s not disappointment. It’s shame. I didn’t make it. I wasn’t successful enough. I’m not Elizabeth Gilbert. How pathetic that I’ve even tried.

I think we do shame people in this culture — or at least, persistent advertising-driven media messages do. We don’t shame them about their morality or effort, but about their bodies, their money, their prestige or lack thereof. And when people actually try to improve their life through real effort as opposed to a gimmick, we tend to shame that, too. Ask a fat person sometime what kind of comments they get when they exercise. (No, exercise won’t necessarily make you thin, but it will improve your life and health.) Ask someone how they feel when they have to say no to TGIF drinks, or stick to water, because they are saving for a house.

It’s not only that we honor the unworthy. We actually shame those who try to better themselves.

Okay, that was a little longer than I thought. But the idea was STILL to hear your thoughts on the topic, not mine! So make with some insights, already, mmkay?

First chat of 2010, live today from noon-1 Eastern time here. You can read the transcript later if you can’t make it.

Blogger Sassy Curmudgeon has a nifty chronological advantage for a writer — born in a year ending in “0,” she can write a decade-in-review piece that is also a review of her own life. She’s done so, rather hilariously, in “Ten Years of Twenties,” which everyone who is or has been in their twenties should read:

Unless you have a particularly rough childhood, your twenties are your birth into the real world, by which I mean a world that doesn’t involve trading “points” for meals or having a third party pay for your cell phone. They are painful and joyful, exciting and despondent, infantile and terribly grown up-seeming, drunken and sobering.

Hat tip to Mr. Improbable for introducing me, with typical American informality, to this “global portal for diplomats” and its advice about U.S. cultural customs.

I think this one is hilarious, because it is so true:

People who like to touch really like touching, and people who do not like to touch really dislike being touched. You will need to watch your colleagues for clues on what they are comfortable with.

… and I like this one for the alternate perspective it inherently embodies:

Do not be afraid of hurting someone’s feelings by responding “no” to an invitation. People will be offended if you say you will attend and then do not come.

Which ones struck you?

Christmas was quite delightful this year (the belatedness of the annual Mystery Milo notwithstanding). We had a good group of folks with us, and “Sherlock Holmes” certainly didn’t disappoint as far as holiday escapism, and the uncanny desirability of Robert Downey Jr., were concerned.

The only part that made me slightly unhappy was when we went to Changsho for dinner afterward. We got the big table with the lazy susan — does anything speak of joy and inclusiveness more than the big table with the lazy susan in a Chinese restaurant, I ask you — and sure enough, I was That Person who had to take her entree off the lazy susan and hoard it to herself, because I couldn’t share what anyone else had ordered.

I’m going to be That Person for a while, it seems. Essentially, there is more bad acid floating around in my gastrointestinal system than at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert, and I need to change a lot of eating habits fast. After a couple of months, when things calm down, I should be able to have the occasional quesadilla or slice of pizza.

But until then, I’m one of Those People, those people who can’t share. I can break bread with you, but that’s about it. Oh, and those fabulous Ugly Wintry Mix cocktails you all came up with? Yep. None of those, either. Which means I might now encounter Mr. or Ms. Pushytipples of my own, now that I’m not drinking much. (Or, more likely in my case, Mr. or Ms. Terribly-Concerned. I can have a drink occasionally — very occasionally — and while I appreciate being warned of things like unexpected rum in eggnog and habaneros in the queso dip, I also appreciate being treated like an adult. I am at the moment eternally grateful to one of the Fabulous Bureaucrats, whom I had dinner with two days after my diagnosis, and who unblinkingly sat through my dithering about whether or not ketchup was on my new list of forbidden foods, as well as my consumption of two glasses of white wine. The FB in question knows me well enough to know that I can’t change all my habits overnight, but change they will when I set my mind to it.)

Before all of this mishegoss went down, of course, I knew that food and identity were deeply linked, as were food and sociability: it’s pretty much what the food chapter of my book is about. But having to make a lot of changes, fast, brings certain issues into even sharper perspective.

For one thing, there was this brilliant you-know-you’re-middle-aged-when moment a few weeks ago, when I met a friend at Casablanca for a cocktail-hour business meeting. He immediately apologized and said he couldn’t eat, because he had a colonoscopy the next day; I, of course, couldn’t drink, as I have gastritis. (We ordered hot waters, he shared his broth with me, and we left a really good tip.) Not sharing food turns out to be as good a bonding experience as sharing it, though I doubt restaurateurs would agree.

It’s also been interesting to see how many of my friends with a strong ethnic identity have been quick to share recipes from their own cuisine with me. I’m not just appreciating their food; I need it. Their Greek, Bosnian, Filipino, Russian recipes will save me from my own sick body and restore me to health.

So in at least two cases, having restrictive food rules has brought me closer to people who either have similar — permanent or temporary — restrictions, or people whose ethnic identity is complemented and complimented by what I can eat. I’m sure I’ll run into others, as time goes on: people who disbelieve in my condition, or the way my doctors and I are treating it; people who will take it as a personal affront that I cannot eat or drink their particular favorite food; people who, one way or the other, make my biological condition into some kind of metaphor of rejection, perhaps rejection of something they hold dear.

Yesterday’s “Coupling” addressed that, from the perspective of a food consultant/chef who finds it impossible to form relationships with men who have food rules. She writes, “Gradually, I realized that a willingness to try new foods spoke to a person’s general openness to the world and new experiences.”

It may. Or it may speak to a person’s number of taste buds, or to their immune system or bowel functioning. Our bodily processes may be a metaphor for deeper psychological issues — or they may simply be the sometimes working, sometimes on-the-fritz results of a complicated and frankly klugey system. (No offense, but how anyone over the age of 25 can believe in Intelligent Design is beyond me. Wait ’til your knees start going and see how intelligently you think you were designed then, kid.)

The Milo arrived yesterday!

Not our dog Milo, of course; he’s been home with us all this lazy week, and enjoying very much having two relaxed and largely unproductive humans to snooze on. I mean the annual gift of Milo, the malted chocolate beverage, that someone has been leaving us every Christmas since Milo, the dog, arrived to live with us.

No Milo arrived this Christmas day, which amused me; did my newfound joy in Christmas somehow mean I had to give up the Milo of my Scroogier days? But yesterday, there it was on the porch, carefully wrapped.

We gave it to Milo to open:

But he liked the bubble wrap better:

… is online here.

I’d be curious to hear from parents who have experienced anything like question #2, which I’m sure you have — how do you handle it when someone expresses beliefs you disagree with, or uses language you disapprove of, around your child?