bookberry

On Friday I made two delightful discoveries.

1) The Pinkberry frozen yogurt that people are clogging the streets of West Hollywood for totally lives up to the hype. Isn’t it nice when something does that? Actually, I have to admit that I tried a knockoff version, the Big Chill’s Chillberry flavor, which has thus far only clogged a small strip mall parking lot.

But it’s damn good stuff. A frozen yogurt version of plain yogurt, basically—tart with just a little sweetness.

When I returned from lunch, I reported my findings to Jamie and Cait, our intern.

“It’s so good,” I said. “It totally lives up to the hype. The only bad part was that I got a chocolate peanut butter cup topping—it was like putting a really ornate Victorian chair in the middle of a sleek, modern apartment.”

Cait, being a 19-year-old USC student who is already over trends I’ve never even heard of, was familiar with Pinkberry, but Jamie hadn’t heard of it. When I described it to her, she said, “That’s like the original frozen yogurt that was around when we were kids! They had tart vanilla and regular vanilla. But later they only had regular.”

I decided it must be a Hawaii thing, since the Klein family had a pretty serious frozen yogurt habit in the early ‘90s and I remembered no such thing. Plus the current tart frozen yogurt is an interpretation of a Korean dessert, and Hawaii is half an ocean closer to Asia than Southern California is. As for Cait, she was barely eating solid food in the early ‘90s.

2) Borders has my book.

I spent an hour there Friday afternoon, scanning the acknowledgements pages of books I liked in hopes of discovering who my favorite authors’ agents were. All the literary marketing smarties tell you to do this, but it actually wasn’t very fruitful. Who knew so few writers had acknowledgements pages? Ungrateful brats.

I was about to leave when I decided to see if they had my book—just for fun or self-torture, depending on the results. I figured it would be the latter. But lo and behold, there it was, just to the left of Stephanie Klein’s Straight Up and Dirty. My heart skipped a beat when I saw it. My little book! In a bookstore not known for ordering local writers’ books just to be nice.

I wandered around in a daze for a few minutes. I toyed with the idea of writing a little note inside each of the two copies. Something along the lines of, “Hi, I’m Cheryl. Right now I’m shopping at Borders. Please buy this book.” It’s not graffiti if it’s your own book, right?

I also thought about buying it, just because it would feel great to walk into Borders and buy my own book. Then I thought, I’m not about to shell out $12.95 for a book I already have. Then I thought, Shouldn’t its mere presence here mean I’m rich enough to shell out $12.95 for a book I already have?

In the end, I contented myself with turning the book so the cover faced outward instead of the spine. This involved some repositioning of Deanna Kizis’ already-facing-outward chick lit novel, Finishing Touches. Actually, I used to intern at Entertainment Weekly when Deanna was a staff writer there. She was never very friendly.

(Wow, that sounded chick-lit-y of me.)