Dear Sedaratives,

We’re thinking about ordering a pizza, but it just seems like such a boring, predictable meal. Are we overthinking it?

Thanks,

Shannon and Linda
Atlanta, Ga.

Dear Shannon and Linda,

There’s something about pizza in the South which is really interesting. You have to do this kind of cognitive disconnect from your Grecian ideal of pizza and think about it more along the lines of bread-item with cheese-and-tomato stuff, and then it’s quite enjoyable. Are you aware of this practice of putting ranch dressing on pizza? I assure you, it’s everything it sounds like. I was introduced to it by a travel agent who was hanging out in my motel room. She had just gotten her belly button pierced and her midsection was wrapped in cellophane. She said her piercer had forbidden her to have sex for a month for sanitary reasons, and I, having taken quite seriously the no-means-no stuff I heard in college in the late ’80s, took this as gospel. But in retrospect, I think she wanted to sleep with me, she just wanted some kind of minor stricture to break in the process. Or maybe she wanted me to beg.

Mike

Dear Sedaratives:

Alcohol is fantastic and sugar is fantastic. Why is sugar alcohol so mean to my digestive system?

Reese
Tom Miner Basin, MT

Dear Reese:

I didn’t finish my story about the ranch dressing on the pizza because I was waxing woeful about women who wanted to sleep with me that I was oblivious to. So, I used to order wings along with the pizza just to get the ranch dressing, because I thought it was a special thing the travel agent with cellophane wrapped around her midsection did, and how gruesome, right? But then I realized that I didn’t care how the pizza person judged me. I ordered ranch dressing and he added it to the order for an extra seventy-five cents without batting an eye, and it dawned on me that people actually did this, this was an accepted practice. I wouldn’t do it in New York, because, though I try to live by the maxim, “What other people think of me is none of my business,” I don’t want to be negatively evaluated, or disdained as a rube.

Mike

Dear Sedaratives:

My eyeliner keeps smearing underneath my eyes. What’s your trick?

David
Eustis, FL

Dear David:

My trick? David, there’s no trick, just be honest with yourself. There’s no hokum. I promise. And David, you be happy with yourself just as you are, smearing or no. You know what’s been bothering me? Whether Ol’ Dirty Bastard was a comedian...