• Cabergoline, a drug that makes women stop producing breast milk, is usually prescribed to women with HIV, but now, women are reportedly taking it for "social reasons" like wanting to return to work or not wanting the shape of their breasts to change. • A Toronto judge has ruled that a mother is using her breastfeeding schedule to keep the father of her 29-month-old daughter from seeing his child. The father says if the mother used a breast pump and gave him milk, he'd be willing to keep up with the feeding schedule. • A British sheep named Dolly has given birth to sextuplets. Sheep usually give birth to only two or three lambs at a time. Now Dolly's owners are hand-feeding the lambs because she doesn't have enough teats for all six. • China has moved the last six pandas still living in the Wolong Panda Breeding Center to another breeding facility. The preserve was badly damaged in last year's earthquake. • This Japanese potty training video shows a talking animated toilet bowl and dancing poop and pee with faces. • Residents in Melbourne, Florida are complaining because a church is holding a three-week program of "Great Sex For You" sermons in the auditorium of the local elementary school. • Voters in the Appenzell Inner Rhodes region of the Swiss Alps voted to ban naked hiking after dozens of German nudists started hiking through the region. Violators will be fined. • Eight-year-old Texas girl, Emma Hicks, steered her grandmother's SUV off the road after her grandmother had a seizure, saving both of their lives. • New U.S. Census data shows that in 2007 black college graduates made only 78 percent of the salary for comparably educated whites, which is the biggest disparity in pay between whites and blacks since 2001. • A grand jury has indicted two New York City police officers for allegedly raping a woman after they escorted her from a taxicab to her apartment while she was drunk. • New research shows children who are firstborn, breech or whose mothers are 35 or older have a significantly greater risk of having autism. • A British woman has been locked up until May 5 for violating a court order prohibiting her from having noisy sex. • Researchers have identified an area of the human genome that may contribute to the development of pelvic floor disorders like pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence, which will affect one-third of all U.S. women at some point in their lives. • Drinking diet soda may reduce the risk of forming kidney stones. Researchers found the citrate and malate content in many diet sodas may be enough to inhibit the development of calcium stones. • Cosmopolitan's new executive editor Nicole Beland has enraged Catholic League president William Donohue by writing about a sexually repressed woman, "It's not easy to undo damage caused by years of exposure to Catholic-school nuns or overly conservative parents." Donohue says, "It would never occur to Beland that a woman who is sexually repressed might have been molested growing up ... No, for Beland it is empirically obvious that Sister Mary Alice did it." Really? That's the most offensive thing he found in Cosmo? •

And forgoing even well whiskey for a grain alcohol daiquiri squeezed out at one of those drive-thrus in New Orleans is tragic. A lot of drunk driving accidents happen on account of those daiquiri joints, babe; it's the Louisiana liquor lobby keeping them there, the same ones who've kept them from raising the liquor tax since 1948, which is why the whole state is one big sobriety check. Modern life can be a needlessly overwrought con that way, which brings me back to calorie-free sweeteners.

I used to rip Equal packets into cappuccino foam, and watery oatmeal, sometimes even toast (though Splenda, incidentally, is better on toast.) I had a sweet tooth, I listened to St. Etienne and Stereolab and shit; I fell in love and marveled that my mother reserved her sweetness intake to a Starlight mint after work and a half-teaspoon Sugar In The Raw; in one office, they kept unlimited Diet Coke and I would throw my cans in other people's cubicles to hide my shameful excess, blah blah blah blah. Anyway, at some point I stopped caring about sweets, I think when I realized my mom had about the happiest life possible. (Not especially.)

"After the sugar high," you write, "there is the sharpened sense of everything that is not sweet. After the saccharin, there is a sense of shame at our consumption. These moments of guilty aftermath aren’t more valuable than the moments of indulgence that precede them, it is simply that the tension of this sequence can bring us into contact with the full range of ourselves, as carriers of sentiments both heartfelt and cerebral."

But hold up, sweetie, is that what the comedown from a sugar high is like? We're not fucking talking about Ecstasy here. I haven't had one for awhile, but I recall that the comedown from a sugar high feels like run-of-the-mill lethargy, and I have a feeling you're deliberately misappropriating metaphors here because what's going on can be summed up as
1. An eating disorder and:
2. Unrequited love maybe? Unrequited worship? Do you desire someone older and more knowledgeable than you, or maybe just with better CDs? I know, it's a cliche, like creation itself! (Oooh, Equal on apples: discuss.)

Fear of sugar/sentiment/cliche has crippled your art, you claim, and you cite one of your early characters, Sophie, as an innocent victim of your fears. Of Sophie, a fellow writer offered:

“I know someone’s going to want to kick me in the balls for saying this, but there are times when it seems like the author is just lining up Sophie’s misfortunes: She has a facial deformity that has crippled her self-esteem, she is sexually assaulted, guys don’t like her, she may have an eating disorder, and she’s a transfer student. Does anything ever go right for Sophie?” It was a fair point. Sophie hated herself because I hated her too, and hated myself for making her hate herself so much.

So here's another fair point: depending on the deformity, those are some pretty First World problems, and hating yourself for being too young to dwell on any other sort of problem is extra-First World, but eventually the self-hate will subside, resignation will set in, and coffee will taste better black. And the prospect that he may love you back will be just as awesome, though it may lack the same sweetness, since there's no manufactured shame from which you'll be delivered.

In Defense Of Saccharin

Tab (soft drink) [Wikipedia]