Over the weekend

-Saw the notorious, inescapable first episode of "Girls." It's definitely funny, as well as refreshing to have a self-deprecating, underdog female character who's a) the star, and b) not played by a glossy size-four actress. As for the "privilege" angle, I thought the episode actually got at something quite interesting. On the one hand, we're meant to roll our eyes at the protagonist, Hannah, to consider her spoiled and entitled, and to remember that she's white, straight, able-bodied, the only child of an intact marriage, a college graduate, etc. On the other, it tells us something about our times that a college graduate might have been going to work at an office - and not even a very glamorous one - for a whole year without receiving a paycheck. Is Hannah a brat for even taking an unpaid internship, post-college, without side jobs (or - and one might imagine otherwise from the buzz around the show - a trust fund), and expecting her lower-end-of-upper-middle-class parents (profs somewhere outside NYC) to foot the bill? Or is this simply what's replaced entry-level work in many fields, and a recent college grad can think she's doing everything right, only to confront parents who never got the memo that dependency reaches up to 30 these days? By all means, criticize the fact that we're being subjected to yet another show about a group of friends, in their 20s, in New York, and of the Caucasian persuasion. But the show at least says something about that milieu, and isn't merely set there because that's the natural place to set a TV show (think "Rules of Engagement").

-These lemon bars are amazing. I used the same size tin the recipe suggests, but halved it, and completely lost track of the various cooking times, probably undercooking the base and overcooking the whole thing once assembled. Whatever it was, it worked out great. I look forward to celebrating a no-cavity trip to the dentist with a couple more.

-Philadelphia is the city closest to where I live, except not near at all if you don't have a car. But there are such things as car-sharing programs and spouses who know how to drive, so I've now been twice since the move. What I wish I could recommend, but would strongly advise against, is the Reading Terminal Market. I pictured something along the lines of Chelsea Market or a Montreal food market, minus the fashion-folk and Frenchness, respectively. Instead, it was a wide range of cuisines, each represented by a tub of grease or muck. "Chicken basil" at a Thai place was a tub of red oil. "Eclair" at an Amish stand was some kind of gelatinous pudding. The best bet seemed to be pizza, but this turned out to be the very worst pizza ever: cheese tasted freezer-burnt, sauce tasted how vomit smells. A few rungs below amusement-park pizza, yet $3.25 a plain slice and part of an Italian festival being held in the market. Oh well.

Then we walked through an area that looked very much like the less-appealing bits of Fulton Street in Manhattan (or, I suppose, in Brooklyn), which slowly morphed into a posh-generic shopping district, and culminated in a square that sometimes has a farmers' market but this wasn't one of those times. We ended up in a West Village-ish area, with a West Village-ish name. I had an iced coffee in a hipster coffee shop and an avocado-mango salad at what might have been a gay bar with a menu. Just as we were starting to get situated, just as I was at the point of appreciating the city for itself and not comparing it to familiar neighborhoods in my overrepresented hometown (although, to be fair, this is my blog, and not a TV show, for now at least), it was time to return to the poodle. More for another time.

Now the women of the household are both ombré. And, in this photo, very nearly asleep.

-So I finished the process of re-ombréing the tips of my hair, this time with the stronger Manic Panic bleach. The first attempt had produced bright yellow tips, and no real fade effect. The second appears to have worked. Ombré may be so last season, or so three years ago, but it remains the coward's ideal radical change-of-style: it can be removed with one haircut, or tucked into a bun. Whichever damage there is to one's hair texture or professional appearance is easily hidden or reversed. It's the only semi-permanent hair-dye experience available to those with very dark hair. It's not going anywhere.