A few good quotes:
“We should stop asking people in their twenties what they “want to do” and start asking them what they don’t want to do.”
“You tell people the good things. Diaries are for the bad things!”
“Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier.”
She joked that an SNL hairstylist once told her, she “had a great place for wigs.”

Great at improvisation and writing. “I was never too this or not enough that. Every week o SNL I had the opportunity to write whatever I wanted. And then I was allowed to read it!” “Writing gave me an incredible amount of power, and my currency became what I wrote and said and did.”

Her gynecologist died the day before she went into labor. How ironic. She did the Hillary Clinton vs. Sarah Palin SNL sketch and the Sarah Palin rap the week she gave birth.

A few inserts by her friends like Seth Meyers about the SNL sketch with Sarah Palin rap and her mother about her birth. Nice perspectives from other people.

Comedy is hard work. “Doing comedy for a living is, in a lot of ways, like a pony and camel trying to escape from the zoo. It’s a ridiculous endeavor and has a low probability of success, but more importantly, it way easier if you’re with a friend.

As a comedian, she occasionally went overboard and had to apologize like the case about a disabled girl. “A word about apologizing: It’s hard to do without digging yourself in deeper. It’s also scary and that’s why we avoid the pain. We want so badly to plead our case and tell our story. The bad news is that everybody has a story. Everyone has a version of how things went down and how they participated. It’s hard to untangle facts and feelings.” How true! “Every performer has to to figure out what feels right.”

About divorce, she quotes Louis CK “divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.” She referenced a few of her favorite books about divorce. She didn’t talk much about her own divorce of her 10-year marriage though.

On aging, “fighting aging is like the war on Drugs. It’s expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.” “Getting older makes you somewhat invisible.” – so you’re better observing a situation. “The moment people start looking at you less is when you start being able to see through people more.” Learning from the “older friends”: “I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things.” “Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns.”

Taking improv lessons from Charna and Del Close. Met Tina Fey in the class and performed “Women of Color.” Did her work touring as Second City member across Texas and many town with low pay and Upright Citizens Brigade. “We were young and foolish and didn’t know what we were up against.” “Being foolish was the smartest thing to do.”

Amy had lots of imagination since childhood. Living in a normal, loving middle-class family, she needed to create her own drama like handcuffing herself with a friend at fourth grade.

She enjoyed reading “tragedy porn.” “I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit.”

Amy was hired on Saturday Night Live in August, 2001, just a month before 9/11. She was forced to do comedy in a city that was “battered and still on fire… while avoiding being killed by Anthrax.”

About being a mother, Amy complained about people’s asking her, “I don’t know how you do it.” She heard “I don’t know how you COULD do it.” – making her feel guilty and overwhelmed. I never thought of it that way. She did disclose she’s got a full time nanny or “wife.”

On sex, she gave a few advises. I like #6, “get better at dirty talk.” and #11 Laugh a lot and try new things with someone you love.”

Awards or “pudding” were elusive to her in the beginning. I like her practical joke of organizing every nominee in the category to fake winning the award. Have fun anyway whether you win or not.

Amy has worked so far throughout her life including serving ice cream in a local parlor, waitressing. “How a person treats their waitress is a great indication of their character.” This was followed by doing gigs as a comedian before her career took off on SNL.

“Treat your career like a bad boyfriend.” “Good or bad, the reality is most people become “famous” or get “great jobs” after a very very long tenure shoveling shit.” The reality is that most career advancement is from referrals. “Try to care less. Practice ambivalence. Learn to let go of wanting it. Treat your career like a bad boyfriend.” “Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren’t. Career is the thing that will not fill you and never make you whole.”

But distinguish it from creativity. “Creativity is connected to your passion, the light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. The small voice that tells you, ‘I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going.'” She drew analogy of “creativity” to a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug.

“Ambivalence is the key to success.” Wow, that’s powerful and so true. “You have to care about how good you are and you good you feel, but not how good people think you are or how good people think you look.”

She talked a lot about her role in “Park and Recreation” series and how it came about after the end of SNL career. Because of this book, I actually a few episodes on Netflix. She went a step further talking about the show business – the pros and cons of all the players: actor, writer, director, and producer. Nice insight.

She offers some tidbits about time travels (and she does in her own way), using drugs, her two boys and being a “moon junkie,” her charity involvement in WWO visiting orphanage, and ended the book on her love/hate relationship with the cell phone.

This is a good book to read if you like comedy and curious about how a comedian become success or you simply like the story of a hard working woman doing what she loves with great passion and creativity and succeeded in it. You’ll get some laughs too. Why not?!

My key takeaways from this book:

1. Bliss point – precise amount that makes the food and drink more enjoyable – the inverted U-shape in pleasure vs. quantity of sugar.

2. Grouping data into “light,” “medium,” and “strong” coffee drinkers. Gladwell’s TED talk about Ragu’s grouping into extra chunky and 35 other kinds of spaghetti sauces. Sugar is the second critical ingredient after tomatoes.

3. We are driven to eat or crave certain food other than the emotional needs, tastes, followed by aroma, appearance, and texture. Sugar does it all.

4. Use of DOE (Design of Experiments) to come up with most appealing taste in carefully orchestrated taste tests across the country to engineer a food product.

5. Convenience is the key, e.g. Jello remade to jell within 5 minutes. Thanks to more women working. For convenience, lots of additives were added. Among them, the biggest one is sugar. Tang orange mix was created in the lab trading off all other vitamins except Vitamin C.

6 Food companies deploy an army of home economics teachers to teach cooking classes using their ready-made mix, and create a fictitious chef celebrity like Betty Crocker, and infiltrate the home economic associations.

7. Cereal should be considered as “candy.” They are laces with sugar for quick fixes.

8. Good history of the processed foods like cereals, Dr. Pepper, and chips.

9. People are eating more snacks and less or skipping main meals.

10. People can exercise their own will but can they if they’re “addicted” to the salt, sugar and fat.

11. Lots of repetition since all 3 ingredients combined pack the biggest punch.

12. The CEO’s or product managers of their own food category do not eat their own foods to keep off the salt, sugar and fat.

13. It’s sad to see that in pursuit of ever time and cost efficiency, people are replacing normal healthy home made foods with those processed foods that would eventually put them in the chronic illness like diabetes, heart diseases, high blood pressure and others.

Sugar:
– Cola war story of Jeffery Dunn, repented – now selling carrots.
“Sensory-specific-satiety” explains why people are addicted to Coca Cola because of it’s balanced taste – no lingering edginess, the aroma of vanilla and the citrus, and whole family of spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, then you have the sweetness and the bite of phosphoric acid, and the tingle of the carbon dioxide bubble – all the parts of the flavor construct.
– Self imposed curb of marketing to children under 12. But local stores are magnets for kids to consume soda. Teens spend less and visit stores more often.
– Story of “Tang” mix: designed artificially to mimic oranges but have to add in Vitamin C only to keep the good taste.

Fat:
-Mouth fullness feeling from fat. But it has no tongue receptor. Gives cookies more bulk and a firmer texture. Has not bliss point – the more the better – no negative feedback from the brain.
– Fat has a narcotic effect on people. Ice cream makes people happy.
– Hard to replace as people can taste the difference – “mouthful” feel.
– Fat is often linked up with sugar in candy bars. Majority of calories (60~80%) come from fat.
– There is no cheese in Cheez Whiz.
– Krafts’ American Cheese is the “processed cheese” left over from bottom of the pot after stirring the cheese. Enzymes are added to speed up aging and flavoring process.
– Surplus milk was converted to cheese.
– Story of Lunchables – from Oscar Mayer, started by Bob Drane.
– The making of the “pink slime.”
– Government agency including USDA helps promote meat, cheese, and milk inside and outside the country.
– Correlation of saturated-fat diet to lung cancer. For Philips Morris, this could be another nicotine problem like in the cigarette.

Salt:
– Sodium in salt pulls the fluid from our tissues into the blood which raises the blood volume (high blood pressure) and forces the heart to work harder.
– Most of the sodium/salt consumption comes from the processed foods, as people are cooking less at home.
– People don’t just love salt, they crave (or addicted to) salt . It’s one of the hardest thing to live without.
– Makes the wet-dog-hear meat taste more tolerable.
– More salt makes people less sensitive to salt, hence eating more of it. After being cut off, the sensitivity to salt can be enhanced and need less.
– In bread making process, salt keeps the huge, spinning mixer machines from gumming up. Also salt slows down the rising process to keep up the pace.
– Salt can help the “warmed-over” foods taste better.
– Cargill, one of the biggest supplier of salt and other farm-related products, is an extremely profitable private company.
– Potassium Chloride could be substitute for salt but tastes bitter.
– Potato chips are a source of heavy salt consumption. Call them “toasted” not “fried.”
– Baby Boomers are aging and eating less potato chips but more salty foods in general due to more snacking and reduced home cooking.
– Different crystal formation of salt can be customized to each form of food. Fine crystal for potato chips to produce the maximal effect.

In summary, this book serves as a wake up call to the readers/consumers the danger of submitting oneself to the seduction of salt, sugar and fat in the processed food. The food companies will do their best to pander to the customers even if the products are not good for our health. Being educated is the best weapon to protect ourselves from the harmful effects of the processed foods.