I’ve been away, dear reader, for quite some time. I’ve been busy driving a child to and from preschool, making Target runs, finding my spiritual center on Oprah’s Lifeclass (the first lesson taught us about the false power of ego), watching The Bachelor and Bachelor Pad (it takes three hours to watch that show every Monday night — that keeps a girl busy!), and wondering how I can avoid cooking the Thanksgiving Day turkey. [Read more →]
There was a very sadly missed opportunity not long ago. It was a brief flash of insight from Administration PR man Jay Carney. Don’t worry, it didn’t last and has not been repeated but somewhere deep in the mind of this poor confused fellow he discovered a simple fact and, intentionally or not, exposed it to a gaping press. “Well, the White House doesn’t create jobs. The government together — White House, Congress — creates policies that allow for greater job creation.” What possessed Mr. Carney to publicly rubbish the fundamental Creation Myth on which sits the whole contraption of Obamaism? There must have been a demonic home-invasion in his little skull, invisible to video or audio but perhaps if we slow it way down and turn it way up we will see the ghost of Milton Friedman dashing in his one eye, speaking his piece and then fleeing through the other. Either that or Jay stumbled on a bit of good sense accidentally, which happens, but then quickly throttled it in its infancy, which also happens. [Read more →]
10. Anthony Weiner’s image consultant
9. Parka salesman
8. Suicide bomber
7. Amish air conditioner repairman
6. Lindsay Lohan’s bail bondsman
5. Apprentice crackwhore
4. Public pool pee monitor
3. Chris Christie’s lotion boy
2. Shark bait
1. What, people still have jobs?
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
10. Instead of giving you a chair, he makes you squat
9. He insists that you think of him as “Your boss…with benefits”
8. Your healthcare plan is a box of bandaids
7. “Casual Friday” means he comes to work in his pajamas
6. You wish he were only “all hands”
5. Your “probationary period” is now in its sixteenth year
4. You have to submit your request to use the bathroom two days in advance
3. The closest thing you’ve had to a promotion is when they doubled your lunch break to ten minutes
2. He greets you every morning with the phrase, “Do you still work here?!”
1. He insists on paying you in Cheetos
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
“Work,” Noël Coward once said, “is so much more fun than fun.”
Thomas Aquinas would have agreed. “Agere sequitur esse,” he declared. Action follows from being. You are as you do.
I also agree, especially now that I have returned to work (last week, I started a part-time, presumably temporary gig at the Philadelphia Inquirer). [Read more →]
I just learned that my great Aunt Molly, one of my grandfather’s remaining siblings, passed away yesterday.
It took some time to process this information after I received the phone call from my cousin. I would be lying if I said we were particularly close –- it has easily been a year-and-a-half since the last time I saw her, since her health began to decline and she went into an assisted living center.
But Aunt Molly used to be one of the regulars at the Adult’s table growing up, and a sense of importance and regality surrounded her and the fact that she somehow out-adulted my own parents. I am 27 now, but Aunt Molly always seemed to be the same age: old –- old enough to seem delicate, but never in jeopardy of dying. This though, comes with almost 2 years of decline since the last time I saw her -– between reality and the memories I kept carefully preserved from it. [Read more →]
This week has been a walk down memory lane for two interesting milestones in my life. Twenty years ago this week I wore English Leather cologne to a high school party and a girl thought I peed myself. That’s a whole other story that I’ve told a million times, but I’d rather talk about the ten year anniversary of foolishly taking a job at an Iranian man’s lock and door hardware company. It was a nightmare from the get-go. [Read more →]
My day gig is teaching, so I am off this week. All I really had to do yesterday was shovel snow. That is it. This was done by about eleven o’clock in the morning. Did I come in and compose a sonata? Did I practice an extra hour on my guitar? Did I work on the final two mixes on my current musical project? Did I get around to writing this article before 8:55 PM last night? Nope. [Read more →]
I noticed that one of the three glass globes on the light fixture in my son’s bathroom was badly cracked, so I brought it to Lowe’s to find a replacement. None of the glass globes for sale were a match, but I saw that Lowe’s had the same lighting fixture for sale. I asked an associate how I could get a single glass globe. I was expecting him to give me the contact information for the manufacturer or that he would special order the part for me. Instead, he opened up the box of a new lighting fixture so he could give me one of the glass globes. But it wasn’t a match. It was close, but our fixture must be a few years old, and the globes that come with the fixtures being sold now are slightly different. He then got out the giant steps and climbed up to examine the display units high on the wall. There were three models on display — versions with two, three, and four lights. The glass globes were not all the same on the displays, and he removed several globes before finding one that was an exact match. When he did, he gave it to me. No charge. I didn’t have a receipt, nor do I know for sure that the fixture was purchased at Lowe’s in the first place, since we moved into this house a year and a half ago and the fixture was already here. For going out of his way to help me, I hereby present [whatever the guy's name is] with the Scott Stein Excellence in Customer Service Award. Lowe’s, if you’re reading this, [whatever that guy's name is] deserves some recognition from you as well. He ensured that this customer (who was already buying stuff at your store every week) will continue to shop at Lowe’s.
Mark SaFranko has led a writer’s life. Dan Fante once said of SaFranko that the man would rather “write than breathe,” and Mark has stayed restless but productive throughout his working years. This means he has held too many shit jobs and too many of his manuscripts have been left to rot unpublished and unread, but this fall, a breakthrough is on the horizon. In November, his cult classic Hating Olivia will be his first novel published by a major press in America although the book was published five years ago in England. Indeed, SaFranko follows a long line of American novelists who found a home in Europe before they managed to crack the conservative culture of American publishing. As you’ll read below, Mark has fought battles as a writer, a husband, a father, and a human being. But even when the future was most bleak for SaFranko, it knew better than to fuck with him when he was on a writing kick. Keep reading to check out his excellent responses to my questions about Hating Olivia, parenting, the future of books, and more. [Read more →]
