BipolarLawyerCook

It’s been a strange week in Book Wobe­gon. After a week of hit­ting every sales goal, sell­ing mem­ber­ships like it was the newest style on the cat­walk, and peo­ple rolling in off the street to demand they be hooked up with that Dan­ged Dig­i­tal Reader Device they’ve all got to sell, things have gone […]

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Remem­ber those episodes of Star Trek?  The ones where Doc­tor Leonard McCoy– “Bones” to those of us who just LOVE the grumpy old South­ern doc– would protest that “Damnit, Jim,” he was a doc­tor, not a fill-in-the-blank?
The last three weeks at work have been like that.  It’s been crazy– we’ve all been one-armed paper-hangers in […]

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The Sun­day Times Book Review has an arti­cle about a new book– a tran­scrip­tion, really, and I’ve read the advance copy, it’s well worth the read– of an inter­view between the late, great David Fos­ter Wal­lace and the Rolling Stone reporter and writer David Lip­sky as Wal­lace is doing his book tour after Infi­nite Jest […]

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Some­times, she feels like an air traf­fic con­troller, and wishes that instead of the Head Cashier phone she most times does not carry (too heavy, too clunky, and most days, well, eh, she just doesn’t need it and the ring­ing of the lines she does not have to answer is just plain annoy­ing) she had […]

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I’ve come to decide that most retail cus­tomers fall into four cat­e­gories: ass­holes, nice peo­ple, needy mcneed­sters, and freaks.
Some­times the venn dia­grams over­lap.  Some­times they don’t.  There are out­liers, of course.  Aliens who land on Earth just to make you grab your hair and say OH MY GOD WHERE THE HELL DID THEY COME FROM, […]

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Des­per­ate for Par
It’s a note my coworker left me on top of one of the tills in the safe,
an echo of a phrase I used once in pass­ing.
A joke.  Sort of.
We were so out of ones, fives and rolled coin
it was giggle-inducing.
Hol­i­days work­ing in retail make you punchy like that.
It’s meta, that com­ment.
She’s home­sick for the South, […]

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A lot of cus­tomers– they all think they’re wags– ask if they sell any good books.  Har-dee-har, har, she wants to reply.
One of her cowork­ers– the cool artsy-school grad, female drum­mer, was in a band, if she’s describ­ing her in a screen­play, wears chi­nos and button-down shirts and worn Vans(-ish, they might be Skech­ers or something, […]

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Yep.  Workin’ Christ­mas Eve.
But that’s okay.  You know why?
I baked.  Cook­ies.  Lots of ‘em.  I made my tra­di­tional Fine Cook­ing but­ter cook­ies with rasp­berry jam fill­ing and frost­ing.  And choco­latey cook­ies sprin­kled with salt from Bar­bara Lynch’s cook­book Stir.  (Run, don’t walk, make these cook­ies.)  And the best tof­fee you will ever eat, ever.
That’s right– recipe links.  […]

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Dear Sir:
The fact that you insist that you have “a email,” (it’s actu­ally “an email,” just because you have an Eng­lish accent doesn’t mean you have mas­tery over your own tongue) with a track­ing num­ber prov­ing we’ve received your book doesn’t change the fact that both my inven­tory sys­tem and my phone call down to […]

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Large denom­i­na­tions are change­able,
but when you’re out of pen­nies and ones, you’re in real trou­ble.
It’s an exis­ten­tial life les­son, sure,
we’re all alone in the end,
but mostly, just make sure you have enough pen­nies and ones.
The ladies with Prada purses and Louis Vuit­ton wal­lets
don’t always expect you to make an excep­tion for their returns.
The men in sweatshirts, […]

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