Okay, you know the 7 Deadly Sins.  Lust, sloth, greed, etc. (you can rent Se7en if you need a refresher).  Well I’ve always wondered why there isn’t an 8th.  You have to understand, though, I don’t mean “sin” in the sense of the pet-peeves of a petulant God, fuming from the heavens. I mean in the […]

It can seem so hard, sometimes, to get people to like you.  But with a few simple tricks, you can get anyone to like you, because people are such easily manipulated idiots! (Note: don’t tell them they’re idiots who are easily-manipulated.  Maybe that should be #6…) 1. People like to hear their name said to […]

The company where a friend of mine works was recently Streamlined For Greater Efficiency, which means he was Invited to Exit so that his position could be Folded Into Internal Synergy. (translation for those who don’t speak Doublespeak: The company’s going broke, so he was laid off after his position was eliminated) In order to […]

**This is a continuation of the story that begins here.  I’d highly recommend reading that first to be caught up. It won’t take that long, I promise. So… The lead actress and the director arrived at last.  She wasn’t really speaking because she’d lost her voice that morning and was going to have to croak, […]

Putting together any kind of creative performance – dance, a play, shooting a film – requires such delusional, quixotic optimism, that when I got a call this Saturday asking if I was available to play a part in a scene for a web series on Sunday, and the associate producer said: I knew there was […]

As most people know, there are agreed upon nonverbal signals ranging from fairly minor – like the “okay” signal or an eye roll to communicate an “Oh, brother” reaction – to very important non-verbal distress signals. *** But the truth is, there are an incredible number of situations in which non-verbal communication is crucial.  Here […]

Continuing from the first part of the story, getting to Amsterdam during my senior year of college…  One of the things that came with being a “sampler’s pack” of backpackers was that we all had differing agendas.  We tried to overlap them, but this led to some, let’s say, conflicts of interest. Southern Belle went […]

When I was in college I spent a couple terms in Nottingham, England.  Toward the end of Fall term I decided to go to Amsterdam – by that point, though, almost all the Exchange students had already gone, so it was down to the scraps: Two guys from Maine, a southern belle, some random guy […]