This morning I was almost about to apply to grad school. It's been another one of those things that I would like to do if time, money and location were not a factor. I got into college almost completely by accident and it has tainted any kind of hard work I might produce ever since. When I was seventeen I got a letter from a school saying that they had read something of mine and they thought it was a great admissions essay and that if I filled out the enclosed application they would take care of the rest.

No matter how hard I try this won't just happen with grad school. GRE, transcripts*, recommendations, writing tests. Where's the scholarships? Where's the bookstore account? Where's the flying me into town to visit?

Being grown up is a crock of shit.

*Transcripts are due along with the application on January 3. My college's admissions office is closed from Dec 22-Jan 2 and they require two weeks to process transcripts. I'm going to remember than the next time they send us a goddam fundraising letter.

Is it just me or is Fall Out Boy just Christian Rock with the poorly worded longing for salvation replaced with poorly worded, cred-proof longing for girls?

Sometimes I think that, like grundge, my iPod is less fun now that your mother understands it.

1) During the transit strike yesterday I rode my scooter from downtown Brooklyn to 53rd st in some of the densest traffic ever. the highway department loves scooters because of a technicality they invented that makes it possible for you to ride around cars. Everytime two miles of traffic backed up, I could skip to the front of the line. It was awesome. And that's the only word for it because I didn't feel like a competent adult who would be one of the few to make it into my place of business that day.

I felt like I was playing some secret level of Grand Theft Auto. Halfway to work I stopped a cop thinking that she would probably automatically come over and blow me.

On the final block before work I jammed on the brakes as some pedestrian stepped out in front of me and I started to slide. I couldn't stop. Ice? No. It turns out as I narrowly avoided him. I was skidding on the intestines of a dead rat.

2) Annie and I have a rat problem upstairs. This is the polite way that we refer to the angelic, blond, early-risining three-year-old girl above us who has just learned to gallop. Like children in a divorce, she is a mere pawn, an extension of her embattled parents (our landlords).

I would like to say something to them, especially since my occupation requires that I stay up late, but I don't want to scar the child. When I had smaller feet my parents were always complaining about me clomping around. It gave me such a complex about it that I moved to Chicago when I graduated. Even now when people discuss loose floorboards or nazi duck walking, someone in my immediate family always adds: "Oh don't get me started, when Brendan was six he..."

Even when confronted with the dents my heals made in the soft pinewood floors of our first home I remember thinking, "Gaawwd leave men alonnne, okay? I've only had these ankles for five years I'm still getting used to them."

Most of parenting scares me if only because it exists in a world without logic and is usually best served by old fashioned shame.

Labels: Chicago

Unlike most apartments I've had in this one you can walk maybe three feet from your door and get the mail or the pizza or the paper. It's nice for me because it means you can do it in your underwear if necessary.

Yesterday I creeped out the door to get the paper, knowing that this was a likely time that the landlords would leave. I listened in case I heard them on their stairs. Nothing. Opening the door, I reached through the iron gate to grab the blue plastic bag that might tell me something about the strike. And then I heard:

"BRENDAN! BRENDAN!" thump thump thump thump "Brendan!"

I grabbed the paper, covered myself with its pages, and skittered back inside. "BRENDAN!"

From the other side of the door I could hear my landlord screaming my name. He ran into the street. "BREN-DAAAN!!"

As he walked back into the house, I held the front page broadsheet-wise as if I had been sitting by the door reading. "The furnace blew last night and we have a guy coming in today. Are you going to be home?"

1) This is the man who refuses to take responsiblity for Annie's iPod being stolen. 2) I just remembered that I was supposed to stay home today and wait for the power company to come over.

"I just got called into work," I said. "I don't mind if you bring someone into the apartment to fix the furnace, but...would you mind waiting around for the power company for me?"

As I readied for work I played some loud music and showered thinking how, for once, the goddam land lord was working for me. I was singing in the shower*.

I tend to get a little overly self-congratualatory over minor victories. This morning I was celebrating how my quick thinking prevented my landlord from seeing me in my underwear.

I thought that all the way until I sang my way out of the bathroom, mostly covering myself with a towel, and ran into my landlord and the furnace guy.


*Most likely singing about how I was breaking rocks in the hot sun ever since I fought the law.

My only comment on the matter: Unions, like the democratic party are, in general, ineffective groups of priveledge losers who probably both recycle and tip poorly--yet they still make money based off of the great things they once did when they had the balls to do so. I support a transit strike because in the richest city in the world it is criminal that the people that keep it running have to live an hour outside and will probably never finance any of their childrens' educations.

I thought this all the way until I realized that the strike would totally ruin my plan to get sushi after work with my friends.

This is further what I mean when I say I am losing my edge.

This conversation happened at work today

"Goddamit," I said as my shoe came off for the second time on the carpet. "The floors are sticky today. Did someone spill?"

Another man of my profession plodded the floors with his feet like a cat getting ready to sleep on your pillow. "Yeah," he said in his deep Boston (Bah-stahn) accent. "It's like walking around in a porno theater." He lifted his feet again and the thick carpet stuck to his shoes as well.

I couldn't really think of how to respond to that. When someone makes a joke, I feel the need to make a bigger joke. But if this weren't a joke, I wasn't interested in taking it too far.

"You're probably too young to remember those, aren't you? You're a part of that VCR* Generation."

The limitations of the English language are such that you can only take one stance at once, leaving out whatever is least important: 1) I've never owned my own VCR. 2) People actually go to porno theaters? Do they go with their friends and share popcorn? 3) This relates to a conversation I had earlier this week about who would actually do something disgusting like rent a porno that someone else watched when you could just suck it up and buy one if you didn't have the internet.

What came out instead was: "How old are you?"

"51."

For some strange reason, I always assume that everyone I work with is my age. When I was a reporter, I couldn't believe that the guy at the desk next to me actually had kids and was 31 since we both liked the white stripes. The fact that I have the same job as a man my father's age--indeed, last week I was training this man--filled me with an awful dread for my bleak future.**


*V-C-AHH
**Me at my same dead-end job in the year 2035: "Jeez, the image quality on image generator is terrible. It's like watching a web cam." (read this entire article.

This is something I wrote for one of my freelance jobs. I never know if it will come out so I am including it here.

Back Handed Book Reviews
By Brendan Sullivan
When you’re an English major, you spend your whole life searching for meaning. What is the author trying to say? What is this pop song actually about? What does this eviction notice really mean?

The holidays are no different. Your loved ones get you some well-meaning gift and your there, pondering it like a Richard Kelly film. What is my dear mother trying to say with this copy of “Land That Job!”?

What you end up saying with most gifts is, of course, “To my family member, I’ve known you my entire life but I still have no clue who you are.” Books are an excellent gift to give, if only because they can be easily exchanged for DVDs now at most chain bookstores. But if you’re looking to maybe impress your cousins this year with books that are new and new in paperback, then check out the list below and see if you’re reminded of anyone.

NON FICTION
“Everything Bad is Good for You” by Stephen Johnson (Riverhead, 234 pp.) Remember when the bad guy was just the bad guy? Johnson makes a very convincing argument that today’s pop culture—from video games to films to TV shows like 24, The Sopranos and The Simpsons—are much more complex than we give them credit for and may be making us smarter and safer. Good gift for: your father who wouldn’t let you watch “Full House” because the children were sassy, but who now can’t tear his ass away from his “Sopranos” boxset long enough to carve the ham.

“Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show” Get it if you think John Wayne is a pussy. Cody rode the pony express, fought in the civil war, fought Indians, and was a dime store novel hero all by the age of 23. At 26 he starred as himself in a traveling road show about the his life which, it turns out, may not have been so exciting. Good gift for: Your cousin in Maine who wear cowboy boots and quotes Cool Hand Luke to excess.

“Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt (390 pp.) How did a glovemaker’s son from the boondocks, who already had children of his own managed to change the London theater world forever? This book talks in depth about Shakespeare the social climber, the wannabe gentleman, who did things like pay off the College of Heralds to pretend that they had “discovered” the age old Shakespeare coat of arms with the motto that translates to “Not without right.” His rival, Ben Johnson, lampooned this in a satire of a rustic buffoon who who pays 30 pounds for a coat of arms. A friend mockingly proposes the motto “Not without mustard.” Get it for: your drama queen cousin who unironically wears black turtlenecks.

“The Secret Man” by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, $23). Remember a time, long, long ago when we had a thuggishly inept republican president at war who spent his second term dodging a scandal that mired everyone around him? Remember when we had half as many reporters on the ground, but twice as many who were doing their job? Me neither, that’s why I loved reading the true story behind Watergate, Deep Throat, and Mark Felt. Also, according to Woodward The Hartford Courant was the newspaper that actually outed Mark Felt as Deep Throat. Get it for: anyone you know who votes or watches “West Wing.”

“Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson (Vintage, $14.95). This is the story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, a story of rebuilding a great city that had just burned down, the story of the thousands who flocked to the city to see the show. It is the story of Buffalo Bill, Houdini, Edison and a young Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson. And some guy named Mark Twain who came all the way to Chicago and spent 11 days sick in his hotel room. It is also about H. H. Holmes, an American Jack the Ripper who lured untold numbers of office girls into his home, tortured, murdered, and often sold their corpses to science for money or filed to claim their life insurance. Get it for: anyone who would rather be watching “24.”

“Are Men Necessary?” by Maureen Dowd. Two opposing things: 1) Give this book to someone for the surprise on their face and the jokes that will ensue. But don’t expect to change their life. In every chapter, Dowd produces choppy, sloganeering paragraphs. She quotes Oscar Wilde so much that you might think she is searching hippie stores of the world for a bumper sticker quoting her. (“These days, the scarlet letter morphs into the dollar sign.”)2) Dowd never pretends to have all the answers. This is the first book to seriously catalogue the shift in gender culture of the past five years where we now find both men and women with careers and mortgages shopping for shoes while at work and gossiping about their dating failures. Get it for: any former bra-burner who now needs a girdle or anyone who misses "Ally McBeal."

FICTION
“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $25.95). There is no real reason to read Zadie Smith books--but you still should. Even the bad ones. In this, her third--and possibly her best, London-born Smith follows the lives of two suburban Boston university families whose lives are tangled together by chance. Get it for: empty nesters who have children in college.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage, $15.28). If Jake Glylenhal’s “Brokeback Mountain”--a non-gay romance between two cowboys--is any indicator, we are in for a serious pop-appraisal of man-love. In “Fortress” we follow young Dylan, the only white kid for miles in his Brooklyn neighborhood as he grows up in an era of funk music, the birth of hip-hop and the abortion of punk. Dylan has a strong bond with his neighbor, Mingus Rude. Get it for: anyone.

“Indecision” by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, $21.95). Like far too many novels of this era, it should be titled “The Day I Banged that Girl, Finally.” It has received glowing reviews in every paper for its clever premise (a pill that supposedly cures indecisiveness) and its main character (a 28-year-old dullard who, by virtue of his Manhattan address, privileged background, education and lack of direction in his life, garners unfair comparisons to Holden Caulfield). The story is funny at times (after getting canned, the narrator tells his girlfriend: “I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!") and not too taxing on the brain. Fantastic gift for: Your sister who finally dumped that New York nancy boy who should have proposed three years ago.

“Mission to America” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday, $23.95). Somewhere in the hills of Montana a semi-new age cult is in trouble. After years of insular life the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles’ gene pool has gotten a little shallow. When one of their own makes it big in something called a “reality TV show,” he sends young Mason Laverne out in the world to find a wife with money to help the group survive. Laverne all at once confronts the world of television, fast-food, and teeth whitening with a naif’s eye. This hilarious tale is spun by the author of “Thumbsucker.” Get it for: your brother, the reality-TV addict.

Do you know someone who actually reads literature for pleasure? Some of the most important titles to come out lately are works that debuted decades ago. Gone is the age of stilted, Victorian renderings of masterworks. In each of the following, a present day scholar has set the original story to a fluid, readable modern tongue. In every case it helped bring out the original joy and humor of the works. “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper Perennial, $16.95; “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, ed. by Lydia Davis (Penguin, $20), and “The Odyssey” by Homer, translated by R. L. Eickhoff. Get it for: anyone in your family who does not own a TV.

Labels: Chicago

One of my greatest fears is dying in such a way that the New York Post might take notice.

It's sad in a way. Whenever I'm not writing I think: Man, I really should be writing. And usually when I am writing I think, Man, I have so many other things I could be doing to waste time.

The only way I can get around this is to somehow wake up in the morning, rested, hop downstairs and start writing before I'm dressed or showered. Breakfast is a distraction that keeps me from other distractions. I eat it like I'm trying to get it out of the way. Somedays I can just get to work with no problem.

But somedays I get distracted or Annie needs me for something. Yesterday for some reason I felt like I was in withdrawal--which is about the most pathetic state that a grown man of my tax bracket can be in. I haven't smoked in a while and I'm starting to realize that I may have trouble sleeping because I drink four cups of strong coffee all morning and then drink fancy lattes while I'm at work. Annie really wanted to discuss dishwashing technique with me during my failed writing time and I calmly said, "Darling, would it take less time to do the dishes if I smashed this coffee mug in the sink and stormed out of the room?"

Anyway, I think that is probably how it happened. This morning I woke up and finally finished the two chapters that the agent wanted me to work on. Some days it comes easy, some days it just won' happen. Some days writing is the last thing I want to do at all and I hate it but then I get to a revelation of sorts and I'm really glad I started. But then today I woke up and thought, Jeez, who spilled coffee all over my manuscript?

Annie's iPod was stolen from our apartment the other day. She had put it by the door so that she would remember to take it to Italy and when the building guy and his partner finished installing some smoke detectors it was gone.

You may also know that my hard drive committed suicide a few weeks ago and I lost all of my music, songs, pictures and the short stories that I thought might go somewhere. The only songs left were the twenty playlists I made for Annie starting with our first date. We are both very fickle about music and we got through phases which means that for a month we listened only to The Thrills and Bright Eyes and Kinds of Convenience. I labelled that list "5- First night in Brooklyville" for when I ran out on my life in Chicago and moved in with her in New York. "14- Puerto Rico!", "20- Moving to Fort Green."

I bet I haven't heard any Bright Eyes song once since last winter. When I play them I remember being a cold, unemployed loser on hold with the credit card company and staring at the screen of my potentially repossed laptop--hoping that a novel would fall out of it. I hide almost all of my memories in music.

Annie did what any normal person would do and she looked around the house to see if anything else had been stolen. She found a big shit in the toilet and a missing bag of croissants*. She called me at work and I relayed her her that I had taken the breaded treat to work, but that her iPod was still stolen.

When I say landlords, I mean the people whose basement we live in. They pay an unlicensed, untrained, unskilled man (who lives with his mother) $500 a week to stick around and fix things. He's a great guy whom I trust and respect because he installs dishwashers, does drywall, turns on our heat, hooked up our washer, and he also thinks our landlord is an asshole. When we moved in, he brought in a twenty foot ladder so we could hang our vintage "Submarine Voyage--of Tomorrowland!" poster.

It's his assistant that we're concerned about. What this man will ever do with a pink iPod mini full of Le Tigre and our other hollaback girls, I will never know. The landlords said nothing for two weeks until I left a note on the door with my phone number. They called while I was Dj'ing.

"I don't know what to tell you, Brendan. We called him when it happened and he searched his assistant and I find it hard to believe that he got out of there with your iPod and ate a whole bag of croissants."

"Annie told you two weeks ago that the croissants were not stolen. I took those to work," (I also will freely admit that I have problems with authority which is why I added:) "I mean, I don't know if your wife has ever been robbed while you weren't at home, but I bet the second thing she'd do is find out what else is missing.**"

"You, uh..." I should also add that both of our landlords are librarians, which I originally thought was going to be fantastic. In their apartment they have one book: The Book of Mormon. Turns out they are Law Librarians.

"Look, I'm at work right now. I don't mind if you call me at work tomorrow. Will that be okay?"

"Sure." He hangs up with me and calls Annie immediately. He brings up the goddam croissants again. He speaks condescendingly about the missing mixes. And he agrees to pay for half the iPod. ("We can't be responsible for everything that goes on in that apartment.")

David Sedaris has a great essay about cleaning peoples apartments. He always said that they got paid fifteen an hour but that his company kept five of it, which he was more than happy to do just incase there was a problem with anything being stolen.

If my landlords were using a licensed company of some kind I could just go to them. And I would because damn the man.

They said they will only pay half because we can't prove anything. I can't stand it when people make statements on flawed logic: If we could prove that he stole it, we could get it back and then they wouldn't have to pay anything.

Moments ago I took a break from writing this to close a window in the living room. When I did the glass plate fell out of the poorly installed, unlicensed window and cracked me on the forehead. I'm bleeding now. And it's six times colder than it was before. If you see me tomorrow: I don't want to hear about how flat my fucking man bangs are.

I want to keep fighting because I've worked up all of these great lines. (Emotional: "If he had stolen a picture frame do you think I would care more about the frame or the picture in it?" Mind trap: "Are you paying half out of principle or are you just being cheap? If he stole our newspaper would you insist on only paying us a quarter?" Pure personal satisfaction "Yeah he took her iPod. He also took a shit in our toilet: you want in on half of that too?")

Do I:

1) Continue arguing until I get him to cave into buying a new iPod (even if this means making things tense with them?)

2) Tell him he has to pay half of a new nano, plus $990 to buy 1000 songs on the iTunes music store that will possibly replace the ones that are gone?

3) Forget about the iPod and just go after them about the blood coming out of my forehead?

*I wish that the object in question had been Wonderbread. It's just as hard to get sympathy about your missing croissants as it would be about you missing your manicure appointment.
**If you ever need to be a condescending dick: use phrases like "the second thing you should do.." because people always make the first thing they do personal and embarassing. Or better yet they get distracted by wondering.

Labels: Chicago