I have it on good authority that the furnace repairman will be at my house sometime between the hours of five a.m. and midnight today. I couldn’t be more thrilled. With the daytime high temps lower than the voting age in most states, this was precisely the wrong time for my furnace to develop [...]

  My children and I live in different time zones. They live in Teenage Standard Time and I live in the real world. In the real world, deadlines have mass and momentum and cannot be ignored. Whenever I get a new deadline it starts making a sound like the music from the documentary film Jaws [...]

I’m worried about my wife’s memory. Just last week she forgot a key ingredient for dinner. I found her standing in the kitchen, staring into the pantry with a look of intense concentration; the kind of look you associate with a sage pondering the nature of the universe or someone trying to figure out how [...]

  Next week I have to take a personality test at work and I’m a little worried. What if it comes up negative? Will I be summoned to the HR office where I will be forcibly enrolled in some flashy, pricey character-building exercise like a Dale Carnegie seminar, a ropes course, or graduate school? I [...]