I have spent the past few days FINALLY getting a grip on my office.  This is how I did it:  We bought a biiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggg screen TV last week which enables me to sit at the dining room table, spread out the piles of paper, and watch mindless TV while I deal with the shit.  So I saw Oprah interview Carole Radziwill on her memoir What Remains.  I’ve read an excerpt and she’s a hell of a writer.  But Oprah seemed downright hostile.  She basically said–no, she actually said, if this book weren’t about John and Carolyn Kennedy, no one would publish it and no one would read it.  So unOprah-ish.  And, IMHO, so untrue.  I DON’T read celebrity bios, but I will buy What Remains because it’s about friendship and love and dying and living. 

It is Rosh Hashanah in a week, and I’m beginning my personal march up to the holydays.  This consists of some reading and reflection on the past year and next year.  My mother hated the holydays, because her father made them all about death and dying and sin and remorse.  I love them because I make them all about where I’ve been and where I’m going.  I get a real sense of movement when I look back at past years and what I was dealing with then.  Time goes by so fast, and the only way I know to slow it down is to think about where you are and what you’re doing and why.