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December 22, 2006
TT: Through for the night
One of the minor ironies of my job is that in order to take time off, I have to see shows in advance and stockpile columns to be published in my absence, meaning that I usually end up spending good-sized chunks of my holidays recovering from the spasms of overwork that make them possible. In the five days preceding my trip from New York to Smalltown, U.S.A., for instance, I saw four shows, filed three Wall Street Journal columns and a Commentary essay, and caught a cold. On Wednesday I went to bed at two and arose at five-thirty, and by three o'clock that afternoon I was knocking on my mother's back door halfway across the country, suitcase in hand. I slept for ten hours that night and took a two-hour nap the following day, after which I felt like myself again, more or less.Outside of sleeping, I haven't done much since I got here. My mother and I watched Cool Hand Luke and To Have and Have Not and took a drive around town to look at the Christmas lights. I check my e-mail from time to time, but it isn't easy to surf the Web with a dialup connection nowadays, so instead I've been watching The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, which is a bit like listening to a kindergarten teacher from an upper-middle-class suburb cheerily reading horror stories out loud to her class.
I've finished one of the books I brought with me to Smalltown, a dullish biography of Tom Stoppard, and now am trying to decide whether to read myself to sleep with Bleak House, Fathers and Sons, or Master and Commander. I need to make up my mind pretty soon, for it's drawing close to midnight and my eyelids are growing heavy. The only sounds I can hear are the soft whir of my iBook, the flickering whisper of rain on the rooftop, and an out-of-tune train whistle wailing in the distance. All my pieces are written, all my shows seen. For the moment, the rest of my life can take care of itself.
Posted December 22, 2006 12:00 PM
