Lou!

So clearly, work is a whirling, sucking vortex set out to eat my brains.

Lately all I can do when I get home at night (usually after a 12- to 14-hour day) is blindly stuff my face with a whole day's worth of calories because I have no time to eat breakfast and lunch anymore and then plant my face six inches deep into my pillow

then I like to wake up at around 3:30 in the morning and anticipate and savor all the myriad ways in which I suck, and am awful at my job, and will shortly be exposed for the pathetic fraud that I am

and then I can sleep for a couple more hours before mechanically bathing and dressing again and going back to work to face the mind-numbing amount of work that still remains to be done.

And somehow today there was a light at the end of the tunnel, a lightening of the load, a parting of the clouds, and I feel better. A friend tells me this is a "very rough full moon" we are going through right now. I'll buy that. Whatever it is, it's been brutal.

The only other thing to report was that I got to talk to Lou Grant on the phone the other day. He was gruff. You know, in a sweet an charming way. And if you are younger than I am and from a hipper family than mine that didn't WATCH Mary Tyler Moore in syndication because you were too busy watching Little Home on the Prairie or whatever you watched instead of MTM and Maude and Soap and Taxi -- all of which have informed my idea of what is funny TO THIS DAY, then here is your homework.

And I am spent.