In A Socialist Country You Can Get

The Empty Nest Is Underrated.

We Have A Game We Play When We’re Waiting For Tables In Restaurants, Where You Have To Write The Five Things That Describe Yourself On A Piece Of Paper. When I Was [in My Twenties], I Would Have Put: Ambitious, Wellesley Graduate, Daughter, Democrat, Single. Ten Years Later Not One Of Those Five Things Turned Up On My List. I Was: Journalist, Feminist, New Yorker, Divorced, Funny. Today Not One Of Those Five Things Turns Up In My List: Writer, Director, Mother, Sister, Happy.

There Is Something Called The Rapture Of The Deep, And It Refers To What Happens When A Deep-sea Diver Spends Too Much Time At The Bottom Of The Ocean And Can't Tell Which Way Is Up. When He Surfaces, He's Liable To Have A Condition Called The Bends, Where The Body Can't Adapt To The Oxygen Levels In The Atmosphere. All Of This Happens To Me When I Surface From A Great Book.

The Realization That I May Have Only A Few Good Yeras Remaining Has Hit Me With Real Force, And I Have Done A Lot Of Thinking As A Result. I Would Like To Have Come Up With Something Profound, But I Haven't.

I Am Living In The Google Years, No Question Of That. And There Are Advantages To It. When You Forget Something, You Can Whip Out Your Iphone And Go To Google. The Senior Moment Has Become The Google Moment, And It Has A Much Nicer, Hipper, Younger, More Contemporary Sound, Doesn't It? By Handling The Obligations Of The Search Mechanism, You Almost Prove You Can Keep Up.... You Can't Retrieve You Life (unless You're On Wikipedia, In Which Case You Can Retrieve An Inaccurate Version Of It).