It’s not that I’m not doing things, I am doing things, I am doing a lot of things, I’m taking trains into the city and ripping my skirt on the arm rest so that my underwear shows and I have to run into a store and buy a new skirt, I’m meeting my youngest sister for dinner and getting schmackled on a bubbly red, I’m walking home from the train station at 11 under a full moon, I’m reading the entire New Yorker in bed in the morning while the men hammer and bang things somewhere else on my house. The house! I’m driving to Stamford to look for wood flooring, I’m agreeing to expensive additional procedures for the renovation, I’m calling the tree man in for a consultation, I’m talking to our contractor about our progress and handing him an enormous check, I am in pursuit of the perfect front door.

I'm reserving a room at a midtown hotel, where I'm planning to meet my husband tonight, I'm holding an appointment for a haircut on Wednesday, before I head to the Open with my father. I’m slowly making my way through Saturday, although it’s overdue, I’m going through the children’s papers for the first day of school, I’m following Gonzales’ resignation, and the arrest of Larry Craig. I'm eating breakfast, and I'm even doing the dishes.

The children are gone, is the dramatic way of saying that they are at their grandparents’, and happy, and that they slept through the night. I had so many things to do in their absence, but I didn’t understand how I would feel, doing them.

Last night sometime in the wee hours I was woken by my husband saying, What the fuck is that? He heard something in the bathroom. He turned his light on. He picked up the yardstick that the previous owners left in my closet and that the children like to whack things with, and advanced, cautiously. He still heard it. What could it be? Could it be the beating of the wings of an enormous moth? It was. When I woke up in the morning the first thing I said to him was You’re part of the conspiracy, by which I meant the conspiracy to wake me at least once during every fucking night, but which probably sounded crazy. Well, I was crazy. When it was time to go and John started whining for a Starburst, because we have a bag of Starbursts on top of the fridge that started as a rewards system for using the potty and which has mutated into a fountain of bribes, I said, You are getting to the door by the count of three or the Starbursts are going in the garbage, and held them over the garbage like someone in a Neil LaBute play.

The thing about Crazy Mommy is that Crazy Mommy wins.

I don’t like Crazy Mommy. Yesterday I played tennis with some women I don’t know very well but who know each other fairly well and felt stupid and smiley and wasn’t playing very well because I wanted everyone to like me, but of course not playing well doesn’t make people like you, does it? It is at these times that the advice of my husband, who, despite (because of?) his tendency to listen for the beating of giant moth wings, is intelligent and perceptive, comes to me, and I think, I don’t give a shit if these people like me. I’m here to play tennis. And then I played well and in fact won. Later in the day I was reading Ian McEwan’s first book, the first story of which is a first-person account of a boy’s rape of his little sister, and I thought, It’s just like tennis. You have to not give a shit about what anyone thinks about you in order to play well.

It’s rainy, the back of our house is roped off with Caution tape, and I wish I were somewhere else, writing about my travels. If you’re stuck in Istanbul with nothing to do, make your way to the covered bazaar, where you will find, in the third row of stalls, a man whose family has been making paper airplanes for three centuries. He will sell you one for five to ten cents (don’t forget to haggle) and invite you to his home, which is on an island and only accessible by boat. By the time you are halfway there you will wish you hadn’t accepted his invitation.

In Brussels one must not miss the Mannekin Pis.

Few visitors to Goa know the legend of Mary Mary, who led sailors to their deaths.

In Venice, actually, David and I lunched next to a couple who invited us back to their palazzo, an invitation we, our eyes meeting, accepted. I don’t know if I had already read Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, in which a young couple visiting a city just like Venice is stalked and killed by a friendly older couple. Once we got to the palace, or really the half-palace (subdivided), we were separated, and I was shown their bedroom. One of them wrote poetry, and I remember there was some kind of evidence of this around, although what could it have been? We admired their house, and went out again into the street. This was the kind of thing we thought you should do while traveling, meet people and have little adventures.