Back to work

Happily, I'm back to work. I've gotten a lot done and discovered that it is not me that smells like rotting cookie dough, but something out in the hallway. But the thing that brings me here is a long, rambling holiday e-newsletter that was waiting for me when I returned. Enough has already been written about the strange holiday letters that seem to contain too much information of interest to too few people. But this one was remarkable for the fact that it also contained a reckoning of all the famous people the writer (or her relatives) knows. This is strange to me. Who wants to know famous people? Vince Neil's housekeeper knows Vince Neil, and she's still got a job that involves cleaning toilets. No, if I have to have some relationship to fame, I want to be the famous person. If any of y'all get famous, I don't want to be the kind of person that name-drops. I want future holiday letters from me to read something like "My year has been fun. I swam naked with the sharks and Miss J off the coast of South Africa and, except for the drunken spanking incident in which the Sheik and I were banned from Applebee's, that was the most exciting thing that happened to me." Let my flunkies be the ones that have to point out that Miss J is that famous scholar who writes the opinion column for the New York Times and that the Sheik I so casually mention is indeed THE Sheik who was on the cover of Fortune after his hostile take-over of USBank. ....I wonder how one goes about getting some flunkies....