Nowadays it's starting to seem as if the only time I write in this is when I'm under the influence of caffeine or alcohol, and this post shall be no different. The two substances are an apt metaphor for the far ends of that precarious parabola called manic depression, on which I currently happen to be skewing far to the manic side. After spending the bulk of July traveling to various corners of the northern hemisphere--I'll spare you the boring details because no one wants to

Exhaustion is getting home after a ten hour day (and another one the day before, and a fourteener the day before that) and collapsing into a dead sleep on the couch without even bothering to take off your shoes or pet the cat who has come to nudge and lick your face with maternal worry. It's days like these, especially right after I wake up from one of these addling corpse naps, when I have to remind myself that I have the best job in the world, that I get to go to work every