Do not adjust your monitor. We’re back to our regularly scheduled style sheet. Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause the Matrix-themed style sheet is going bye-bye… Sorry! Sorry. I can’t help myself.

Anywaay…

I just want to say for the record that working on two books at once is not easy. You go in to the office, crank away on manual #1 for eight hours. Then you return home, wolf down some food, and put about three more hours into manual #2.

Then you sit down and write a smashing journal entry. Or not, as the case may be.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Writing for eleven hours a day is draining, but it sure beats digging ditches for eleven hours a day. Don’t get me wrong, I like exercise and fresh air and all that. It’s just that I still don’t know how to swing a pickaxe or shovel dirt without doing bad things to my back, despite my father’s hours of patient instruction on proper pickaxe-swinging techniques.

This is why I’m glad I live in the world of today, rather than the world of my ancestors. I just don’t think I’d do very well in a world where my survival depends on coaxing potatoes out of the frozen Eastern European soil. Oh, sure — maybe I’d have been lucky and been born a rabbi’s son, in which case I would have spent my youth happily ensconced in shul with nary a potato to be seen. Also, let’s not forget that if you were the rabbi’s son, the chicks really dug you. (“Chava! Have I got a match for you!”) Nice work, if you can get it.

But more likely than not, I’d be forced to show off my potato-hoeing skills on a regular basis. This makes me very glad that I live in a society that values other skills also. Somehow I think drawing yourself up and proclaiming, “These are not the hands of a field worker! These are the hands of an artiste!” just wouldn’t cut it on the shtetl. It didn’t cut it in my Dad’s backyard, that’s for sure.

Anyway, we’ll see about being a little more regular about these here journal entries. Coming up next: the real, live, gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines, no-holds-barred story on how I’ve so far narrowly avoided becoming a lawyer. This year, anyway. Lawyering… now there’s another profession that wouldn’t have been so helpful on the shtetl. I mean, I’m sure the marauding troops of the Tsar would have wanted to read all those strongly worded briefs and injunctions and whatnot. But hey, when you’re galloping through the village with saber in hand… who really has the time?