Despite this picture of me on the beach in my '73 Mach I, I think my kids and I will be moving back East at the end of the summer. I am thrilled to announce that I will be teaching at Columbia in the graduate school of film. This is a crazy time for me, but wildly creative. The political blogging is one of the most satisfying things I have ever done, but I have also written a play that the Lincoln Center Institute will put up next year. I am in the middle of writing Father of the Year for Rodale and I am developing an hour-long show for Showtime with one of the creators of Huff.

In the midst of these varied projects I am balancing my role as "mommy-daddy." My daughter and her friend were in the middle of a sleepover in a pup tent in the front yard when her friend suddenly got homesick and had to be taken home. When I finallly put my daughter to bed I had a long talk with her in the dark about the challenges ahead. Her mother will be taking off for Europe and then India while her brother and I get ready to move to New York. My little girl is almost eight and has a gaggle of Hilary-Duff-obsessed friends here in California. The move to Manhattan, where I'm from, will be hardest on her.

My son, who is almost five, is about to have a great change of life anyway. He's moving up from preschool to kindergarten. He's so charming, as if perpetually running for public office, that I am sure he will have half of Manhattan in love with him by Halloween.

As for me, I am thrilled at the new opportunity, thrilled to be three-thousand miles closer to my Italian love, and thrilled to be closing the long chapter in my life that began in 1990 when I moved out here with my then ex-wife.

The great Buddy Hackett once said that Los Angeles is a city where you go to sleep by a pool a young man and wake up an old man. My folks were professors. We changed cities every six to eight years. I've lived in Florence, Italy, Fukushima, Japan, Ramatuelle and Paris, France and Santorini, Greece. Never in my life did I think I'd be here in California so long.

Nobody ever does. Just ask the late Mr. Hackett.