Summer already seems like a distant dream. The kids started the day after Labor Day and I thought that i started teaching at Columbia the day after. The morning after dropping them off for their first day at school I casually emailed the department and they told me that my first class was in a few hours.

I fired up the computer and finished the polish of my syllabus and raced to school. I didn't have time to round up a sitter, however, so I taught the three hour class for an hour and then put on Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels and raced downtown to pick up the kids.

This first week has been like that. I'm working on an internet startup and the phone rings and it's my brilliant editor at NPR and she wants yet another tweak to my latest piece. While I'm talking to her the cellphone goes off and tells me there's yet another delay in finishing the work. Meanwhile the people who have made an offer on the house are due to see it again at three. Then a bit later the guy helping me sell my car in LA calls and says the new door panels aren't quite right and need to be reworked. Nothing is easy, nothing is finishing.

And though I love this city the noise and the smell are at times overwhelming. Especially at 3:20 yesterday morning when some sort of alarm went off and kept going off.

I knew this would be a hectic time. Even before I became an academic I have always been more in tune with the academic calendar. The day after Labor Day is the starting gun to all the ambitious projects I've got rattling around in my head. It is also the time when everyone, it seems, wants their money. The kids's afterschool, rent, insurance, they have all come due at the same moment.

On top of that I feel pretty lousy. My nephrologist had to postpone our appointment. I don't know if I'm just anemic again, which feels gross and has me, as I did yesterday, take the kids to school and come right back to sleep for a few hours, but I'm also often nauseated. My fear is that it is my creatinine rising even higher, a sign that the kidneys are really failing. Somewhere around the numbers that I have been hovering around people start to feel gross. Then again, I am a big hypochondriac, have thought that was happening before and have always been wrong.

The gross feeling, however, is making me think of Sekou Sundiata, an artist friend of friends who just died at the age of 58. He too had kidney disease and did a performance piece about getting a transplant. I'd love to live much longer than 58. I'll be 45 in October. That gives me thirteen years. Chet will be nineteen, Ava, twenty-two, the exact same age I was when my dad died. I turned out all right and guess I can live with that but it's not my first choice. My first choice is that I live to 100, spending the last ten or twenty years of my life in a small house on a big private beach.