When my friends ask me, "How do you do it?" How do you teach grad school and write a book and a play and blog on the HuffingtonPost and raise two kids and blah-blah-blah. The fact is that I am woefully overextended and mess up from time to time.

Yesterday was one of those times.

I had been scheduled to do an NPR interview weeks ago but then I was told by my publisher that they'd changed the date. So there I was at home wading through a pile of applications for grad school next year when the phone rings and NPR is wondering why I'm not in the studio.

My heart leaps to my throat. I live way uptown and their studio is at Times Square. I assure them that I can be there in twenty minutes and dash out of the house (without my book), run into the subway, run out at Times Square and dodge pedestrian traffic to arrive, yes, twenty-minutes later, panting, at their New York studio. The interview actually went well and I relaxed for a second until I saw that it was 1:50 and I had to teach back uptown at Columbia at 2. So I raced back to the #Subway, took the express to 96th street but the local to 116th wasn't coming so I vaulted up the stairs and took a cab.