Back from Vacation

So I'm back. There was very patchy service where we were, and I worried about that, but it turned out it was easy not to talk on my cell and not to use it as a time piece. It was also fairly easy not to have WiFi, even though I'm addicted to my email in my regular life. It was hard, however, to work. The house we rented was small; there was nowhere for me to work while the kids were there, too, so I'd go to the one restaurant in town at 7:30 and work for a while, then at 9 I'd line up for the New York Times (if you blinked and waited until 9:30, all the papers would be gone), and it was fine and I worked at night, too, but it was also, somehow, strange. Because even though I managed to steal an hour here or there to work, there was no urgency, and I really have to have this project done by the first week of September. But I was a little like, "Oh, I've got to work, OK, I'll do that," and I didn't get big knots in my shoulders. I hadn't planned to blog about this, but sometimes, the anxiety takes over. Besides, it's work anxiety or a discussion of the first 200 pages of The Dark Side, Jane Mayer's book about how the Bush/Cheney administration hijacked our justice system and made torture a matter of policy. It's not a new story, exactly, but reading it in Mayer's unblinking and extraordinarily well-organized account makes for many uncomfortable moments. It also made for some bad dreams. I feel as a citizen I have something of a responsibility to read it, but it really is the dark side, and I don't know how this country gets back into the light.