12:22 a.m. These are the days! This is the life! Today there has been time enough to try to have a well-rounded day. I emphasize the word try. Ever since I got my latest round-the-clock project finished and packed off into the mail, I've been trying to recuperate and act like a normal person.

I'm trying to read a little, sleep a normal amount, garden a little, watch TV a little. Go out and about occasionally. Cook a nice meal. Clean it up. Who am I kidding?

I am no more normal than you. Or you. Is there a single normal person out there?

Let's backtrack. I awake with the horrible sense of dread that only the self-employed can fully appreciate. It's never early enough and you've never done enough the night before to justify your existence. I try to read the newspaper, but I'm jumpy. I read the New York Times and New York is the small town of publishing.

I've been featured in it before and I want to be featured in it again. It's that simple. So, as Mayor Koch used to ask, "How am I doing?" Instead of a newspaper, it's like looking at a report card every morning.

Not comforting. Not distracting. Not informative. Just that raw competitive grinding of stones in the stomach. Otherwise, have some coffee. Try to read the column about ebooks by Harold Bloom, a bona fide intellectual. He's agin' them. Here's what he thinks of the Internet: He says it "is like the Congo. I know it exists, but I will never go there."

And yet, because he has a new book out this month, they give him the bottom half of a page, with color illustration, to discuss Michael Crichton's downloaded Timeline. He doesn't like it. Not at all. He doesn't like reading words on a screen, and he makes sure we know he's written his piece on a yellow legal pad with a ballpoint pen.

It's always a yellow legal pad for some reason. It's what real writers are proud to write on. One side of the paper only, I presume. Then it's off to one's handy typist to transpose and then -- ah, then! -- the real editing work can begin in earnest. Circles and arrows and slashes, oh my. And then back to the handy typist for a fresh look-see.

The writing life. The rules these men live by.

Harold Bloom once visited one of my poetry classes and gave a guest lecture on several of Emily Dickinson's shorter poems. My poetry professor, himself a world-famous man, was giddy as a schoolgirl at the thought of Mr. Bloom's august presence in the room with all of us. The room was crowded and you could hear a pin drop.

My kingdom for a pin. There was plenty of low-level mumbling, but there was no poem there -- only an elaborate and unfortunate explication and enough bombast to lift the Andrea Doria. I know that if Emily had been privileged to attend that particular lecture, she would have been totally at sea. She would have doodled.

Moving on. I didn't really garden but I did wash out a few clay pots. I'm getting ready to garden. It's a grand scheme. Instead, I watered everything. That's counts, too.

Out and about, laundry, watch a little TV. Ditto. The meal? Linguini alla olio and do I even have to note that I didn't feel like taking out a container for the leftovers so I ate them instead? It was just faster. Now, I have that particular hunk of guilt to digest.

And so it goes, as night falls, here in the Congo.

(The glittery Krystyn has given me these Harold Balloonians. My heart leaps with joy!)