Here’s you lying awake at night, frettin’ & cold-sweatin’: War, plague, relationships, family, global annihilation, etc. Here’s me: What in the heck is that actress’s name? Kate something. Kate … not Winslett. Not Blanchett. Not Capshaw. Goddammit what the. She was on Dawson’s Creek. She was on the cover of that magazine I looked at while waiting in line at the grocery store last weekend. She was in Wonder Boys and The Gift — but not Cate Blanchett! MOTHERFUCKER I AM GOING INSANE.

Ever since I turned thirty, that’s how it’s been. My ability to identify every actor and every movie they’ve ever been in just suddenly went down the drain. It took me like five minutes to come up with Jude Law the other day. Jude Law! This is the sad part of the TV movie where I make a scary fall down the stairs and am forced to admit, teary-eyed, that I’m no longer capable of taking care of myself.

And I think filed under the same category is the fact that I ordered new shoes through the internet yesterday. Identical to the ones I’m currently wearing but which I should no longer be wearing because — since I only ever own one pair of shoes and since they’re usually at least one size too big — because they are broken and cracked and not waterproof at all and feel like I have maybe a strip of leather on the top of my foot and that’s it, in terms of protection and comfort. I know that ordering shoes online might seem kind of modern and cutting-edge but isn’t it more like some broken-down old man getting his polyester pants through mail-order, even though they never fit right and smell a little iffy, but nevertheless doing it year after year because that’s the way he’s always done it and he just doesn’t cotton to these high-tech malls with their people and their Orange Julii?