My tiny town has a menorah lighting ceremony ceremony next to its Christmas tree and one reasonably naked busker. My union president, walking briskly toward me on the main drag, urged me, “Go get a doughnut!”

Not many people know this about me: I don’t eat doughnuts. It’s not that I’ve joined the Doughnut Temperance League (meetings Tuesday nights at the Best Buy near the feed store), it’s that I have no metabolism and the fastest way to double in size is eat a doughnut or six. I don’t really miss the doughnuts I don’t eat.  So when I was encouraged to get a doughnut, that is exactly what I did not do.

“Ta,” you say, “this is fascinating and all – everything about you is! – but what does it have to do with – for example – me?” I haven’t got the faintest idea, really. At the moment, I’m sitting at a desk, waiting for someone to finish a task so I can resume doing a very large job where I work at the unnamed university. Waiting is a skill. I do not have it! It is taking a great deal of effort on my part not to skitter across this room, loom over the working someone and bellow, “ARE YOU FINISHED? BECAUSE MY MIND IS WANDERING AND I AM TALKING ABOUT DOUGHNUTS.” You can see where that might be a workplace no-no. And I am so hoping my new supervisor won’t have HR on speed dial.