Tomorrow morning, my girlfriend, my dog and I are taking a rental car up into New England to go stay with a friend at Martha’s Vineyard. This will be another one of my attempts to relax, unwind etc., and to shake myself free of this semi-confused haze that I feel like I’ve been carrying around for months. Wouldn’t it be great if I could return completely refreshed and with a renewed zest for life?

Curiously, I’m hoping to use this little getaway from the city to catch up on my backlog of New Yorker issues. It’s mildly ironic that the city’s most prominent periodical namesake is often best read when far away from its five boroughs. Actually, it’s going to be a “New Yorker”-themed weekend, as I will also be trying to make it through a big chunk of Ben Yagoda’s “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.” I’ve been stuck at the hundred page mark in this excellent chronicle of the development of that magazine for a few weeks now, and I’m actually quite anxious to get back to it. So now you know.