It is five in the morning on Christmas Day. The windows beside my bed are dark but for their frames; each one a pale yellow rim of lamplight. Turning on the lamp might have been a poor choice. The first of the wasps are crawling out from their lair behind the radiator, and somewhere out there in the gloom a ladybug just lifted off with a rattling sound . Sleep has not been forthcoming.  For whatever reason, a ragged queue of unfinished thoughts have been traipsing along behind me since we arrived in Maine, and I, thinking I might exorcise the louder ones with a paragraph or two, began groping around in the dark for my journal.  Hence the lamp.

But there's no avoiding the wasps. Now a gang of three is slowly "thummmmmmm"-ing in slow circles around the lamp and it's only a matter of time before this ragged bedside copy of The Doctor's Dilemma is used to deal out some ruthless insect death. The skin on my legs is beginning to pebble up with adrenaline. How something so small could command this much fear ...

There. The Doctor's Dilemma now features antennae and a faint stain.

It was only when we got very close to Waldoboro last night - icy pines leaning in to our headlights from both sides of the road - that I began to mull over the fact that I do not lead the sort of life you read about in magazine articles. Not that this is a particularly troubling observation, mind you. I had just finished reading a story by Ariel Levy about that one time she gave birth in a Mongolian hotel bathroom. It's a horrific episode - the child survived for mere minutes - but is rendered clearly and compassionately and one gets the sense that it could be pitched exactly as is to a film producer. All this despite - or perhaps because of - her use of a voice that (understandably) comes across as a bit distant, disaffected. In short, it is a beautifully rendered moment and the fact of that beauty triggered the next thought-domino (this happens during long car rides), which was that her writing seems to fulfill nearly all of the requirements laid out by David Foster Wallace in the article I had read before Levy's.

That one had been by written by Adam Plunkett for n+1, and was about a class Wallace had taught at Pamona College, just a few months before his suicide.

His principle of empathy governed all that he taught us, even when he taught with tough love. Make your comments maximally helpful. Never sacrifice clarity. Don't make the reader work unnecessarily - parse unnecessary clauses, wade through unnecessary data. He wrote on the syllabus that the purpose of good writing wasn't self-expression, "or whatever your teacher told you in high school," but communication, meaningful communication between two human beings."

Which are all criteria that I have difficulty with, but which Levy, with spare, heartbreaking sentences like

His lovely lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world.

seemed to adhere to with near perfection. After reading her story, I felt I knew, or had at least the smallest inkling of what giving birth in a Mongolian hotel bathroom was like, and, furthermore, why that knowledge was important. She had carefully led me in to that room, made me watch the most beautiful moment a mother can experience end in mute terror, and then with her quiet, unflinching prose had held my hand through the next several months. A voice deadened, certainly, but in such a way as to make that simple, raw connection between writer and reader feel all the more alive.

At this point it was dark outside, and as cars crested hills ahead of us, their headlights caught in birch boughs, thick with twigs sheathed in ice, and turned them for a fading second in to flaming chandeliers, sparkling brightly above the road. Mom and I were in the back seat, and with some squinting I realized that she was still awake, her head touching the window to look up at stars. I followed suit, and by god there were stars, a whole sky of sharp white flecks that spread right down to the ragged empty edge. And I thought about stars and empathy and Mongolia and recalled a third story, this one about promises, how iPhones are made, and the lives we so easily forget when staring down at our screens.

The third story started out in a Kathmandu dairy factory that had somehow been reached by the promises of a rich man on a bright stage far, far away. In this case, the rich man was Apple Computer's very own director of marketing, a pinkish, blow-dried executive named Phil Schiller, who last year revealed to the millions of us out there waiting for the iPhone 5 that instead of delivering a host of new features, this time we would be getting our new phones a whole month earlier. And, though it's embarrassing to admit now, this was actually thrilling. I remember being thrilled. But I don't remember ever thinking about what, exactly, Phil really meant when he made that promise, or just how he planned to make good on it. In fact, beyond daydreams of fondling that lithe little device, I doubt I did much thinking at all.

Well, thanks to the efforts of Cam Simpson, a journalist for Business Week, I would find out that to execute delicious little promises like 'one month earlier', Phil would need to be in command of a staggeringly large supply chain that was able - is able - to reach in to the life of an extremely poor Nepalese dairy worker and offer him a job so tantalizing that he would leave Nepal and go $1000 in to debt pursuing it. This guy is real, his name is Bibek, and his story is hardly unique. Bibek would end up locked in an dingy apartment building in Malaysia without food, passage back home, or even the job itself because of Phil's promise, and what is rather uncomfortable about all this is that Phil's promise was really just a translation of my promise to pay Phil to continue making promises.

And the dark magic thrumming below Christmas commerce these days is that I'm able to connect Phil and his promises to that phone without considering the cost to Bibek and his wife. Or other Nepalese guys sucked up in to the manufacture of my toys, or the thousands if not millions of Chinese and Malaysian and Brazilian guys and girls bent over assembly lines. These are whole armies of displaced laborers who can only be effective if they are hidden; whose existence is both necessary to the creation of my toy and detrimental to my enjoyment of it, which means that vast, vast sums of money must be spent buttressing my enjoyment with advertising that depicts a scrubbed race of smiling vacationers who are as far from Bibek as the those tasked with creating the advertisements can imagine. Fantasy families with bright teeth and scrubbed looking children. Families who are supposed to tap in to a collectively held ideal that causes me and mine to pine and whimper and buy our way a little bit closer to the flame; an ideal that is alluring in part because it appears to exist in a cleaner, easier, entirely separate universe. But it can't, obviously, and looking up at the sky with mom I had a moment of wondering what the stars above Bibek's home looked like - whether they shone as brightly, or whether his wife looked up at them when she had missed him, so many thousands of miles away.

I have now killed no fewer than ten wasps, and poor old Doctor's Dilemma is looking gruesome indeed. It is hard to wipe blood from a paper sword. God knows where they're coming from, but thankfully these blows to their brethren hasn't woken The Swarm, which I imagine as a huge, seething nest somewhere below the floorboards. In any event, morning is upon us. Across nearby windows a slate gray light is burning away the honeyed reflection of my lamp, and it occurs to me that in order to fit all those chimneys in before dawn, Santa must be moving west.