I’m trying to get my life in order. Really. Some of you may remember the last time I tried to get my life in order, which resulted in the rather impertinent little green book. This was an effective taskmaster but did nothing for my overall organization or joie de vivre, so I’m trying again with a system called Getting Things Done, an all-encompassing scheme for Getting On Top Of Things Once And For All. So now, the dusty pyramid of papers in the corner of my office—the one that has kindly given a home to a bushel of dog hairs and a passel of spiders—is joined on the floor by a heap of organizational equipment I bought at Staples. These are not interacting as well as I had hoped, but the spiders seem overjoyed at this opportunity for expansion.

In other news, I got so much Done over the past few days that I decided I had time to go see the famed EPISODE THREE yesterday. Following George Lucas’s previous two cinematic disasters, I was not expecting much from this, and indeed, the latest film’s major flaws include genuinely cringe-inducing dialogue, the eerie sense it was plotted by a committee of fanboys (“Wouldn’t it be neat if Yoda had a lightsaber fight with the Emperor!”), and the narrative annoyance of dotting every “i” that leads up to A New Hope. And yet, it somehow transcended the sum of its parts to the extent that I didn’t spend two hours actively wishing it were over, as I did in Episodes One and Two.

The best part of any Star Wars movie is always the first four seconds, when “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .” fades in, and the opening chord of the score rattles the theater walls. It always makes me cry, dragging me back to that day I was six years old and seeing it all for the first time. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a story about this life-altering moment, which is, I think, why we all stick with it through thick and thin (mostly thin).

I’m not sure anyone imagined at the time that the Star Wars “universe” would become so complex, a turn of events that was highlighted for me yesterday as I waited for the movie to start. The woman sitting behind me was trying to describe to her companion what had happened in the previous two movies that lead up to this third (either because he had not seen them or, like me, he had seen them and found them instantly forgettable). “I watched the DVD of the second one yesterday,” she said, “but I couldn’t see the whole thing because I had to finish cleaning up after the kids and making dinner. But from what I gather, they sent that Padme character to live by a lake somewhere, but all they gave her to wear was a bunch of evening gowns. And I don’t know who was cooking and cleaning for her and stuff because you never see any servants, but someone had to be doing her hair . . .”

Or maybe See-Threepio learned how to braid.