Finally, I had some bread that’s actually bread. It’s homemade and sold at the farmer’s market. All the ingredients are simple and normal. Flour, salt, sugar, yeast, egg. It almost made me want to start baking bread if only the activity weren’t spoiled by the pro-lockdown crowd.

Translation: mommy didn’t love me but I’m too immature to recognize it. We need to treat such people with compassion but be firm in reminding them that their dysfunction is their private issue and should be resolved with a psychologist paid for with their own money.

There’s altogether too much of people strewing around their mental rot because they are too cheap or too stupid to seek paid help in cleaning up their psyches.

Today Klara asked me if the grass minds that we walk on it. She would have really enjoyed more of her grandfather’s company because he’s the only person I ever knew who could understand this kind of concern.

The downside to being capable of deriving great joy from the most mundane things is that you personalize them and feel both the good and the bad more intensely.

For a translation company I’m working for, I need to do certification tests where you get a series of sentences and their translations. Each translation contains one mistake, and you have to edit the sentence to eliminate it.

I have easily passed the tests in the Ukrainian=>English and Ukrainian=>Spanish language pairs but I completely bombed the Ukrainian=>Russian test. I tried English=>Russian and bombed, too. There are three tries for each test, and the tests are very simple. So I now failed the Russian test 6 times.

Apparently, I speak the language too well. I can’t identify what the test-makers see as the single mistake I need to correct. I see 5 mistakes in each sentence and have no idea which one to choose.

People are scared of meditation because they think it means sitting all slackjawed, staring at the wall and trying not to think about how much you’d rather scroll through your Twitter feed. But there are many other types of meditation that work better for people who are incapable of feeling anything other than antsy and bored during regular meditation sessions.

My version of meditation is bullet journaling. I find it sensationally relaxing. In my job, I work with words, so having a little outlet that’s not about words but colors and shapes is very pleasing. Ten-fifteen minutes a day make an enormous difference. If I’m worried about a public appearance or a meeting, decorating the notes I made for it in my bullet journal turns the meeting into an enjoyable event. Or there’s this class I really didn’t want to teach. I started putting the class plans in the bullet journal and decorating them into the infinity. I now really enjoy the class. My brain associates it with the enjoyable act of decorating my planner.

In Florida, I used another form of meditation where I’d float on my back in the swimming pool and observe how the sharp edge of a tall building sliced up the sky. Two minutes of that were an equivalent of an hour-long nap. Hardcore.