Compensatory mechanisms are the fuel that propels you through life. You know those days when you just can’t get going, you’ve got no energy, and it feels as if you were bogged down in sand? This feeling tells you that you haven’t refueled in a while, and your engine is sputtering. 

It will never cease to amaze me that people fill their lists of resolutions with promises to sacrifice every single compensatory mechanism they use. It’s like saying, “My car will be unstoppable if I never fill up the tank.” Right you are! Nobody will stop it because it won’t start moving in the first place. 

A compensatory mechanism is everything that gives you energy to live. Some are shared by many people but some are very individual. The problem is that people castrate their own compensatory mechanisms by feeling guilty for them. And they end up in a constant struggle between trying to get energy from the mechanisms and wasting it on the guilt. 

You can figure out what your compensatory mechanisms are by looking closely at the days when you were on fire, super energetic and productive. What happened right before that? Where did the jolt of energy come from? Before doing this exercise, though, resolve to avoid feelings of guilt and refuse to berate yourself for whatever you discover about the mechanisms.

The compensatory mechanisms don’t seem to have much connection with the nature of the trauma you are compensating (and everybody’s got trauma). They come from very early learned patterns of behavior. So for instance if two people were in a car crash, one might compensate by smoking a pack of cigarettes and another by calling 40 friends on the phone and relating the story to them (and what’s curious is that both of these compensatory mechanisms come from the same source, but that’s too arcane to discuss here). Yet another person might compensate by writing poetry about the crash or by a blackout drinking binge. 

And if you just automatically classified these examples into “good” and “bad”, I’ll guess that you often suffer from feelings of guilt and inadequacy. And that’s the worst energy drain of all. This is what makes you feel tired at the end of the day and prevents you from doing more in your life. And please don’t take this statement as a prompt to feel even more guilty. 

Being in public spaces with a child is very different than being there alone. When I’m with Klara, it’s as if the world were transformed by a stroke of magic into a place where everybody is a lot happier, kinder and is glowing with generosity and joy. 

It’s a great culture where people are so into kids. Of course, Klara is so cute, sociable and funny that it’s impossible not to melt in her presence. 

Also, it’s clear that this vocabulary is set up in a way that precludes students from being successful in literature courses because it’s impossible to find works of literature that center on shit like “global village, GDP, community service, youth service, and civic solidarity.”

The textbook can work in Washington’s private schools that cater to the children of legislators. For anybody else, this is a total waste of time.

The textbook we are supposed to use is total crap. Here are the vocabulary topics we must cover in Intermediate Spanish, Part II: technology, cultural diversity, environmental causes, politics, and “world without borders.” As a result, students end up being completely useless when they need to go to a store and buy something or name body parts or participate in daily conversations where globalization and diversity don’t tend to come up a whole lot.

I’m not a big fan of shoes. But I’m obsessed with Camper. I can’t unglued myself from their website. This year’s collection is insane. 

Maybe it’s good that the Montreal trip has been canceled because I would have hauled out the entire store.

Klara loves her daycare teacher Ms. Pattie. All kids love Ms. Pattie because she adores them. She gets an almost religious glow when she clutches a child to her chest. 

All parenting books warn me that it’s normal to feel jealousy when your child shows love for a stranger for the first time but I say, are you fucking kidding me? I’m ecstatic that Klara loves her teacher. 

By the way, everybody who was telling me not to be afraid of daycare and stop looking for a nanny was right. And I was wrong, probably because I saw daycares in Soviet terms. For instance, both N and I were stunned to discover that we can brimg Klara in and take her home whenever it’s convenient. Of course, we are never disruptive of the group schedule but if I feel like not bringing her in on a Thursday, for instance, I can do that.

In reality, this in-between identity that I wrote about in the previous post can be a fantastic asset, especially in terms of one’s value on the job market. But as I said, you need a certain degree of intellectual sophistication to be able to put it to use.

The Manchester bomber is a child of immigrants. Children of immigrants turn into a high-risk group in terms of anxiety, depression, alienation and anger if the parents resist integration or refuse to acknowledge that any emigration is a traumatic rupture that requires compensatory mechanisms. If the parents choose not to compensate, children will have to do it in a much greater degree. 

When such children end up stuck between two cultures, the private and the public, unable fully to move into one or the other and lacking the intellectual sophistication to turn this situation to their benefit, they might act in destructive ways. The nature of the destruction is, of course, mediated by gender and culture. Some people will thwart their own lives, others will visit devastation on their immigrant community, and there will be some who will go to the extremes of the Manchester terrorist. 

None of this is aimed at justifying the act of terror, of course. Everybody has shit to deal with, and it’s everybody’s choice how to do that. 

At first, I thought yay, I’m finally too old to be harassed in the Dominican Republic, so I’ll get to enjoy my visit there in the Fall.

But then I remembered that middle-aged women go to the Dominican Republic and Cuba in droves for purposes of sexual tourism. Does that mean I’ll be harassed even more than in the past?

The first time I was in Havana I was 23, and the harassment was so bad that there were days I wouldn’t leave the room. Not even to eat (and we all know how I feel about eating.) I’m not a shrinking violet and I don’t see every smile and compliment as offensive. But this was relentless harassment that was very hard to deal with. 

Everybody is asking about the famous diet. OK, here is the example of what I ate today. 

Breakfast: I made a frittata with beet greens, tomatoes, zucchini, a teaspoon of garbanzo flour dissolved in water, and 2 egg whites. And some cracked rosemary. 

Lunch: lentil soup with spinach and zucchini. And an ear of young corn.

Dinner: zucchini and patisson noodles (I bought a ton of zucchini at the farmers market and now it goes into everything) with tomato and fresh basil sauce. 

I eat raw cucumbers and radishes at every meal because I always do. 

I’ve been on the diet for exactly a month tomorrow, and I lost 10 lbs.