N is telling me about an immigrant whose parents brought him here when he was 13.

“This poor guy!” N says. “He hasn’t been able to fit in at all. I’ve watched 10 YouTube videos by him, and all he does is complain. Everything here is bad, the medical care is too expensive, the politics is ridiculous, literally everything is worse than in Europe, the quality of life is shit compared to France or Sweden.”

“Gosh,” I said, “this fellow fits in a lot more than we do. He’s a typical American! And he doesn’t even know it. Which is very typical, too.”

You know how it’s popular these days for companies or entrepreneurs to figure out their why. This means the deep reason why they do their work, the profound motivation.

Do you know your why? Do you know the reason you are dedicating most of your time to whatever it is you are dedicating it?

I never had any doubt about my why. I’ve been deprived of my culture and my language and given something I never wanted instead of it. So I’m trying to fill the void with other languages and cultures. What are Basques, in the end, if not people who in circumstances very similar to those of Ukrainians did a much better job preserving, creating, dreaming up – who cares, really? – a culture, a literature, a language, and a will to exist?

Reader DWeird made an important comment about the weirdness of the expression “going to the gym” that seems to imply that the main difficulty is to set out in the direction of the gym. The comment points towards an important distinction among different groups of underachievers.

1. The first group is called “Failure to Launch” and it consists of people who have difficulty beginning to work on a task. They delay and find a million explanations why they can’t start already and need more time to prepare. Once they actually start, they are extremely effective and do everything faster than anybody else. But dawdling before the start eats up a lot of their energy. These are the anxious people, the OCD people.

2. The second group is “Failure to Execute.” These folks start easily and often. But then they run out of steam. They can never follow through and get bogged down in details. They lose interest fast even if they were very enthusiastic at first. They run into a mountain of unsurmountable obstacles and finally just give up. And start from the beginning. These are folks with low self-esteem and feelings of guilt that eat up their psychological energy. They are also fearful of being as successful as they know they can be. The loss of interest is an act of self-sabotage aimed at avoiding success. The reason they avoid success is because there are people in their lives who will be threatened by their success.

3. The third group is “Failure to Disengage.” These are the people who don’t know when to stop. They’ll fuss over an article for years and never submit. They’ll miss the deadline for a report because they are still putting on the finishing touches. They’ll kill their own pitch because they’ll keep selling long past the time they should have shut up. These are the folks who can’t end a hopeless relationship and keep going to the same extremely problematic partner they’ve broken up with a hundred times already. These are people with control issues. They can’t relinquish control over what they perceive as their. As the previous two groups, this is also away of dealing with anxiety.

Of course,you don’t have to be strictly one group or the other. Some people are two and even all three. This depends on the degree of anxiety one has.

I’m notoriously group one. Once I start, I’m an animal. I execute, carry through, and complete extremely well. But I spend a lot more time delaying the start than actually doing it. So as the always insightful DWeird pointed out, going to the gym is a challenge for me precisely because getting myself physically into the building that houses the gym is an adventure.

I’m starting a spring clean challenge that I will do for 18 days. Bonus points for those who can figure out why it’s this particular number of days. The challenge points are:

1. Going to the gym every day for the duration.

2. Doing the Korean beauty routine every day.

3. Not buying any new books for myself no matter what happens.

4. Reading 40 pages of an Anthony Trollope novel.

I also have a bunch of other things in the challenge that I’m not ready to make public.

Every year, the end of the academic year has me bug-eyed and a mental wreck. I want to avoid it this year by concentrating my attention on something completely different. The challenge is aimed at distracting me to the point where I’ll forget to get overwhelmed by the end of the academic year.

What’s fascinating to me is that Obama’s and Trump’s policy on Russia clearly comes from the same source. It’s a crescendo of silent blows that go from a tiny pinprick to harsher and harsher ones. The consistency and the smoothness of the operation makes it clear that the people we see on TV are not the ones who create foreign policy. We all knew it was the case during the Cold War. But it’s fascinating that there is still a consistent policy independent of any particular administration or party. Now the really fascinating question is what it is. What is its organizing principle?

When you are not a native speaker, people keep finishing your sentences for you. Even when you have no trouble expressing yourself. The smallest of pauses one might make is interpreted as a struggle with insufficient vocabulary. As if people with enormous vocabularies never needed to think about what they are saying.

The perfect breakfast for me is the kind you get at a typical American diner. Two eggs overeasy, potatoes, sausage, two pieces sourdough toast, one for butter and one for grape jam. And an appointment with a laprascopic surgeon in July.

Obviously, now I can’t look at my perfect breakfast unless I call an ambulance before taking the first bite. I’ve been trying to get into cereals but there are so many that I just get confused. Which ones are not completely unhealthy? I love Fruit Loops but even I’m not so clueless that I don’t understand that they are not really food.

So, folks. What do you eat for breakfast? Even if I can’t mimic you, I can at least read about people enjoying their breakfasts.

One of the most wonderful moments in a woman’s day is the moment when she can take off the tights. It’s almost whether wearing tights just to experience the relief of getting rid of them.

Everything hurts my gallbladder. Everything except for steamed fish and steamed vegetables. And I used to love them, but after eating them twice a day every day for months, I can’t look at them any more.

The only thing I can it that somehow magically doesn’t hurt me is food at the Indian buffet. I don’t know how it works because I’m sure it’s really not fat-free at all, to put it mildly. But it has no bad effect on me. It was the same when I had severe gestational diabetes. I couldn’t eat anything without my sugar going through the roof. Except for food from that buffet (obviously,I didn’t touch rice or bread.)

The only other thing that has this effect on me is borscht. But borscht is native to my culture, so that makes sense.

Wanted to go to the local Easter brunch. Checked out the menu:

Here’s our menu for the buffet –
** carving, waffle, and omelette stations
**8 types of salad
** Eggs Benedict, scrambled eggs
** french toast bake
** bacon, sausage
** smoked trout crepe
** roasted chicken with mushroom risotto
** black and blue beef wellington
** orecchiette pasta with Sicilian lentil sauce
** roasted vegetable medley
** shaved Brussels sprouts with prosciutto and cranberry
** Duchess potatoes
** white truffle mac-n-cheese
** seafood gumbo
** chicken & wild rice soup
** breakfast pastries and assorted desserts

I can have absolutely nothing whatsoever on this menu before my surgery. Which is in July.