Back on a low carb diet. My calorie intake plunges to 1250 and I feel fuller than on days I had 4000. It’s the damn carbs that make you feel peckish.

I have this list of goals, 23 to be precise, since am a maniac in some ways, and am getting a little angry with myself for not reaching some of them faster

One of the reasons I enjoy dieting and get some buzz from it is that it gives me a sense of control in a world where I seem to control almost nothing.

Opening X has become a form of self-harm. Am prone to find insidious forms of self-harm. Like migrating to a country like Slovakia. It doesn’t look like self-harm at all, but when you dig a little deeper it totally is.

On X my timeline has completely exploded with ripped apart kids, people literally putting pieces of relatives in shopping bags and genocide lovers trivializing what’s happening in Gaza or even mocking the victims of this ongoing ethnic cleansing operation.

Am still working on my book ‘A journey through my soul with my enemy as my guru’ about my process of making sense of Palestine and Israel and what my thought process on this matter reveals about me as a human being.

Throughout the day I have to be cheerful and engaging with clients. I accept that, I mean, it’s my job. But it does take effort sometimes, when people talk to me about their challenges and a voice inside my head is comparing their plight to, say, what the victims of a genocide are facing.

I honestly don’t want to complain about one of the ways I generate money though. I love most of my students.

Yesterday one of them was surprisingly enthusiastic about trying to help me promote what I write. She concluded that I write a lot, but don’t promote anything I do. She said I need a literary agent.

I taught two kids yesterday and they are just amazing. They are both polyglots and aren’t even 16 yet. Both can somehow do any English accent you can think of. It’s uncanny. Must be a result of YouTube.

One of my students wanted to know the latest on Gaza. I swear I gave her both versions. The pro-Palestinian version and the pro-Israeli version. I told her to choose what she thought was the more plausible course of events.

Oh and when it comes to struggles over boundaries… Am still fighting my own fight there. I have a client who bombards me with every little detail about how he’s trying to bed the maximum number of knock-out babes and just like with my diet I am filtering out anything that doesn’t nurture me mentally too. With my helper syndrome I have also had to drastically reduce the amount of attention I give to people who only contact me to whine about their problems and are rarely interested in solutions.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, for the past two years I have been in a lot of physical pain. My back and my right hip. At times I get so desperate I google what that kind of pain means on a spiritual level. According to some rather esoteric looking websites it’s about not knowing where you are going to and not being able to express your needs and desires. I bet we’re all heading for back and hip pain in this society then.

One of my clients talked about how difficult it is to be satisfied in our culture, because we now have every tool available to us to compare ourselves with the rest of the world’s population. If somebody in Mongolia is driving a bigger car than you, Instagram will kindly inform you.

The other day I watched a neurosurgeon talk about the detrimental effects of influencers.

My client, who could be a model, refuses to pose in the flimsiest strips of textile to get likes on Instragram. She knows it would work to build up a following very fast, but she refuses to do it. I respect that. I don’t know if I’d have the integrity to resist the pull of superficial Instagram fame if I looked good in a bikini.

Today is one of busiest days of the week for me. There are some clients I look forward to and there are some am not particularly fond of. But working with people who are not my ‘blood group’ (very popular Slovak expression these days) shows me who I am, what I do like and what kind of people give me energy and which ones don’t.

One of the keys to make life on this planet bearable is to have a bulldog in your mind which is always looking to catch something positive.