Butter. If I’m feeling extravagant, butter and jam, but that’s only if I’m pushing the boat out.
How do you feel about public speaking?
I hate it. I think I’ve said this before, maybe on the podcast, but I am very, very bad at public speaking – it makes me anxious and uncomfortable for days ahead of time, and I am one of those nervous speakers who gulps in the wrong places and perspires a lot. Performance is very much not for me, at least not in a live setting, which I wish was not the case; being a good public speaker, like being able to play a musical instrument, is one of those skills that I desperately wish I possessed, yet not enough to actively do something about.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, also poured derision on the Republican letter in a statement expressing astonishment that members of Congress would seek to undermine a US administration by writing directly to a foreign power, and suggesting that the letter’s authors had much to learn about international and even US law… Zarif, like President Hassan Rouhani and several other senior members of the Iranian government, holds an advanced degree from a western university, and appears to have taken umbrage at the condescending tone of the senators’ letter. He delivered his own lecture in response.
‘I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law,’ he wrote.
From here.Everything about this Republican letter to Iran is astounding, and not in a good way.
If I Wrote For Marvel Comics #1
March 10
I’ve written before, I’m sure, about my hatred of waiting for a phone call that you know is going to happen — the way in which the foreknowledge ends up filling my head, making it impossible for me to think about anything else, filling me with both frustration and anxiety before the call itself. This is true even when I’m the one that controls the timing of the call, as is the case today — I have a window during which I can call a mysterious someone for a mysterious something (I know who and why, but it’s not something I want to talk about publicly just yet) — knowing that I can make the call whenever I want (within reason) doesn’t make me love phone calls any more.
And yet, there’s something so surreal about the call, or at least, the reason for the call, that I find myself wanting to laugh and think more kindly about it. Occasionally, something pops up and you’re left thinking, well, this is absolutely ridiculous and so I should follow it through for that reason alone. It’s approaching events for the purposes of future anecdotes, perhaps, but in this case, the potential anecdotal experience along will be worth however much frustration and anxiety are currently on offer and more. I just have to keep reminding myself about that beforehand, over and over again.