What are your best healthy eating habits?
My favorite menu is always veggie first. That should be healthy, yet I’m persistently overweight.
It’s been thus since childhood, even at the family table where we had a salad served every night.
Bread was always on the family table. We are from Bivše Jugoslavije after all. I know you will blame the bread, carbs are an easy target.
If your pet could talk, what would be the first thing it says?
Could it be anything other than feed me?
Yes, maybe it’s rub my belly, take me for a walk, then feed me.
If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?
It’s unlikely that I could string 365 days – 366 if we count it a leap year – all of which are worthy of a retry.
There are plenty of good days, just that any day to day doesn’t add up to a year-in-the-life. Or perhaps it’s that every year was a good year so it’s hard to make the choice.
It’s intriguing to think about such a proposition. Isn’t it?
What’s a cultural tradition from your country that you love?
Have I mentioned my pursuit of my mother tongue? That I missed being able to retrieve the language I once knew.
This is not to suggest that I am not at home in New York with English as my language of choice.
I just want to be able to speak Serbo -Croatian.
To communicate at least as well as the Stranci who have moved to live in Serbia.
The foreigners who chose a village in Serbia over Rio or Sydney didn’t make their decision lightly.
They did it because of the cultural traditions they found there.
They found more community, a life that was slower and a place where connection truly mattered.
They enjoyed the lifestyle, the pace and being invited to coffee.
Most of them also stayed because they found love in Serbia.
They identify self-sufficiency as a stand-in for selfishness. It is an idol that leads to self-centeredness.
Cultural traditions that transform life to living the life. I look from afar with envy and the regrets of being plucked into a diaspora.
My American life, fully assimilated, is experiencing a split personality, feet in two cultures. Am I having a late- life crisis? Or just reconnecting with my origin story?
How do you deal with uncertainty?
Uncertainty is a feeling which leaves me feeling uncertain.
There is nothing certain but death and taxes.
Which author would you love to have dinner with?
Dostoyevsky popped to mind, but of course, I haven’t any intention of dining with him.
My truth, folks, I have never even cracked open one of the old boy’s books. Not the intellectual I claim to be. Sorry.
Shall I answer your question? I do admire and envy many of the many writers whose works I read. Some are contemporaries and I suppose a dinner would not be impossible.
Now, it’s a party.
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
My tendency is to look for ways to confirm my priors° not contradict them. I don’t think I am unique in wanting a prejudice supported by any facts available.
°’priors‘: This term of art, as it were, came to my attention recently, and my ears pricked up. Isn’t it cool?
Heard on The Bulwark
As a rule, I would catalog the ideas and viewpoints that encourage my way of seeing the world. The song in South Pacific that is imprinted most prominently is You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.
Here’s to Oscar and Richard!
This is, of course, just one reference that I carry around, but you get the point. I have been inspired by more of the American songbook catalog, of course. I get goosebumps while listening to Somewhere from West Side Story. Every time.
For this one, I owe my thanks to the trio of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.
The list is long, and I won’t strain to give credit to all my inspirations.
What’s a common misconception people have about happiness?
People think that happiness is complicated. It’s really just this simple: cat with flowers, for example.
What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?
Don’t overthink it. Shouldn’t the future be unpredictable?
Jules Verne needed to imagine what he’d like to see, but you and I can just sit back in the back of a Waymo and let tomorrow unfold.
Researchers or rocket scientists also may have to shape expectations. It’s their job to look towards improving the future.
If we want to be visionaries, we’ll have to honor what might happen.
If we need to bend the future to the will of the present, we can work towards what we want to happen.
Let’s not run ahead of ourselves.
Leave reading the cards to the $10 psychics.
How do you plan the perfect road trip?
Perfection is a high bar, but we like to think it’s within reach.
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