I'll save the world later

As my husband says, (finally) a useful post. No, just joking. He just said it may be worth sharing this recipe with you: homemade breadsticks. Grissini in Italian. Have you ever found yourself found yourself with some friends coming for lunch, no ideas for an appetizer, no time to go foodshopping and no time to do elaborate things? If the answer is yes, you are probably the parent of a baby. Welcome to the club, just know you are not alone. Jokes apart, I often find myself getting peckish in the middle of the morning or afternoon. Or after dinner. Yes, I am often peckish. Cookies and chocolate are very attractive but not the healtiest choice and also sometimes I crave for salty snacks. But time is a precious resource these times and I need something simple to prepare. Therefore I did some experiments and invented a recipe for homemade grissini. Here you go: Ingredients: - 300 g flour - more or less 100 ml cold water - 1 tbsp olive oil (EVO) - 1 tsp salt - ground rosemar...

So, it's Halloween time...yay!!! Just kidding. I've grown up in Italy, where Halloween is not part of the culture. The first time I heard about it was probably reading Peanuts and all the comics with the big pumpkin. Until recent years, Halloween stayed where it belonged. Not in Italy or among Italian people, where superstition is rampant and celebrating death and horror was taboo. The times, they are a'changing, apparently. I am not in Italy any more, but I hear that celebrating Halloween is now very trendy, almost compulsory. There are even parties in school for this occasion as (maybe even more than) for Christmas. Anyway, the place where I live now is no exception and today in the canteen people where talking about the thematic parties of the week end. But I am old and grumpy and boring. So this post won't have much to do with Halloween. The only thing I like about Halloween are...pumpkins. I like eating very much. And luckily enough, I like cooking...

I have started this post some months ago. I have drafted it, thought a lot about it, changed it, deleted many paragraphs, rephrased ideas... In short, it's a difficult one. You might be surprised by the title of this post. If you browse the thousands of blogs and articles on personal development, you will find plenty of useful tips on how to develop resilience, strategies to forge your stamina through the fires of hell and slogans to never, never, never give up. They can be very useful. Why this title then? I find it's easy to follow the mass and encourage people to develop resilience and go go go and conquer the world. But in the end you have to be honest, at least with yourself: can you go on forever? If you are looking for popular or easy solutions, probably this is not the blog for you. This is not a blog for the people who pass by things and just say "fuck it", for people who like to post pictures on social networks with their mouth wide open, for p...

"Are you looking for new challenges? If you are creative, resilient and have good personal skills, this is the job for you." This could be the beginning of the job ad for the best job in the world. Some years ago, I was the right hand of a big boss. I had a lot of responsibilities: coordinating people, drafting policies of the company and taking care of the "behind the curtains" for my boss. Dirty work included. In other words I had to do everything to give him visibility and let him make "bella figura" [untranslatable Italian expression which means more or less "good impression"]. Among many other tasks, I had to write speeches for my boss. He was considered an excellent speaker and he was invited to many conferences to share his wiseness. Let's give credit where it's due, he was quite comfortable in public speaking and he was able to improvise when necessary. Writing speeches required long researches and a lot of extra hours of work...

Looking around on the web, on news and social networks you will probably have seen so many articles about the importance of having a good breakfast and what you should or should not have for starting the day well. In particulart in the last times, facebook - just to name one - proposes me at least one article a week about this subject.  It usually comes from the Huffington Post...by the way, if any of you knows how to filter it out, please let me know. Their titles are very intriguing, I would even define them fire alarm questions, then I open them and they say such trivialities that they make me feel so stupid for having opened them. So you could wonder: do we need another article about this? No, indeed you don't need it. So why am I wasting your time - but also marginally my time - talking about such a banal and hackneyed subject? Because it's for sure hackneyed, but it's not banal at all. Well, I used to think that it was banal indeed. Everybody knows that...

Some time ago I started thinking: yeees, it would be nice to put all these chunks of personal development into a blog. And then everyday I found perfectly valid excuses to postpone it: naah, today I'm tired, I'm not inspired, it's sunny, it's cloudy, too much work, I have to put the 200 shirts in my wardrobe in chromatic order, and what should I start with?, etc. Thinking about it, I could have drafted a list of them, they were so pertinent. And then days went by, the ideas where still there in the back of my brain and the blog had not seen the light. And then...well, something happened. I couldn't call it an epyphany, it was just a small event. One day, I will tell you the full story. For the moment, let's say that, even if I still had a looong list of excuses to postpone it, I thought: here is the perfect subject to start my blog: procrastination. Let's go live. Procrastination. Ever heard of it? If any of you has never experienced it, raise your ha...