Weeding the garden for one hour in the morning is my new meditation. Of course I prefer the no-tools method so I can feel the resistance of the roots giving way and 'win' hundreds of times before 9AM. There's something inexpressibly satisfying about weeding this way but my obsession with it decommissioned my right arm last summer with 'tennis elbow'.

So I was motivated to be open to the advice of a professional gardener: she recommended using a hoe which is not nearly as satisfying but a lot faster. As I whacked the weeds with a hoe the other morning, I pondered why the easier softer way (the hoe) doesn't appeal to me. Words from forty years ago filled my head. A fellow student at the Beaux-Arts weighed in on the subject of my disastrous love life: "Anne, tu aimes les plats épicés?" (trans: "Anne, do you like spicy food?")

I remember being annoyed at her suggestion that my attraction to difficult men was just one manifestation of an integral part of my character. But it's funny that this line has stuck in my craw lo these decades. Maybe it explains my fixation on taking a popular but obscure micro-budget web series from its audience of thousands to global domination. I haven't given up.

That's dirt splattered on my face and hands.