Janet

As a sport, yoga is definitely not all about competition and progressing to a higher level, which is good, because it forces many of us to let go of our annoying tendencies to be competitive and drive ourselves to a higher level. Or so I thought. Semester by semester, I've been moving into a smug yoga zone wherein I started to believe I possessed core muscles that could support my actual body weight. Fortunately, last week I had a very Zen experience that brought me back to my center.

Welcome to my first restaurant review column, wherein I will describe an exquisite meal I enjoyed last Sunday evening. Unfortunately, I really can't tell you the names of any of the dishes I sampled. I can't expound on the origin of the recipes or the inventive things the chef did to change them up. I can say for sure, however, that some of the dishes were made with chicken, some were made with beef and some were made with the relentless, fiery tears of the scorned Goddess of Red Pepper Heaven.

There was a time when I could easily lure my three young children in from their summer-night street games with the bait of the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week. " We would all gather on the family room couch to watch the frighteningly close-up, spectacular shots of feeding frenzies — fins and teeth chopping the water into a Bass-o-matic froth filmed by a brave diver in an underwater cage. A narrator — with all the inflection and dynamism of Dick Cheney — would relate key facts about the class Chondrichthyes as well as salient environmental and habitat issues.

A window in my office cubicle looks directly onto the roof of the building next door. Ordinarily, this would not be a particularly captivating sight, but the building next door is having its roof replaced, and for the past two weeks I have been able to look right into the weathered faces of the guys who have been working on it. In a way, it's like my cubicle has been annexed to a strange skyway connecting the typical American indoor office worker...

Is good luck something you can amass and store up for future use, by simply acquiring large numbers of items that are widely regarded as good-luck charms? I certainly hope so, because we in Janet's World are positively stockpiling good luck around here. And I'm talking tasteful good luck, not tacky good luck. For example, when you queue up at my residence early Monday morning for the opportunity to touch a good-luck Gilbert on his or her way to work, you will not have to wade through distasteful piles of dingy rabbits' feet or rusty horseshoes.

When I sit down to write this weekly column, the first hilarious thing I do is open up the "Janet's World" template I've created on my computer and change the newspaper run-date in the "header" field. I'm sure you appreciate this fascinating window into the creative process. But when I did that today, I was transported for more than a few minutes. I could suddenly smell the hot slate of the front stoop where I sat most August nights waiting for the neighborhood kids to come out after dinner.

These days, I work in a cubicle that is roughly the size of an upscale restaurant's wheelchair-accessible bathroom stall. I make this comparison because I know you can appreciate it; we have all used the wheelchair-accessible stall at least once when no one was looking, just to enjoy the roominess as well as the considerably cleaner sink and guaranteed-to-be-stocked toilet paper dispenser. So now you can picture my workspace, and over the past weeks I've been organizing it and making it my own. At first, I simply focused on finding economical places for storing my purse and water bottle, a box of tissues and an assortment of healthy snacks.