start in on

Stop down for a 20-minute meditation break I’ll usually meditate for a second time before I start in on cooking or whatever the evening’s activities are going to be.

A lot of my gay friends, particularly the eccentric ones, will say the same thing, because when you’re walking down the street looking weird, you never know who might start in on you.

Watching it unfold, Bermann said she had been reminded of lines from “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth: “The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.”

He was already starring in big international productions that made little use of his talents, and he was about to start in on the television work that would occupy much of the last two decades of his career.

But this year we’ve also had fires in California so vast that their smoke turned the sky an eerie orange in the San Francisco Bay area; punishing heat waves in many parts of the country; a devastating derecho in Iowa; and so many Atlantic hurricanes that those in charge of such things ran out of A-to-Z names and had to start in on the Greek alphabet for the surplus.