I think I'm learning Japanese, I really think so

One of my big goals is to learn Japanese. I like the word polyglot (isn't it funny?), and I'd love to be able to refer to myself as one. If I maintain my tenuous grasp of the English and Spanish languages, re-learn the German I studied briefly so that I am capable of doing more than simply ordering bratwurst and hot chocolate, and add Japanese into the mix, I will achieve polyglot status.

Aside from my affection for anime, video games, and Japanese culture in general, I decided to focus on learning Japanese for a couple of reasons. My sister and my boyfriend both studied Japanese for several years and are fluent, so A) I'll have people to practice with, and B) I can use my dim competitive streak to my advantage. I also plan to visit Japan at some point - hopefully next year - and it would help to be able to say things other than cat, very, and cute. (I exasperate my sister by using very - "totemo" - as a sort of catch-phrase. I pronounce it incorrectly, making it rhyme with totoro, and use it at inappropriate times. I love it.)

Yesterday I started listening to part of a language learning lesson in an attempt to gradually absorb conversational Japanese. I bought the set meant to allow you to learn a new language on your commute, despite my commute being about two miles. (I was planning to re-start walking to work, which would have made the commute 45 minutes instead of ten, but the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.) Anyhow. I learned the word for car, and how to say that it exists and is little; there were a few more words that I should have picked up, which I didn't exactly, but I made up for this by improvising. My boyfriend listened as I showed off my new vocabulary, and explained that most of what I'd just said wasn't actually Japanese. Oops.

I could at this point say that I'm bad at Japanese, or simply that I haven't devoted enough time and energy to learning it yet. They're both currently true, but latter explanation is definitely more optimistic. Here's to learning proper Japanese, and to the long, slow crawl towards polyglotism!

Killing time

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

I decided to go through my email draft folder this afternoon. I had about 60 drafts in it, and I didn't have the foggiest idea what most of them were. I tend to send myself emails of things I like or want to remember - recipes, quotes, Craigslist postings - and I found lots of random stuff in my unsent drafts.

One of the treasures I unearthed was the quote at the beginning of the post. It reminds me a little too much of the rare workday in which very little happens, and how much I dislike those days. I experience the loss of time more keenly now than I did when I was younger, and I do my best not to let moments slip by when I could be doing more. This is not to say that I multitask - I try very hard not to, though it's a difficult habit to break - but if I have a spare moment I'll try to combine things that don't cancel each other out.

I used to use my email draft system and a lot of notebooks filled with scribbles and sticky notes. I've since gravitated towards Evernote to store everything from grocery lists to potential blog post topics. I miss notebooks to some degree, but in general I feel like this is the time period I've been waiting for all my life: Tablet computers, programs that save to the cloud, social networks that let you keep up with people you otherwise might have lost touch with between reunions, and technology that allows you to be portable without completely disconnecting from everything. There's so much to fill our time with. I guess the challenge is to keep from oversaturating ourselves to the point where we don't mind watching time die.

Blah de vivre

Today has just been kind of a "meh" day. I had trouble concentrating at work, and in general I've been tired and unmotivated. I decided to push ahead and try to get stuff done anyway.

* I've been meaning to do laundry for a few days now, and finally decided to just get it over with. I'm very happy to have clean clothes, even if I've only folded two-thirds of it so far.

* I cooked dinner today, even though all I wanted to do was order a pizza. Warmed up some rice and a can of black beans, reheated some macaroni and cheese in the oven, and chopped up an acorn squash to use as part of my mother's recipe for "calabasitas." One of my goals is not to let any of the veggies in my fridge go to waste, so I'm forcing myself to be creative. There are probably fancier ways of cooking acorn squash, but whatever works.

* I gave my cat's litterbox a much-needed scooping. I can't believe I let that creature sleep on my pillow.

* I've written a blog post. I promised myself I'd blog every weekday, and so far I have, however devoid of insight or content it might be. I see no need to be a perfectionista when staying within the letter of the law does just fine.

I've set the bar pretty low today so I can just step over it and fall into my pillows, but there's always tomorrow!

Regret vs. dreams, part 1

Today's quote, courtesy of John Barrymore by way of Lifehacker: "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

While Lifehacker took the "age ain't nothing but a number" approach, I instantly thought of the opposite: no matter how young you are, and how much time you theoretically have left, you're just waiting out the clock if you've given up on making your dreams a reality. By this metric, I know some people who have been old a very long time. I was one of those people once. More on that tomorrow later.

Katamari as a life philosophy

I'm a writer, my sister's an artist, and my brother's a musician. Our parents, meanwhile, are doctors. My siblings and I don't have medical school - a hugely formative experience in our parents' lives - as a frame of reference, so their stories of triumph wouldn't have quite the same resonance if they weren't tweaked a bit. Our dad is good at this, but some stuff still gets lost in day-to-day translation, namely what we plan to do with our lives and how we intend to get there.

I had the opportunity to talk with my sister the other day about communicating with people. My sister, who's studying animation and graphic design, pointed out that it can be difficult for people grounded in certain disciplines to use broad terms that aren't necessarily field-specific, which is why it's so important for people to learn as much as they can about a lot of different things. She hit upon a brilliant approach to acquiring knowledge.

"If you eat, breathe, sleep one thing and nothing else," my wise sister said, "you're not really expanding yourself into a fuller person. It takes a lot of things to make a good person, and that's why it's important to read scientific articles, keep up with news, read the history, learn the mythology and learn something new every day. I believe that people should be like Katamari."

She refers to Katamari Damacy, a popular video game series. For those not familiar with the game, a katamari is a magical, sticky ball one rolls around through various levels to create an even bigger ball made out of everything from thumb tacks to shrubberies to cows. (Watch this to see how this plays out.) The goal is to make a planet of some sort, and ultimately to avoid beatings by the King of All Cosmos, who's kind of... eccentric, shall we say.

I love the idea of my mind as a katamari, collecting as much knowledge as possible to become a "well-rounded" person and able to share what I've learned with the people around me. I discovered that Katamari Damacy even (roughly) translates from Japanese to "clump soul." (Thanks, Wikipedia!) How awesome is that?

Nourishment

Rather than put off grocery shopping until after work on Wednesday, when I knew this essential task would likely be preempted by War in the North, I decided to do it during my lunch break. My goal - inspired by my significant other - is not only to refrain from eating meat, but to actually eat vegetables instead of quesadillas, which tends to be my default non-meat dish. I figured a good way to do that would be to actually stock my refrigerator with vegetables. I bought spaghetti squash, eggplant, onions, green onions, tomatoes, acorn squash, apples, pears, bananas, milk, almond milk, cereal, and eggs.

At the checkout was a pyramid of identical paper grocery bags each filled with about $10 worth of food. When purchased, the food would be delivered to a local food bank for Thanksgiving. I thought, I am so lucky. I have a job, one that isn't so strict that I can't take a slightly longer lunch if I need to. I can afford to eat healthy food, even if I don't always do so, have decent insurance, and am in reasonably good health. I have a place to live, great friends, and most of my problems can basically be written off as first-world problems (e.g. I have more video games than time to play them). It's so easy to take things for granted when you don't have to worry about them. I want always to be grateful, even for being able to do something as mundane as shopping for groceries. So many people don't have that luxury.

I picked up a bag and put it in my cart. An impulse buy, yes, but much more worthwhile than the two magazines I could have purchased with the same amount of money. I felt happy. I smiled at the woman in line behind me, who, despite her full cart and "Namaste" shirt, didn't look happy at all. That's something I noticed recently when tabling for an event at a local mall - people tend not to smile when they're shopping, or even seem pleased to be there. And that was on a Saturday night! This was a place people chose to spend their prime leisure time, and they all looked supremely miserable. I wonder if people would still spend time there if they could see the expressions on their own faces instead of the nicely-dressed mannequins reflecting their aspirations.

Enforced obsolescence is the new hedonic treadmill

“The things you own end up owning you." - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker discusses Thomas Hayden's essay on "crap technology" and brings up a good point: What makes "crap" crap? Koerth-Baker and Hayden fondly discuss their mp3 players of choice - a Sansa Clip and a Coby, respectively - and I thought of my own Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (left). A gift from Christmas 2003, I still have it - I use it regularly, in fact. It's my go-to music source when I'm working in my closet-office, mostly because it has most of my music collection on it. My iPod Nano, also from the pre-touch screen epoch, can only hold 8GB of music - I use it for workouts if for some reason Spotify doesn't have a particular album or I want something less high-maintenance than Pandora.

I finally upgraded to a smartphone this year. While it's not an iPhone, the LG Optimus S is light-years ahead of my old flip-phone - it felt like I'd finally joined the 21st century. I think holding off on such a purchase has made me appreciate this technology more, and while it sometimes freezes or takes its sweet time loading an app, it still does everything I need it to do. I might be more patient with the slow crawl of old gizmos, since I only just quasi-replaced my 6-year-old Apple PowerBook G4 (which I also still occasionally use) with an iPad. Dazzling new features are even more dazzling if you've waited half a decade for an upgrade. Feature creep? More like feature warp speed.

My own pet theory: Is it possible that the quest for self-improvement has been replaced in our culture by the desire for shiny objects? Instead of striving to be better people, perhaps we've shifted our focus to striving to have better material things. It's certainly quicker, if you have the means, but ultimately less satisfying... and then you end up with clutter. But that's another post.

The art of not sucking

This fantastic Lifehacker article by Adam Pash on aptitude, or lack thereof, got me strolling through the sketchier parts of Memory Lane. Much of my life until recently was governed by a crippling fear of failure. I wanted to be able to do something well immediately, without practice or effort; anything that I wasn't instantly good at wasn't worth doing. I don't know when in my childhood this idiotic idea lodged itself into my brain, but I had this absolute dread of making mistakes, especially in front of other people.

Which brings me to piano lessons. I love music, and one of my childhood dreams was to be a composer someday. Piano lessons, unhappily, were music made torturous - not only did they require me to practice (and make mistakes!) within parental earshot, but every so often recitals and competitions would rear their ugly heads. Those were the worst. Not only was it possible that I would make a mistake, but it would be in front of people, and there WERE stakes - a gold ribbon, dammit! Blue, to me, was unacceptable. It had to be gold.

And it was, four years in a row, until the combined stress of perfectionism, performance anxiety and a bad teacher (and, let's face it, my own lack of diligence) ended my competitive piano career. The few instances my new teacher - whose training was exclusively performance-oriented - brought up the possibility of recitals, I burst into tears. Every time. The silver lining to my increasingly heavy high school workload was that I was finally able to stop taking piano lessons.

My anxiety about performing in public took years to dissipate. It even took me a while to warm up to games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band - they looked like fun, but I was still terrified of making musical mistakes in front of people, to the point where I would shake at the prospect of holding a plastic guitar. My friends would play, and I would watch, and admire their ability to not crumple into sobbing, self-pitying wrecks at the mere sight of a fake instrument.

Fast-forward through years of proverbial therapy. I recently went to a friend's house to play Rock Band after the evening's bowling plans fell through. (Apparently bowling is big on Friday nights. Who knew?) At this point I now love Rock Band, and no longer regard scores of less than 100% as abject failure worthy of seppuku. As my friends and I rotated instruments - five players, four instruments - it became apparent that no one else besides me really liked playing the drums in this game. Also, that the other 80% of the group was rhythmically challenged. They soon dubbed me "Animal."

I guess I have a soft spot for percussive instruments, because, despite the stress of my experience as a piano student, I'd always wanted to play the drums. I was in fourth grade when I mentioned this to my parents, who promptly shot it down. That wish never quite died out, though it remained dormant until that Rock Band marathon. There really wasn't anything to stop me from signing up for lessons, even if it was 18 years later than I would have liked. So I did. Being a grown-up has its advantages.

I've been taking drum lessons for a month, and I love it every bit as much as I thought I would. Do I suck? Not entirely. But my aptitude will only take me so far. That's why I practice - in earshot of my cat, my significant other, the downstairs neighbors unless I use a pillow - as often as I can. Do I make mistakes? Oh, yes. But that's how I know I'm learning, and I have a lot to learn.

And I can't wait to play in a band someday.

Building a framework

What kind of person do I want to be? It's a question I can finally start to answer with clarity now that my brain has largely emerged from its fog. I haven't lacked for framework on the subject: the last eight years of my formal education included two distinct sets of attributes that a graduate escaping each institute's orbit would possess. The ideals inscribed on the base of Tommy Trojan, for instance, are Faithful, Scholarly, Skillful, Courageous, and Ambitious. Meanwhile, my high school's "profile of a graduate," as they called it, included Open to Growth, Intellectually Competent (which I always thought was kind of a low bar), Loving, Religious, and Committed to Doing Justice.

I've wondered often, were I to define my own mission statement, which ideals I would choose to strive towards. One would think I'd have a better grasp of what means the most to me. Now, I've decided, is as good a time as any to figure this out. Better late than never, I suppose.

While this list is still a work in progress, these are some of the traits I'd like to embody.

* Open to Growth (O): I've rolled scholarly, courageous, and ambitious into this one, as being open to new experiences involves all of these characteristics. I want to challenge myself physically, intellectually and emotionally, whether by learning new things or working to improve my abilities in things I have already begun to learn.

* Committed to Doing Justice (J): I want to live my life in a way that's consistent with my ideals. I don't want to patronize businesses that screw over their customers and treat their workers poorly. And aside from the tenet of "do no harm," I want to actively do good.

* Conscientious (C): I want to know that I've put my best effort into every task I complete, regardless of the end result. I don't want any "what ifs."

* Appreciative (A): I could have gone with the two-syllable "grateful," but I think this is more comprehensive. I want not just to be grateful for the good in my life, but cognizant of the complexity that life has to offer and aware of the role everything plays in the universe. I want to appreciate everything there is, even when things don't go my way.

* Earnest (E): I want to parlay sincerity and enthusiasm into everything I do. It's so easy, and so tempting, to be detached and ironic, and much more risky to embrace things fully - not enough time to let go if it all comes crashing down to earth.

My continuing resolution is to do at least one thing every day that helps me live up to each of these qualities. Here's what I did today:

* I mailed off my application for credit union membership. If all goes well, by this time next month I will have bid Chase adieu. I want to support small local business, and a credit union seems like a much more organic way to do that. Plus, I want to stick it to the Man. (J)

* Instead of just taking off for the day leaving some things unfinished, I went to my boss' office to follow up. I ended up being one of the last people at work, but I'm glad there's that much less to do tomorrow. (C)

* I sent my grandmother the book I told her about when I called her last week. I think she'll like The Happiness Project, or at least find it interesting. I wrote her a note on a Thanksgiving card, too. I think she'll enjoy both things. (A,E)

* I started NaNoWriMo and got about 900 words out - the biggest chunk of writing I've done in a while - and also re-started this blog. Definitely risky ventures, as far as the possibility of failure goes, but if one hasn't failed, one hasn't tried. Points for effort! (O)