BuJo Initiate

It’s the Ex week again, and like for the past few years now, I’ve taken it as holiday time. It has also been the habit to use the time to do practical economical household craft projects each year during this time, as sort of an advanced preparation for making winter a bit cozier. This time around is no exception. Last year, it was some carpentry to reclaim storage space; other years, it has been canning preserves. This year, I’ve minimized and simplified things even more for a multi-day project.

Over the past couple years or so, one positive habit I have been cultivating for myself is carrying

One template format I'm exploring . . .

around a pocketbook and pen. Sure, a note taking app on the phone is quite handy, but when in a pressured dash or impulse to record, capture, and recover something more instantly and accurately while it is on the tip of my brain, the pen and notebook beats the cellphone. I have been finding my old-fashioned pocketbook to be as indispensable to me as carrying my keys, wallet, and my cellphone. It has helped save me a lot of time, money, and energy, especially in spots when the phone had little to no battery power left.

I like technical innovation a lot, but honestly, only up to a certain point. We think we are doing well for ourselves by organizing our lives with apps on our phones and computers, but this is illusory on some levels. It is ultimately making us comply to a complex system that suits tech companies in finding new ways to control us with ones and zeros, and for them to glean more of our money and personal data from us. In this sense, apps can tend to cheapen the quality of your life, or they at least make the data of it more valuable to everyone except yourself. There is a point where we lose sight of being able to create a very personalized, customized, and more organic system that allows us to stage things better for our own organizational needs, our unique learning modalities, our own personal goals; one that accommodates for recording through our more private and practical eccentricities. Those ones are not for sharing, the non-bloggables: thoughts and ideas best left on a page of paper, with the privacy assured.

One of the things I regret about my formal education, from childhood on through to my early university years, in the days before academic computer use, and before the internet was available, is that I never had any teacher at any time of my life who put any effort at all on teaching me how to do the very essential and elemental thing for excelling in true higher learning. That is, really teaching me on how to organize myself with the practical skill of efficient written planning/journaling, and effective note taking. It seems absurd, but it’s true. Sure, I of course learned literacy, but only mastering merely the taking in and absorbing of information part of it. I always had substandard teachers and mentors for helping me exploit my strongest learning modalities to transpose, and express, what was going on in my head in the way I sensed it, and frame it in the best organized and condensed manner on to a page that was most memorable and comprehensive to me. My willingness to write, or “show my work”, as was always demanded of me, just wasn’t there, and from that I think I suffered greatly in such a way that I was always reticent, reluctant, reserved, made to feel embarrassed, about expressing any form of creativity at all through the written word or graphics for the longest time. I was no dullard, there was lots of thinking going on; but I was always embarrassed with my poor organizational ability of trying to sort it out on paper. Capturing thoughts through note taking was like trying to catch wriggling live fish with soapy hands. I improved a lot over the years, but my journey to get better at it has been a very independent and solitary one, and I missed the most critical of years of when what I know now would have served me better at an earlier time. I’m trying to actively compensate for that even today.

This all brings me now to making a concerted effort at learning something that encompasses serving me as a means of approaching efficient minimalism, enhancing my productivity, and being a creative pastime. Currently, I’m immersing myself in the craft of bullet journaling (or BuJo* for short)¹. Like most of my hobbies and pastimes, it is nerdy thing that is a nice blend of aesthetics that pleases the senses, and orderly precision that gets mathematical, scientific, and data oriented. What I gain from doing it is a clearer snapshot of how my mind works while figuring out goal-oriented objectives. One thing I’m noticing is that there is a great and drastic schism in the quality in my handwriting between the floodlight mind (cursive, observing and fervent collecting a vast array of thoughts instantaneously) and my spotlight mind (block printed, mindfully focusing and methodically organizing them on paper, without the pressure of time and other stressful distractions). Comparing the two is seeing my brain operating and functioning in two different levels, or existing on two entirely different worlds, for each process. I wonder if there is name for the weird psychological anomaly to describe this huge difference between each modality. Examples provided.

My manic, brain-on-fire,
"conspitated looking" as one
of my friends once called it,

cursive writing vs.

My relaxed and focused self

block printing

My goal with this pastime is to get a journal formatted and formulated with templates for the

One template I designed that I may 

use for seasonal tasks. I couldn't

 find anything like this in a stationary 

store. Custom made is the way to go!

remainder of this year and the entire coming new year. What will I do with it all? Well, to automate some plans without the actual need for technical automation; to make cybernetic changes and adjustments without the cyberspace. I’m not trying to think like a machine, but I am trying to enhance my own recording and processing of stuff in much the same way that computers do: more effort to taking a small codified, point/mark, or bit of info to record and ramming it through a formatted program or function to filter out a result. Pixilating points (or customized bullets) to track data is a simple and effective way to record progress. The gist of this being investing in time to structure a perfect (for me) format now so that I can waste very little time and material for recording stuff later. Minimal effort through simple coding that can lead to big results. There is stuff to enter that is not as simple as purely numerical, or a yes/no, true/false, 0/1,

kinds of data. Some stuff, of course, is trackable and traceable only on a spectrum, or layers of spectra, or else needs a full out verbal explanation. The modular nature of this system allows for this too. I’m most interested see what kind of artistic infographics I’ll be able to create and incorporate as well. I want to see if I can progress from being crude to making the great leap ahead of being . . . slightly less crude with my graphical talents. Most of the detailed subjects that I will be recording, and tracking, are too personal to post here. However, I will disclose the broader general reasons for this new objective:

• Shifting from Day to Night Mode – Someday, I hope not too soon yet, I will be transitioning to doing night shifts. It will be a major upheaval for my body and mind to adapt to, with phases of insomnia assured to come; my working memory being the worse off casualty due to that. Hence, I’ll have to get into the habit of writing things down more often to not lose track of things. Also, having lists of things to work through eliminates the burdensome and torturous task of having to make decisions in such a state (or suffering consequences of making bad decisions in that way, read further below).
  
• Total Schedule Reorganization - There then must be a major reorganization of my schedule for my daily activity, have a productive rhythm to my day; to conserve my energy, and my social life and relationships outside of work. 
  
• Monitoring Health – Another offshoot of switching to nights is needing to actively check myself over for signs of physical deterioration due to the odd hours and unnatural rhythm of wakefulness. Knowing and marking the ideal time to exercise, and what and when to eat during this (mal)adjustment period is critical also, since “breakfast” kind of doesn’t work (doesn’t feel right) as a meal option in mid-afternoon. Alcohol consumption periods are things to be mindfully reckoning with too. What gets measured gets mastered.
  
• Impulse Grounding – One of the things I have noticed after long bouts of insomnia is the poor ability to make sound decisions. The likelihood of acting on impulse rather than think things through rises significantly. For example, this is especially bad when I want to commit to a minimalist lifestyle, but then act on a reckless spending spree for impractical things after too little sleep. BuJo is a way to do a brain dump and check your thoughts outside yourself, with some frame of order, to analyze and weigh pros and cons. At the very least, the very act of doing this is a much cheaper alternative of using one’s time rather than falling into an impulsive habit of mindless consumption of whatever it is that one could possibly become addicted to.
  
• Cheap Hobby – It only needs: a writing instrument of your preference, and a good quality dot

  

  My entire Bullet Journaling kit.

  (or grid) paged journal for the basics. For refined line forming for edging and bordering and such, a cheap geometry set from a dollar store works. Additional lettering stencils and templates can be found cheap in an arts and craft shop, or even in a dollar store. Just engage the imagination, and that’s it. A minimalist’s dream come true! Very portable, and it doesn’t need a battery for power (except maybe just a good source of caffeine). It’s a big step upward from an adult colouring book anyway, and far more practical to use as well.
  
• Veering Away from Toxic Social/News Media – Simply substituting a bad use of time for a better, more constructive, one. I will have a genuinely more enriching time working on a means to sort my own life’s issues, and creating my own viable solutions for approaching problems and goals than thinking and believing, that during these turbulent politically charged times of the election season, that any government or other social institution, is going to be genuinely interested in doing that for me. It’s my time to opt out of indiscriminately spending too much time and attention on negative news and social media during these times of waiting for our nation’s federal election coming this October, and the bloody ridiculous circus of the still 454 remaining days of campaigning until the American election. Working on my own betterment through my journals will be a nice retreat away from all this.

The most satisfying and enriching thing about using BuJo as an analogue system of note taking and calligraphy²: purposely taking a plain word and page space and embellishing it such as to make it so strikingly elegant and distinctly vivid enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Imagine then how much more powerful it would look when it is applied to a whole written thought or idea. Goals are made to appear to have an esteemed meaning, as truly worthy goals should. It somehow makes your own ideas and listed tasks and duties appear more alive/animated. Even the duller things on a to do list can then look like they could be integral parts of some overall grand adventure.

A potential syllabus list

with flipped open pages

to record book titles

journaling is the chance and choice to be liberally creative and expressive with stylish lettering and artwork in one’s journal, thus further stimulating and empowering one to use the entire brain; not just the analytical and logical left hemisphere. I really believe there is some weight to this as a benefit, adding artful flourishes through doodles, and calligraphy.

I’m coming closer to understanding why monks in the medieval era were charged with the tasks of illuminating pages, making copies of calligraphic manuscripts, and other such scrivenery. Apart from being just merely literate, to do such a job well very much requires and demands a deeply focused, disciplined, and meditative mind. It can be very relaxing. However, I’m certainly not a monk. The best advice I could give as a novice for starting a page template is just to dive right into it. It is 100% guaranteed that it will be imperfect at the start, making lots of mistakes in your initial formatting, lettering, and page section alignment. So, once that is all done, set it aside for a long while, have a drink or two, then come back and review it, and then be totally relentless, ruthless, and absolutely merciless with editing it, and redo it until you get the right design and style that really satisfies you. You are allowed be your own harshest critic since you are going to be the only one interacting with this material; you have no one to please but yourself by taking such a measure.

The first mess . . .

. . . then the final product. Custom made and adapted for a coding 

matrix system unique and personal to me, and again, 

it can't be found in any regular stationers shop.

I have nothing more to include with this entry, except for this last thought from a quote by the author of my guidebook:

“Each Bullet Journal becomes another volume in the story of your life. Does it represent the life you want to live? If not, then leverage the lessons you've learned to change the narrative in the next volume.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future

*- I like Bujo because sounds more to me like some unique, Zen-based, Japanese term for some sort of work ethic discipline, like kaizen.

1. The initial resource I used was The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. I solidified the reason why I decided to undertake this; after that though, I’ve been finding a multitude of ideas for personalization on Pinterest.

2. I’m not ashamed to say, as a guy, that I love the artform of calligraphy. Before you scoff and think by default that it’s a sissy craft to do, consider this: the most instrumental class that Steve Jobs said he ever took (before he dropped out of college) which he said had been the most influential one for the inception of the Mac computer wasn’t a software programming class, wasn’t a computer science or engineering class; it was a calligraphy class. In a roundabout way, the practice of it forced him to see things differently through the elegance of design, and natural forms and ease of interface that made one want to engage with using a computer. Proper design is powerful stuff!

Winter Solstice/Yuletide 2018: The Inaugural Yule Bookfest

I’ve been writing this in a piecemeal fashion, starting around the winter solstice, Dec 21^st.

It has been a long while since I’ve posted an entry; for all good reasons. For the last while, with being in a new relationship, I’ve been more attuned into living intentionally and sharing my life privately with someone instead of being a passive commentator about life and sharing random observations about it with a general audience in written form. With the approach of our first yuletide season together, there also comes this excited eagerness and willingness in both of us to adopt some special thing to make as our own unique holiday tradition as a couple. So, we agreed to include a new observance for ourselves during this season. I feel like it is one worth sharing. Personally, I would hope it catches on with others as well if anyone so chooses to copy it.

The new custom we decided to observe isn’t really a specific local one, or even a Canadian one, but it serves our introverted selves very well. It’s one that we kind of appropriated from Icelandic tradition. By virtue of having relatives in Wynyard SK, a community that was largely founded by Icelandic settlers, I’ve already had some exposure to some traditional Icelandic Christmas (Jól) feast fare (like Rullapylse and Vinarterta) from my past holiday visits there. And now, strangely enough, we’re setting out to sample another custom similar to the one from that island, as a Canadianized form of it to suit us.

Temperature-wise, winters for that island nation seem relatively mild and less miserably frigid when compared to those here in Saskatoon, but given their proximity to the Arctic Circle, their winter nights are a lot longer during the approach to solstice*. The long cold darker nights around either side of winter solstice naturally stage an environment for which to retreat into coziness and stimulating one’s brain with a good story. Despite inhabiting one of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and being quite good at exercising frugality, folks in Iceland seem to spare no expense when it comes to buying and reading books. The result is that they have become one of the most culturally literate societies on Earth. Thus, books of all kinds are the most frequently gifted items around the Christmas season there: so much so that there is a word in their language defining this tradition of exchanging reading material as presents during the winter holidays. This annual tradition of buying and gifting books is called Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas time book flood” roughly translated into English. It sparked some appeal in both of us when we heard about this custom because we do both like to read and would find this exchange quite endearing. We thought it best to anglicize the name to Yule Bookfest*, (see further below as to why). She suggested having this exchange on the last Advent Sunday before Christmas Day, and I thought that plan was perfect: a day of rest, dedicated to fully relishing the blessing of being able to read in peace with a fresh new story. As much as we love our families and friends; and having a chance to gather with them for feasting, gaming, and drinking, for introverted people this extra onslaught of social activity during the holidays, even with it being awesomely joyful and fun, can be a bit overwhelming and draining at times for our mental lives. Yule Bookfest is thus a way to have a day to simmer down the nerves; to take a breather from excessive social overload from the holidays, and to gain a sort of calmer private celebration; balancing the yuletide joy with some peace.

Most people around here refer to the “Christmas season” as the general period covering the latter half of December; I think this term is too vague, and a little thoughtless and sloppy for my liking. I’m a little more demanding of accuracy. I grew up in a family that, at least for a while during my childhood, observed both the Gregorian and Julian Christmases (December 25^th and January 7^th, respectively), as some other kids did in mixed Anglo-Ukrainian families in the community where I was raised, where these holiday traditions mixed and merged. In my formative childhood years, I remember that I was sometimes insistent in having others specify which Christmas they were referring to when they were trying to talk to me about the holidays. When I refer to Christmas, I mean specifically Christmas day (Dec 25^th) or I get even more specific in defining it in mentioning Julian/Ukrainian/Orthodox Christmas on Jan 7^th, and don’t usually use it so vaguely to refer to any other time within the period of December and early January. For that, I‘ve been reverting to the word “yuletide”, for referring to the greater span of days of celebrating between and during Advent and mid-January. Yuletide may sound a little more pretentious and a bit archaic, but it is a word I’m noticing that I’m becoming fond of and favoring (at least in my writing) of its use instead of using “Christmas” all the time ubiquitously over the whole season. Partially because it is a better term that can extend to generally include all days from the first Advent Sunday to Orthodox New Year’s Day (Jan 14^th) and all days in between, and covering all holidays during that time from many other cultures, including newer bizarrely contrived ones (as perhaps ours is), with the celestial event of winter solstice roughly being the tethering post in the middle of it all. As for our new celebration, I’d like to start off doing this special day right, at the very least linguistically*. I see calling it “Yule Bookfest” instead of the original “Jólabókaflóð”, or “Christmas Bookflood”, as necessarily suitable because:

·         As I said, it leaves the word Yule to indicate an extended period of winter days; not just the singular day, of Christmas. After all, one usually needs more than just one day to completely finish and enjoy a book

·         Yule is a shorter word to type than Christmas. I get lazy at typing sometimes, and brevity is sweet and efficient for modernistic purposes. Plus, there are no accented characters, or funny letters (like eth -“Đ,ð”) to mess around with while typing, unlike the original Icelandic word.  This form does respect at least some part of the cognate** from which it was translated.

·         It better denotes that it’s not a serious religious observance; it’s open for anyone to enjoy, no matter what creed/faith, or lack thereof. One has only to appreciate the gift of a book, so we can just leave the term Christmas alone.

·         Rather than a flood, it’s just a single book to gift each other, for indulging in deeply. So, the word fest is best.

·         From the Wikipedia definition below,*** yule is a word originally derived from something rooted in a concept of playing, feasting, merrymaking, and joking around; not being seriously contemplative or solemnly meditative. There’s plenty of time left to do that latter stuff for the goddamned miserable other part, from January onward, of a Saskatchewan winter.

What else does this special day perhaps entail besides exchanging books? I think being costumed in ultra-comfortable loungewear (e.g. housecoat, sweatpants, and/or pyjamas), finger snacks (preferably drier ones to avoid smudging your pages: perhaps cheese, crackers and various other chacuterie), a warm(ing) beverage, perhaps by a crackling fireplace, and not moving too far beyond one’s armchair, or chesterfield. Snuggling and napping between chapters is permissible and encouraged.

My girlfriend picked out a perfect book for me: both in terms as theme material for this day, and the reflection of the kind of person I am, and the strange characters I’m interested in relating to. The book I was gifted for this inaugural celebration of pages was a piece of fiction written by Robin Sloan titled Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. A cool story that involves a bright, but somewhat hapless young fellow who falls into unfolding some strange secrets centered around this bookstore and its gentleman proprietor, Mr. Penumbra. It's kind of book that will inspire you to recommit to being a more avid reader, and to perhaps try to write in more than just some unidimensional prose. It has re-affirmed ambitions that I should follow up on in the coming new year.

This is a bit of a digression . . . but the nerdy part of me usually likes to reflect on the anthropological stuff as to how and why certain traditions have originated over the holidays. This year, it’s kind of nice to be an active force in it all. Speaking of new and modern Canadian yuletide traditions, it leads me to wonder what will be unveiled in this special inaugural year of the legalization of cannabis in this country. I’m going to guess (perhaps correctly) that several folks around the country are probably going to embellish the theme having a “green Christmas” to the max. Perhaps this is the year where there will be started some grand tradition of some kind of Yuletide Bongfest which will become adopted by the potheads of this country: exchanging weed and the means for which to smoke and consume it. I presume it could be on December 20^th (to correspond with the “20” in 4/20). Who knows.

If there was one thing I wish people would tune into more of as an addiction, I wish it was the substance of reading and literature. Long winters here in Canada would set us up for making a few more scholars if Yule Bookfest was taken seriously as a celebration.

*- Sunrise on Dec 21^st in Reykjavik, 11:21 am; sunset, 3:29 pm. In Saskatoon, Sunrise, 9:12 am; sunset 4:56 pm.

**- Given that this is a bilingual nation, I would suppose that we could possibly call this “Fête d’Hiver des Livres” for the Francophones, but I’ll leave that to be properly translated by someone with a better command of French than I have.

***- Yule (from Middle English yole, from Old English ġeōl, ġeōla (“Christmastide, midwinter”), either cognate from Old Norse jól (“midwinter season, yule”),^[2] from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą (“celebration, festivity; yule”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *yekə- (“joke, play”)) +‎ -tide (“period around a holiday”) (from Old English tīd (“period, season, time; feast-day, festal-tide”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dī-(“time”)).

August Civic Holiday/Vacation 2018 (Lagom, Hygge, and Kalsarikännit)

As usual, as glorious as it can be, this summer in Saskatoon is passing too quickly. This one seems to be flickering past me even more rapidly than others. It may be because I have been overall happier. The inclusion of endearing forces in my life are doing me good. The absence of some other tyrannical, narcissistic forces, and whiney nagging people has allowed me to climb still further out of a hole of negativity. I’m enjoying the reprieve from that thus far. I feel strong enough to be a supportive friend again, and to be there for those who matter. 

It’s the beginning of another stretch of holidays for me, and yet I honestly haven’t been that eager to formulate some grandiose, concrete plan for a getaway for it; perhaps because it’s the first time after the longest time that I finally feel like there is nothing I really need to escape from. The most off-kilter thing I done throughout this time around was daring to play a clandestine poker game in a meat locker with a bunch of Russian gangsters*. My brain has been switched on to entertaining myself with puzzles and games again, on top of digesting some literature. It’s a personal barometer that indicates good things for me. It’s a peaceful retreat for this time, even when the annual ruckus of the Ex appears once again in the neighbourhood. My internal clock is already shifting itself now, by default, to waking up even earlier, and trying to nap a few hours during the heat of the day to compensate for the rest I won’t be getting at night. Yet, despite all that, I can retreat into my own head now more easily with a greater sense of clarity and contentment, without any great interference; and to seek such a thing from someplace else right now seems like a needless and futile squandering of energies. With temperatures rising as high as 40 degrees near week’s end, I’m even more disinclined to be too active. By then, the thought of playing games in an actual meat locker might really be appealing. Even more desirable would be an upgrade to a walk-in beer cooler.

I did give myself a few moments to wonder about and reassess my own personal reasons as to why I would travel. I did so because I was probed with such questions by my sweetheart about what I’d like to do for my upcoming birthday. The thrill of travel isn’t planting my ass on the sand of some beach, nor is it even visiting museums or festivals, though they’d be interesting enough I’m sure. Neither does much for me in exploring or understanding the vibe of the place, which I think is the whole jest of traveling to begin with. With this gaming mentality going on for me now, I realize that the thrill of travel for me is just to get a whole new perspective on other lifestyles and challenging myself to interact with them successfully. That’s like a game in and of itself. It includes the challenge of using and interacting with another language and finding avenues to do so for sake of just getting around and taking care of your basal needs of eating, lodging, and moving from spot to spot. It’s strange for me to see people who have traveled far more than I have, and yet who are totally scared shitless at the thought of daring to depart from their all-English-speaking tour group from their isolated resort. They say that they like to tour around; and at the same time are totally xenophobic. As introverted as I am I still like taking the more immersive and anthropological approach to traveling and touring by vagabonding.

This gaming/puzzling phase I’m in has made me both reflect and fantasize about the scenes I liked and would like to retreat to. I got nostalgic thinking about watching the citizens playing spirited games of dominoes in the outdoors taverns when I was doing life in Valencia many years ago. In past summers at some lake with family, when we were not cooling off in the water, or fishing, or eating, or listening to stories and gossip around a campfire at night, we were spending time playing Kaiser**, Meadow Lake Rummy**, or other card games in the campsite or cabin. I thought about how content I’d be and how cool it would be just chill out in a café nearby a souk in Istanbul playing backgammon with some locals, or perhaps learning mah-jong in a park in Shanghai or Hong Kong. I think about this because apart from the need to buy and consume, use math and logic, and listening to music; entertaining oneself with gaming is another thing that can transcend language, or at least be another avenue to learn about language and culture by this other amusing and informal vehicle.

Speaking of language and culture, that has been the subject of my non-fiction reading during this time off. It once again is a study into the Nordic/Scandinavian lifestyle, and being a nerd for linguistics. I should diversify into studying other cultural viewpoints, but once again, I can’t help but to be attracted to the subject of Scandinavia, as it always intrigues, interests, and impresses me. It is partly because despite with me not being immersed in such a culture, I yet somehow already live by, learned through my upbringing, or have adopted similar such equivalent ideas and ethics***; I just now have discovered new words for some of these memes by some strange synchronicity, which aren’t conveniently packaged into the English vocabulary for me to describe my own personal modus operandi. It’s the whole Law of Jante (Wikipedia source) thing they got going on over there - that I can deeply appreciate, which is sort of a Scandinavian societal modality that serves to curb things like vanity, greed, undo pride, pretentiousness, and a false sense of entitlement. The book I’ve been reading is called Lagom: the Swedish Art of Balanced Living, by Linnea Dunne. A guide for balanced living seems to be an appropriate thing to read while spending some holiday time alone. I touched on the subject of Lagom in a past entry, but I didn’t do it any justice in trying to elaborate on it.

The best new concept words I learned from this book that I can appreciate are:

·         Köpstopp – (pronounced sort of like “short stop”, switching the “rt” with "p") It’s the discipline of applying a spending cap for a given amount of time: a voluntary moratorium on shopping for anything beyond essentials for living. I experimented with this at the beginning of the year, I just didn’t have this concise name for this behaviour. A way to tame mindless consumption.

·         Panta – a recycling fee for your cans and bottles. The Swedish form of what would be the equivalent of a Sarcan refund here. A monetary incentive is always a good thing to encourage a cleaner environment.

·         Plastbanta – The banning of toxin plastic products in your household, and opting for wood/bamboo, stainless steel. I was already shifting towards this trend; again, I just didn’t have a concise name for it before.

·         Lördagsgodis- Not everything falls under the self-regulatory restrictiveness of the Laws of Jante, or the discipline of Lagom in Sweden. There are memes for unfettered indulgence, like this one meaning “Saturday goodies/candies” basically meaning going whole hog on sweets and snacks, but just for once a week. It coincides and accords with my cheat days whenever I have the hair-brain schemes of dieting, and whenever I entreat myself to something weird and exotic to experiment with in my kitchen, as the rhythm for that typically falls on Saturday.

·         Fredagsmys – Another once a week institution. This time meaning roughly “Friday coziness”, relaxing and retreating in your own home with nothing but your snacks at the ready and other creature comforts, and no other obligations to do anything else but veg out. Being that they neighbour as countries, I imagine there may be some correlation with the Finnish meme of kalsarikännit at this time of the week (read on further).   

·         Pyttipanna- A general cooking method of creatively making the most out of the leftovers in your fridge and pantry. Something I do all the time as a personal principle, because being wasteful disgusts me.

·         Loppis – A word meaning to tour flea markets, yard sales, and other places for gently used goods. Loppisrunda means making an entire day’s event of it. Another movement towards frugality, and waste-reduction, repurposing, and giving second hand items a new home and life.

The other Nordic memes I’d like to look into more, study, and explore are the concepts of hygge (Danish) – something akin to “coziness” but I’m led to believe and understand that it is something more divine and intricate than that, and the Finnish institution of kalsarikännit – I apologize that the translation is not too succinct: it roughly means “underwear drunk” but it actually essentially means succumbing to the urge to get intoxicated at home alone in your underwear after a bad day, with no intention of going out and socializing. That’s perhaps the perfect one to test out on a smoky, smouldering, 40 degree August afternoon, like what’s coming ahead.

*- Not for reals; in the Xbox game Prominence Poker. It’s the fact that I’m playing video games to begin with, instead of immersing myself in some other strange little project: that’s what is off-kilter for me, but it beats frying in the merciless heat for now.

** - Two very regional games unique to the area where I was raised here in Saskatchewan. 

*** - Perhaps it’s all mysteriously inherited and instinctual, seeing now that 25% of genome is Scandinavian after a DNA test. Nature versus nurture arguments will be for some other time.

Winter-ruption

Some people have the habit of immersing themselves into their Sunday morning with their coffee, and leisurely reading the weekend paper. I’m noticing that since the year began that I seem to be immersing myself into my Sunday morning with my coffee in hand, and pretending as if I were writing for a newspaper.

There were unwelcome strange things going on throughout the week since last entry, mostly confined to my personal life for me to deal with beginning the moments I came home after work on more than one occasion, but thankfully these tricky things didn’t mushroom into anything more wild or intensely serious. They included: my building almost catching on fire, another threat of infestation, and my poor little pooch getting injured. Of all those, my dog’s health was/is my greatest concern. She is healing: slower than I want, of course, but at least she’s not deteriorating for the worse. I’m happy that the week ended better with new interesting experiences, and overall soothing transitions. It has been a good weekend to shake off some of the mid-winter blues, which included crawling out of my hermit hovel for a change, and being a little more social. I got myself a ticket for sporting event, which I deemed to be a kosher purchase despite some new project ambitions, which I’ll cover more about sometime in my next entry.

I checked out my first lacrosse game on Friday evening. The Sasktel Centre arena was packed. The Saskatchewan Rush played the Buffalo Bandits. Unfortunately, the Bandits earned their team name too well, first stealing away what was an initially impressive and massive lead by the Rush, coming hard and overtaking them to come to a tie, and then stealing the game away in overtime, 16-15. An epic comeback for them (uncelebrated here, of course), and an embarrassing downturn for us. It was only the Rush’s first loss of the season though - small potatoes. It was still worth the effort to go, and I’d check out at least one more game for the season. Again, I write this next part for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. The game originated in this nation (actually long before we became a nation) centuries ago by the Iroquois tribal first nations out east. Anthropologically speaking, it was evidence that the development of such a game was an indication of less reliance on nomadic hunting and gathering, and the preference to adopt permanent settlement and the deployment of agriculture. Leisure time appears more with the fixation of working around seasons in one place, and acting out non-lethal ways to practice martial tactics through team sports also evolves*. However, despite it being our official national sport, it fell into obscurity in our cultural scene for a long while. It lost out somehow to hockey and to curling, in terms of popularity as a spectator team sport in these modern times, or at least there has never been a Lacrosse Night in Canada televised on CBC during our nation's formative sports media years. The more novel and esoteric team sport of broomball** (another rink sport invented here, because we have way too much fucking winter to deal with) even became a more popular community sport around here during my early years than Canada’s official national sport, lacrosse. Lacrosse still has been around, but it just hasn’t really been popular as a big-time league field sport until it had been recently re-hyped somehow, and has been making a grand resurgence, thankfully avoiding a sort of extinction from our identity.

I don’t know, or couldn’t guess, as to how or why lacrosse became so diminished in popularity, and a lesser meme of the field/arena/rink team sports played in this nation to begin with. Perhaps it lacked the display of brute strength of football, or the more extreme speed and sometimes pugilistic action that ice hockey has, or perhaps it wasn’t as cerebral, or loaded with enough focused and refined, single-pointed calculated target finesse that curling has in satisfying the other end of the spectrum of stimulation through spectatorship. Sadly, I believe that it wasn’t more strongly popularized throughout our history really because white guys originally from Britain or France didn’t come up with the idea first. It looks like something that Dr. Seuss may have invented. It sometimes gets tricky to follow the plays, as the ball isn’t out as much in the open as a hockey puck is, hidden in racket netting as players are trying to deek each other out, so it can be definitely harder to track. Maybe that's why it got harder to promote and sell through radio and then television, when these media forms were in their infancy: the technical issue of reporting and recording where this elusive ball was throughout a game. The extra dimensional axis along the field of play makes it as interesting, if not more so, than ice hockey. More hand-eye coordination is involved with it perhaps than hockey in that respect. Even if I were younger, I know that I’d have a real challenge playing it. I wish success not only for our team, but also to the league as a whole.

Another newly hyped outdoor game/sport for this winter-ruption season in the city that I’m checking out this weekend is Crokicurl. You can’t get much more Canadian in a game than this: taking a table game that originated in this country, something I’ve played a few times in some dingy, up-in-the-sticks barrooms (Crokinole); a game, as with darts, where one’s prowess is tested and tempered by making it even more challenging yet for one’s fine motor skills with heavy alcohol consumption, and then making an augmented version of it to play on a post-studded ice surface using curling stones for counters. What a concept! No doubt, some form of inebriation or intoxication had to be in progress as the heads came together to create this fusion of these two games. It’s so simple, and perfect! I also can’t really believe that we’ve been so stupid as to not come up with this idea a lot sooner for around these parts. Oh well, better late than never for this heroic flash of innovation. Sponsorship for this bar game come outdoor spectacle, especially from the local brewers and distilleries, i.e., those who could have some sway in allowing drinking in public, could really help it to take off in popularity during this most wretched of the yearly seasons. Hey, and why not just loosen up a bit more about drinking outside in public in the middle of bloody winter as well for special events like this? Especially considering that things are getting lax enough around here where weed is going to become legal by next summer. Hell, I bet the newly forming cannabis corporations here may also want a piece of this sponsorship action. It might be even more entertaining watching these “athletes” trying to play this while they are completely high***. It could potentially be the new stoner outdoor winter sport (not unlike snowboarding, which already holds such a distinction), that can get more involvement and appeal from the lesser-than athletic types. It will be interesting to see how this thing evolves as another one of our national wintertime leisure activities.

It's all hype folks: a sport doesn't become a sport nowadays without it. Pulling a new one out of obscurity and making it fly off the ground with popularity seems now to be impossible to do without commercial sponsorship. 

*- Non-lethal is not always the case. The Aztecs had fully adopted agriculture and civilization too, and consequently developed their own basketball-like team sport called ullamaliztli, a game that died out right along with them. Maybe it’s popularity didn’t take off so well because the losers of the game were offered as human sacrifices to their pantheon of gods. Hard to the develop teams if they are constantly being physically eliminated by getting their hearts torn out. Let's just say that their PR folks kind of didn't give this a serious think through for promotional purposes.

**- Broomball: an ice rink sport believed to have been invented right here in Saskatchewan (first official recording of it being played is in the community of Perdue). Played sort of like hockey, except with using an implement resembling a broom to whack a ball around (hence the name, like, duh!). Comparing it to hockey is like comparing (American/Canadian) football to rugby. There’s no special padding like hockey, and specially soled shoes are worn instead of skates. You need some sure footing as you run along the ice, but you may get the advantage of some added extra traction by occasionally trotting over someone's missing teeth. It can be even more pugilistic than hockey, as I’ve seen in some goonfest matches of it in the past. Maybe it's because there’s less a lot padding to punch around, and there is a decided advantage in being able to base and balance a striking posture more easily to scrap, drift, and coldcock a guy on ice while wearing shoes rather than skates. It's what makes one who is being a broomball goon even distinctively more of a lowdown dirty psycho bastard than as such in hockey in comparison. It would be great, if not miraculous, if this actually got recognized as a sport fit for the Winter Olympics, other than seen as the lowbrow hybrid spawn of hockey/rugby that it could be. 

***- I’m sure at this point of reading this composition of crazy ramblings, that some may think that I do marijuana myself. I honestly do not. My limited alcohol consumption (because of medical reasons) is enough of a vice as it is; I don’t need anything else beyond that. Personally, my life wouldn’t change when cannabis becomes legal here, except probably dealing with issues as a steward about the grey areas when it comes to interfering with work performance in others on the job. I would treat it as a medicine (one that I probably can’t take anyway due to contraindications with my other treatments), and nothing more than that. I am, however, pro-legalization; more so for the reasons that I believe a strengthened hemp-production economy and industry makes for an inroad toward more sustainable ways of environmental and ecological preservation, and will ultimately lead to less taxed and stressed healthcare, law-enforcement, and corrections systems.

5Q5A: Small Online Indulgences

It’s a Friday evening. I’m expecting it to either rain or storm later. I've been put in a spot medically where I’m exercising caution and teetotaling tonight, so I’m trying to rediscover some simple long forgotten bliss of just sitting and snacking on tea and cookies in the refreshing open air. Hence, I’m not confined inside just passively watching TV just by simple spatial logistics. Reading here outside to combat boredom was a thought, but the subject material I borrowed from the library* was about global economics: a topic that, I confess, I'm woefully ignorant about in general. I'm trying to make myself take a more vested interest in it, but it still comes across to me like too much bullshit and gobble-de-gook, and I can't seem to trouble myself to do it tonight. I'd be better off reading the Big Blue Book of Fairy Tales and find something with more sense and logic in it. Another topic, for another time. The urge to do something more interactive (yet without the annoyance of other people) became stronger. I chose to write up a snapshot of what these activities look like on an evening such as this. More to clear and decompress my bothered mind than anything, and to be appreciative of these little things for what they are.

Q1. Latest New Wits-Tester?

A1. A video game downloaded from Steam, The Long Dark, by Hinterland Studios, supported by the Canada Media Fund – It’s rare that I ever get so captivated by a video game, but this one is special. Firstly, it is 100% Canadian in both production and (virtual) game environment, with the setting being somewhere in the boreal wilderness of Canada. The mission: to survive the elements alone after a plane crash. The conditions are post-apocalyptic, but there’s no terrorists or zombies to battle. Just you in the first person. No other humans around, just the elements of the cold of winter, the scarcity of food, the struggle to find shelter, and facing the prospects of starvation, hypothermia, succumbing to accidents, or being ravaged by carnivorous predators. Nothing more complicated than that, but so real-life in terms of the weighed consequences of the hazards in dealing with such an environment. I’m a fan of shows like Les Stroud’s Survivorman on OLN, so this game is particularly intriguing to me. You use whatever resources you can scavenge, salvage, and exploit from nature. The community online is graced by a smaller set of international players with same-such personalities akin to mine; of whom I never thought I’d ever find. It’s a very respectful group, and we can even interact with the developers for idea input and feedback. Really cool stuff, not only to be a player, but to be a voice in its future development. This is the game that puts my wits to the test and fascinates me because it is reflective of what I wrote sometime earlier of what I claimed I would do in the hypothetical scenario of spending a winter in cabin alone (Cabin Pleasures vs. Cabin Fever) and getting a prize for it. Games like this are the more comprehensible primers and interactive courses for economics: for making decisions about what to do with finite resources in an environment of scarcity with a finite amount of time before you could possibly meet up face to face with the Long Dark. Now, if I download another similar type game with zombies or bananas in it, it might make the material in the book I'm trying to focus on now a bit more understandable.

Q2. Online Window Shopping?

A2. Scouting and hunting through eBay and Amazon targeting for my vintage Russian Submariner Watch, an authentic (yet cheap) Moroccan Tagine cooking vessel, concert T-shirts from Rockabilia, and checking out cheap flight prices for a non-tropical** holiday perhaps for next year.

Q3. Music Streams?

A3. Mostly in a retro/vintage Alternative and folk/nostalgia/shoegaze Indie mood tonight. Memories from my mid-20’s onward, to more modern stuff. My sample set of favourite songs played thus far, I list them as they come:

·         Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division

·         Make You Better – The Decemberists

·         I Wanna be Adored – The Stone Roses

·         Hot on the Heels of Love – Throbbing Gristle

·         You Trip Me Up – The Jesus and Mary Chain

·         Airscape – Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians

·         A Forest – The Cure

·         This Must Be the Place (Naïve Mix)- The Talking Heads

·         Girlfriend – Matthew Sweet

·         Backsliding – Radiohead

·         South Central Rain – R.E.M.

·         The Only One I Know – The Charlatans

·         Fake Empire – The National

·         Seether – Veruca Salt

·         Picture You – The Amazing

·         Shovels and Dirt – The Strumbellas

·         Skinny Love – Bon Iver

·         Love Is All – The Tallest Man on Earth

·         The Night We Met – Lord Huron

·         Time - Tom Waits

·         Red Hands – Walk Off the Earth

·         World Spins Madly On – The Weepies

·         Gigantic – The Pixies

·         Serpents (Basement Version) – Sharon Van Etten

·         Summertime – The Sundays

·         I Know It’s Over – The Smiths

·         Suedehead - Morrissey

Q4. Adult Stuff? (the responsible stuff; not pornography)

A4. Testing the waters again with FOREX trading, and more serious study into the technical analysis involved with trend watching for the rise and fall of currency pairs. It seems sensible to research, as nowadays, money itself has been making more money than labour or other resources has. Also, looking for online classes for SQL, advanced Excel script programming, and other database management courses. All stuff I started to study, but have long since forgotten.

Q5. Language Lessons?

A5. Je continue à apprendre plus de français avec Duolingo, mais j’ai sauté quelques leçons. Ma motivation devient faible maintenant.

*- The book is Zombies, Bananas and Why There Are No Economists in Heaven by Jessica Irvine. I thought with a delightfully oddball title like that, it might actually find some chords to strike within me that I could relate to, but I still see that it has its work cut out for itself. I will say that finding an economist with a sense of humour in itself is like finding a diamond.
**- My lungs still won’t let me breathe well in elevated heat and humidity, as proven throughout this past week. It’s been like breathing through a wet paper bag. So, why would I opt to go to some tropical place with that extra extreme, plus 60% less quality in medical service if I should ever succumb to it? It’s either Eastern Canada (in fall), or Northern Europe, that I have left as options.

The German Project/Das Deutsche Sprachproject: 55 Days/Tage, 63% Fluency/Fließend

Es sieht immer noch aus wie mein verrücktes altes Gehirn kann mehr neue Wörter ziemlich gut auf Deutsch lernen. Ich habe fast täglich für zwei Monaten die Sprachübungen arbeiten. Ein Teil meiner Grammatik ist manchmal falsch, aber ich (langsam) weiter zu verbessern. Ich benutze auch ein Sprachübersetzer Programm für mich zu testen. Ich kann Sätze jetzt mit weniger Anstrengung komposieren. Wann ich deutsch dazu spreche, versteht mich das Programm gut, also ist mein Akzent zumindest verständlich. Ich kann es besser schreiben, ich lese es gut genug und ich habe die Bedeutung von unbekannten Worten durch ein bisschen besser intuition zu erraten, aber ich mache immer noch schlecht beim Lernen durch das Zuhören. Das ist immer noch ein eine ständige Schwierigkeit für mich mit Deutsch und anderen Sprachen. Vielleicht sind meine Erwartungen jetzt zu groβ, aber ich versuche es noch.

Translation (or at least what I tried to say): It seems that my crazy old brain can still learn some more new words in German fairly well. I’ve been working on the language exercises almost daily for two months. Some of my grammar is sometimes incorrect, but I am continuing to (slowly) improve. I also use a speech translation program to test myself. I can now compose sentences with less effort. When I speak German to it, it understands me well, thus my accent is at least comprehensible. I can write it better, I read it well enough, and I’ve been correctly guessing the meaning of unknown words through a bit better intuition, but I’m still doing poorly at learning through listening. It is still the constant difficulty for me with German and other languages. Perhaps my expectations are too great now (at this age), but I’m still trying.

I sort of did a review of some progress notes on earlier attempts and reasoning for learning German in an entry some while ago (Deutschhackung). Some of that commentary still applies here. This is the third of my language projects (after Swedish and Ukrainian). This re-immersion into German has stepped me up into a more intermediate level. In all honesty though, despite the fluency rating my program gave me (which I think is over-generous), I feel that I’d be dead in the water if I had to engage in a more technical or colloquial conversation in German with someone. My “know enough to avoid getting jailed or shot” principle applies equally to learning this as it did with learning Spanish many years ago.

It’s a really shame that more Anglophones don’t learn more about this language, as they are closely related, and there are some really cool tricks about German, mostly to do with its flexibility for compounding words, more so than English has. Unfortunately, the taste for learning and acquiring it generally has been soured somewhat for most North Americans and non-Teutonic Europeans alike in the past, for the fact that Germans were our adversaries in two of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. People, out of some defiant reaction toward a perceived enemy’s propaganda of being a “master race”, won’t readily pick up an interest in learning that other language or culture, especially when one’s own national or cultural pride takes over, from the fact that one’s side proper was victorious over such opposing forces, not just once, but twice*. It thus made the language, and the culture around it, maligned for a long while, even perhaps subconsciously if not overtly. Sadly, there were several decades of this friction going on between us and the Germanic states in the early and mid 20^th century, and even though over 100 years has passed since the beginning of it in World War I, with a worsening of it by fascism throughout the second World War to follow, the result was that, either through our own ethno-centric pride after those war years, or through lingering stale resentments. Thus, German’s popularity as an alternate language to learn waned and became a lesser desired form of protocol language. Sadly, I feel that German was uncooled for us in that sense. This ignorance became a meme that continued to stick around long afterward, even being passed on into the generations who didn’t or don’t even have such grudges about the past. More sadly, it’s also commonly perceived that the only other reputed keeners for any such renewed interest in learning German here in North America, outside of those who already have familial ties with the culture, are mostly amongst those who allegedly belong to or associate with Neo-Nazis, the Skinheads, or those who have similar such sociopathic racist tendencies. That’s not exactly good PR for the language either. That’s my theory for its weakened popularity anyway. If I could make up a nice concise German word that adequately sums up this meme, it would be probably be Bedrohungkulturvermeidung**: a defiance against, or willful shunning of, something representing a cultural force that is, or once was, thought of as corruptively evil or potentially destructive to your own. It’s an ignorant concept meme that I suppose I’m actively trying to shatter.

Now that I’ve been more immersed, here are a few things of note that I like/love about the German language, or at least keep me curious and interested enough about it to make me keep learning it:

1.       Easy to spell – No, honestly! Some other people look at the longer words and get intimidated, but it’s really quite logical. If I do misspell it, it is due to me being a shitty typist (and unable to find the umlaut characters in the Alt-key sets). There are no silent letters in German that I can find, unless they are adopted foreign words. There are some signature diphthongs, but at least those are restricted to only one sound each. The only confusing part in writing it for me is when to use “v” and “w” when guessing the spelling of some words, as those sound the same to me, and when to use “s” or “ss” or the “ß” in the spelling. Otherwise, it’s all pretty straight forward.

2.       Prefixes and suffixes – The prepositional prefixes (ab-, an-, auf-, aus-, .  .  . -, über-, un-, unter-, ver-, vor-, zu-) , and the suffixes (like -heit, -keit, -ung) can be affixed to an infinitive verb to make a lot of options with a lot more flexibility than what English has.

3.       Easier pattern recognition for me for translating cognates – For example, the German words with “cht” in them generally equate to the same word with “ght” in it in English (sicht = sight, licht = light, Nacht = night, Macht = might (power), acht = eight) … und so wieder (etc.).

4.       Lots of similar and common words in German with not only English, but other languages – Dutch, what little I studied of it, looks like a very vowel splattered marriage between English and German. If I choose to learn more of it, it would be easier knowing English and some improved German. Swedish has lots of words that are related to German, which makes it a little more retainable.

5.       It’s multinational – Germany, Switzerland, Austria speak it, as well as pocket German ethnic communities like in the Czech Republic, the Alsace region in France, plus in Northern Italy, Southern Denmark, Western Poland, and whichever other countries share borders with the German-speaking nations. It’s more likely that the German language extends into these other bordering nations rather than the other way around.

The things that aren’t so nice about German:

1.       The dreadful grammatical gender issue – not just masculine and feminine to know, but neuter as well. As an Anglophone, my revulsion for such a complicated system, which includes having to match all case articles and adjectival forms accordingly, seems to be deeply ingrained.

2.       The numbers – the way the order gets switched for the tens and ones after the teen numbers. This doesn’t help a mind like mine, which is already tainted with a bit of innumeracy.

3.       The guttural ‘ch’ sound – Not such a pleasant thing to hear, but at least it’s not as heavily used in German as it is in other languages like Dutch or Arabic. My reluctance to learn either one of those other two is greatly based on the frequency that this horrid sound is made in general parlance when I hear these languages being spoken. It’s somewhat of a hostile sounding phoneme. I’d hate sounding like I’m going to spit or hock up phlegm all over someone while I talk. The word ‘Küche’ (kitchen) is a particularly awful word for me to hear. If someone said ‘Gehen Sie in die Küche.’ (Go in the kitchen!), just the sound of that final word in that sentence would make me feel like I was getting punished instead of going to this room that ordinarily makes me happy. To be a fair critic, I give equal weight in comparing annoying sounds between German and English, I’ll readily admit that the most unpleasant sound to come from the English language (as many foreign learners of it would probably agree) is the silly ‘th’ diphthong. In fact, I hate the word ‘diphthong’ itself for the fact that it has ‘th’ compressed in it.  A lisping sound that is considered generally ear-grating and annoying in most other languages is all too common in spoken English***. Linguistically, in general I find that these are the two most unsexy sounds that any language can have.

4.       Genitive Case confusion – A Germanic language like Swedish is similar to English when changing to a case form that indicates possession, the advantage being that neither language has grammatical gender.  German itself is inherently so much more complicated because of that issue of grammatical gender.

5.       Accusative and Dative Case definite and indefinite articles – this is a nightmare for me to keep straight in my mind between all the stupid genders. Added to that are prepositional article contractions to account for too (am, im, zum, vom, zur, beim, etc.). This is not at all easy for an English thinking mind.

6.       Which “This” to use – I cannot for the life of me keep it straight in my head about which form of the demonstrative adjective ‘this’ to use in German (dies, diese, dieses, diesen, diesem, dieser) for the right case. I cheat a little and generally play at safe all the time by simply using das (that) or ‘das hier’ (the English equivalent to ‘that there’ or ‘this here’).

The some of the more useful to adopt and interesting German words, in my mind, are as follows:

1.       Schadenfreude – (harm joy) that twisted sense of pleasure you get when you find out that someone you absolutely despise becomes stricken with some sort of misfortune. It has been adopted into the Oxford English dictionary, and I don’t think we use it enough when we witness things that pertain to it.

2.       Ohrwurm – (ear worm) that song that enters your head and then just won’t stop playing itself over and over again through your mind.

3.       Words ending in -ig, -ling, -us – those endings denote that a word is masculine, less shuffling around to do in my mental junk drawer.

4.       Words ending in -ung, -ie, -ik, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -ion, -ur – those endings automatically indicate that the nouns are feminine. Again, a detail that helps me do less mental hunting and pecking.

5.       Words ending in -um, -ment, -chen, -el – those ending indicate that the noun is neuter. Again, a helpful mnemonic.

6.       Weltschmerz – (world pain) A feeling of melancholy about being sick and tired of dealing with too many problems. Another German word readily adopted into the OED.

7.       Reichen – a verb (infinitive form here) roughly meaning ‘to be sufficent’ or ‘to be enough’. Handy to know if you are in a situation like when you’re with some hard-drinking German buddies who are trying to order round number five of Jägermeister shots each chased with one litre steins of beer, and you’re half-wrecked already and haven’t yet finished your third. It’s easy enough then to say half-pissed “Nein danke, das reicht!” (No thanks, that’s enough!). I’d probably be drunk enough by then to pronounce those awful “ch” sounds correctly.

8.       Hintergedanken – (behind thoughts) I actually learned this word from one of the lectures of Alan Watts. It’s used to describe a thought in the back of your mind that you are instinctually trying to act on. It’s sort of like working on an ulterior motive that you are not really conscious or aware of.

9.       Fernweh – (wanderlust) Given that I’m typing this entry on what is yet another staycation, I’m getting too intimately familiar with the meaning of this word. It is the complete opposite of homesickness (Heimweh in German). That is, it’s a desperate intensified and unsatisfied desire to be anywhere else: for the sake exploration of someplace novel and unfamiliar; to be anywhere else than where you currently are at.

10.   Bierficker – Here comes the nasty word number 10, the spot reserved for profanity, vulgarity, and potty-mouth vocabulary. I learned this one many years ago (and not because it was directed at me though). It’s a compound word used as an insult directed at a guy’s masculine endowment: the combination of ‘beer’, and a word that means the same as the English one with the ‘i’ substituted for the ‘u’. It’s meant to suggest that some guy’s Schwanz ist so klein dass er in den Hals einer Bierflasche passen kann. Again, this sentence is semi-Anglified since I can’t use the genitive case very well, even to describe genitals. However, the gist of this word implies that indecent acts with a beer bottle could be performed, because one’s genital unit is so miniscule that it could fit into the neck of one. Leave it to the beer-drinking, applied science/technical engineering minds of the Germans to dream up this kind of trash talk.

I found the time to complete this language program five days early. Partly because I was a bit more ambitious because I’ve been finding more comfort and ease with this language from, and partly because I had nothing much else planned during my week of holidays. I filled the void with some more lessons.

 The next two-month language learning session I have lined up is French, which is appropriate: because the program begins on July 1^st, on the 150^th birthday of this great nation, and thus it would be very fitting to learn more in my country’s other official language. I was hoping that I’d get some direct immersion in it from a trip to Montreal, but that’s going to have to wait.  

*- It should be made clear that there are no real winners of a war. Lives are still lost, industries, infrastructures are razed, the environment gets destroyed, and debts amass all for the sake of destruction on both sides. Resources get taken away from education, reducing social poverty, enhanced development, and responsible sustainability. Victories have an expense just as losses do. The one thing I’ll say for the resilience of the Germans, despite being defeated twice, they came together again as a leader in technical and economic development on the world stage, far better in ways perhaps than we have as North Americans, who were the so-called victors of both conflicts. Another reason they should be respected.

**- A compound word I constructed from what I think roughly translates to “threat-to-culture avoidance”. It’s probably incorrect. I don’t know if such a word actually exists in German, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it, or some variant of this word really did.

*** - I had a living example to bring this fact to light to me during my brief time as an English teacher in a foreign country. I was tutoring English to other teachers in the faculty of the school where I was working at after class hours. This one teacher, though interested in learning some English, had great difficulty in pronouncing the ‘th’ sounds, and judging by her reaction, she also found this diphthong a repugnant nerve-grating thing to hear. To make matters worse, she was a math teacher, so I assumed she would be interested in learning the proper way to say the numbers. Big mistake! The ordinal numbers after 2, and the way fractions are expressed make learning numbers in English a nightmare for someone without ability or liking for pronouncing the ‘th’ sound. Teaching her ordinal numbers (4^th, 5^th, 6^th etc.) and fractions was almost like the scene in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where the Judean masses were taunting the lisping Biggus Dickus with the recitation of ‘S’ laden names. I realize now that I could have been exceptionally torturous to her, and could have made her recite the ordinal fraction 3333/33,000 (three thousand three hundred and thirty-three thirty-three thousandths)