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!

A Full 360

I’ve been up since 4:00 AM . . .  again, like five hours before sunrise. Doing upgrades and fixes to my laptop was is the only activity I could think of doing that seemed half-assed productive, and yet not loud enough to disturb any of my neighbours at this hour. While waiting for the scans and optimizations to finish, I’m filling the gap of the period used to all this with some writing to clear my head as well. My phases of insomnia have been getting progressively worse now for the past few weeks. There’s still another month yet to pass after the recent solstice until maybe things normalize themselves with the wonky sleep issues as the extra darkness recedes after then. Being exposed to fumes, dust, and debris containing noxious chemical compounds in both fresh and old deteriorating forms of adhesives (NOT WILLINGLY!) from the past three days probably hasn’t been doing me any good physically or mentally either. I’ve came home from work feeling a bit sickly and even more de-energized, and I have been falling into a cycle of collapsing on my chesterfield napping, and ruining the phases and timing of more appropriate sleep hygiene. The closest geographical place right now that suits my phases of wakefulness of normal diurnal activity where I won’t be disturbed by jet lag is probably Iceland. Also, for some reason as of late, unknown to even me, I’ve been gazing up skyward to note the positions of planets and constellations as well when I walk the dog in the early morning and mid-evening. Perhaps, it’s something that’s becoming instinctual:  to tune into and immerse myself deeper into nature’s flow of rhythms and cycles, in the middle of a winter season which never seems to budge from either coldness or lack of daylight around here. In any case, a more intensified consciousness of timelines indeed occupies my mind around this part of the year. I tend to think and process time in shapes along with numbers: another weird way my brain works.

The first five days of this year involve my usual messing about with planning and scheduling for the whole calendar year ahead, which inadvertently leads to me playing around with the trivialities of time equations*. January 6^th isn’t just where Christmas eve falls on the Julian/Orthodox Christian calendar, or Epiphany on the Gregorian calendar; it is also Day 1 of the remaining 360 days left of this year, signifying in a sense the first degree of a full circle. I’d like to suggest that making New Year’s resolutions just prior to, or after, New Year’s Day is really an exercise in futility. One should never use just a couple spontaneous (usually guilt-spurred) moments to make a full commitment that’s supposed to take you the rest of the year or beyond to achieve. I’d say avoid that impulsivity, and plan for something within the first five days (not just five minutes, or something blurted out in five seconds) of the New Year, doing such things as:

·         Setting a timeline for steps

·         Writing the goals down (I won’t be doing that here though, it’s too personal)***

·         Prioritizing the things that are important

·         Reviewing what resources and materials you have, and what you still need

·         Looking through an actual calendar to establish dates for milestones for setting reasonable goals

·         Setting a budget for this stuff

Today is the first degree of a small step on a journey of coming to full circle. Check your progress throughout. Be a real geek about it. Check the first 15 degrees of this special circle (on date January 20^th), check on Pi (π) day, a day devoted to circles (March 14, 2018), check on the first full quadrant (April 5^th), check on your birthday after this point**, check the midway point from here to year’s end (July 4^th), and three quarters of the way through (Oct 2^nd). Take time to cull out whatever isn’t working and replace it with something that does along the way.

But, what do I know . . . typing stuff like this on an insomnia-addled and chemical-fogged brain doesn’t necessarily qualify as sage advice for myself and others for movements toward betterment for the year ahead, but it’s better than no real plan of movement at all, which 95% of the time is wasted efforts by people who use impulsive and rash resolution making on New Year’s Eve or Day.

So, Happy Epiphany, and Merry Christmas to the orthodox celebrants. Do realize that three hundred and sixty days is a quicker cycle than one usually expects, try to do the best with it.

Addendum: My friend introduced me to an app that is very fitting for this endeavor: HabitBull. I'll give it an exploration and test through.

*-Like the statistical frequency or rate of goal scoring needed for how one team to tie or surpass another in some IIHF Word Junior hockey games, for example.

**- January 6^th is special to me because it is exactly a full 9 months from here until my birthday (an entire human gestation period). Thus, I would guess being conceived on Epiphany (derived from the Greek, meaning “manifestation”) is as significant as an extra holy day for me, as being born on Christmas day is for my Dad.

***- The one thing that I will note here that was a success from last year’s go around was learning some elements of other languages, with better fluency than I thought I’d have.

The Swedish Project/Svenska Projekt: 50 Days/Dagar, 15 % Fluency/Flyt

Jag har varit lärande mig några svenska för sju veckor nu, och jag har använde mellan tjugo till trettio minuter per dag sedan starten av den ny år att lära det. Det var en speciell utmaning: eftersom jag ville se om jag kunde lära mig och använda de elementära delarna av ett ny språk inom två månader.

That's enough of that. Hunting for the Alt characters to make these accented letters is becoming bothersome. The translation of what I typed beforehand is this . . .

I have been learning some Swedish for seven weeks now, using 20 to 30 minutes each day* since the start of the new year to learn it. It was a special challenge: because I wanted to see if I could learn and use the elemental parts of a new language within two months.

This is my progress with the first of my self-imposed two month language programs. I have six of them lined up for the year. I tried a 100 day program before, but I was learning slightly skimmed modules of 10 languages at a time, to get a feel for both what I was most proficient at, and what was most challenging for me to understand in terms of grammar and other difficulties. There's not much that can be retained that way. So this time, I'll be diving into one language at a time, for two months at a time, with more intensified focus. Some of you are asking, "Why Swedish exactly?"

I present for you the following reasons:

1. It's one of the closer sibling languages to English -  The real test of this project, before I even selected a language to learn, was to see how competently I could master learning a new language with minimal effort. It's been a while since I made an effort to really learn something new. I'm taking the road to ground zero of language acquisition, since it has been a long time that I practiced any language. I don't want to start with, or have anything to do with, the messiness of extensive verbal conjugations. To sort of gain a sense of my maximum range of my potential, I thought I would put some effort into learning a language that's more similar to English than not. That is, something new (for me), yet loaded with enough common cognates to make it look a bit familiar in certain ways. According to one index I found, Swedish ranks as one of the top nine languages that are easiest for English speakers to acquire. It might not look like it when you compare the two languages from the sample I gave from what I learned to process so far, but English and Swedish are more similar to each other than French is to English, or Spanish compared to English, or even German to English. Even for those who are linguistically challenged people, who are completely talentless at using foreign languages, they might possibly read a Swedish phrase like, "Dessa män här är hungrig." and may be able to deduce correctly that it does indeed mean "These men here are hungry."  Many common words exist between English and Swedish, and the other Nordic/Germanic languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, due to the historical fact that the Vikings invaded the British Isles, and along with the raping and pillaging they did to that land, they impregnated the forming English language itself with a lot of common loan words. English words like they, them, their, egg, shirt, skull, stick, whole, wake, break, sky, skirt, law, and even the word earth, for example, are actually Scandinavian in origin. There are also lots of common words between Swedish and German. For the record, I've found Swedish a lot easier to learn than German. So, Swedish is also going to be helpful in bridging some vocabulary with that other language I already know a bit about, and would like to learn more of in the future.
2. It's multinational - There are only about 10 million speakers of Swedish in the world, but if I wanted to learn one of the languages that's closer to English, I would want to be able to use it in more than just one country when traveling. Norwegian is spoken by a smaller population, plus it's restricted to Norway, and as I understand it, there are so many dialectic deviations and differences even between communities that there are multiple dictionaries in that country for translating one form of Norwegian to another. That sounds too cumbersome and impractical to me. Danish is restricted to Denmark (and some of Greenland: a miserable looking island I wouldn't bother to ever visit anyway). More about Danish later. Icelandic is more archaic, more complex, and limited further still to just having a few hundred thousand native speakers of that language. Then there is also Frisian, which is said to be the living language that's most similar to English (although I can't see it), but it is also almost moving rapidly towards extinction. However though, Swedish is not only used in Sweden; it is also used in Finland (another place I'd visit) by a few hundred thousand more people. Therefore, it's perhaps the more practical of the Scandinavian languages to learn of the languages most closely related to English that I narrowed the choice down to.
3. The several easy things about it - Speaking as an Anglophone, along with the many common words and similar cognates, there are greatly simplified things in the Swedish language that are wonderful. The verbs are great; only one conjugation per tense form across the personal pronouns, quite unlike something as dreadful as a Latin language like Spanish, which has eight different conjugations to memorize for each person form [I, you (singular, informal), you (singular, formal), he/she/it, we, you (plural informal), you (plural, formal), they]. The syntax and grammar are more similar to English than German is. When using numbers, the Swedish ones accord to the way the English ones are used; not like the crazy way the French say quatre-vingt or "four-twenty" to say eighty, or the weird way German places the ones before the tens, as in einundzwanzig or fierundsechszig [one and twenty (21), and four and sixty (64), respectively]. It was one of the factors that eliminated Danish out of the picture also (for now), as I found out that Danish has number counting oddities like those of the other languages I mentioned. There is also in Swedish, different rules for grammatical gender to deal with. In fact, in modern Swedish, there is a movement to introduce a gender pronoun that denotes a person with no specifically known gender. There is the word man (meaning either "man" or more generally "one"), but for some Swedes that word seems to be too biased for the masculine side, and not entirely gender neutral. There is han (he), hon (she), and now hen simply to mean any one man or woman, or to refer to someone whose specific gender isn't known, or for the transgendered. I couldn't say how eagerly that word is being adopted there, perhaps it's even controversial. It would be useful in those awkward "Pat" situations where you can't figure out what the hell someone is supposed to be gender-wise. It's strange, yet true, and perhaps somewhat progressive in some way.
4. More Orthographic Spelling/Pronunciation- Like the blissful thing about German, Spanish, and Ukrainian (once you learn the Cyrillic alphabet), there are relatively fewer anomalies when comparing how the language is spelled and how the words are pronounced in Swedish than in English. Both of Canada's two official languages, English and French, are terrible ones to learn because of too many instances of the lack of concordance between pronunciation and spelling. I also eliminated learning Danish when singling out a language for this project as well because of this same issue in their language: just like English and French, it's polluted with so/too many words with silent letters. There are fewer stupidities in spelling/pronunciation in Swedish than in English, which has crazy things like the eight different pronunciations of words with "-ough" in it. So, I ended up with Swedish as my choice Nordic language to learn.
5. The accent is interesting and beautiful - Forget about the garble you hear from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show, and the "bork bork bork" stuff. The actual rhythm and cadence of the language is quite pleasing to me, plus it's that rhythm that is very helpful in audibly differentiating each of the words, quite unlike for me listening to the horrendous rapid fire staccato output of languages like Spanish or Tagalog, where the sentence sounds like one long word. Plus, Swedish sounds far less guttural (to me) than the other Germanic/Nordic languages, like Dutch**. Perhaps because Swedes seem like a more relatively introverted cultural group, the lack of guttural sounds comes from sounding more low-key, and not being so bold, loud, and boisterous. It sounds like a more intellectual language to me in that respect.  
6. The relatively very few hard things about it - The only trouble I have with its pronunciation is the one unique sound that Swedish has, denoted with the diphthong "sj" which sounds nothing like an s, or a j, or anything else in English, or any other language I heard. The other thing, as I complained about earlier, is the multitude of accented vowels, which unlike the French ones, actually do function 100% of the time, thus they become important to include in correct spelling. Swedish seems to have more vowel sounds than English and necessitates being more of a stickler to correctly pronounce them more so than in English. It makes typing Swedish a pain in the ass with my English keyboard, leaving me to use a hunt and peck method of typing using the Alt key characters. The other thing that throws me off, that's even trickier than the use of other languages' gender specific indefinite articles, is the more arbitrary use of "en" and "ett" (the so-called common gender, and neuter respectively), of which both are more gender non-specific (e.g. both "man", "woman", "boy", and "girl" use the same common "en" gender indefinite article). There is no distinct pattern or system in how to use them that I can recognize, although fluids (water, coffee, tea, beer, oil) seem to favour the neuter "ett" indefinite article. The other tricky thing is changing the noun itself to represent a definite case, in singular and plural form, (e.g. dog = hund, a dog = en hund, dogs = hundar, the dog = hunden, the dogs = hundarna). Along with using some prepositions correctly, those are about the only issues I find really grammatically challenging about the Swedish language.
7. It will serve as a useful cognate database for learning the other tricky Nordic languages - Maybe, if I do travel around someday, I'll get to use Swedish as a bridge language for learning German and those other tricky Nordic languages*** that are supposedly mutually intelligible to each other.   
8. Because I genuinely want to travel to Sweden one day - Therefore, it isn't impractical to learn it. I always feel a certain shame for North Americans in general (less so for Canadians, some of whom are bilingual; more so for Americans) who have so little interest in trying to be bilingual, or multilingual, compared to the Europeans. I hate the lack of consideration by such people failing to learn at least some basic greetings, manners, and polite request phrases, coupled along with this absurd and arrogant expectation by some to automatically be served and accommodated in English when traveling to someone else's nation. I find such behaviour burgeoning on being disrespectful and disgraceful. If you have a capacity to learn and express yourself in at least a few words of a foreign language, by all means, do it!
9. Possible Sanctuary - Sadly, it's also coming to a point where I'm also seriously thinking of places to exile myself to if the political situation on this continent really goes to shit. If Americans are trying to get into Canada because of the Trump situation, where would a Canadian go to if a Trump-like political catastrophe happens here? Certainly not to the US; not for me! The worst case scenario I can think of is Trump somehow getting a second term in the US presidency, and then one of the worst possible candidates for conservative party, up here in Canada, becoming the Prime Minister in 2019 (i.e. Kelly Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary). I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a nation that is becoming more like how America currently is now politically, and if the remaining English speaking nations of the British Commonwealth or Ireland wouldn't have me, or become just as deplorably divided politically and socially as America is now, I would opt to live in a place like Sweden, a country that tops a lot of the social wellness indices and scales, along with the other Nordic nations***.

So far, throughout my study of the language, my list of favourite/interesting Swedish words I discovered through my linguistic tour of it is as thus:

1. Lagom - the Goldielocks word which concisely means "not too much; not too little, but just enough. It is a unique word to Swedish. I already mentioned it in a past post.
2. Orkar - A verb (present tense here) that means roughly "to have enough energy to do something". Example: Jag orkar inte jobba i dag. Jag känns sjuk! Translation: I don't have the energy to work today. I feel sick! I myself personally would be applying this verb in the negative to mostly housecleaning, anticipating encounters with drama queens, doing my taxes, and, of course, hangovers.****
3. Samboskap - With so many Swedes opting not to live as married couples, this word summarizes a common-law household living arrangement.
4. Fika - a nice little word that's used as both a noun and a verb for "to break for coffee and snacks"
5. Dog - It simply means "died" in Swedish. It leaves me to wonder if the Swedes listening to the song Hound Dog are perplexed as to why Elvis is singing so merrily about his dog dying.
6. På - Sort of pronounced like "paw". It's like the Swiss Army knife of prepositions, mostly meaning "on", but I notice in some cases that it can be substituted for the English equivalents of "in", "at", "with", and  "by". When I get confused while running through the online test quizzes about which preposition to use, I can whip out på and have about a 63% chance of having it be correct or acceptable.
7. Klockan - it literally means "the clock", but it's also a conveniently simple way to express hourly time. Just as we say "It's six o'clock.", to say the same thing in Swedish you'd say "Det är klockan sex." Incidentally, sex is both the word for six and sex in Swedish, and it leads me to wonder if Swedes habitually have sex at six o'clock. Man kan alltid hoppas att hitta det för sig själv (One can always hope to find that out for oneself).
8. Sjuk - If you didn't figure it out already from the example in point 2, it means "sick". However, with the ghastly, God-awful sounding, unique phoneme this language has for the "sj-" pairing, combined with the "Ook" sound from the "-uk", this word becomes a perfect piece of disgusting onomatopoeia for sounding like you are genuinely becoming sick: like you're trying to stifle yourself from puking on your shoes.
9. Varandra - A much more lovely word than "sjuk", that's for sure. It's a nice, concise, almost poetic, word that means "each other". It flows so smoothly and nicely in a sentence like Vi älskar varandra (We love each other). Awwwwww . . .
10. Jävla Jävel! - I was going to reserve spot number ten to include the foulest, rankest piece of profanity I could dig up from this language, but honestly I think I failed. When I sound out these two words together, they sound too lyrical and musical in my English thinking mind to be even considered nasty and offensive words. If someone yelled this at me, I wouldn't even flinch at all. However, read or said together, they roughly mean "fucking son of a bitch!"  

Exercising the mental task of acquiring another language is one of the most beneficial, enriching, practical, and not to mention cheaper things one can do to improve the brain's physiological health, and to prevent it from aging too rapidly and harshly. The injury I had last year, plus the trauma my lungs and heart took the time before that has made me wary that my work life has to probably veer away from physical labour to doing more cerebral stuff, so it's even more important to keep my wiring in check. It's to retest my mentally ability to adopt and adapt to things. It's also one of those great and cool Jason Bourne type skills to add to one's repertoire. Most other foreign languages intrigue me, and I am very envious of people who are genuinely talented polyglots. It's not just learning another language to me, it's gaining another world perspective and seeing what is enhanced or diminished with the addition and boundaries of another foreign vocabulary. Combining this, with more math skills and logic exercises gives me more of a clearer avenue to test out machine language programming and coding later on. I'll see and hope that my interest in this doesn't wane. As for now, I've applied it to playing against native Swedish speakers in Trivia Crack (. . . and beating some of them to at 6-0, hehehehe).

*-Finding 20 to 30 minutes a day to commit to a project like this is easy once you consciously start breaking the negative habits of watching junk TV and avoiding depressing news, avoiding toxic people, and dropping using other apps that aren't productive.

**- Dutch has some similarities to English, at least that I can see in written form, but it sure isn't pleasing to listen to with my ears. No offense intended to the Dutch; I'm sure there are some practicalities and nice and sensible inherent qualities about the language, but for me, it's like listening to someone talk while they are struggling to swallow a mouthful of live cockroaches. Afrikaans, being closely related to both Dutch and English, sounds just about as weird, and is further impractical for me to learn because South Africa isn't a place where I'd care to visit. Please note that I'm not touting English as a superior language. I get that it has lots of flaws and deficits.

***- I have Danish friends, and I don't want to demean their mother tongue, but I'm simply working at this project empirically. I simply find that between listening to and reading samples of both languages, Swedish is the one that is more comprehensible to me. It's so strange how a phrase translated into both languages, which in my eye have close to identical spellings in some cases, can yet sound so radically unlike each other. Sorry Danes; it's not you, it's me. I've even committed to trying to follow episodes of Dicte on Netflix, to study spoken Danish a bit, and I find your language far less inferable or intelligible than Swedish is (otherwise, it is a good show once you slap in the subtitles). It sounds more mumbled or slurred than Swedish does to my Anglo-Canadian brain/ears. Both are probably loaded equally with their own unique idiosyncrasies that I have yet to learn more about. I'm certainly not perfect linguistically, and I'd probably butcher the pronunciation badly of either of them, no matter which one of the two I dare myself to speak. Regarding point 9, I'd eagerly move to Denmark too were it not for the fact that the language is much more challenging.

****- I thought I should add an example reply (past participle): Med än, du hade orkat att dricka en hela flask av Absolut vodka i kväll går! Så, hur kan jag vara ledsen för dig? Komma, låt oss gå fika. Translation: But yet, you had managed to have the energy to drink a whole bottle of Absolut vodka last night! How can I feel sorry for you? Come on, let's go grab some coffee.

Year's End Evening 2015

The year 2015 ends with me sitting in my humble dim living room, by my fireplace that was lit and kindled with the old calendars, sipping on a Scotch* on the rocks, reading and reviewing my chronicled entries I wrote throughout this year that has passed, and writing this current one. I really can’t find the will to be around any other company, despite feeling somewhat more alone than usual right now. The playlist generator app I switched on in iTunes guessed and programmed the perfect set of songs for what’s rolling around my mind right now. The ideal title for this particular playlist would be It’s There and Real. I wish it could be shared with the one I’ve been thinking about.

I was sort of lamenting earlier, as I wrote my last entry, about how 2015 did no special favours for me as a year of good fortune, and I’m at the point where I’m begging for some better karma for 2016. It seems though lately like even a small bit of good luck is a huge thing to ask and pray for. Even when good luck does come there now seems to be a catch, or a caveat. It seems to find a way of short changing me the chance of any complete potential, or the fullest scale for total happiness. Shortly after posting the last entry a little more than a week ago, I received a revelation that stunned and shook me to my very soul. I’ve been in a strange place ever since then, one in which I waver between states: where on one hand I feel like my heart wants to explode with joy, reveling in news that a guy like me would equate to winning the lottery . . . twice!  Then, I find myself falling just as suddenly to the other extreme of wallowing about in a fog of despair because the timing, distance, and other circumstances leave me powerless to be able to do anything more to make the reality of the situation less complicated and conflicted. It's like holding a winning lottery ticket . . . and being unable to collect the prize. A promise of discretion keeps me from explaining anymore about it; I could never betray the trust of the person who told me the facts. It’s something that I couldn’t ever forget anyway, and thus it's not necessary for me to record more here in great detail for the sake of my memory. All I can say is that I really wish I had the ability to clone the dearest people in my life. 

I have set no resolutions for this upcoming year: at least none which I could proclaim openly. My last meal of the year was nothing monumental. I worked this evening with no special ceremonies, struggling hard to find and recall any other special moments of the year for myself, other than what I just mentioned. It was futile. My last purchase of the year is a 3 TB cloud drive, for the arduous task of archiving and organizing my digital life so I can attempt to move other mountains. The recent effort of trying to recover some old photos showed me how urgently this needs to be done. It was bought out of necessity, not desire. It’s for preserving other work I have for the vain hope that it may get published some day. The threat of my laptop crashing any day still looms. Dealing with that may be my next issue.

I just glanced at a clock to see that I’m 40 minutes into the new year. My glass is now empty. Ella’s fear of fireworks was triggered from the bursts and shock waves from outside, and I suppose I have to coax her out of her hiding place. I suppose I should be thankful that throughout this past week, I’ve got real with myself after being sort of jolted and then coaxed out of some hiding places too.

Welcome 2016! Please don’t be as cruel of a year as 2015 was.

*-Single malt, 12 year old Auchentoshan . . . excellent stuff.

Winter Solstice Eve 2015 (Chance Rolls)

I have been doing my usual annual round of avoidance of the insanity of shopping the weekend before Christmas routine, and tried to keep this a low-key weekend at home.  It is the Eve of Winter Solstice*, and it seemed like a fine enough reason as any to relax by the fireplace and reflect. Finding it in me to make entries for the past couple months since the election hasn’t been there. There has only been drama-laden news and negativity charging at me from all sides since all the tragic happenings in Paris and San Bernardino, the ongoing debate about the refugee crisis, plus the fear-mongering stupidity abound stemming from creeps on social media to the campaigning in the States. Adding my input or other comments about these salient things one way or another doesn’t make for a course of relief from it all, nor changes the hateful idiocy of others who are making such crises worse.

Someone else who is just as unwilling as I am to get out of

bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.

I’ve been reflecting on the other 354 days of this year that have passed. I suppose 2015 for me will be known as “The Year of the Great Weakening”. I’ve come to face to face with working through a lot of denial about how much of a toll last year’s suffering really took on me, and what kind of impact it has left, and how it still affects me today. I didn’t think it would have amounted to affecting me so chronically. I’m sick of realizing how much it all has physically aged me in such a (relatively) short while: a notable and pronounced loss of resilience. I re-entered work this year with not only lots of upheavals regarding my personal health, but also wading hip deep into problems and challenges affecting not only me, but my co-workers and people I serve, and with my role in the Union. Holiday plans were ruined by fires throughout the summer, more injuries through late summer and fall, and then the other tragedies pouring through the news from late October onward. It hasn’t been what I would call a fun year to say the least.

Sure, there were lots of hard lessons to learn, but I didn’t need the pain, stress, and anguish; I’d benefit more from them if some element of fun or a lighter side was present. That didn’t happen. Life became too serious for my liking; nothing I’d want write about. It has been bad enough that I decided to suspend my more analytical and logical modality of problem solving thinking recently. It has been helpful in guiding out of problems, or at least taming down sparks to prevent bonfires, but there has been nothing that I would call feeling better with a sense of satisfaction or interest in doing so. So, just on a whim while Christmas shopping for others, I thought I would seek out a small inexpensive something that I would identify with as a “lucky charm”** for a more acceptably benign form of exercising superstitious thinking for myself: by consulting some form of oracle. I realized that the perfect sort of rosary objects or gris-gris for me is a set of dice. My threads of “logic” for making them significant totem objects are as follows:

• I like simple and symmetrical geometric shapes; dice have that going for them. It’s a reminder to seek out the most fundamental and simplest solution to a problem first and to take a balanced approach to tackling it.
• Dice are linked to gaming (my favourite dice games are Backgammon and Yahtzee, which I’m becoming addicted to playing online); a reminder to try to find some way to approach a difficult situation by making it entertaining enough to keep it at least interesting to follow through with dealing with it.
• Often my biggest problem is analyzing too much, and slapping down too many options and approaches in my own private sessions of brainstorming. Paralysis by analysis happens too frequently. Dice would be practical tools to help me speed up decision making and to settle on single options.
• Dice are mathematical instruments, which appeals to me when I want to entertain that geeky side of myself. I mentally retreat sometimes into thinking about the world weighed and measured in numbers to help myself be less bored or depressed.

Most importantly, a six sided die is a mnemonic representation of all the dimensions and elements of what depression or boredom is, or their flipside. Boredom = (energy) – (interest) – (attitude) – (knowledge) – (imagination) – (focus). By default of existing, one has a physical mass that works and interacts within the dimension of time. That is Energy (remember E=mc²). Unless you are in a freaking coma, or sick to a point close to dying, the powers that be gifted your conscious self with some physical/mental abilities to use for the waking hours of your day, and the choice of how, or whether or not, to use them for your and/or others’ benefit. How present or absent the other five factors are that play on your energy will dictate how bored you will or will not become. It’s even hard talk about, or write out what boredom is and to somehow make it a subject of serious interest. That is until you see what happens when you add plus signs to all of those variables following energy. Then what you have is its complete opposite: creativity. If you have little or none of those things in that set, you simply have to get real and honestly ask yourself why those variables are depleted, or outright absent, for each or every one of them; that keep you shackled to a mindset of boredom, and impedes your approach to something more creative.

If I were to create an official national holiday marking winter solstice in this land, the celebrations would include a lot of dice based games, candles/lights/fire to brighten things up, and of course drinking. There would be no obligation to exchange gifts; just share good company. Sounds like a good start anyway. Who knows, if Trudeau the Younger ends up legalizing marijuana, the trend might naturally flow to there being a reversion to some more hippie neopagan-esque celebrations that would mirror things like this anyway.

An addendum paragraph to this entry the day after. The question about what my plan for 2016 was brought up to me by a friend over lunch hour. I was lacking in speculation and answers. It may involve more of what rolls of the dice have to tell me. If they break horrid spells of indecision and, if I gain a course of action and commitment from using them, it is all fair game.

*- I always wondered why we haven’t made more generic holidays and celebrations here in this nation for both solstice dates of the year, like they do at least for the Summer Solstice in Scandinavia. We are multicultural society in Canada, and we all live under the same sun. It wouldn't then matter who you were racially, ethnically, culturally, spiritually (or not). It would be somewhat uniting I’d think. I’ll always welcome another statutory holiday.

**- If you want to get judgemental and think that this is all very silly, let me remind you readers that people use such symbols, charms, and trinkets all the time, and it is more common than you wish to acknowledge. It usually comes and is possessed in the form of jewelry. Think about the multibillion dollar industry happening alone just for the sake of procuring an outrageously expensive shiny rock affixed to a ring just to show off and symbolize engagement or marriage. Others get more and extreme and tap ink into their skin permanently to express their totem symbols in tattoo form on impulsive whims (which they may regret later). Surely, my choice is no weirder or more extreme than any of those things.

Labour Day Weekend Bucket Dump

A combination of rainfall from outside and my pooch snoring at the foot of my bed woke me up this morning. It rained buckets overnight. I would have went back to sleep if I wasn’t immediately seized by overpowering leg cramps soon afterward. I couldn’t think of much else to do since 5:30 AM to quietly take my mind away from the pain, except to write. I realize that it is somewhat ironic that I am finding myself starting off this day stuck in bed, trying to unlock and unfold myself from a fetal position, because it is my birthday. It will be nothing significant or monumental. It’s forecasted that it will be drizzling and gloomy all day, and all the people I’d like to share this day with have their own long weekend plans, or are out of town or province, or out of the country. It’s the kind of day where I definitely feel I’ve grown a lot older, but not much wiser or better; hardly worth celebrating. The only special thing I can think doing is to try to move soundly enough to make some coffee and my breakfast of choice, and to tour around the world a bit from the armchair: reading online travel guides, and articles and posts from the Quebecois and European news sources*. Beyond that, my motivation and speculation for activities for the rest of the day is as dull and grey as the sky is now. All I know is that suppressing aches and pains, being forced to sit still, staring at screens, and perusing lines of text isn’t the ideal way to spend this day.

But hold on a second . . . I just caught sight of a blog entry from Tim Ferriss. It is about bucket lists. It occurs to me that I don’t officially have one. Given that it is my birthday, it should be the gift I give to myself. If I can do nothing but sit around, retreat into my own head, and write, I might as well devote some time and serious thought and focus to this instead of being depressed and watching it rain buckets. I won’t be sharing it: it’s too personal. I will divulge that:

·         I’ll shoot for about a 100 things. That alone could be challenging enough to be classified as list item # 1. It was hard enough just to think of one thing for the  "Before I Die I Want to . . ." Wall I mentioned earlier.

·         Skydiving won’t be on there. It's a ridiculously cliché thing that a lot of other people put on theirs. A bucket list, in my mind, is about the things you want to do to make you feel alive; not doing things that would kill you in such a way that there would be nothing left of you except stuff that can only be scooped up and put in a bucket. I had to return to this point to edit this a bit. It's not like I'm advising against it to those who really want to try it out, just make sure that it's the last thing  on your list . . . unless you are a real asshole to everyone, then please do us all a favour, and make it the first thing to do on your bucket list.

·         No experimenting with drugs, nor anything else illegal, will be on there. I prefer lucidity, and not risking wasting any of this precious lifetime I have left behind bars.

·         It won’t involve any buying anymore gadgets and or computing technology. It will be about shifting from the virtual world to more engagement with the real one.

If anything, I hope it sets me on a course of being more energized and motivated for the day and beyond, and not victimizing myself with too much boredom during this day of solitude.

*- Aside from the actual news, I do it more so to help me retain some of my secondary language skills. Reading the translated versions of my own blog entries, on subjects that are of interest to me, and which stem from my own original thinking, is another useful learning and retention technique that I also exploit. I’m still lousy at oral communication: in that I usually don’t easily comprehend what is being spoken to me. Transmission OK; reception bad.

Toxicity Taking Away Toxicity

Neo Citron is a troublesome over-the-counter remedy for me because I make less-than-prudent decisions while using it, and I begin perceiving cause-and-effect events in a whole different realm*. It makes me more disinhibited in thought and deed: more so than alcohol ever does. I know I experience strange occurrences which have bizarre repercussions triggered every time I consume the horse-tranquilizer strength form of this cold medication, but after this time around, I experienced one of the weirdest series of consequences that I ever had under its influence. This time it made me realize how even my most passive involvement in things could unravel some wild series of consequences. For this time around, its use, along with being extra irritable and less tolerant to nuisances since I became sick, plus the lack of sleep due to coughing and sneezing all night which put me into my disinhibited insomniac state were factors in the equation that prompted me to make a 911 call.

A raging domestic dispute was happening down the block. Such things have been happening repeatedly during the early mornings of the past few weekends, and sometimes midweek, from this one particular house; sometimes so loud and wrathful that their arguments wake me even when my windows are closed. I just ignored all the previous battles as best I could. I wasn't even really able to pinpoint the source of all of them until that morning. So, this couple have been fighting and verbal feuding openly on various mornings, screaming and playing out their petty drama at each other taking it out on the street. However, this time it escalated to one them starting to destroy property: racing out and breaking down a staircase guard rail at the front entrance, and taking a large column of it and swinging it around and threatening to club the other with it. It seemed pretty obvious that they were intoxicated. After witnessing that, and knowing that there was a legitimate enough concern to report a violent outbreak, I jumped on the chance to call the police and end this ongoing loud and toxic bullshit once and for all. Even after the cops came, they didn't tone down their jostling and hollering. They were so oblivious to everything else that they didn't even notice the police arriving, so I felt pretty assured that they had never noticed me witnessing this drama unfolding from my distant vantage point. My blood ran cold when I heard the woman then screamed out, "He murdered my sister!" repeatedly. Another police cruiser came, a prolonged period of de-escalation and intervention ensued with more cops entering the home. The police didn't clear out of there until an hour afterward, taking away a guy in handcuffs. If there was a killing, I don't believe it happened at that site, since no ambulance came there that morning.

What makes my head spin, apart from the cold medication, is realizing that my simple expressing of a complaint with the intention to just have a morning peaceful enough to enjoy my coffee** outdoors on my balcony for one of the last weekends of summer, and to make it feel less like one of my precious few days off for summer was being stolen from me by illness and other intrusive frustrations, may have by some fluke led to a homicide suspect being taking into custody. There was nothing heroic in this on my part. It was dumb luck to have this kind of negativity simply cleared away in this manner. I hope it will ultimately bring some peace to that household and the rest of the neighbourhood. This time, I'm thankful that using Neo-Citron probably had a lot to do with setting off this particular chain of events, because truthfully, I don't believe I would have made that call if I wasn't using it. I would have probably just instead took the regular course of action of either ignoring it, or leaving my place to go elsewhere for some peace, failing to be around to actually witness the real implications and results of that feuding, and thereby allowing this crap to continue and having someone get hurt or worse. I thought this all was a story worth writing about because it's one of those weird ironies and rare cases where a disinhibiting side-effects of a mind-altering chemical was used to actually prevent a crime and possibly linked to solving, or leading to an arrest for another more heinous one.

Another thing to note to be thankful for is how the police here dealt with this situation, and comparing it with what has been going on in Ferguson, Missouri in the past few weeks. I can honestly say that I'm thankful for the fact that we have a police presence here that operates more with civility and less with brute force and active militarization.
 
*-The worst sentence I've ever written where I am over-using-hyphenation.
**- Actually, it was another dose of Neo Citron.

Hacking German/Deutsch Sprachehackung

 It's the first day of August. I can't believe how quickly summer is drifting by. This morning is calm and cool, but I expect 33 degree heat later today, and a thunderstorm by the late afternoon or evening. I hope I'm wrong about that. I have been learning some more German vocabulary and grammar for about 12 consecutive days now, using around 10 to 15 minutes per lesson.

Es ist der erste Tag des August. Ich kann glauben nicht wie schell der Sommer vorbei. An diesem Morgen, die Wetter ist sehr ruhig und stille, aber ich erwarte 33 Grad für Hitze später Heute im Nachmittag oder Abend, mit ein Sturm möglich. Hoffentlich, wird das nicht so sein. Für über zwölf Tagen, ich hatte mehr Deutsch Sprache gelernt. Ich arbeite für nur 10 oder 15 Minuten jede Lektion für mehr Vokabular und Grammatik zu lernen. Das ist genug jetzt. Zu schreiben mehr in Deutsch, muss ich mehr Kaffee (oder Bier) zu trinken.

So, why another language, specifically German? My outlined answers are as follows:

1. The obvious mission – I still want to travel to Europe someday, and it only makes sense to learn that which is most commonly spoken there as the primary and secondary language. Putting that together with my English and the French and Spanish I know, and I should be able navigate around most of Western, Northern, and Central parts of that continent well enough. One could be a hopeless dork and be confined to traveling around with a tour group full of complainers who can't think outside the box (my idea of hell) who wouldn't dare to speak a word of any other language of the visited nation, and not discover anything really different from what could already be found in a guidebook. I prefer doing the total opposite and going rogue: being like a Jason Bourne and heading off the beaten path; operating independently. To do this, knowing at least the bare essentials of more than one locally spoken language is a must.
2. To make learning the "cousin" languages easier – There are the other languages of the other nations I want to visit along Northern Europe (Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian) in the same Germanic linguistic family that share a lot of the same cognates found in either English or German. Having this other German dataset should (in theory) make learning these additional regional languages easier just as knowing French, a Latin born language, made it easier for me to pick up on Spanish. Learning the complex forms of case articles, three forms of grammatical gender, and different word order would temper me up better if I really wanted to learn something even more complicated in depth like Russian or Ukrainian.
3. Cognitive Improvement – Studies are showing more and more that learning new creative skills, adapting to novelty, and solving puzzles (without too much stress) and testing the working memory are the best things that can be done for stimulating the brain enough to ward off things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Learning a foreign language covers all these bases. It's a cheap form of prevention that I can do now that may keep me from suffering hard later. I take the issue of preventing geriatric mental illness a little more seriously than most. It's because I currently don't (and possibly wouldn't) have a trusted life-partner around to take care of me if ever I should become chronically ill, or ever need help to guide me along if ever my mental gears started slipping due to anything age-related in the future. I've worked long enough in health care to see what the real personal and social costs of cognitive impairment are, and how I don't ever want to be rendered into some zombie-like, dementia-stricken elder with no grasp on reality, or left at that the mercy of a system whose only answer to deal with you in such a state is to over-medicate you and shut you away. My inspiration came from hearing about a lady who was in her nineties who was still learning other languages, and she was still very cogent and bright during her interview.
4. It ultimately helps me to speak my own language better (or at least makes me recognize the ways I use it poorly) – when I stepped outside my box to learn Spanish years ago, it struck me as to how badly I use the subjunctive tense in English when I compared the two languages. Learning German now helps me to clearly see the functional difference between accusative and dative cases as it is so much more necessary to be aware of using them precisely when speaking German, which I wouldn't have learned as readily or adequately if it was explained to me in an English lesson.
5. To fit my idea of personal betterment – when I take into account the most interesting people that I've ever met in my life that I had the pleasure to engage in amazing conversations with, they had mostly these characteristics: they were bright, but in a way that had nothing to do with the number of years they spent in University, they were "richer" people, but it had nothing to do with the measure of the material wealth that they had, some were less well off than me. The one overlapping element they all had in common, which I believe made them bright and "rich" with experience, was the fact that they all could speak more than two languages, which effectively made them wiser with a grander world view of things. To learn another language automatically puts you in the place of having to find another way of thinking or perceiving things. I find myself envying those who are able to think and dream in more than one language, I think that's a fantastic mental talent to have. I'm hopelessly inconvenienced with only being able to think and dream in English. To be able to speak another language or two fluently really is hard to do without a reasonable amount of social intelligence: another enviable quality to have, which is probably what made those other people's company so enjoyable. German's distinction in the role of human betterment, despite having a relatively small number of worldwide speakers compared to Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and English, is that it's the second most used language for scientific publications. Using time to learn another language is the only time when I feel like my brain is actually growing, unlike other times when I'm just passively absorbing and then regurgitating other trivial stuff.
6. It forces me to become a better listener – something that I wish all people could learn how to do better (myself included).
7. Because learning another language is becoming cheaper and easier to do than ever – thanks to cross-comparing my ability with apps like Google Translate, and Duolingo, I can drill and test myself at my own pace.
8. A 30 day program project - It also all part of a 30 day program to see how much I'm able to learn, and to test my ability to commit to it that long. Learning German is challenging enough to force me to re-think things and to be transformational, and yet harmless enough that if I fail at it the consequences won't be too harsh.
9. I'll learn something that won't go obsolete – the only things that I feel I learned in school that have never escaped me and served me most practically were basic mathematics and the ability to tactfully and correctly use language, which is useful in a highly technical world for. . .
10. Building programming competence and confidence – making an effort to understand something which would ordinarily look and sound like garble to you and then putting into some functional and logical order to get something done is the very essence of computer programming. I strongly believe that you have to have some proficiency with practicing this with human languages first before you can even apply it into controlling something as stupid as a box full of silicon chips.

I'm doubtful that I'll ever learn enough German to be fluent enough to understand the great intellects like Goethe, Thomas Mann, or Einstein; to read their actual thoughts in their own words. That's not my ultimate mission. I just hope to know enough to be understood when I need to make requests, or ask for directions. If I re-translated my little composition above, I'm sure I'll find glaring mistakes. The case articles and genders are the hardest things for me to understand as an Anglophone learning German, but I'm trying. I'll see if and how I'll improve after the 30 days has past. 

Zen and Car Shopping

This morning is close to feeling frosty, but I still troubled myself to make time very early this morning to drink coffee on the deck. It's probably the only real moment of peace I'll be able to find today. Some co-workers lately have commented to me on how stressed I look. Sure, I have some weighty issues to contemplate, but it's mostly due to lack of sleep, because I am still having a challenge in being able to settle myself where I'm physically comfortably enough to be free of my remaining aches and pains. I notice how badly I've been dragging myself through the latter half of each day for the past week as a consequence of it.

I've healed up enough though, and now physically mobile enough where I can finally get on with wrapping up the sordid business of settling my insurance claim, so I can finally ditch my old wreck of a vehicle instead of still relying on it to get around. I'm grateful that I'm finally made it to a state where I can walk almost normally, and can endure a prolonged biking trip at least halfway through the city and back. I'll have to manage with doing more of both walking and cycling; since as of today, I'll be carless for an indefinite period of time.

Running, however, still has been too physically demanding and problematic. I still can't push my pace or breathing anywhere near to the intensity I used to do: not without risking more damage. The inner muscles surrounding my lower leg bones are super-tight; my tibia and fibula feel like they are encased in steel pipe. My chances for racing by month's end are looking really hopeless.

Along with that, I've been frustrated and disappointed with so many other things during this week. They range from car shopping still being a bothersome gong show, to discovering the deceptive means that our province's social services use to screw over care aide workers and those they serve, all with the attitude of: "you're just pawns in this game". It's an ongoing adventure in discovering how ignorant, corrupt, and stupid people are, and the lengths they'll go to try to shaft you. I don't mean to get preachy, but it's a good moment to reflect and examine some of the past-goings on, and to put them in a Zen context.

I think of the example of dealing with the matter of car shopping alone to illustrate this. I have been delaying car shopping for quite some time. Procrastination? Maybe, perhaps a little of that . . . but there was also a strong, nagging, instinct in me telling me that I wasn't ready for it yet. In Zen Buddhism, there is the teachings of the three unwholesome roots, also referred to as "the three poisons". They are: hatred, greed, and delusion. On a more primary level, they in turn are generally connected with ignorance, attachment, and avoidance, which are the components and sources of all suffering. In car shopping, while trying to heal myself, it's inevitable that I'd be confronting and clashing with those three elements within myself and in others. The (incomplete) breakdown is as thus, with crossovers and connections between each point:

• Hatred (Avoidance) - hating getting injury irritated by moving around, to appointments that could turn out to be just a pointless waste of time; more negativity and distrust of the sellers, frustrated by misrepresentation in the ads; frustrated by limited mobility; hating not having a work schedule that accommodates me to look at cars at the times when most are available for viewing; dealing with insurer and the idiot who rammed me; I dislike shopping most of the time to begin with, and it's now worsened by feeling pressured to do so out of necessity; ultimately wanting to avoid the feeling of being deceived and cheated; new debts, higher registrations fees, etc.
• Greed (Attachment) - Sellers assigning too much value to a high mileage/older car; me being strict and inflexible with a personal budget; me wanting to use time to rest rather than kick tires; wanting/liking a car and then finding out too late that it has been sold; feeling a lack of options, and forced to buy something out of some duress; buying more than I can afford in the long run.
• Delusion (Ignorance) - my impatience for wanting to heal faster, yet still forced to do things that are counterproductive to allow for it; seeing a person not acknowledging the flaws I detect when I examine a vehicle, and/or flat out trying to bullshit me about them; not having the right senses to detect the real performance of the car and poor/rash decision making (being on pain-killers); failing to ask the right questions/missing details; lacking a consumer confidence in making the right decision for myself; the clash between the reasoning about what is practical need, and what I find more sensually appealing; having too high a standard on things that matter less: having too low of a standard on things that matter more.

Along with healing to get better mobility, delaying (procrastinating) was one way to mentally detox, to clean some of these poisons out of the mind, if I really wanted to put a champion's effort into wisely buying a vehicle, but it's important to limit it before it turns into another form of avoidance.

So today, I face the reality of trying to crack open the trunk for the first time since the collision*, to clear out and salvage my vehicle's contents, and load my bike in there to permit myself a means to ride to the bank with my settlement afterward, and return home. My car served me well enough, but I'll be happy to finally rid myself of that little beast, and move onward. I have no special sentiments attached to it: no regrets, no tears. It just gave me lots of lessons (and repairs) to process for the time I had it.

Back to a more intensified effort toward walking, biking, and hopefully running, better . . . for a little while hopefully.

*- It doesn't matter if it can be shut again, since the car is heading to the scrap yard after I drop it off at the claims centre. Addendum: as expected, the damn trunk didn't close once I dropped it off there.