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)

5Q5A: Summer Holiday Stretch 2017 (Part 1)

For the past while it seems, I’ve been becoming very paranoid every time I book holiday time: because it feels like I’ve been jinxed or cursed, for the past few times in frequent succession, by something that either afflicts me negatively health-wise, or else presents itself as some other crisis to respond to that gouges away at me financially, robbing me of funds to do anything more adventurous. As a result, lately I haven’t been too committed to even make any travels or definite plans for extended leave, just out of pessimism and cynical belief that some recurring pattern of this will happen: with something coming along and ruining things for me anyway. So far, this time around, some whammy, bad karma, or some other force of malevolent juju hasn’t befallen me (yet). However, now I’m deprived of anything of novelty to do, and starting things off in this suck-ass rainy weather of today doesn’t help. I turn to writing as my last resort to noodle things out, and to try to put things into perspective in 5Q5A format, to also hopefully prevent me from rambling on too much.

Q1. If I can’t away anywhere, what things can I do to at least “mentally vacate”?

A1. My regular weekend routine involves just doing my own laundry/housecleaning, or hacking food

My favourite thing to do alone as a kid was

assembling model airplanes. Here's what I

walked out of that store with: a cheaper

than plastic option, and a whole lot

more to build for a cheaper price.

to pieces and applying some form of heat to them, and maybe preserving this stuff. All still labour-intensive projects; all still a lot of work, and it’s certainly not 100% leisure. I thought I was going to try to test how far I could still run with my infarct-afflicted lungs. Of course, that didn’t happen given the rain. One other thing I thought of doing was taking a prolonged break from all this “being-an-adult-with-responsibilities” bullshit. The trick then is to think like a kid. With me not being, or having been a parent, I have never had many opportunities to view the world vicariously through the eyes of a child: watching them grow, or interacting with them as an adult through play. If brought up right, kids are usually uninhibited in using whatever creativity, wonder, and genius they have: before too much progressively invasive adult reality dulls that shine away from them. To get back that quality involves finding some place where adults go to supply themselves with stuff to exercise some new creativity, and the place to spark that kind of stuff was Michaels art supply shop, to find some sort of craft supplies. I did find something that tickled my fancy, and made me a bit nostalgic of my own childhood. My next stop will probably be at Lee Valley, to collect some precision tools, if making little airplanes isn’t going to entertain me.

Q2. What was the thing that came closest to being bad juju then at the beginning of this holiday?

A2. My beloved coffee grinder, one that was gifted to me over 20 years ago, finally kicked the bucket - a bad omen perhaps. It served me well. I always have whole bean coffee here; never that stale pre-ground crap. There is no shooting off into new realms of inspiration or creativity here from ground control without the right kind of caffeinated rocket fuel early on in my day. And with nothing else to grind my beans, that is a problem. I tried using my blender for grinding them, but unfortunately, the resulting grind was too course and it just couldn’t do the job right. Thankful, I found a replacement for a bargain.

Q3. If expense and travel time weren’t factors, what would have the plans otherwise been?

A3. Something like the list of the following things, on some madcap adventure throughout Northern Europe spending time:

·         Exploring the local castles

·         Picking random stops along the London Underground, and just wandering around for days staring up at the architecture

·         Cycling around Copenhagen and Amsterdam and taking in the outdoor markets and cafés

·         Touring the Viking Museum in Roskilde, Denmark

·         In a jacuzzi full of Swedish bikini models*

·         Gorging myself on fresh seafood in some seaside bistro along the Brittany coast of France

·         Visiting the D-Day battlegrounds and memorials (Juno beach)

·         Having my ass-end warming some barstools at various pubs in Dublin, and in other Irish communities

·         Doing whatever else Anthony Bourdain would be doing in those regions, and taking time to write some memoirs of these jaunts (He’s a lucky son of a bitch, and I am so envious for the job that he has!)

Q4. If then resorting to cheap(er) thrills, what are they?

A4. Not exactly a cheap thrill, but being in a rut of boredom, depressed by the dark sky and rain, and otherwise void of inspiration, I made a trip to the casino, and thankfully won a little money, just enough to cover some of the cheap thrills I bought throughout the day. The beer I brewed last month has cellared long enough to sample; I’m at least well-stocked with that. The best score so far for this early part of holiday time in terms of simple things (apart from a bargain priced new coffee grinder, and model plane book), has been an ample supply of . . . super fresh Black Mission Figs. The first time I ever had a fresh fig in my adult life seemed like a religious experience**.

Foccacia Bread baked with fresh figs, unripened goat cheese,

and seasoned with mint, pepper, and a little drizzle of salt

and olive oil. This, plus some olives, and some wine cured

dry salami as some chacuterie was my lunch. The rest were

just simply eaten raw, and some were reserved to be pickled

in balsamic vinegar.

That happened several years ago in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. For that I thank a certain Mr. Testa, an old gentleman Italian immigrant, who is also my cousin’s father-in-law, who offered me the experience of what one of these things actually taste like in their perfection: fully ripened, and eaten within seconds after being plucked off of its tree proper. Simply amazing! The fig tree he had grown and husbanded himself was his personal treasure. It stood only about two meters tall, sheltered in the very centre of a very orderly greenhouse, as if presented there in a shrine-like display, surrounded with all the other pots of herbs, pimento peppers, and various other plants he used for crafting his own homemade canned antipasti. The tree was itself a product of carefully and mindfully placed grafted scions, according to some tradition of his Old Country, which gave it a perfectly sculpted symmetry. It was like an oversized, fruit-laden, Bonsai tree. Amidst the branches of this tree were smaller pots of soil, tied and secured to them. The soil surfaces in these pots were contacting the bottoms of the crooks of the smaller boughs. These pots were triggering root growth on those nodes of the branches, which when established, he would then cut these rooted branches away from the main tree body. It was his method of propagating new cuttings, which he either further nurtured separately, or sold as new little fig trees; I was very impressed with this resourcefulness. The tasting a fresh fig now always reminds me of this sort of ingenuity and pride. The same kind of pride my Dad had for his blossoming apple tree earlier this spring. Fresh figs are a rare find in this town, so scoring some by happenstance was a real bonus. So, I grabbed up as many as I found practical to use, given how perishable they are.

Q5. What is the next thing to invest in for having a decent summer holiday locally?

A5. Given that I’m conveniently only a block away from the riverbank, I’d really like to explore the

city, and the southern riverbend, from rowing around on the South Saskatchewan itself. The only watercraft that I might be able to carry there and back by myself is a shorter (2.5 - 3 m) kayak. The only things that keep me from outright getting one is the question of storage space (it would have to be hung from the ceiling of my balcony, a possible condo regulation infraction), the question of how to transfer it safely in and out of the building (I mentally engineered a pulley system from my deck, like casting away a lifeboat), and the fact that if I capsize the thing, my own comfort and ability to swim equates to that of a thrashing, drowning cat - even with a life jacket on.

Although thankful that I won’t be at work for a while, it feels like the grip of boredom and a mindset dulled and numbed by previous stessors has to be shaken off me in a drastic and desperate manner: like Houdini escaping from a straight-jacket in a tank of water kind of deal.

I have eight more days to reckon with all this.

*- I struck this out, not because it was a thing I had already accomplished (I’m sad and sorry to say), but because, if I weren’t travelling alone, if I ever did reach Europe, I’d ideally be traveling with a female companion, and I wouldn’t think she’d approve of this sort of frolicking and cavorting on my part. Secondly, of all the things on that fantasy list, this one would probably be as likely to happen as me being struck by lightning not just once, or twice, but thrice!

** - Buddha himself allegedly found enlightenment just sitting meditating under a fig tree, so perhaps it’s not some sacrilegious hyperbole to say such a thing. It makes me wonder if he indeed partook and relished in eating its ambrosia-like fruit.

Old Dead Drunken Authors and on Writing while (somewhat) Impaired

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools. -- For Whom the Bell Tolls  

What the hell do adults do alone in Saskatoon after 10:00 PM on a showery May evening: something that's somewhat stimulating outside of the regular home life, yet not too abnormal? If one isn't into the NHL playoffs and generally dissatisfied with all other television programming, plus no appetite to speak of, with the bookshops being closed (not that I'm really in the mood to read anyway); when one doesn't care to waste coin visiting bars, or a cacophonous casino; when the cinemas have nothing special to show, and when it seems too late and unsettling to abuse caffeine and sugar at donut and dessert shops, there really isn't much else to do by oneself at this hour enduring sleeplessness*. So, one tours around cyberspace, while at the same time retreating inside one's own head; it's doing me no favours. It seems to be too busy in there as it is. I only have more insomnia to contend with later it seems: if I don't do something about it. It's times like these when I reflect and speculate on what notable people did in the past: those who didn't have such options for entertainment and yet were creating it for others, and who have suffered relatively more than I have. The topic is also spurred by a strange fact in a posting thread I read earlier, and stunning myself with noticing strange connections.**

I couldn't think of much else to do for now but to remain at home; propping myself in front of my computer keyboard, with a tumbler glass full of whiskey, starting this entry, and perhaps pretending for a while that I can pull off a Hemingway, i.e. having something profound exit my mind and onto a page whilst I'm half lit, that is if I am not made sleepy first by my libation. Whatever gets crafted as a result afterward, for better or worse, I'll credit to the liquid inspiration. As much as I choose to avoid drunken outlandish storytellers in bars, I am however intrigued by some of them when they end up committing their words to paper

Ernest Hemingway could at least verbally draw something fantastically vivid out of a scene that others would ordinarily find trivial. The copious amounts of alcohol he used for fuelling his process was his gimmick modus operandi. The question about whether he was a writer with a drinking issue, or a drunkard with a writing issue, still remains debatable amongst his critics. One can't fault Hemingway much for becoming a drunk though. After all, he did witness the worst of the resulting suffering from the savagery along the frontlines during the first World War as an ambulance driver, until he was wounded himself. Booze was probably the most convenient tool around for dealing with what was called "shell shock" at the time. I suppose he made the best with it as he could.

Edgar Allen Poe is another example who comes to mind, who has my respect as being another writer, who was a hopeless sot, yet who was still able slap together sentences well enough to make them stir one's senses with eloquent, yet macabre, diction relating to things intriguingly mysterious. He was a sickly and melancholy fellow for most of his forty odd years of an odd life. Drinking lots surely didn't help him, except only to be probably more disinhibited to find the right words for him to express with ink and pen. To write literature well, I suppose some sorts need to reach a certain degree of pathos. There's no shortage of that stirred up from excess imbibing of liquor. There's a fine line as to when it turns from a help to a hindrance.

It's interesting, and yet kind of sad, to know just how many of the best critically acclaimed literary works out there are products of someone's neurons being basted in ethanol, or other narcotics and psychedelics. Perhaps, when it comes to writing on a level that's appealing and impactful to all sectors of society, it's just proof that if you are intelligent and keen enough to use grammar effectively, one has to contort the mind such chemically to observe how weird, warped, and surreal the rest of society is as to give it a fair and accurate commentary as well. Probably that's what Hemingway was alluding to in the quote above. He also said that he drank for the sake of making other people look better. That definitely doesn't work for me. It's not the kind of writer I'd want to be. Again, using the examples of Poe and Hemingway: Poe ultimately died alone and penniless, wearing someone else's clothing under mysterious circumstances, and Papa Hemingway sank to such a low that he cancelled himself off with shotgun blast to the head. There's no glamour there I must say.

My whiskey is finished . . . enough about that. I'm not so seasoned as either a hardcore boozer or a writer, so I'll choose to stick with just this one glass. After reviewing what I just wrote, I still seem to be rather lucid.

This reminds me that the Top of the Hops season approaches, and I'm debating if I should go this year. For now, I see no reason to this time.

*- My only other feasible entertainment options for the evening were non-adult things: like videogames. We laugh at our house pets and think how kooky it is when we pull out a laser pointer and make them chase a projected dot, but isn't that what we ourselves are essentially doing when we try to chase and maneuver around sets of pixels on a screen with some control interface? In that perspective, playing videogames isn't exactly very creative or intellectual either. Contraband things could then be listed after this I'm sure.

**- An article about E.A. Poe, and about how he sort of predicted a shipwreck with the name of one of his characters in one of his stories (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) being identical to one of the victims who suffered the same fate under the same circumstances in real life (cannibalized on a lifeboat) occurring several years later. The name of the character was Richard Parker. It struck me then that it was also the same name given to the tiger on the lifeboat in Yann Martel's book Life of Pi. This wasn't coincidental. I found out that Yann Martel purposely chose that name for the tiger in his story based on these uncannily identical, yet temporally separate literary/actual events. It's like Poe time travelled.

The Ukrainian Project/Український проект:Day/ День 60, Fluency/Швидкість 8%

Український дуже складна мова. Це найважчий мову, який я вивчаю. Я знаю тільки прості речення. Найголовніше про це в тому, що вона вчить мій розум читати інший алфавіт.

Translation: Ukrainian is a very difficult language. It is the most difficult language that I am learning. I only know simple phrases. The most important thing about it is that it teaches my mind to read in a different alphabet.

It is near the end of the second two month period of learning another language. This time, I chose the hardest of my set of six to practice. It is strange to progress from the easiest (Swedish) to the hardest in the repertoire, but that's how the random selection worked for me; plus, all the other remaining ones in the set would look easier after doing this one. So, why is Ukrainian one of my target linguistic ambitions? Like for the last language project (The Swedish Project), I provide this summary of reasons:

1. It's one of the languages of my heritage - One weird fact about me is that I taught myself how to read Ukrainian alphabetical script before I ever really learned any of the language. My grandmother used to share our family's post office box with my parents, and after she died, her issues of the "Ukrainian Voice", a Ukrainian language Canadian newspaper, still came in our mail. I figured out the alphabet by myself when I was in a more precocious phase of my adolescence, merely out of the interest of being sneaky and trying to "break a code". And I did it, using only a copy of this newspaper and a bit of pattern recognition (I was a weird kid!). As for learning to actually communicate the language, it was sadly lost upon me. I never got to learn and understand anything from my paternal grandparents, and by the time I started getting a better aptitude for it, sadly, both of them had already passed away. Even if they were still alive when my interest in learning the language may have peaked, they weren't exactly scholars themselves, and I don't think they would have had the patience to teach me at that age. I do this to sort of honour them. It's a shame that out of all their grandchildren, I'm probably the only one who could find their tombstones in the cemetery they are interned at, since the engravings on them are all in Ukrainian. This leads me to the next point . . .
2. To not lose my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet - I find it strange that my Dad, who was immersed in Ukrainian in his youth as his first language, can read cursive written Cyrillic script but not the alphabet printed form itself (or it at least doesn't come to him as instantly). He may have once, but somehow it didn't imprint itself well enough, and it became lost in the lapse somewhere between his ages of eight and his eighties. I suppose it's proof of the adage, "If you don't use it, you'll lose it." I hope not to have that same deficiency as I age. This is the practice I need to avoid such illiteracy. Personally, I really like the Cyrillic alphabet for the fact that all the consonant sounds in Ukrainian are presented with single letters; no strange couplings or illogical looking diphthongs, or tricky silent letters are there as in English (ch, sh, th, kn, ough). You'll realize how superior it is to the Latin alphabet when you compare it to a Slavic language that doesn't use it, like Polish. The consonant sounds made in Polish sometimes need up to four Latin letters strung together (like "szcz") to represent the same sound that is written with one letter (Щ) in Cyrillic. That, plus along with using the horrendous montage of accented characters Polish has would make typing it a nightmare. Polish and Ukrainian, given that they are neighbours geographically, have many similar cognates, except the same sounding word in Polish may be written with eight Latin letters whereas the one in Ukrainian could probably be spelt with four in Cyrillic. Ukrainian has a tough vocabulary and a bitching hard set of grammatical rules, but once one is acquainted with the alphabet, it becomes at least a relatively easy language to spell despite some of the tricky pronunciations. For me personally, knowing this alphabet has already been useful in garnering employment in the past, working at a museum and cultural centre, so it validates and verifies to me that it's not such a useless thing to learn.
3. It's a true survivor - It's impressive and simply amazing that this language still even exists at all given the tumultuous history of Ukraine itself. The etymology of the name of Ukraine itself derives from a something akin to meaning "borderland". The region has long been a route for traders and invaders, given its ease of access with much of it being flat steppe land, meaning that it has long been a disputed land and a target for conquest from the early Eurasian groups like the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Turks, and other Eurasian steppe tribes , to the Vikings, Poles, Lithuanians, to this last century of Austro-Hungarian Imperial rule, and of course ending off  with Russian Communism, and hostile Russian expansionism up to today. So many of these empirical forces, coming at all sides of it from Europe and Asia, either by brute force, or slower forms of assimilation, could have washed away this language off the face of the Earth and making it extinct, like what has happened with so many aboriginal languages on this continent. But, the Ukrainian language remains alive, despite all the historical upheaval of conquest and subjugation of the darker political forces. The resistance and resilience of the people and the culture and language of that region pretty much sums up what Skinny Pete said in the movie, The Italian Job, that being: "If there's one thing I know, it's never to mess with mother nature, mother in-laws, and mother freaking Ukrainians".   
4. For simplifying and softening the introduction to Russian - Ukrainian is closely related to Russian, which is one of the other of the six language modules I'm learning this year. Russian is the more unfamiliar one. I'll explain more as to why I'm learning it in the entry I'll give about the future progress with that.
5. To have an avenue of some connection with potential ancestral ties - It's doubtful that I'd ever step foot into the "Old Country", given the political unrest occurring there, even for the sake of taking a genealogical tour to get to sense of what my roots of one half of my heritage are. I'm far too estranged from whoever there are left of the relatives that live there now. That's a real shame. The insular nature of Communist rule severed the contact we could have had with each other. However, I won't discount the chance to somehow reconnect with any relations there, just as there is some contact made with my Mom's relatives in Britain now.
6. Learning tough grammar cases helps to better learn (or at least question) those noted in my own language - The sobering revelation one [an Anglophone] gets through learning a language like Ukrainian is understanding how stupidly ineffective and imprecise English can be in comparison, and how dastardly difficult it is for others to learn it. There is lots of English grammar that is technically imprecise, and heavily reliant on context. I cite this following example: if you were Ukrainian  and just learning English for the first time, and heard the spoken words "mother's milk", what must go through your head if you had an especially analytical mind?* First of all, just hearing (not reading) the words "mother's milk" with the Ukrainian ear isn't enough for this listener to define which case is being used. It could be: 1. mother's milk: (singular genitive) - like the mammary secretions from a nursing mother, 2. mother's milk - like a glass of milk belonging to mom that is going to be used instrumentally for consumption, 3. mothers' milk (plural genitive), milk from more than one mother, (except in Ukrainian it may be corrected by perhaps pluralizing the word milk to "milks" because logically, more than one mother doesn't make the same milk in one collective breast), 4. mothers' milk - where more than of a set of mothers share the same container of milk to use, 5. same case as 4. except there is more than one glass of milk involved, and then 6. let's not forget that milk is also a verb in English, so another question that can brought to mind to the Ukrainian listening is, "What are the mothers milking?". All those noun cases can be indicated with the single oral utterance of "Mother(')s(') milk**" in English, but yet the words are not orally/aurally differentiated to represent each one of them accordingly. However, in Ukrainian, that isn't so: the declension of the nouns between singular and plural genitive, instrumental, accusative, dative, locative, and vocative cases make each one of those situations I mentioned a lot more defined and accurate grammatically, or at least pertinent enough to better distinguish whether it's some mother's glass of milk, or her actual breast milk on the table, along with a more exacting degree of plurality. Out of all the languages I'm learning, Ukrainian has the most (confusing) case declension forms to deal with. It's very daunting, I must say.

The things I find challenging and difficult about Ukrainian is a very long list and would be too exhausting to explain. I will focus on the positive though. For now, at least I can: a.) readily identify if something written in a Cyrillic alphabet is Ukrainian or not (as opposed to Russian, Serbian,  Kazakh, Belorussian, etc.) b.) figure out the verb conjugations with a bit more intuition, and c.) at least know enough for a few manners, to explain that I don't understand well, and to politely ask a person to speak slower.

Now for the list of my favourite words, or at least the one's in Ukrainian that I find interesting. I'll transliterate them to the Latin alphabet for your ease of reading:

1. Туман - Tuman - It means "fog" or "mist", but more colloquially, I learned from my parents that it's also a word used to mean something like "fool" or "dummy" (they didn't use it on me as far as I know). I would guess that the relationship is derived from the same sense as we would say in English that we are trying to think with a "foggy mind".
2. Птах - P'takh - It simply means "a bird" or "the bird"***. It's funny to me because, if you are acquainted with the Star Trek universe as I am, you'll note that it's pronounced the same way as a frequently used Klingon insult. If you ever saw the comedy film, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the same sounding word, presumably from Hebrew, was used to suggest some context or action involving the union of genitalia. Ukrainian takes a word that sounds profane or vulgar in other languages (fake or real), and makes it mean something a more neutral and natural.
3. Пю - P'yu - The first person present conjugation of the verb "to drink", as in "Я пю" (I drink, I am drinking). I like it because it's one of the more useful and shorter words in Ukrainian, like "go" and "do" are in English, despite the fact that with my English speaking brain, it sounds like you are doing more stinking than drinking. It's probably purposely made that way as a matter of convenience, and thus indicative of how drinking is a culturally popular thing for Ukrainians to do.
4. Дякую - Dyakuyu - It simply means "thank you" (it literally means "[I] thank").
5. Літак -Litak - A very unique word meaning "airplane". Unique, as in most European languages borrow and incorporate the common initial word (Like airplane/aeroplane/aviation, or things like telephone, or computer) to describe some invention or machine that is so relatively modern in relation to the language. The word for air is in Ukrainian is "povitrya" ([stuff/substance] of the wind), and the word for craft or vehicle is something else very long; they don't compound together to make some single word to mean aircraft. The only other unique language variants for airplane of my set of languages I'm learning that I know of so far that isn't derived from scientific Latin (air/aero/avian/aviation), is flygplan in Swedish, and German's Flugzeug (literally meaning "flight tool")
6. Розумний/Зрозуміти - English kind of denotes the verb "to understand" and the adjective "smart" as two different concepts. However, Ukrainian somewhat depicts them as sort of stemming from the same thing. Rozumniy (розумний) means "smart", and the verb Z'rozumity (зрозуміти) actually means "to be (become) smart with . . . " to reflect and equate to the infinitive of "to understand". "I want to be (become) smart with Ukrainian", does essentially mean the same thing as "I want to understand Ukrainian."
7. Сто - Sto - My favourite Ukrainian numerical word: a nice short word one meaning a hundred, having as many letters to spell it as the number has digits. I just wish the rest of the numbers in Ukrainian were so short with non-tongue-twisting syllables.
8. Хочу, можу, буду - 'I want', 'I can', and 'I will', respectively. Three modal verbs, when followed by a verbal infinitive, save me my lots of time and agony struggling to think of the correct conjugation, and allow me at least limited ability to express future tense.
9. У мене є - oo meneh yeh - It's a rather peculiar alternative way of saying "I have". Я маю машина, literally means "I have a car" whereas the other form (у мене є машина) roughly translates to "(in/at/of/for) me [there] is a car. Weird stuff there.
10. Голодомор - Holodomor - Like on my last language project list, I reserve spot number 10 for the most foul and depraved words, in my opinion, of that language. Even though it technically isn't a form of profanity per se, the word for "famine" draws up a perverse and horrible historical memory in this culture. When this word is said, it instantly is associated with the man-made famine, in the 1930s in Ukraine, imposed by the Stalin regime in that region that killed millions, some speculate even a number equal to that of the number of Jews killed in the Nazi death camps. The word doesn't just mean famine, it means something more akin to "murder by hunger". What could be more profane than a word expressing a political will to reduce millions to starvation by confiscating all their food? The fact that Ukraine at that time was part of the Soviet Union made awareness about the event virtually unknown to the West, either because of the insular and secretive nature of Stalin's brand of communism, or there was no interest or collective sympathy for any human beings living under communism, or because the Soviet Union was needed later on to take pressure off the western expansion of the Nazis, and needling Josef Stalin about this issue at the time wasn't a good measure of diplomacy to gain his involvement as an ally. So, attention about the matter of Holodomor in the Ukraine was purposely and conveniently kept out of the news to placate the tyrannical bastard, who throughout his life, was responsible for exiling and killing more people through his rule, mostly his own citizens, than his rival, Hitler. 

The adventure of learning and collecting new words continues from here onward. In summery, between learning Swedish and Ukrainian, I've been practicing one or more language modules each and everyday since the New Year began, roughly 120 days straight. I've just opened an envelope and revealed to myself the random pick of the next intensified language project to do. The next two month quest for improved linguistic proficiency . . . German! Thankfully, it's something a little more familiar, with the advantage of me knowing someone who could tutor me through some conversation.

*- Looking at language learning through this reverse perspective, I'm a lot more forgiving to my paternal grandparents for not learning very much English. They didn't have the advantage of something like an Open Door Society at the time when they immigrated. Knowing this, I am more empathetic to other newcomers here whose language is vastly different from English, and who are trying to rebuild their lives away from something oppressive.
**- I just noticed that putting the apostrophes in parentheses makes them look like a couple of upside down breasts with an "s" between them. This milk example is creating an obsession.
***- Like languages like Latin, Russian, and Chinese, Ukrainian doesn't use doesn't use definite or indefinite articles like "the" and "a/n". It's convenient in some ways, but not for others.

Sweet and Sour Cherry Spare Ribs (Crock Pot Recipe)

Generally, I view cooking spare ribs in a slow cooker as some form of sacrilege, but I'm trying to be open-minded. Given that this Sunday is too cloudy, cold, and gloomy to make me want to tramp outside and tend to a grill, I thought I'd experiment with a slow cooker, but I'm doing it on my terms by concocting my own version of a sauce that I think would go well with them using this method.

My objective was to get cherry flavour penetrating the meat on all taste dimensions (salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) and to rely a little less on the more piquant seasonings that I usually prefer. So, here it is: one of the very few recipes that I've created in which I bothered to write down.

Ingredients

1.7 kg - Pork Spare Ribs (I used side ribs), cut into 2-3 rib sections

1 Cup - Sour Cherry Jam (found at the Saskatoon Farmers Market)

It tastes great in Vodka too!

1/2 Cup - Pickled Sweet Cherry Juice*

15 - Pickled Sweet Cherries*, halved with stems and pits removed

1/2 teaspoon - Fee Brothers Cherry Bitters cocktail flavouring
1/2 Cup - Coca Cola
1 Tablespoon - Creamy Horseradish Sauce

1/2 Teaspoon - Chinese 5 spice powder

1/2 Tablespoon - Coriander seeds, lightly cracked in a Mortar and Pestle

1/2 Tablespoon - Pink Peppercorns, lightly cracked in a Mortar and Pestle

1/2 Tablespoon - Red Chili Pepper Flakes

1/2 Tablespoon - Kosher Salt

1/2 Teaspoon - Cayenne Pepper

After sectioning the ribs, combine all the rest of the listed ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly to make the sauce.

Dip each rib section in the sauce, coating them completely, and place them in a slow cooker crock. Pour the remaining sauce over the ribs, put the lid on the crock, place it in the slow cooker, and then set on medium for eight hours.

The Result

It actually turned out more sweet than sour, so in the future I may add either white vinegar, or red wine vinegar, to give it more balance to improve its tanginess. I would guess that the same sauce could be possibly used with browned chicken thighs, and roasted or slow cooked as well.

*- This is one of my own homemade condiments which I also have the recipe for, so you kind of get a bonus. For making Sweet Pickled Cherries, the process is as such:

1.75 Cups - White Vinegar

1.75 Cups - Granulated White Sugar

0.75 Cups - Water

2 - 10 cm long, cinnamon sticks

2 Teaspoons - Whole cloves

1 Teaspoon - Whole Allspice berries

1 kg - Dark Sweet Cherries (with the stems)

Combine vinegar, sugar, water, cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer gently uncovered for 20 minutes.

Sterilize three 500 mL canning jars, and pack the cherries into them.

Remove and discard the cinnamon sticks and pour in the hot syrup over the cherries to within 1.5 cm from the rim of the jar. Seal the jars and process them by immersing them fully in a boiling water bath for at least 10 minutes. Wait 2-3 weeks before using.

Earth Day 2017

Earth Day, for me around here, is the more official beginning of spring, in that it prompts me to commit to a better lifestyle not available for me for most of the winter months. That is: less vehicle use, a move to a healthier lifestyle, more engagement with my community, breaking through a bad seasonal trough of depression, and having better intentions for living well in general. That’s a challenge to do around here in Saskatoon from the beginning of November up until the first half of April. Earth Day marks some sort of pivotal point of true alleviation from the stresses of winter.

This is my personal snapshot of conscientiously lowering conspicuous consumption, and basically an audit of the footprint I leave on this region of the planet for this day when I decide to note how to tread lightly on it. Taking account of just how much we really consume in utilities like our power, water, fuel, and the money and resources for which we are using and wasting for these things in our households, and in our communities, is something I think everyone should be responsible for doing, and Earth Day seems like the perfect day to be mindful for doing it.

Earth Day for me is the reminder of the pervasive perversion of what I call the Double F destructive cultural forces we humans indulge in that are killing our biosphere. The first destructive Double F culture is the Fossil Fuel culture, and its role in climate change, and the lobbying by their proponents to make movements towards renewable energy illegal in some cases. The second is the Fast Food culture, and its role in not only making us a toxic, devolving, weakened species of obese diabetics and cardiac disease patients, but it is also an overwhelming source of pollution in terms of discarded containers (bottles, cups, wrappers, straws, etc.) all for the sake of our selfish and foolish sense of convenience, and wasteful and unethical mass production practices which are under the control of a handful of corporations whose ultimate goal is to control all elements of growing, processing and distributing food on the planet, and squeezing out practitioners of ethical animal husbandry, organic food production, and removing natural genetic biodiversity in our food stocks. I could add a third destructive Double F cultural force: the Fascist Fathead culture, of seizure of political control by cretins like Donald Trump, aided by a population so ignorant to allow that to happen, who are not only climate change deniers and not only taking inroads to making this planet worse environmentally, but getting us uncomfortably closer to some reality of an approaching world war. I won’t comment anymore on such things, but I will comment on my initiatives for this day, and see if they lead me to action for a happier place to be.

Morning: Woke up. Washed up. Fed the dog, then fed me. We walked outside after breakfast out to our neighbourhood park and back. Like on previous Earth Days, we took some effort to be mindful to transfer stray bits of litter in the public spaces to a trash bin*, and collect whatever discarded recyclables to cash in along our walking circuit. This year, I must say that the area looks much cleaner. I suspect several positive and negative factors at play:

·         The laws cracking down on DUI drivers in the province, may mean less vehicular boozing, and hence there have been fewer beer cans tossed on the street

·         The earlier thaw this year got people out earlier to do their spring cleaning and less wind strewn litter has been coming out of the yards

·         The City’s street sweepers came through recently, hoovering up the extra stray human made debris

·         The kids from the nearby Adventist school perhaps went early on their own Earth Day programme to help clean up the park and surrounding area

·         The wretched oppressive austerity budget from this government is making people trying every means to save cash; buying less pre-packaged junk/fast food, hence less wrappers, and saving their bottles and cans for SARCAN refunds.

·         More indigent people around who are reduced to picking up waste recyclables as prices/(sin)taxes get inflated

Ella and I still found plenty of litter, but not one bottle or can was spotted along our walk. Mostly paper and plastic drinking cups. A 20 liter bagful was collected and cleared off our path and trashed. A small move for some better karma I hope.

I then cycled to the Farmers Market, bought a local product, and then returned home.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           .

Lunch Hour: Made a pizza – using the ingredients that I’ve either already had here, that were extras from other cooking projects (just like the way the original traditional pizzas in Italy were made, i.e. repurposing leftovers) or bought piecemeal through the week from a shop on the same route as my commute from work, thus no extra fuel expended for a special dedicated out of the way shopping trip for one project.

Afternoon: Reading, napping, daydreaming/meditating, doing sudoku, some house cleaning, language learning, dog-walking, attending a March for Science Rally (too briefly, but I at least got to sign some petitions), I went to the library to make returns and check out more new material. Except for the household cleaning, and language lessons, all of those things required neither power, nor fuel, nor water, nor extra money to do for the day. I’m writing this I suppose to tell those who are Millennials and younger that it is indeed possible to have a life for a large part of the day without electronics.

Evening: Drinking homebrewed beer, ate left overs for supper, more reading, listening to tunes (mostly bass-intense, shoe gaze Indie), writing this entry.

Power Used: Actively deployed power usage that I opt to turn on and off (apart from the constant utilitarian use of electricity like fridge and freezer operation, Wi-Fi router, etc.). One kitchen light, one bathroom light, one hallway light (combined 20 minutes of use), a toaster, 15 minutes of magnetic induction burner use (very efficient), kettle boiled, smartphone charge, 40 minutes of oven use at 170 degrees Celsius, ran the dishwasher, 2 minutes of microwave oven on high, my Bluetooth sound bar for music streams and running my laptop to write this blog (both for 90 minutes). I opted not to use the TV at all today (too much bad news). I read my books by natural day light. Including all my constant essential appliances running (fridge/freezer), I would guess that I used about 5-6 kWh today so far in total for my total power consumed if I interpolate the readings right from my last utility statement. The average Canadian, according to one statistic, uses  around 4500 kWh per year. Sadly, we are the highest per capita users on the globe, for the fact that we use power almost as liberally as the Americans do, but yet additionally have a climate that demands extra heating for homes, and more vast spaces to transmit power between centres where there is a significantly increased line loss. If my personal average use nudges up to close to 10 kWh per day, i.e. 3650 kWh per year, I'm still below the per capita national average for consumption of power.

Gasoline Used: Zero – I walked or cycled to everywhere I went today. As chilly and gloomy as the day was during the time that I was biking, I at least had the invigorating fresh air to breathe, the uncrowded Meewasin trail to use, the peace of not having to hear the awful screeching noises emitted from under my car’s hood (time to change some belts), and not having the annoyance of having to hunt for and pay for a place to park a vehicle.

Water Used: Health and Hygiene (brushing teeth, sailor shower**, and two toilet flushes, so far***), reloading the dog’s drinking fountain, making coffee, making ice, personal hydration, running my dishwasher (on economy setting as always), cooking and kitchen clean up. An estimated 40 litres used, or two brewing carboys’ worth. It’s good to know of this quantity should there be any planned water shutoffs for maintenance, like I already have been warned about coming in the summer months.

Personal Waste: As it is now, after three days, my 15 liter kitchen garbage is one third filled with stuff that is 85% compostable refuse (mostly fruit and vegetable peels and egg shells). I regret that there is no sort of composting station around here, and I wish my condo could be provided with one of some sort so I could reduce this waste volume further still. I’d use the matter to make enough soil to grow my own herbs. I buy very little canned food, but my building at least has the convenience of a recycling bin for such things when I do.

Purchase Today: Just ten dollars at the Farmers Market, for a jar of Sour Cherry Jam. I’ve been hunting around like crazy for this stuff (I have a special project in mind for it, which I may blog about later). It may be much more expensive than other commercial jars of jam, however from the perspective of living happily on the Earth while doing it a favor, and building stronger communities:

·         This is a unique commodity that I have not found anywhere else but the Farmers Market. For today, it seemed right to get something that came from nature. And it is delicious. Never willingly buy anything that doesn’t fix a problem, doesn’t educate you, or doesn’t give you pleasure! That is the essence of frugality.

·         It would still be more expensive if I were to try to make it all home, plus I’d still have to wait until the cherries were in season, if I ever actually had the time to commit to make this stuff (home economics issue)

·         It was made here locally, from produce from a local orchard, and not trucked in from a half a continent away, or from someplace across either ocean (fossil fuel conservation issue)

·         You support a small business and not a giant corporation (corporations which are generally polluting on an industrial scale, and you directly help them to do it by buying their products)

·         An added bonus is that I have gained another reusable Mason jar to fill with my own crafted canning recipes later this year

The cost break down of my day is actually very different once I tabulate the information on my SPL Check Out Receipt. It tells me the monetary value in savings I made by loaning the books instead of outright buying them. I saved $81.89 today, adjusted to $71.89 subtracting the cost of my wares at the Farmers Market. I’ll whittle down that figure again accounting for the real cost of the ingredient proportions for the pizza I made, and the beer I brewed myself ($6.50 for the pizza, and $0.67 for the beer) the savings of the day is now $64.72. Let’s compare that with the likes of an impulsive spender, let's call him Joe Schmuckjob, who is probably the same kind of stupid bastard who's living in my neighbourhood and throwing his cups and food wrappers all around on my block. Let's pretend he is going to have himself the same sort of “cheap” weekend of entertainment as I am. He buys the $81.89 worth of books (though I doubt he really reads, we could substitute that material with the same value in dope and video games), he spends another $25.00 for delivery of the same quantity of pizza I made at home, drops another $20.00 for a six pack at an offsale place, for his beer ration, and let’s not forget the yummy $10.00 Sour Cherry Jam. His cheap weekend is turning out to be costing him $136.89 so far, and I haven’t even factored in the fuel his lazy ass is using, and all the extra trash he is making, which has an extra civic cost to clean up and dispose. Sloth, blended with impulsivity and stupidity, is expensive. Bringing all these facts to mind is making it a happy Earth Day for me.

I don’t want to get too sanctimonious about these measures I used, because I’m certain there are areas of improvement I could still work out, especially for my water usage and power, plus I also still lazily exploit food services at times when I don’t want to cook – I just don’t do fast food or delivery. This factoring of the SPL receipt also makes me pissed off even more that the Sask Party is taking measures to defund library services throughout this province as an austerity measure, hence my effort to sign petitions.

*- I’m like the average typical Canadian who thinks you’re a scum of the earth if you openly choose to litter.

**- Moistening the body first, shutting off the water, scrubbing down thoroughly with soap and a loofah, and turning water back on only long enough to rinse off shampoo and soap. Less than six litres used with a high pressure-low flow system.

***- Sadly, I don’t have a low flush volume tank.

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.