Do I take the plunge?

Chaos roundup: One project down, another one added?; revisiting a hobby for fun; lessons from recent language struggles; how to keep a killer time schedule without sacrificing health & social life? 🤯

This week I didn’t get as far with my main projects (JFA and my thesis) as I’d have liked as I spent more time than usual being social and going out into the city. Berlin is entering Fall and it’s already quite chilly, which means Winter is nigh and we should enjoy the sunlight and one-jacket weather while it lasts. And I must say, I love Berlin more and more each time I go out. I am pretty sure I will stay here a long time, and this has given me a newfound sense of inner peace and determination that I’ve never felt before.

Of course, I’m stoked to go home to the US this year, but Berlin/Europe is, I realize, mine. I’m eager to see where things go over the next years — but first, with all these projects (plus a new, exciting one!).

Italy Citizenship

I needed a copy of grandmother’s (GM) baptismal certificate to confirm that her name changed from Lucia to Lucy on all the documents following the creation of her birth certificate (#immigrant-name-problems). I contacted the local church via email and sent them the photo of the original that I have, and they were thankfully speedy about giving me a certified copy with a cover letter, mailed to my aunt’s local address. Whew!

I’ll need to get this one notarized then apostilled (a fancy word meaning certified by the issuing state for international purposes), but then I only have two more documents left – my mother’s birth certificate (which I hopefully get in the mail with no hitch!) and my own amended birth certificate.

German

I went out most days and nights with German-speaking friends this week, which is cool because I sensed gains in my confidence speaking and understanding, and when I went to a planetarium show on the weekend I was able to interpret a good deal of the talk in English – an unexpected feat for me. 😤

But still, now that it’s Sunday, my brain feels quite fried and I can sense my speaking abilities crumbling when I talk. My weaknesses (I still mix up which preposition to use for what place, and then akkusativ and dativ) jut out more to me, and because of this brain pain, I am forgetting or misusing words I know I should know. It’s frustrating, but a part of the game.

I understand it as a symptom of lack of (regular) reinforcement: I haven’t been correcting my own output or reviewing the vocabulary and expressions I use most, and namely not on a consistent basis. Thus, I repeat the same old mistakes. I broke my formal study streak as I figured my brain was working hard enough trying to understand and participate in this week’s social outings, but this week I need to dial it back a bit and work on regulating and perfecting my output. This means more morning/evening repetition drills and writing practice.

Japanese for Anyone

I spent time writing outlines for the first section of the book. These are the hardest parts of the book to write because they set the stage for the rest – the tone, the attitude, the style, the contents. I also have to be careful that my explanations aren’t redundant (meaning the same explanation in different sections), so planning here is key.

In the past I had instead dug into the middle and then went back to the introduction section, but this resulted in an inconsistent style between the two that meant I ended up going from middle to introduction and back to the middle again to make it all fit together properly. Huge waste of time.

This upcoming week, I plan to write the drafts of the first section for which I made the outlines for.

Work @ the Business School

My endeavor to learn Excel well enough to “automate” the profile book data cleaning process was a success! On Tuesday I stayed late at work to finish my part before passing on the manual editing part to my supervisor — but even then, I was reticent to allow any “manual” work on the document. Excel should do it all! And Word / Mail Merge should too! But my supervisor insisted I did enough, and by the end of the day on Tuesday my brain was too fried to continue.

I honestly became perhaps too obsessed with figuring out Excel’s secrets. I mean, I even went to bed thinking about what formula I could try next to make the desired result appear. 🤓 I’m determined to become an Excel/Word wizard by the time my contract at the school is done.

And, this experience with Excel made me realize, perhaps I should just do that web development bootcamp I’ve been eyeing up for the past six months…

New project! Web Development Bootcamp

I’ve always liked making websites and the whole art and science of it. I actually already own 6 or 7 domain names and pay for hosting yearly, even though half of the domains don’t even have splash pages and I don’t do much to maintain them. I self-taught myself HTML/CSS/Bootstrap and other web dev basics, but I’m not at a level I feel comfortable making websites for anyone aside from myself, and even for myself, my skills have not been sufficient to bring my ideas to life.

But what about Squarespace, you say? or Webflow? Or Wordpress?

Well, they’re all quite expensive (Wordpress if you buy a nice, fully customizable theme) and they never quite have the functionality or look that I really want. Or perhaps they do. Doesn’t matter: I simply like writing code.

The Excel project at work made me realize how into it I get. I think it’s magic and I feel like a powerful wizard when I write code that works. When I think about all the things I could do or show if I was better at it, my mind starts spinning. I could spend an entire day fiddling with the CSS of a website and forget the time completely – which is basically what happened when I made the website for the first major draft of JFA: https://japaneseforanyone.com/

Even that process could have been better automated and standardized (by, for example, using SASS).

So I have decided, from October 8th to the end of March, to enroll in a web development part-time bootcamp here in Berlin that will cost me an arm in money and leg in time. I just can’t shake the feeling that I should do it and that I can make it happen even with everything else going on.

But! This then means:

• I will have to work/study when I’m in the US.

• I’ll need to wake up earlier (7 AM on the nose, minimum).

• I’ll need to manage my workweek time better, especially the days I have to go into the business school, so that I’ve mental energy in the evenings still.

• I’ll need a new laptop, because my dear old 2012 Macbook can hardly keep a Zoom call steady at this point.

• I’ll need to eat more and better, as my poor cooking lately has been making me miserable (I don’t eat something if I don’t like how it tastes) and I’ll need more energy to sustain my longer days.

• And sadly I’ll have to cut down my social life or mix it with other essential tasks, like “We can hang out but only if we’re eating dinner,” or “Let’s chat while we run and lift at the gym.”

I’ve never been one to lose sleep over work or personal projects because I think it’s tacky to burn oneself out and damage one’s health in this way (yolo), but since I’ll be paying so much for this bootcamp, I will have to be really on top of my time. I refuse to have my other projects and health (ie. nutrition, gym, social life, relaxing, sleep) suffer.

An old hobby revisited: drums

This time last year I started taking weekly drum lessons and going to a practice space near my apartment 2-3 times a week with the goal of playing Silversun Pickup’s “Panic Switch” in one year. Weeellll, long story short I didn’t get that far. I ended up quasi-quitting this past February/March.

Sadly, since then I haven’t even gone in just for fun, because my nature is to play to improve or not bother at all. But this past Friday, I didn’t feel like going to the gym and instead had an impromptu 1-hr session at the practice space. I found I can still play the songs I had laboriously learned last winter, and I even made some progress playing Fuel’s “Shimmer.” Or maybe I didn’t and just thought whatever I had come up with sounded right enough 😁. Still!

I would like to go more often to the practice space like this, just casually playing and trying to decode the sheet music I have for my favorite songs without making it a serious undertaking to jam in my schedule like I do everything else.

And that’s it! 😅

Before you go: I’ve been thinking a lot about all the cool things I could do with my web dev skills once I’m done with the bootcamp, so I thought I could end this week’s post by asking you about it:

• Do you have a personal or business website or web app, or would you like to have one?

• What are your thoughts and experiences with creating a web presence for yourself outside of social media networks like Twitter/Instagram?

• What websites or web apps do you know of that really knocked your socks off?

I’d love to hear your your answers and thoughts in the comments! You never know, maybe one day soon I’ll be able to make something just like it , or for you! 😎