Hey there. :) So, I used to keep at least part of my journal public, and had the intention of doing so indefinitely. Unfortunately, this page was discovered by spambot vultures a few months ago and instead of peaking and then getting better, the problem has only gotten worse, and I can't stand all the emails announcing spam comments anymore.

From this point forward all new entries are going to be friends-only, and I'm probably going to slowly move backwards privatizing entries as they get heavily spammed. If you want to be added, leave a comment--I'd appreciate some info about you/how you found me, but in general, I'll probably add you. I liek new peeps. <3

I feel like recently I've regressed to my high school brain--I am just bursting with explosive motivation for LANGUAGES day and night all the time, I want to be good, really good, at all of them NAO and it's so frustrating I can't just work on them ALL AT ONCE and get to the point where I want to be IMMEDIATELY. It's so annoying that I'm not really skilled at all of them already. It kills me! I feel like part of my problem though, is organization, so I've tried to slow my racing mind down a bit to try to dissect what my goals really ARE and what I should be doing about each of them.

( Organization! )

Idk. I think I have everything pretty much covered in terms of my options. For my other language-learny friends, is there anything else I didn't mention that you like to do? (Also, should I start working on Chinese/ASL/both? Where should I start?)

Awhile back I posted a video of a song called Fuiste Tú, a duet between Gaby Moreno and Ricardo Arjona.

I can't get it out of my head recently, and the lyrics just seem so raw that I feel like I'm just cycling melancholy and longing for something that isn't...this. When the future comes, I wonder who will end up to blame for what happens. Anyway, I felt like making a tangible translation, because this song is wonderful and I think it's worth sharing. Again.

( Spanish lyrics )

( My Translation )

This was actually kind of a difficult translation, since a lot of lines don't really seem to...take well, to English, and I was so determined to at least somewhat preserve the tone. Usually my translation style is very precise, ultimately favoring the maintenance of sentence structure and word choice over a result that preserves overall tone and flows well. In this translation, I made some minor phrasing adjustments in places to make the English less awkward. The Spanish is VERY poetic, and to me that's half the point, so. My goal was to get something that meets halfway...not too disjointed but not taking unnecessary liberties either. Hopefully it works to that end. The song itself can be found here.

And now, bedtime. I have a doctor's appointment in the morning.

Baa, so I am in epic sleep deprived stupor, and Andres is in for one of his neverending showers, so I guess now's a decent time to chronicle a few of the things that have happened recently.

First off, Maria had come back to Tucson this past week to say goodbye to people (before shipping off to Canadaland forever), and Friday was her last day. Luckily she found some time to have lunch to me. :D We went to a nice restaurant I'd never been to and I ordered a portabella mushroom sandwich that ended up looking looking like a burger patty. <3 And we caught up a bit. Afterwards we went onto campus briefly--and naturally, yet also bizarrely, I didn't recognize anyone. It was kind of a sad reminder that most people I went to school with are graduated and gone now, and nothing will be the same as it was, but that's okay too. I wouldn't want to be in college forever, I don't think.

Yesterday the excitement continued. Last weekend, I told Andres that I wanted to go to the zoo--but he decided it would be better to plan it out further ahead and he promised he'd take me this weekend, so I'd been looking forward to it for the entire week. We got up early, and I was so gratified to realize that I felt reasonably well and functioning! Perfect for zoo exploration! It was super exciting, I had been so worried that I'd mess up all of our plans by not feeling up for the trip. We invited Brittany along with us and we walked around the entire place and saw all sorts of animals! I'm really glad that we waited til this weekend and decided to go relatively early. It was hot and even humid, but not as hot as it could have been, and a lot more of the animals were active and fun to look at, as well. Highlights were the roaming anteater (not as awesome as an aardvark, but still super cute), the capybara (*squeeeees* omg), and the elephants. They had an enormous elephant enclosure with 5 African elephants in it, and 4 of them were playing in a pool beside a viewer vantage point. We probably stayed there for 20 minutes watching the elephants splash around and play together--they were so playful and cute and they seemed so happy! :D I was so grateful that we got to see it. They also had some trainers feeding them from time to time, and they were doing little tricks with their trunks to earn treats. :)

Andres had told me before about how the Tucson zoo was small and lame, so I guess my expectations were rather modest...but I thought it was pretty great, all things considered. To be fair, Andres has been to the San Diego Zoo, which is not even in the same league, but--I don't know, I was fully satisfied. Yes, the zoo was pretty tiny, and they didn't have the biggest variety of animals, but I also feel like the smallish enclosures allowed me to get closer views of the animals than at other "better" zoos I'd been to, like the one in San Antonio. It was also devilishly hot when we went to the San Antonio Zoo, so we didn't really see any active animals, whereas yesterday there were a bunch of animals moving around, interacting with their environment, etc, especially towards the beginning of the visit. The only negative thing was that the polar bear was apparently taking refuge in his refrigerated room and we didn't get to see him, but other than that, everything was absolutely perfect. I haven't been so happy in a long time, and I know that Andres and Brittany enjoyed it too. :)

Unfortunately, when we got home from the zoo and lunch, we only found more creatures...of the unsavory kind. -_- I noticed there were numerous houseflies around the large animal cage, and with a sinking realization I looked around and confirmed my fears--new infestation, 40+ flies. Ugh. I'm almost completely sure they bred in one of the cages, which is ironic, because I had concrete plans to clean the cages the following day...today. But alas. Anyway, tired out from walking around the zoo, we had to start a full housecleaning overhaul and I had to find the energy to clean all the cages. :P It eventually got done, though, thankfully. I think I learned a lot of lessons from the previous fly infestation in terms of how to limit damage and spread, but I'm also really angry at myself for having let it happen a second time. I'm just hoping that it gets better and doesn't turn into a week-long nightmare again. Things are looking promising today, at least. There are still a lot of flies around but they seem more random and disjointed, so I'm hoping we just have to pick off the remaining stragglers and then we'll be good. I will say, I am grateful that we noticed it when we did; not later--but also not sooner, because I am pretty sure the infestation had begun in the morning and had I been paying attention rather than focusing on getting ready for the zoo, it could have ruined what turned out to be a fantastic day.

Today, though, I'm tired. REALLY tired. I've been having pretty severe insomnia all this past week (2-3 hours of sleep for every 24), for no apparent reason. On top of that, yesterday was obviously busy and exhausting, and I took 2 benadryl (which actually serves as a sleep aid for most people) to deal with allergy symptoms while cleaning the cages--but at the end of it all, last night I literally couldn't sleep at all. It doesn't feel as wretched as it could, but I still have absolutely no energy and I'm starting to get really incoherent (sorry if it shows in this entry). On the bright side, my only plans for today were to clean the cages, and I don't even have to now, since that got done yesterday. Haha, small victories. Maybe my new plans for today can be to get an hour or two of sleep.

Haha, so I wrote this entry last night, but apparently passed out in front of my computer before submitting it. I'm just going to post it the way it was, rather than going back and changing time references to make them more accurate to this morning.

I bought a viola yesterday. It was a pretty irresponsible thing to do, given the circumstances, but I couldn't help it. It had been on my mind on and off for months. Ever since I started playing the violin a few months ago, I've been missing the sound/feel/etc of the viola and appreciating the differences between the two instruments. I figured I would never really get to play a viola again, though, which was kind of saddening but at the same time something I had accepted and was okay with. I had the association in my mind that string instruments = necessarily hundreds and hundreds of dollars at the cheapest, aka, more than I'll ever be able to afford, even if I get healthy and get a job. That's why, when I saw a viola at Bookmans a couple months ago, and it was around $200 for the instrument, bow, and case, I was shocked. Of course, I didn't have the money, but the idea that something I imagined to be prohibitively expensive could actually be attainable infected my mind and made me ambitious. It changed my paradigm.

But, $200 was still money I didn't have, and nothing was really going to change that, so. I tried to forget about it, and succeeded to some extent, but not completely. Every once in awhile I found myself wondering if it was still there. Therefore, when my dad sent me some money in order to fix my bike and to help us move, and ended up sending more money than we're going to need for either of those things, it's immediately what I thought of. So, I went back to Bookman's and found that it was still there, and I couldn't help but scoop it up. (I think it's the same one I saw. I seem to remember the first viola I saw being $175, not $200, so either they raised the price for some reason, or they managed to coincidentally get another super-cheap viola into stock. Either way, works out for me!) I did some research, and I'm convinced I got a good deal. The brand is apparently kind of cheap and shitty and typical for student/beginner instruments, BUT, out of all the cheapest and shittiest brands, it is the only one to still maintain a reasonably good reputation. People's main complaint with it seems to be that it doesn't sound like a $10k professional instrument. But, it's *not* a $10k instrument, so I'd say all in all I'm quite okay with that.

Today Andres brought me to an actual music store and I bought a new set of strings, and refitted the viola with them. The instrument has a sort of tinny sound in the higher strings, but it is LOUD and it has great reverberation and I feel like that's more important than the overall tone, which could probably be improved if I felt like investing in better quality strings. I printed out a little bit of public domain music from the internet and I've been practicing. At first I forgot where all the notes were and was shifting notes down by 2 in my reading, and I wondered why everything sounded so bad, LOL. Once I remembered which notes were which on the alto clef things sounded a lot better. :P I really have missed the viola a lot; its tone is so deep and earthy and awesome. All in all I'm really excited about it, and really motivated to play and remember and learn more. I'm hoping it'll give me another thing to do rather than being sick and bored while I'm at home by myself, even on days when the violin feels too shrill to bother with.

I guess that's mostly all of what I wanted to say about it. As a side note, though, I have another little story that I think is worth sharing. I recently had the chance to answer one of those "can't know for sure what you'd do until it happens" mysteries..."would you ever be okay with using an opposite-sex/opposite to your gender presentation public bathroom?" Turns out the answer, for me, is a resounding yes. I was at the grocery store with my roommate a couple of days ago, and we were at the self-checkout. There was a basket in the way of where we needed to put our stuff, so I moved it out of the way--and as I was moving it, I felt something wet. When I looked at my hand to see what it was, there was unidentifiable purplish brown goo smeared on my hand. AUGH. So, in spite of the fact that our grocery trip had been ill-fated and suffered all sorts of delays and complications *already*, I apologized profusely to my roommate and ran immediately to the bathroom to wash the offensiveness away. Of course, just my luck, the women's bathroom was closed for cleaning, but the men's bathroom was there, beckoning. So yeah, I went right in. Didn't even really hesitate, lol. There was a man inside who gave me an extremely confused look and seemed about to say something, but I gave him an exasperated look and he stayed quiet, haha. It wasn't as hard as I would have imagined, but it was still one of the most awkward things I've done in awhile. It also makes me really admire (even moreso, really) people who are trans or outside the gender binary who potentially have to put up with that awkwardness (plus fear, etc) every time they have to use a bathroom in a public place. Wow.

Sigh. Anyways. One more day until we start moving! I really hope the world decides to grace me with some energy at that time...I imagine I'm really going to need it --;

OMG! This song. This video! It was filmed in Guatemala! It was filmed in Antigua! (And Tikal. And Lago Atitlán. And probably Jocotenango.) I wasn't even expecting it, and then all of a sudden OMG I know where that is! I've been there...and there. And chicken buses! Omg, I miss it so much. I think my heart just crumpled into a thousand pieces and bled out my ears.



Ugh, sorry for the sticky nostalgia trip. I am in sort of a maudlin mood anyway because Andres has now been gone since early yesterday afternoon and Matt's shift was extended today, so I had the house completely to my sickly self for a long, long time. It's not as torturous as I thought, though, and Matt is off for the next few days so at least I won't have to be completely alone. I'm glad Andres ended up going to El Paso and that I decided to stay. But at the same time, being too sickly to do much makes it easy for me to get bored or frustrated by things I'd like to be doing but that I don't have the energy for. (Cleaning, yardwork, etc.)

I'm not sure what the point of this post, is. I guess I just had to share the beautiful cinematic slice of Guatemala with everyone.

Every once in awhile when I get bored and listless I watch TEDTalks lectures. I started on Netflix, but then I realized they have them on Youtube as well. They're actually pretty fantastic, most of the time--people have really great ideas and talk about some really interesting things.

I think this is my favorite one that I've watched to date:



It strikes me that sometimes the most obvious ideas are lost in a sea of negativity and black-and-white, dismissive rhetoric: No, we can't POSSIBLY deal with electric cars, the technology isn't there yet. The plug and charge model is the only one possible, and it's not viable, therefore electric cars aren't viable. Electric cars are necessarily more expensive and less convenient and therefore there isn't a market for them. Etc. The step from "okay we don't have the technology to work magic yet" to "what can we do to make this work with the technology we DO HAVE" seems like it should be so obvious, so natural, and yet, it's not, somehow. The naysaying drowns it out. But doesn't his proposal make so much sense, after all? If people could set up an extensive infrastructure for transporting and dispensing gasoline--a volatile, toxic, flammable, liquid substance--could it really be *that much harder* to create the plug-in and switch-in-switch-out battery infrastructure that he describes? Only in the sense of pushing it through politically, I'd imagine. Thank god some governments are less deeply mired in oil interests than ours is...

The only thing that makes me kind of sad is that most of the information I'm finding about him/his project is a few years old. What's up with the progress? I wanna see progress. :0

As for me, I know I haven't updated in awhile, but there's not much to say. I've basically just been chilling, trying not to be a vegetable...swimming no longer seems to be helping with my symptoms, which means I've been a sad and miserable panda most of the time. I've been continuing to swim when I can possibly bear it, though, and I recently made a new record for myself--900 yards (36 laps of the pool) in a go. :) My new goal is 1,000.

For awhile I was trying to record some songs--I have 4 prepared, but my voice just refuses to cooperate. My allergies have shown frustratingly little improvement since I moved the cage out of my room, and I basically have 100% congestion all the time. I am wondering if this will get better when we move, and am tentatively hopeful, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. ><;

The only other thing I've really been doing is studying German like a fiend--what started as a whim has turned into my primary hobby, for the time being. I'm using an online textbook series and just working through the exercises, and I think the way they unfold is almost ideal to my learning style because I feel like I am just soaking everything up and learning so efficiently and so fast. For comparison, I'd dabbled a little bit in German self-study occasionally over the years, and started doing so again a few months ago--yet with all the times I tried to teach myself a little bit, almost NOTHING would ever stick. But this--it's working this time. It's actually kind of jarring how effective this method has been for me. The textbooks have no audio, and they're limited in the sense that they're just, well, written exercises, so I'm clearly missing some things by studying this way, but I feel like it's giving me a really solid foundation and it's a really good start. I want to just work through without stopping but I've been forcing myself to slow down and pace myself so that I actually remember things and don't overload--the waiting is actually hard! I get to learn about genitives next, but I don't get to do them til tomorrow...haha, it's actually kind of sad. :)

If anyone else is interested in learning German, the books I've been using are available here. Every chapter deals with one or two new grammar concepts, and contains 60-70 practice exercises. The answers are available for each one in an answer key at the bottom of the page. I have also been creating an Anki deck with all the vocabulary from the book as I go, and if anyone is interested in a copy of that I am more than happy to share. :)

So anyway, that's what I've been thinking, and what I'm up to. What do you guys think about this new way of conceiving of electric car infrastructure? And what have you been up to yourselves?

I'm mostly posting this for diosa_iluminada, jeje. A story in the tradition of biblioteca/librería. ;)

Last night, Andres said he was going to clear off the coffee table so we could paint miniatures.

My laptop was right there in the middle of everything, so I asked him, "quieres que guarde mi computadora?" (do you want me to put my computer away?)

And he said, "no, porque vamos a hacer la aplicación primero" (no, because we're going to do the 'application' first).

So, let me say, in Spanish, "aplicación" means "application", but only in the sense of applying something to something else. Since my mindset was on painting, I interpreted this as "the application of a coat of paint".

So I thought he was saying, "don't put your computer away so we can paint, cause we're going to apply a coat first". Ummmm...okay, not sure I follow??

He repeated it 2-3 more times and laughed at me for being so dense before he finally realized what word he SHOULD have been using: solicitud.

Cause, what he was TRYING to say is that we were going to fill out the application for a lease on a new house before we started painting. Which, the application is online, so we'd need my computer for that. "vamos a hacer la solicitud primero". Magic! It all makes sense.

The moral of this story: Spanglish can be a serious threat to communication, kids. Employ it with care. xD

*Disclaimer: I LOVE Spanglish, but cases like these just make me laugh.

This morning has been odd. I am completely on a nocturnal type schedule recently and can't seem to rectify this, so Matt and I have been hanging out a lot by night. At 5AM we ended up at McDonalds (I DO IT FOR THE HASH BROWNS, OKAY.), and I consumed two things that are almost certain to end badly for me, sickness-wise: well, hash browns, duh, and iced coffee. But afterwards I didn't just feel okay, I felt invigorated, and Matt invited me to go swimming with him at LA Fitness as he has a membership there. o.O; I was so so hesitant and reluctant but TEMPTED and he finally convinced me.

We did 300 yards in laps! And it felt GLORIOUS. :) I'm so glad I went. It was my first time swimming since the wedding in Texas last summer, and wow, I've missed it a lot. I think that part of the reason I've been so much worse/sicker this year versus last year is the lack of exercise, but it's also a Catch-22 because if I feel sicker then I'm obviously less capable of exercise or motivated to do it. But it's nice to catch a window of non-sick in which to actually do something physical and not IMMEDIATELY regret it. Good times.

It felt good to wear a bikini, too, in spite of the scratches all over me. xD

The only annoying thing is that even though I showered in the locker room, my hair is still kind of full of chlorine and nasty. But I think I'm just gonna say fuck it and go to bed. xD

Yesterday I went to get myself an Arizona State ID since my Massachusetts one, which I've been using for ID for the past 5 years, finally expired. I was incredibly excited when I first received my new card, because I noticed that it has no expiration date. Seriously. In the spot where the expiration date should be, it's just a blank space. (And, really, that makes sense--driver's licenses for non-minors in Arizona are valid for ~45 years if you aren't arrested for anything, so it would follow that they wouldn't care about the renewal of non-driver ID cards...at all). Unfortunately, my dreams of forever-ID were shattered when I noticed that you have to register a change of address within 10 days. Seeing as we'll definitely be moving in August, that means that this new ID is also doomed to be short-lived. Which is kind of a shame, being that the picture on it was actually fairly cute and I NEVER TAKE CUTE ID PICTURES THIS IS A FOREIGN CONCEPT. But, oh well. Life goes on. xD
**It's also worthwhile to note that the infrequency with which such documents expire here, while kind of sketchy (at least in my opinion) has at least one positive side-effect: The DMV experience is *actually pleasant*. Like, you go in, and employees are cheerful and helpful and nice to you and don't appear jaded or frustrated at all. And it all goes fast. I have been to the AZ DMV twice and neither time did I wait more than ~30 minutes to have *all* my services completed. That includes time to fill out paperwork. Massachusetts readers probably understand fully why this is shocking and noteworthy--but I kid you not. When the place isn't necessarily exploding with people trying to renew everything all the time, it's so, so easy. *_*

Yesterday I also finally finished my second read-through of Elena Poniatowska's Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío, throughout which I was careful to make a written note of every single word or phrase that I didn't completely understand. Or even words that I *did* understand, but wanted to add to a list anyway so that I could practice recalling them rather than just recognizing what they mean. Right now, I'm on page 22 of the book out of 317, and my list of words and phrases is already 84 long. AHAHAHAH. There are going to be thousands. But oh well, I'm ready, bring it on. After all, that just means that there are going to be thousands more things that I newly understand after I finish this project! Yei. :3

I guess I better go back and work on that, eheh. >.>;