we made friends at church!

moving countries means also moving churches. though we've been going to this new church every sunday (except of course the sundays when we're away....which has been three already—sidenote, mass in japan was amazing!) since we moved, we hadn't really meaningfully interacted with anyone and definitely hadn't felt like we made any connection with people who might become friends. 

until this past sunday! we went to english mass (which we sometimes do, but not english), and this week they were having fika afterwards. it was like coffee and donuts after american mass, but this was coffee and little sandwiches. 

when you start attending a new church, it's usually not obvious how to integrate yourself into the community. even if you're ready and willing! so many places just assume everyone already knows all the ways one could get involved, and don't think to intentionally create an obvious pipeline for newcomers to enter the fray. 

for example, a lot of places distribute information in whatasapp groups with current members. which is great! but that means newcomers aren't privy to that information, especially if the website isn't kept up to date. my fiancé tells the story of when he reached out to a judo club he was interested in trying out. they took almost two months to get back to him, and when they did, shared that they had been meeting every tuesday in the meantime and he would have been free to join at any time! and he certainly would have, if he had had access to that information! via, for example, the website. 

turns out this time it was a similar deal. once we started chatting with people at the fika, we were able to discover the existence of and join in the relevant whatsapp groups. 

in this case, the fika did work as a successful funnel to catch us newcomers! but it would have been nice to have something catch us earlier than two months in. my family's church back home, for example, has collection envelopes in the pews, which also function as a touchpoint with newcomers: there are checkboxes on the back of the envelope to mark whether you're a newcomer and provide your contact information. then you can drop the envelope in the collection basket, even without or separate from any collection offering you give. 

anyway, all in all it's not a huge deal, but i've been thinking a lot of this sort of thing: the distribution of information, coherent communication ecosystems, and intentionally creating funnels for newcomers to join in. 

back to the title: it was so exciting to make some friends! or, hang out with people who could potentially become friends! it was especially relieving for me, to meet people we liked who felt very comfortable speaking english. not that it's rare in sweden for people to speak english, but there's a difference between being able to manage, and being able to feel completely totally comfortable and even making lots of jokes and whatnot. 

and i continue to be shocked that everyone suited to being my friend isn't my friend already. how many more out there could there be????

writing what i "should write" almost never works

somehow i've been able to remove enough friction to increase my writing output to a relatively satisfying degree. i blogged ~daily and reached 100 blog posts, and have over 40,000 tweets, and wrote an e-book out of my tweets. 

but i still have not been able to sit down and write what i feel like i "should" write. there's still a major block there. maybe that's okay? maybe i'm fine just writing what feels alive/what i feel like writing in any given moment. 

it might be nice to one day have less friction there, though. i think it's possible that the more i write and write and write, the more i'll be able to tap into Writing Mode on demand more easily, and perhaps write more things that are more suited to consumption by others. 

but also, who knows?

as an aside, i feel like my most-used paragraph opener when blogging is "but." i'm constantly trying to escape starting a paragraph with "but." i almost started all three paragraphs above this one with "but." 

but maybe that's evidence of my continual effort to explore all sides of something. yes, this one thing, but also, this other contradictory thing, too! 

but, but, but. hmm. 

learning german vs learning swedish

at some point, my swedish outpaced my german, and i've been thinking about why, while also deciding to put actual effort into my german as well. i technically lived there for a bit over a year, but with traveling factored in, spent a total of about 8 actual months there. regardless, i didn't get as good at german as i would have liked too. i took a month-long intensive course when i first arrived, then didn't really put in active effort after that. i still improved, and by the end i could keep up enough to not need translation while backstage learning choreography for a fashion show. but i never formally learned anything beyond present tense and trennbare verbs. we briefly started past tense but then the class ended before i learned to produce it myself. i absorbed lots and lots of disparate vocabulary, especially church-related jargon, since we went to mass in german every sunday. so it's not like i accomplished nothing. but i'm a language-learning fiend and that wasn't enough for me. 

anyhow, where was i? oh. i find swedish way easier than german. hmm. i forget what i initially wanted to say on that front. oh! 

one reason i find swedish easier than german is that it seems like in many cases, swedish uses the same words in multiple contexts, whereas german (like english, i think), has entirely different words for different situations. let me give an example. in german, words you hear in church are completely different words than you'd hear in everyday life. but in swedish, it felt like i could understand so much more in church much more quickly, because rather than use church-specific jargon, the words were just everyday words. same with like, safety demonstrations on an aircraft. see? aircraft. that's a totally different word. idk, maybe swedish is like that too, i'm still a relative beginner. but it certainly feels like swedish is a lot simpler in terms of words used. 

also compared to german, i feel like you can get much farther in swedish with just a dictionary, whereas german has more grammatical structures that need to be formally learned before you understand them. trennbare verbs are actually a good example. i don't remember exactly, but my impression of them is they're verbs with prefixes, and the prefix gets split from the root of the word and placed at the end of the sentence. so before knowing what they were, i'd be like, "uhhhh why is there a random an or zu at the end of a word?" if you looked that prefix up in the dictionary, it wouldn't tell you the crucial information that it actually belongs to the verb in the other part of the sentence and needs to be connected to it in your mind in order to make any sense. 

and again, maybe swedish has stuff like this too, but this is just my impression. it's nice to be able to discuss my impression of things without first researching every part of it to make sure i'm right. who cares? i write what i think now and then later when i get more information i can write what i think again. maybe that'll be closer to some sort of truth. or maybe it won't, or maybe i'll never write again. who cares? i want to write what i think, so i'm going to write what i think. 

"ugh, i should get back into blogging"

instead of just THINKING that i opened this page and am now writing these words. 

that'll do for my re-entry post

begone, inertia!

we moved countries this month, which has disrupted many of our normal routines. including, but not limited to: going to the gym 3x a week, me booking swedish tutoring sessions, and of course, writing this blog. 

that wouldn't be so bad, except that we're also heading to japan for two weeks. which means, if we let it, this could become a weeks-long break from many of those routine tasks. 

my sage and practical fiancé managed to get us in the gym yesterday, so we've been marked safe from a month-long absence there. his reasoning was that even one within those weeks would be better for maintenance than a complete break—though he did say it wouldn't be the end of the world to have an extended break. 

but i felt it prudent to follow his advice. i could already feel the inertia building, and the emotional friction creeping up each passing day. 

so here i am, doing the same for my blog. i can feel the hesitation lingering ever so slightly longer each day. when i'm in the swing of things, my internal "what if i skip today" voice only has the mic for a few seconds, then my fingers take over and i just start typing. 

the longer i don't write any post at all, the longer that voice holds the mic each day, and the less likely i am to break through the inertia and get up any post at all. 

so here's my post! 

oh no i've been neglecting my blog

i've published very few blogposts this month. i'd like to blame it on moving to a new country. or would i? i mean, it's definitely coinciding with me moving to a new country. but it was definitely a conscious choice to let myself ease off of daily blogposting while moving—not exactly directly a result of moving (though some days i genuinely did forget because i'd been doing moving stuff all day). 

that's fine and all, but with any break comes the necessity of breaking the spell of the break. that's what i set out to do with this post here. 

though i haven't been writing very much, i've been reading a whole lot. so much that i have really surprised myself. i got a library card a few days ago and came home ten books heavier. i brought a big chunk of them with us for a long weekend, and i've already blazed through all but two, one of which is an oscar wilde anthology, so i would be truly gobsmacked if i managed to blaze through that one as well. 

it's been years since i've consumed books with such fervor. something must have clicked finally back in place recently—after years of a shoddy, threadbare attention span that was lucky to manage two pages a night, i'm reading entire books in single sittings, like i did before my attention span needed fixing. 

it hasn't yet, i guess, since i haven't written anything yet, but i am sure this will improve my writing as well—or at least influence it. one of my recently read books is famesick, a memoir by lena dunham; i haven't read many memoirs, or maybe i just don't have any in recent memory, and this made an impact on me. it made me wonder how i would memoir-ize my own story: what angle would i take? what overarching themes would help me make sense of where and who i've been? 

moving to a new country inevitably involves tears

i erroneously thought that being in a better place now for my move to sweden meant that it would involve basically zero tears, in contrast to last year when i moved to germany and cried what felt like daily. but alas, moving to a new country inevitably involves tears. being better prepared for something doesn't mean i won't have any feelings about it, it just means i'll be more resourced to deal with those feelings. 

i moved to germany completely unprepared. what i mean by that is i didn't learn the language in advance, didn't do preemptive research about what living there would be like. i simply got on a plane to be with my boyfriend, and didn't look back. 

for a long time, i thought of myself—quite self-righteously, i might add—as someone who would never move to a country without first learning the language. i studied abroad often during my college years, to two different countries where i learned the language of both. 

what you don't realize when you're young is that you're not always operating under ideal circumstances. for example, you may meet the love of your life and end up unexpectedly moving to a new country to be with him, before you've had a chance to learn any of the language. well, that's ideal circumstances in some sense, but unideal from a preparation perspective. 

as happens often, i became what i had previously judged—this time, a foreigner ignorant of the local language. 

perhaps the most interesting part is that in some ways i almost refused to acknowledge this, and continued operating on the assumption that i am someone who speaks the language of the places that i travel to. this meant i forced myself to operate in german as much as i could, despite, again, literally not knowing the language. there is no moral high-ground in attempting a language you literally do not speak yet. 

now i have moved to sweden. my swedish is in much better shape now than my german was at the time of moving to germany. but it's still not where i want it to be. and even if it was, moving to an entirely new place is inherently stressful, no matter how well-prepared you are. 

so i found myself today in an inexplicable bad mood, pushing through it until i finally broke down in tears. specifically, i was crying about wanting to give up on swedish, feeling like every family event we attend constitutes a failure on my end, for not daring to speak any swedish. 

but generally, i was crying out the entire stress of the move. we have to rebuild every single routine. some things we don't have to think as much about, like scrambling to find weights at the gym (our new gym is overflowingly well-stocked). some things we have to think about much more, like buying alcohol (even cooking wine) only at the state-run alcohol store. 

on the whole, almost everything is better here. we're closer to family, we have less of a language barrier, and our neighborhood is exponentially quieter than our place in berlin. since we've moved, i've been getting straight 100s on my sleep score from my apple watch. 

and it's still stressful. even good things. it'll take a while to find our groove, but i'm proud of us for making the move and doing what needs to be done.