my swedish is improving, but my speaking still lags behind

for a while i thought my problem with speaking is just that i didn't have the courage to speak. i mean, that definitely is part of my problem. it's just not the whole story. 

more specifically, i don't have the courage to speak unless i know what i'm saying is right. this holds me back from improving, but i've decided to stop beating myself up for it. 

i know myself. i know my strengths, and i know my weaknesses. and i know that even when a weakness wields its wild head, i forge a way forward and it all works out in the end. 

it's okay if i wait until i'm confident that what i'm saying is right. i'm okay with the consequences of my (in)actions! 

the stark asymmetry between my different languages skills (listening vs. speaking, for example), used to frustrate and torment me. but now that i've pushed through that even a little bit more, i can see how much i improve just by continually immersing myself, and that speaking will come in its own time, too. 

i haven't even taken a full course! i did one "intensive" beginner course that was a few hours each weekend for three weekends. and i missed one of the weekends! the rest has been learning on my own and simply exposing myself to the language. 

people keep telling me that i'll improve much quicker than those without swedish partners, because with a swedish partner, you can speak swedish at home! but the actual advantage to having a swedish partner feels more like the constant exposure to hearing them speak to other people, even if i'm not even involved! 

family group chats, of course, are also great exposure to natural speech—and a lower-stakes arena for producing swedish myself than in-person conversation. recently both my mother-in-law and sister-in-law expressed surprise at how natural my messages sounded, and thought my fiancé must be helping me write them. 

frankly, i'm just as shocked! i type the messages out myself, then have my fiancé check them. he has yet to correct any. it feels like magic that i've somehow just picked it up and can finagle my way into natural sentences, even if they are brief and infrequent. 

so i am confident that my speaking will follow a similar trajectory. eventually. and for now, i'm fine with having surprisingly-not-that-strange bilingual conversations, as i understand the swedish part and answer back in english.  

i don't want to wear sunscreen anymore

so aging just means my skin is going to get worse for the rest of my life? 

i ask because for a while there, i've been on an upwards trajectory in the skin department. my skin was pretty bad in college, then cleared up and has been improving since. and while that's the case, i've had decent motivation to keep up with my skincare and wear sunscreen. 

despite wearing sunscreen ~daily, i recently noticed a few sun spots pop up on my face. and my right eyelid is now half a millimeter droopier than my left eyelid. and i realized that maybe no amount of daily sunscreen will be enough to stop the aging process of my skin. 

so how am i supposed to want to wear sunscreen anymore? when even when i wear it, the sun still has her way with me? 

my skin tingles a bit as i write this. and my lips, they feel a bit tight. it's been a few days now of giving up on sunscreen, and today i happened to be outside (though it was overcast at first) when they sun came out and fixed itself upon me. 

so yeah, i guess i want to wear sunscreen so that i don't get sunburnt. but negative reinforcement never really works for me as well as positive reinforcement does. 

rambly wambly

i'm not sure what One Single Topic i'd like to write about tonight so instead i'll just write a little about each. let's see how it goes. 

today i had a video call with a twitter mutual. it's been ages since i've done that, and it was way more enjoyable and nourishing than i expected. part of me wants to announce on twitter HEY I'M OPEN FOR VIDEO CALLS!!!!! but the truth is that i'm open to video calls as they call to me and only with people i'd like to have a video call with. which feels bad for some reason. idk. 

anyway, about an hour and half before the call was scheduled to happen, my fiancé suggested we go to the gym—if we wanted to go today, it'd basically have to be RIGHT THIS MOMENT or not at all. so i changed into gym clothes faster than i usually do, and without first doing a "final check for twitter notifications" from the vibecamp twitter (oh yeah, btw, i'm running that now!). 

almost out the door, i realized, "THE VIDEO CALL!" 

would i have enough time? should i just skip it*? i ended up—bravely—deciding to go for both. i'd go to the gym AND i'd make it on time to the video call. as we walked over to the gym, i decided i'd just skip benchpress, shortening my routine enough that i'd make it home in time. 

the gym was crowded when we arrived—much more crowded than the off-times we're usually there. normally this would throw me for a loop, but today i was on a mission. 

what happened next was a level of Locking In i had yet to experience at the gym. it felt like a milestone. not only was i not fazed by the crowds, i also just went faster than i usually do and ignored little discomforts and ouchies i wouldn't have otherwise. i pinched my—uhhh, what's the name for the webbed bit of flesh between your thumb and your pointer finger? *googles* purlicue? oh ok...—purlicue adjusting the J-hooks (another term i didn't know, but this time i just asked my fiancé) and took three seconds to watch it turn bright red, then shrugged and moved on. 

after i finished my workout, i walked briskly home and even hopped in the shower before the video call. when i reported this to my fiancé later, he was appropriately shocked (in a proud way). usually i dilly and dally and dawdle my way to the shower, sometimes needing to be convinced to actually get in. 

another point of celebration today was i stopped and realized, while tidying thing after thing after thing in our apartment tonight, that i actually really enjoy tidying up. and tidying up is an entirely different activity than organizing or cleaning or deciding where things go. the latter (does it count as latter if there's more than two items? idk. the last one) is the hardest for me, and the one that takes the most convincing to get started. but now that we've done that already, for so many of our things, tidying is simply a breeze! a warm, gentle, spring breeze! 

the other day i was so proud of how our living room looked that a posted a photo of it on twitter. as i was admiring it, i reflected to my fiancé that i'm not used to photos of my living space actually looking as good as i thought would. i'm used to being proud of how it looks for once, taking a photo of it, then looking at the photo and being like, "wow that actually looks way messier and more cluttered than i thought." 

he looked at me. "you know why this one doesn't look messy? because it's not messy." 

ohhhhhhh.gif. 

ugh gosh, speaking of, the gif function on twitter has been downright awful recently. it's a whole thing, something about google sunsetting tenor, and giphy being a subpar replacement. i never got clear on the particulars, but the result is absolutely atrocious and an affront to me in particular. i love gifs dearly and use them unbelievably frequently. might have to start saving the gif files to a folder on my computer and using them that way....

*edit: i meant skip the gym, not the video call. for some reason that feels important to clarify (perhaps bc i'm trying to be more reliable/mean what i say/show up to things when i promise to)

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