morning pages, i guess?

to be honest, i actually do not know exactly what morning pages are. i know i could just look it up, but i also don't really want to (see my last post about research; though this feels like one of those cases where it's probably worth just looking it up...alas, i really don't feel like it). 

my current understanding is they are some sort of free-write exercise, perhaps where you write a few stream-of-consciousness pages right when you wake up? 

part of me feels like it's something i should explore doing, and part of me resists. historically "i should do this" is a pretty poor motivator for me; i usually have to wait until either it feels completely inevitable, or i somehow spontaneously experience the desire to do so ~of my own accord. 

anyway, it is currently morning. and i am writing pages. so...morning pages, i guess? 

i am not a morning person. but recently i took a short intensive language class that required waking up before 8am, so i got in the groove of being up early. 

the class is over now, and so with it goes my need to get up early. regardless, i've found myself naturally waking up around 8:30am, and i've decided that instead of going back to sleep as i'd normally do, i'll get up, make coffee, and bring my laptop back to bed to blog. 

it's quite a nice set-up, i must say. my fiancé slumbers peacefully beside me, limbs entangled here and there. his coffee is getting cold on the far nightstand, because i haven't quite figured out the best way for us to have our coffee at different times (we use a mokapot that makes exactly two servings). 

and i write and write and write. 

blogpost research and wedding glow-ups

at the current moment, i am on some level against conducting research for the purpose of writing my blogposts. 

why? 

well, first of all, that's just not the sort of thing i write. at least now, my focus in my writing is on my own subjective experience. i want to feel allowed to write about my subjective experience just as it is, not feeling like i can't write about my experience until i am researched enough to have earned the right to do so. 

let me give an analogy. something i've been thinking about a lot: the concept of a "wedding glow-up." 

in preparation for their wedding, many women feel the need to achieve some level of improvement of their physical appearance, with the final product by the day of the wedding being significant enough to warrant the word "glow-up." 

with my own wedding fast approaching, i noticed these feelings in myself, but then actively pushed back against them, after realizing what i felt was an unsavory underlying motivation: that in order to deserve the grand love of forever after, i must be different from how i currently am. 

i remember seeing a tweet recently, expressing how after much pondering, the tweeter had come to the conclusion that they did not have "bride physiognomy." as if in order to be worthy of being chosen to be loved forever, one must have a certain look, and if not, well, sucks to be you. 

so whenever a feeling came up for me of wanting to improve a certain aspect of my physical appearance in advance of my wedding, i reminded myself that i don't need to change in order to be loved. my fiancé loves me, just as i am, not some hypothetical slightly-more-perfect version of myself. 

since first taking note of this, i've noticed a big psychological shift. a few months ago, i was crying about how i'd do my makeup well enough that i wouldn't worry about feeling ugly on my wedding day. a few days ago, i looked myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror and earnestly considered getting married with no makeup at all. 

i don't think i'll go quite that far; i will wear some amount of makeup on my wedding day. but now it's from a place of free choice, not out of needing to earn love by changing who i am. 

and maybe that's a good way to approach researching for my blogposts: i don't have to completely write it off, but i also feel free to exist just as i am too. 

it feels good to create in multiple forms

sometimes i worry that i might run out of creative juice if i choose to do one creative thing and not another, for example. i've resisted doing something like "morning pages" because i feel like i might use up all my words and not have any left for an actual coherent blogpost (this doesn't make much sense because the way i currently write blogposts is honestly not that far removed from the concept of morning pages? idk). 

in practice, i don't find that to be the case. the opposite is usually true, in fact. 

the more i create, the more i create. 

especially across multiple media: blogging, tweeting, videoing, diy-ing, fashioning, home-decorating. and most recently, podcasting! 

my most recent blogpost was about the humility required to deal with the mishaps of starting a podcast, and i wouldn't have had that material to write about if i hadn't, you know, started a podcast. and the blogpost before that (also written the same day; i love my mulitple-posts-in-a-day days) was riffing on the topic we covered in the most recent podcast episode. then i ended up using the title of that blogpost as the title of the podcast episode!

allowing myself to be active in a variety of forms helps me explore infinite sides of seemingly the same idea. i'm continually shocked at just how much of any thing there is to explore. and i'm just free to explore it! any way i want! now, tomorrow, on my own, with my beloved, out of my mouth, from my fingers, sitting up in bed at 9:25am while my beloved sleeps, sleepy on the couch at 11:23pm with the lights bright and the mics hot. 

one must be humble when starting a podcast

my fiancé and i started a podcast last week. the idea has been bouncing around in our heads for about a year, and we finally took the leap and recorded an episode, at the behest of an eager twitter friend. 

i was quite pleased with how the recording went! then the technical difficulties began to roll in, and i realized i might have to be a bit less attached to any given recording, because at any point we could lose it forever. 

to be more specific: the recording was over an hour long and a whopping 24gb. it devoured the available storage on my phone, making it nearly impossible for the device to do anything with the file. at the time, i had no idea how any of this worked, so i impatiently went into the editing screen and starting trimming and splicing, not knowing that that meant the operating system would now have to reload the gargantuan file. it tried and failed to do so, so whenever i attempted playback of the video, an error message stopped me in my tracks. 

syncing to icloud also failed. importing to my mac via a cable also failed. airdrop also failed. i was running out of options, quickly. 

i decided to try apple support. before i could give the full context, the support agent insisted the file was corrupted and likely wouldn't be recoverable. i rolled my eyes and pulled the trigger on my single remaining strategy: "revert to original." 

et voilà, it was instantly restored. i couldn't believe my eyes. before i could nearly corrupt the file again, i connected it to my fiancé's mac with a cable and immediately transferred it over. my mind flashed back to purchasing our laptops, when i had said flippantly, "what would i need that many gigabytes for?" 

apparently podcasting needs a lot of gigabytes. 

and that wasn't all: our microphones had also malfunctioned, meaning the recording had much worse audio than we had intended. thankfully, we'd had the foresight to record back-up audio with another phone place closer to us. 

after importing both video and audio into imovie, i made yet another important discovery: something called "sync drift." i'm even less clear on the exact mechanics than the above file shenanigans, but apparently what happens is the video and audio are recorded at slightly different rates, and over the course of say, an hour long video, they drift apart so much it becomes completely unsynced. 

apparently standard units of measurement are not just a given, and each device might be ever so slightly off from the next. 

my head swam as i painstakingly fixed the audio sync by hand. the work wasn't actually so bad; i started to have some fun with it, but if i thought too hard about the explanation of what had happened, i got befuddled again. 

after an eternity, we managed to have workable video and audio, reasonably synced together in imovie. we even recorded a quick jingle and i slotted that in as well. and in less than 48 hours, we had recorded, edited, and published our first podcast episode!  

"oh no i'm not as good as i thought i was"

when confronted with the fact that your actual, non-hypothetical skill level is different from whatever level you dreamed up in your head, you have two main choices of where to go from there. 

justify it away with disclaimers, refuse to look directly at the discrepancy, and begin to orient your life in such away that shields you from experiencing further such situations. 

or face it head-on: square your shoulders, nod curtly at the unfortunate reality, decide to accept that the level you imagined yourself to be was just an illusion—and move forward anyway, because if you're ever going to reach that level, turns out you're going to need to put in some work. 

i'm discovering recently that i'm not as good at this skill as i thought i was—as in, i thought i was pretty good at accepting my weaknesses at face value and working toward improving them. 

in many ways, though, that hadn't really been the case. 

building a new life with my fiancé has. required me to be bad at so many things: new languages, new modes of transportation, new lifestyle behaviors. i used to think i was pretty much good at everything! and now here i was, face to face with a dozen things i was incredibly bad at—and would continue having to be bad at in order to move forward. 

i began to realize that for years, i had oriented my life toward protecting myself against experiencing this feeling. it's much easier to feel in control when you don't go out much, and only spend time doing things you already feel you're good at. 

now opening myself back up to the world, i find innumerable things i am bad at. as much as i can tolerate, i will face them head-on and keep moving forward. 

we started a podcast!

the latest in "i create things with the love of my life": we started a podcast about language-learning!

here's the first episode: 

https://youtu.be/Al5KzzFLb3I?si=pkrFB0-b5Wp4p6tv 

summer swedish class success

i'm taking a short, intensive summer course in swedish, and it's actually going pretty well! 

i've had mixed success with swedish classes thus far. i had one very intro, very short course that i liked, then stopped going to an online one that i didn't like, then had mixed results from tutors on italki (they weren't bad, but i was looking for something great). 

this current course surprised me by being pretty much exactly what i need: a calm and supportive teacher, several but not too many motivated classmates, and most importantly, lots of speaking practice. 

i'd pretty much been bashing myself over the head a few months ago when it hit me just how vast the difference was between my speaking level and understanding level, cursing the hours i'd spent reading swedish books without putting in the same hours for speaking. i could function in increasingly difficult conversations in swedish, as long as i basically only answered in english. 

finally, finally, i can at least dare to utter any words at all. and since i've had so much exposure to the language, it's just been lying in wait for the day i can actually access it and use it myself (the vocabulary words that i recognize and understand when someone else says it vastly outpaces the words that are able to come out of my actual mouth). 

at first i was incredibly scared and felt like i'd made a mistake—this course is a b2 course, which felt a bit insane. but i had taken a placement test a few weeks before and got a b1 result, so it wasn't that insane...right?? 

it turned out okay. i'm not the best in the class (i usually take classes a bit below my level, which naturally results in being one of the top students) and that is also exactly what i need. i need to get over myself and whatever weird ego issues i'm having that are blocking my speaking progress (i'm typically overcome with shyness and embarrassment when i try to speak, which i did not experience when learning previous languages). 

my classmates and i also have a variety of different skills and weaknesses, so interfacing with each other is chaotic but also collaborative. one thing that's been especially helpful for me is seeing my classmates be brave and try things, even when they don't know exactly what they're saying before it comes out of their mouth. i have so much trouble even trying unless i already know what i'm saying is right, and that hinders my progress a lot. 

i do keep half-expecting that each next lesson will be the day that the discussion questions are totally out of my depth, but i seem to be doing okay so far. some days i have more courage than others. sometimes i let more talkative classmates have more airtime, until i remember that i actually do need to spend some time speaking myself, even if i don't think i'll sound as comfortable as them yet—in fact, they only got as comfortable as they are by speaking as much as they do!