Life
It’s been a fairly social week. This has gone against my productivity matrix, but I was having a rough time mental health wise so I feel like it’s alright. The board game gang even surprise showed up at my house and peer pressured me into playing a game with them, because I haven’t been making the time to play as much otherwise. Are y’all tired about reading every week how loved I feel? I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the reminder.
Remember how I talked about no new hobbies? Well, I might have lied. I met someone on Tuesday who I’ve been told plays scrabble competitively (at an international level?). Now, I’ve been playing bananagrams for a while with lots of very smart people and I’ve held my own, but when I pulled it out to play with this person.... it was bad, folks. It was embarrassing. It wasn’t even a competition. As a result, I feel like there’s a fire lit under me. I am looking up anagram puzzles to do every day and have gotten back into my crossword habit. Nothing like proximity to very good to push one to do better.
Health
I had a headache again earlier this week. 48 hours, tension not migraine, but still debilitating. I had to vomit lots. I fully believe this happened because I wrote about no headaches last week and someone put kann. It’s okay, various loved ones did various salt and lemon-chilly things to remove it, and eventually I did feel better.
I’m very glad I kept up with calisthenics this week - apart from the headache, I also haven’t been very well rested. Having Divya come pick me up has been such an important motivator.
I didn’t run this week. I psyched myself up for it - I even woke up both days meaning to do it, but since I was doing it alone I felt like I could just blow it off and recover instead. Spoiler alert: I didn’t feel actually rested. Somehow (and I’m very happy about this) over the last month my body has become the kind that will complain if it doesn’t get the exercise it is used to. A lesson my body will remember well next week I hope.
Learning
I told myself I’ll do the HSK-1 mock on 24th of this month! That’s still two weeks away, but my character learning via Hanly has been slow, and I’m nervous. Have to remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint. I will be adding at least one story every three days to my learning schedule, so this should be fun. My listening is suffering the most, I think, because I don’t have access to too many exercises that have them without having context. I’ll need to fix that soon.
Media Diet
Reading
I feel like I have read a million words of Dramione in the last week. Why Dramione? I’ve read too much Drarry, and at least it’s good romance. Why romance, when I’ve been obsessed with SFF/specfic for ages now? Well, our quota for asking ourselves hard questions this week is over.
Listening
I want to go back to listening to more of the happy, peppy, indierockpop music I did in the early years of college. Think Cage the Elephant, Vulfpeck, maybe even some Within Temptation; but as per usual I am looking for acts with a lead woman’s voice. Gimme please!
Around the web
- With the end of GloPoWriMo, Saket told me about the personal blog of Purvai, someone I met and really enjoyed hanging out with at Dee’s Lohri Party. More poetry for you all.
- Steven Deobald is now Executive Director at The GNOME Foundation!
- This fantastic post on writing as a force multiplier for engineers by Aditya Athalye that makes me regret not paying more attention to my writing journey 5 years ago and grateful that I’m not starting out on this 5 years from now.
Been reading your notes for a while now. Just popping in to say hello to a fellow Dramione reader! Good luck with the HSK - learning a new language is always so hard.