Xenops' Log

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Xenops
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Sporadic Learning

Postby Xenops » Sun Oct 23, 2022 10:24 pm

Hello friends,

My language learning has been sporadic recently, mostly due to surprise events in my life. I keep waiting for “life to settle down”, so I can turn my attention to languages or other things I keep putting off...And yet, I have yet to achieve this quiet life. Life—or maybe God, rather—has other ideas, and so my life is more exciting than I would like. And I’m realizing: maybe I should stop waiting for life to slow its beat, and to work on what I want anyway. Maybe I should plan one day at a time, and fit what I can.

So anyway, events of late:

1. I moved, and even after the move, I’m selling/getting rid of stuff. And interesting artifact: a heating radiator lines almost the entire walls of the room, so it lead me to put my bookcase into my closet. And I realized how much this has given me a peace of mind. I grew up with the idea that shelves full of books, whether read or not, indicates that you are a special person (intelligent, well-read, etc). Yet my book collection as it is now—it only serves as a giant “to-do list”. It only reminds me of good intentions of reading research material for my comics, or seriously dabbling in other foreign languages for the sake of my own constructed language, or keeping a random reference book because it’s hard to find, and all the exports keep a copy. Looking at this book shelf only stresses me out. So I am slowly paring down my book collection.

2. I signed up for an English/Japanese exchange via my workplace university a while back, but got no bites. With the start of the new semester, however, a couple of Japanese reached out to me. Realizing my introvert limits, I diverted the second one to my Japanese-proficient coworker. So we have been meeting a few times a month, and it has been very useful.

Incidentally, I also put that I’m looking for Norwegian or French speakers, but have not gotten any bites.

3. I felt a great amount of my perfectionism being healed the past couple of months. If you would like to know more about it, please send me a PM. Praise God, I almost feel like a normal person. :D And part of this healing, interestingly, has led to a strong desire to revive my storytelling/comic works. Before I felt guilty for wanting to do comics: after all, my dad told me it’s a waste of time, so he must be right, right? An article I wrote for a Christian magazine elaborates on this: https://www.projectarctos.com/archive/61/the-choice

4. I got back on Netflix, and I’m not sure if Netflix did something, or Language Reactor did something, but I’m suddenly finding it much easier to find dubbed stuff in Norwegian...And subtitled! A previous attempt at watching the first episode of Pokemon made me realize that my listening skills in Norwegian suck. But now I have Netflix, with (somewhat) accurate Norwegian subtitles, I think this is a good starting point. And as much flack as Pokemon gets, I somehow tolerate it really well—I’m not sure if it’s nostalgia, or that I love the companionship between Satoshi/Ash/Sacha and his critters, but I find the series endearing enough to watch it multiple times in different languages?

Speaking of Pokemon, I still play Pokemon Go, and about 90% of the time in French—Japanese is too hard, and Norwegian isn’t available. I don’t actively study the language, so I live with a lot of ambiguity, but considering that I look up Pokemon info on the French site, Google tips and tricks in French, and can successfully battle against other trainers knowing only the French names for attacks, I think I’m doing okay.

Maybe I should rename my log “Learning Languages with Pokemon”?

5. Lastly, I got notice that my contract with the university lab is ending in December. :( Thankfully, it is not related to performance: we simply had only samples trickling in for the past two months, and the income isn’t sustainable. Regarding the NGS that I do, PRO-seq, we simply had no customer orders from August to October, and that is our main product.

So now I wonder: where do I go next? There is a hospital just down the street from where I live—but am I ready to reenter the medical field? I’m not sure. It sounds like they are also being bought by a hospital conglomeration, so I might encounter the exact problems that I saw at the previous hospital job.

Conversely, do I look for research lab jobs? What I do know from working in my current job—and mostly interacting with PhD students and post-docs-- is that I don’t want to pursue a PhD, certainly not in sciences. From my understanding, to earn a PhD, you have to work towards an ambiguous goal, with ambiguous trails, and you have to work overtime to try to find the next big discovery...Or at least something worthy of a paper, but before the next person publishes the same discovery.

But do I enjoy lab work? I do. I enjoy working with my hands, and I enjoy understanding the science behind what I’m doing. I also enjoyed some aspects of the medical field—it was very satisfying to contribute to a patient’s recovery. Should I be able to become proficient in Norwegian or another language, my goal was to get higher education in target country...But do I really want higher education? Maybe this is just indicative of my being in my mid-thirties, but the idea of having a “good enough job” that gives me a work-life balance is very appealing. The occupations I was considering to study for in target country would take lots of sacrifice, and I have to wonder—will I find it worthwhile?
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Re: Sporadic Learning

Postby garyb » Sat Nov 12, 2022 2:40 pm

Xenops wrote:But do I enjoy lab work? I do. I enjoy working with my hands, and I enjoy understanding the science behind what I’m doing. I also enjoyed some aspects of the medical field—it was very satisfying to contribute to a patient’s recovery. Should I be able to become proficient in Norwegian or another language, my goal was to get higher education in target country...But do I really want higher education? Maybe this is just indicative of my being in my mid-thirties, but the idea of having a “good enough job” that gives me a work-life balance is very appealing. The occupations I was considering to study for in target country would take lots of sacrifice, and I have to wonder—will I find it worthwhile?
I can't give any answers, but I can relate to this, being in my mid-thirties too now. I got a bit obsessed with my career during the pandemic and was quite set on studying hard in order to make a career move, ideally to a different city or country, and "fulfil my potential" in that area of life. But a couple of years later and with things mostly back to normal now, I'm really appreciating work-life balance and I ask myself... "can I really be bothered?".

I'm curious about the perfectionism too; it's something I've always struggled with but again seems to have improved significantly recently. Must also be a mid-thirties thing :lol:
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Xenops
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Low-budget Vacation

Postby Xenops » Wed Dec 14, 2022 5:46 pm

Good morning friends,

As the post title says, “low-budget vacation”, is what I am currently on—or in other words, I am currently unemployed. But don’t worry, I got a job offer yesterday, and I will start after the holidays.

As to what happened, the university “research” lab I worked at, unfortunately, did not get PRO-seq samples for over two months. As much of our funding is dependent on research labs sending us their samples, so the budget required someone to be let go...My contract was up first. Thankfully my boss bargained for me to have an extra two months, during which I finished last projects and looked for other jobs. I admit my focus had been on finding other research jobs, as people told me, “now that you’ve worked here, the world’s your oyster”. Oddly enough, despite my applying to many jobs, I did not get a lot of feedback, or the interview process was very slow. Was it because of the holidays? Possibly. At the end of my term there was a possibility of working with a neurobiology professor, and it seemed like a dream come true...Until I realized that she seemed disorganized, and she would require me to know a lot more than I currently do. Another position would also require me to learn or relearn much of my first bachelor’s amount of information to be able to do the job well. While initially I was eager to learn what I would need, I slowly realized...I don’t love research and basic science as much as I thought I did.

This realization puzzled me—isn’t this why I left medical care, to possibly pursue science? At first I knew that I didn’t love next-generation sequencing, and I felt bad about this—what is wrong with me? I’m working with genes, and I enjoyed genetics in college! And that neurobiology position—isn’t that the field every biology student wants to join?...And yet, I realized, it wasn’t that I didn’t love NGS, it’s quite possible that I didn’t love research as I thought I did. Originally I thought that, as a scanner/Renaissance woman, I was reluctant to relearn my biology and chemistry because “I hate doing things twice”, but it could be that while I appreciate having an understanding of how natural science works, I don’t love natural science. The thought of taking precious time from learning norsk and 日本語 and comics to relearn my science materials made me feel like I returned to school. Is it really impostor syndrome if it’s true?

So I applied to medical technology jobs, which is what I did during the pandemic. I accepted a job offer yesterday. Now my commute will even be better: to the university it was a 15-20 minute walk, now to this hospital it will be 5 minutes or less. ;) It is a hospital principally involved with musculoskeletal concerns, and there is no emergency room or OB/GYN. I thought, if I was to return to the hospital, this would be the best one. And surprisingly, I am looking forward to it—I think I missed health care. Health care is why I struggled through my first bachelors in raw sciences, and why I studied the second to allow me to work in a hospital. My very original plan was to pre-med with the intention to study in American medical schools, but various things prevented my attempting this route. So I will work as a medical technologist in the meantime.

Now, if the layoff from the university hadn’t happened, would I still be there? Absolutely. It took a while, but if I may say so, I got pretty good at PRO-seq library construction—my boss and coworker would agree with me. I also really enjoyed working with them: I might even argue he was the best manager I’ve ever had. He has the strange combination of being absolutely brilliant (I’ve never met a person with such a memory), while remaining a humble, decent individual.

As a creative person, I also really, really miss the university resources—particularly the ability to borrow books from its vast libraries or access any research article behind paywalls. It was a world builder’s dream come true. The Boston Public Library is good, but man...The university libraries. I also enjoyed other privileges, like using the university shuttle, and I could have free access to the Adobe and Microsoft suites...But no more. It was a privilege to work there, to be part of a gated community, but it is now done. I do grieve the loss, but at least now I have contributed to its workings, at least now I can proudly say I worked there and put it on my resume.

So, for December: I am unemployed, but will start working in a hospital again in January. Hence my “low-budget vacation”. My plan is to revive my Japanese with the Genki textbooks, and also something new: learning Blender, which is an openware for 3D modeling. I began the Donut Tutorial, and it’s already a doozy. My library also has access to LinkedIn courses for Blender, so I will explore those as well. I find I need multiple resources to understand a concept, be it languages or computer programs.

In my next post I will share more about my struggle perfectionism.
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Re: Xenops' Log

Postby rdearman » Wed Dec 14, 2022 7:05 pm

Blender has a ton of free tutorial and a great community behind it. I have been using it for about 20 years on and off but only recently started using it heavily for the VSE (video sequence editor) and a lot of 3d modelling for my 3d printer. I should learn more, because it can do so much more. But I have a tendency to just learn what I need.
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Xenops
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Perfectionism

Postby Xenops » Fri Dec 23, 2022 11:48 pm

For the longest time I thought having high standard was a good thing: high standards push me to achieve better results, right? So I did not think my perfectionism a problem. I could also follow rules and directions very well: whether it be the conduct of a conservative Christian or the ingredients of a recipe exactly, I followed. Because, after all, as my grandfather taught my dad—do it right, or don’t do it at all. “Better not to try than to fail”, I was taught. Failure was to be avoided at all costs, because failure is a reflection of self-worth.

Is it any wonder, then, that I hesitated to work on any project? For recipes for example, if it called for a lemon, I wouldn’t start until I had a lemon—even if a fresh lime was in the fridge. For comics, if I got one inked line a bit askew, I would start the page all over again. Or, for a long time, I didn’t touch a comic page, for fear of producing a less-than- perfect work. For languages, this perfectionism manifested as hours researching the correct learning materials—I needed the best books, the best courses, or my success will come to naught.

Only recently did I realize that perfectionism might be a bad thing: “perfect is the enemy of the good”, or so some say. I realized that my need for perfect results kept me from working on comics or languages—if an effort wasn’t guaranteed successful, why bother? If I couldn’t arrive at an event early or right on time, I wouldn’t go—being late makes me a horrible person, after all. Personal impressions are very important, especially when meeting others for the first time. I have to do it right, or failure would be inevitable.

I was also anxious about finances: I learned that our landlord was kicking us out in September, and that my next place would cost much more. Was going on this trip a good idea? If my Republican, Conservative background taught me anything, is that how you spend your money reflects your performance, and subconsciously, your value as a person. I was ready to cancel my trip—it’s always better to be conservative with my money, right? My background taught me to not take risks. And yet, I also felt that God wanted me to go on this trip. I had studied Norwegian more consistently than other languages, and I felt He was encouraging my interest in Scandinavia than in other European regions. When would I go, if not in August? In my experience, faith means relying on God rather than on my own schemes and means. So like many people before, I took a risk of faith.

Imagine my anxious state when getting ready for the Scandinavian trip in August 2022. I had not been to Europe before, and I could only imagine people there as presented by the media: fashionable, everything in order, perfect. How dare I, a mere American, venture to that continent of successful folk? As Europe has been presented to me, I felt like a mere mortal traveling to the land of gods and fair folk. And so I stressed over every detail: one example was shopping for and finding fashionable flat shoes before the trip. I bought my shoes online, and upon arrival they fit just fine...After a day or two though, they loosened just a bit, so the snug fit had expanded to maybe half a size. Realistically, this was no problem: they were not in danger of slipping of my feet. But my anxious mind obsessed over that half-size: they were too big; I should have tried them on more before wearing; I had an opportunity to have the perfect shoes, but not anymore. I was stuck with less-than-perfect footwear, and this reflected on my self image.

Similarly, when I booked the plan ticket, I was able to select a sit in the emergency aisle for the Boston—Copenhagen flight. Leg room, and all that. For the return flight, however, the website would not let me pick a seat, despite showing availability. I kept trying the website: no luck. I tried calling customer service, but since this was during and after the airline pilot strike, I could not reach them, despite being on hold for half an hour. “Well,” I thought, “at least I have a flight home: even if it’s by the bathroom, at least I’ll get home”.

I noted however, that once on the first flight, that my seat selection came to naught: the emergency aisle seats were blocked off, and I got a seat in the row behind them. No extra leg room for Xenops.

We arrived at the Copenhagen airport, and the stores inside were of expensive brands. This seemed to confirm my preconception of Europe. Once outside the airport, however, I was surprised, maybe even shocked: instead of meeting European demigods, I encountered...Humans. People. Just regular, everyday people that look like me, wearing regular clothes like me. They seemed more comfortable in their skin and shoes than I was. And unlike many Americans, the Danes were comfortable wearing clothing that didn’t look brand new. Either because I am perfectionist, or because Americans wouldn’t tolerate anything not new-looking, I often toss shirts or pants that have a small stain or a tear. Once I ventured about Copenhagen, my perfectionism began to relax—I realized that I was the only one concerned that my flat shoes were one ½ size too big.

So I continued on my Scanditrip, as I have written previously, visiting cities in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. I finished my trip and checked into the Copenhagen airport for the return flight. I waited at the gate.

Imagine my surprise when an attendant approached me:

Attendant: Are you traveling alone? Do you have checked-in baggage?
Me: Yes, and no...Why?
Attendant: I have an offer for you: to take a later flight for 300 euros, to give up your seat.
Me: Oh?

Being raised Republican, I find it hard to say no to money. I accepted. I waited at the gate while the attendant finalized the details. I wondered if I made the right choice: the flight was only a little later, but unlike my original plan, it wasn’t a direct flight to Boston.

The attendant came back:

Attendant: I have a better offer for you: how about 300 euros, and business class?
Me:...Yes?

For the first time in my life, I flew business class, for the long flight back to the US. I took advantage of a free cocktail and the food, and afterwards lowered my seat for a respite.

The layover in New Jersey was about 2 hours, and then I flew to Boston. The next day I applied the 300 voucher, only to later receive an email: “Thank you for flying SAS. Here is a voucher worth 600 euros to fly with us again”.

I remembered my attempts at picking a seat for the outward and return flights, only to be frustrated. I wondered at the events of the return flight, and I felt God was telling me: “I got you. I can provide for you better than you can provide for yourself. I can give you things above your ability to give yourself.” The song lyrics “I got you babe” came and come to mind.

That’s when perfectionism started to lose its grip on me.
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Re: Xenops' Log

Postby CaroleR » Sat Dec 24, 2022 12:38 am

Thanks for sharing your story. It was brave. Sometimes getting older helps soften that compulsion to be perfect so we can focus more on enjoying our lives. Your post reminded me of the poem, When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, by Jenny Joseph. Do you know it?

Here's the first verse:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

May the perfectionism continue to lose its grip on you.
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Re: Xenops' Log

Postby Le Baron » Sat Dec 24, 2022 10:23 am

It is indeed a great poem, can I just say though its title is: Warning.
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CaroleR
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Re: Xenops' Log

Postby CaroleR » Sun Dec 25, 2022 4:48 am

Le Baron wrote:It is indeed a great poem, can I just say though its title is: Warning.
And so it is. I stand corrected.
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Xenops
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Godt Nytt År!

Postby Xenops » Sun Jan 01, 2023 12:50 am

I enjoy New Year’s on this forum, because people you haven’t heard from in months make timely updates on their logs. :D

As for 2022 year review, a common theme seemed to be: Change.

--transitioned from making traditionally rendered comics to digital ones
--got Unlimited Data for the first time, which brought a time-suck known as Pokemon Go...At least I did a lot of walking?
--Got and met regularly my Japanese language-exchange partner
--visited Europe for the first time: specifically, Denmark, Norway and Sweden
--moved twice
--went from 1 hour+ commute to 15 minutes commute
--got laid off my job, accepted another one to start in January
--had amazing spiritual and emotional growth and healing (to continue)

As for languages...Let’s not talk about that. :lol: This December I’ve had time off work, and I think I’ve done more grammar-book study in Japanese during this month than the rest of the year. Well, I did do quite a few Pimsleur level 2 lessons, and my language exchanges can be intense grammar practice.

As for Norwegian, I admit my progress slowed this year, despite the Scanditrip. I’m not sure why I lost momentum: it didn’t come back much after the trip, either. Despite having access for fairly accurate dubbing/subtitles for Pokemon Indigo League on Netflix, I only got a few episodes in. I think I am just bored. So I decided on a controversial mix-up: either I would love the change, or I would come crawling back to the old choice--

I started studying Danish. :D

Sometimes I agree with most people and say, “it sounds funny”. The other times, however, I think it sounds intriguing and cool. I first heard it at length maybe 3 years ago when I began watching “Kingdom” (Riget) via my library streaming service. I first heard the narrator speak, and I thought “I love how this sounds!...But maybe I just like the voice actor”. Further in, I realized I enjoyed listening to all of the actors.

Fast forward, and I started studying Norwegian: it seemed, and seems, the logical choice. My Montana relatives traced our Norwegian heritage to the 1400’s, and it is the gateway language to Scandinavia. Learning more about Norway, I am still impressed with their blending of architecture and nature and with their health care system arguably one of the best in the world.* Oslo was my favorite city when I visited Scandinavia.

But while keeping true to Norwegian, the thought pops in my head: “I love how Danish sounds—one day, I want to learn how to speak it”.

My idea to “take a break” from Norwegian with Danish isn’t reasonable—this I know. For one, written Norwegian and Danish look very similar, maybe more similar than Russian to Ukrainian. For another reason, Denmark is one of the hardest European countries to immigrate to an a non-EU—if not the hardest. Sweden would be one of the easiest, with Norway in the middle. Plus, it is hard to pronounce—its two siblings are much more straight forward.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself—this is just a break, right? “But I love how it sounds.” This is just a break, right? “But despite not having as many trees, I like the idea of living in Denmark.” This is...Well, you know what I’m going to say, right?

So yes, either I will love Danish and progress regularly, or I find myself crawling back to Norwegian. I feel free to try this experiment: with my perfectionism taking a hit this year, I can worry less about appearances and explore a little.

Godt nytt år, alle sammen!

*Who Has the World's Best Healthcare? book.
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Re: Xenops' Log

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:03 am

Happy New Year 2023! May it be even more filled with success than the previous one, with growth, and a lot of joy.
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