Ain’t Dead Yet

It may seem that I have died and gone to whatever hell could hope to contain me, but believe it or not I am quite alive and well. For the most part. Today I had a murderous headache that would not be quelled by migraine-strength Excedrine until I piled four ibuprofen and a day of unconsciousness (did not wake til an hour ago) on top of that, but now I’m doing well enough to call it good-ish.

So, I woke up and checked my messages and found that one of my loyal readers (also known as my oldest friend, brother in crime, and sometimes collaborator in creative plotting) had left me a message stating: “The people are hungry for a BLOG POST. Hahaha. They need CKWS”

Don’t ask me what fucking people. I don’t know. But oddly I had a whopping 9 views today when I had maybe 2 all week. I never claimed this blog was reaching anyone. I don’t promote it at all; largely so I can get away with not writing for a week and not have to worry about losing precious readers.

Somehow, I actually gained a few by not writing anything. I’m sure there’s a metaphor for the futility of the writer’s expectations in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to you to solve for your damn selves. Can’t be spoon-feeding everything; you’ll never learn that way!

So, what the fuck? Why haven’t I been updating the blog?

A few reasons, really, but the most pertinent might be that I simply had nothing to blog about. I sat down a couple of times to start a post, found nothing really jumped out at me to write, and decided I’d just do it later.

Beyond that, though, I’ve actually been filling a lot of my free time (read: every waking hour I’m not looking for work) with other creative endeavours that simply leave me too drained to do anything else.

First, building. I wrote a post about this last week, so I won’t go into the details again, but I’ve been on a pretty hardcore building kick for the MUD that made me “famous”, Prophecies of the Pattern. I finished one 100-room area last weekend and jumped straight into a second that I might finish tonight or tomorrow. Building is a sort of creative jumping point for me. I can sit and pound  out descriptions for rooms, cities, towns, forests, creatures, people, and whatever the hell else goes into any given area for hours to keep the creative mojo rolling, and when that hits a high point I can ride the tide right over to another project and do that for a bit.

While one of those projects has been working  out the details of establishing a new central plot character for the MUD to help revitalize the world a bit, I’ve also been using that time to work on my other stuff. Namely: revising the novel at last, and picking away at a pair of short stories that are currently competing for completion. I had intended to finish one of them and send it off to TOR’s web imprint, but that one’s been going slower as a result of expecting more out of it, and the other has picked up a bit of steam, so instead of hinging on one I’m letting two stories duke it out in my brain to see which winds up submitted somewhere first.

Then there’s the German. I’m up to a twenty-one day streak on Duolingo and level 7 in German. I could probably be higher level by now as I spend a lot of time working on it, but I tend to only run a new set of lessons every two or three days and fill in the rest of my days with practices to rehash everything I’ve learned so far. It must be working, because I find myself thinking in German here and there when I recognize something I’ve learned and can express in a complete sentence. It’s been an enjoyable exercise so far, though at least one friend has declared it pointless because I should be learning Spanish because I live in America, not Germany. To which I say simply; I am a citizen of the world!

That’s really all I’ve been up to lately, though. I stay up until ungodly hours when my brain’s finally had enough of trying to generate creative things, and then I crash all day. I expect that’ll change once I finally get a solid schedule in place around an actual job, but for now I’m just riding out the wave as it goes. If that means I stay up til 6am (or 11am on weekends…) doing anything creative I can get my mind to focus on, then at least I’m not just sitting around brooding about doing nothing at all.

That wouldn’t be good for ANYONE. Except maybe you poor bastards. You’d get to see what madness really looks like in black and white.

Entschuldigung!

Every now and then I get this wild hair up my ass about trying to learn Japanese once and for all. I love classic Japanese culture thanks to a profound appreciation for the martial arts and the films of Akira Kurosawa: who I contend to be the greatest filmmaker ever to live. Fuck anyone who disagrees.

Every few years over the last fifteen or so I’d go rooting around the web or the local library looking for resources to learn the language by. Invariably, I’d pick up a phrase book or a dictionary or some multi-part lesson book series that really expected one to be in a classroom situation, get about a week or two into the effort, and then give up. It’s an easy language to pronounce, and for a while I even had all the hiragana and katakana down pat, but the structuring is just so different and full of weird little rules that don’t quite match up with what an English native speaker expects to find that I frankly just got disheartened.

Now, this effort goes on here and there for a good fifteen years and beyond spending obscene amounts of money on Rosetta Stone or some similar program there wasn’t much in the way of a viable learning source all in one package. I’d start, stop, and start again whenever the notion suited me. Not a very good way to learn a language.

A few months ago, however, I got a glimmer of hope. I was sitting around idling on PotP with a friend who mentioned she was studying a bit of Norwegian to get ready for a trip she was taking to Norway this summer. We got to talking about languages a bit and she clued me in to Duolingo. I went leaping at it immediately in the hope that I’d find a good resource for learning Japanese at last, but sadly found that it’s not quite ready. It’s in the works in beta, but too early in the process as of yet to even be added to the selectable languages for one’s profile.

The idea of Duolingo, however,  intrigued me and I spent a little time poking around at it, decided I’d give Norwegian a try too, and then it crashed my ancient computer and I didn’t go back. As time would prove, though, I came to Ohio with a better computer in hand and a friend’s old iPhone 4 (which I was going to jailbreak and install Ubuntu Phone on, but that effort died flat for now), and a lot of downtime that even I can’t fill with purely writing-oriented activities.

So I decided to give Duolingo a shot again.

I installed it on the phone because I could pace around the apartment more easily, or do it while doing other things on the computer, and got to poking around again. The phone version doesn’t include the languages still in beta, but it had a wide enough selection that I could easily find something suitable.

My last name is German, and even the non-Knapp side of my family is very German in origin. My father had been learning German before he died and I can still to this day recite the German version of the alphabet just because he’d sung it to my siblings and I so many times taking us back to our mom’s after a weekend visit. With these things in mind, I said “why the hell not?” and picked German as my first real foray into Duolingo’s method.

I love it.

I practice a little every day, and often only do a new lesson every couple of days while using the time in between to run the “Practice Weak Skills” option for a quick refresher on days I don’t do a full lesson. I’m only up to level 6 so far, with a meager estimate of 5% fluency, but I’m completely addicted to the app and the language. It’s not too hard yet, and a lot of words are very similar to English or otherwise lending their origin to English itself, and the Duolingo method of teaching is such that a lot of new words get introduced without explanation and can still be reasoned out by the sentence they’re presented in.

Which brings me to the title of today’s post.

“Entschuldigung” is a noun that means “apology”, or “excuse”, and is essentially the polite way to say “sorry!”. A less formal phrase for the same apology would be “Es tut mir leid”.

For some reason, this seems backward as fuck to me. “Es tut mir leid” is a proper sentence, “Entschuldigung” is just one word, and it’s such a ridiculous sounding word that I just can’t take it seriously at all. It sounds just like it’s spelled: Ent-shool-dee-goong, and no matter what sort of tone I say it in I can’t help but to sound like the most sarcastically apologetic dick in the world.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe German doesn’t really account for apologies because apologies are meaningless words. So, Entschulgigung, motherfuckers; I went days without a post and this is what you got out of the wait!