This blog feels increasingly moribund, of late. I keep up with the daily poems, but even those small texts, when read between-the-lines, only serve as vague guideposts to my generalized anhedonia.
Life is frustrating. Arthur, my cantankerous uncle who suffers from dementia and his plethora of deep-seated denials, is mostly doing okay, but he’s not exactly pleasant company. Increasingly, dealing with him has the feel of caretaking a severely disabled but nevertheless overly proud and willful child.
Meanwhile, my mother (Arthur’s sister) gyres into her own sometimes conspiracy-addled anguish, in her antipodean hermitage deep in the Australian bush, and phone conversations with her are increasingly unpleasant and leave me feeling helpless and bitter (really just a transference of those feelings she’s having, to me, I suppose).
The store (which I purchased last fall, after half a decade working there) is mostly a source of frustration and anxiety. I am deeply stuck in a prolonged period of buyer’s remorse. I plod forward, but I derive zero sense of accomplishment or satisfaction with the project.
And my beloved hobby – the digital geofiction hosted on opengeofiction.net and ancillary sites, has felt unfulfilling, too.
I have discovered a new, less demanding pastime. I have embraced my pseudopolyglottism. I have been playing Duolingo.
Duolingo is an app downloaded to my android phone, which is for “language learning.” Really, that description deserves the scare quotes – I started using it when I was in Korea, hoping its gameified interface might help restore my dormant Korean language skills. It’s not bad, for that. Using it is like playing a game – one does language exercises, based on translation, vocabulary, listening (parsing, not really comprehension), and some AI-juiced speaking exercises that sometimes feel like a futile scream into the void, but that other times seem to sorta kinda work.
My review is only 3 stars out of 5. Given the manifold minor but noticeable lapses from natural English, I assume the other languages on offer might suffer similar shortcomings. Yet that doesn’t stop me from playing. It’s amusing, and I genuinely feel I’ve learned new Korean words and grammatical constructions, if only for recognition purposes.
However, I’ve fallen to the polyglot’s temptation, as I spend more and more time with the app (5 minutes here and there add up, over a day). I realized there were quite a few tempting and challenging languages that I could dip my brain into.
Over the last 50 days of play (since I left Korea after my whirlwind visit in May, basically), I have started lessons in Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. And today, I took another bizarre step, as I began a program in Swedish – but with the added twist that I’m taking it as Swedish-for-Spanish-Speakers, since it was being offered that way. That might keep my rusty Spanish alert too, I reasoned. Anyway, it makes Swedish harder – since I don’t get to see the many obvious cognates between Swedish and English. I get bröd vs pan, and äpple vs manzana, instead of the more transparent bröd vs bread, and äpple vs apple.
It’s all fun and games. And kills time quite well. And better than agonizing over the deadening emotional tangle that I feel my life has become lately.
