Letter No. 21

Obviously, I haven't made time to blog in the past couple of weeks. Work was especially busy, and when I wasn't working, I was studying, working on a craft, hanging out with Cris, or just letting my brain rest. So, all in all, I've been busy in a good way.

I can't seem to let too much time pass without documenting some of it, though.

I'm moving out of my current apartment soon. It's a pity; the fire trees in the village park below my window are abloom again. My next window will be closer to the ground. It overlooks a narrow street and faces the side of a Korean church. At least it's yellow, and they have a few trees.

No hard feelings about having to move, though. It wasn't actually long into my lease that I saw, my lovely apartment was little more than an expensive locker in a great location. Yes, I lived there, and I was happy there with my crafts and my books and my simple home cooking and the way the sun turned my cheap curtains into spun gold. But I spent so much of the year living — really living! — outside, too. This year promises even more.

So, it just makes sense to find a cheaper place nearer work, so I spend less time on the road, less money on storage, and more time just living.

Sometimes, I can't believe how much things have changed in the past year-and-a-half. I like who I've been becoming. I like where my life seems to be going. I like most of the people who surround me these days, and my dislike for the rest has at least scaled down to general indifference. ("Do you have a problem in your life?") Life is good.

I'm enjoying language learning more than ever. I'm in intermediate Chinese now, and, all humility aside, I'm doing pretty well. I've also enrolled in a free python MOOC on a whim, partly to see what a MOOC was like, and partly to see if I could still learn to code something other than the minimum blogging requires.

Whether I'm learning human or computer language, there's something really rewarding about understanding how language parts goes together. Chinese is sort of mathematical, musical, symbolic, and poetic (the Chinese for "guest" — the same "guest" you see in the word for "hotel" — is a component of the word for "Philippines"). Python programming is creating math and logic puzzles that then solve themselves. All in all, I think I'm putting up a decent resistance against what a University of Virginia study says is an inevitable decline in brain power when you hit 27.

Things I do miss: China and Glitch. Last month, I was sort of offered a return trip to China, but the sort-of-i-ness means I don't know whether I'll still get to go. Cris was in Guangzhou for two weeks (he'll be flying in tonight), and the pictures he sent me reminded me of how much fun it was to explore. As for Glitch, well, I still haven't found a diversion as wonderfully weird as a place where dinosaur colon was a mode of transportation.