Back to improvement

Yesterday was my first day back on my normal schedule, but I prioritized schoolwork so I didn’t do exercise and cleaning. I got my schoolwork finished just after eight, so I actually had time to exercise (and probably should have done so), but by skipping I wasn’t stressed. I had planned to get back on schedule on Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Tuesday I ended up continuing my game as the Elysian Empire and at the end of the day my goal was still not in sight. So, I played on Wednesday as well. At this point, I just got tired of conquering, waiting for assimilation to happen and peace treaties to expire, then repeating. For me the game’s draw is the imaginative potential combined with the visual progress, but if I don’t invest in the imaginative aspect, it gets quite dull.

Reflection is an important skill, and one that I am seeking to improve through writing regularly. I hope it will also motivate me toward achievement. With that in mind, I will now reflect on my short-term goals and their progress.

JAPANESE

On Tuesday, I did some reading from the local newspaper and was impressed at how few words were unfamiliar to me. Even so, I had difficulty assembling the words into meaning. So just now, I had an idea about how to improve reading comprehension. Instead of answering questions, what if I try to write summaries of articles that I read? The summaries would be in English, so they shouldn’t be difficult, but it should press me to work harder at comprehending texts. I’ll think about it.

Yesterday I picked up a book at the elementary school and read a couple of pages, and enjoyed it. I think it would be great if I went to the library (almost) every day and tried reading children’s books. I’m afraid, however, that doing so would make exercise more difficult, because it would have to be straight after work and then my dinner would be later and I don’t like to exercise on a full stomach, and I’m afraid that exercising after 8:30 will disturb my neighbors. The reasonable alternative would be to borrow books from the library, and I have no excuse not to do this except that I don’t know how and learning to do so would probably involve talking to people. Once again, I’ll think about it. Although I think reading the newspaper is helpful, I don’t think it’s the most efficient method to improve, nor the most enjoyable, so I worry that I won’t be able to sustain this habit.

I was reminded that my Japanese study doesn’t have a firm goal, and though I wrote in my last entry that I would think and make a plan by today, I haven’t thought about it at all. Writing summaries might be a good goal, but it would be foolish not to take advantage of the potential production opportunities available now for a limited time. What’s the problem with production? I have no motivation. Is there any production that I would be motivated to do? I am motivated to talk with Japanese teachers (who talk to me), especially at the upcoming end of year parties. However, I don’t feel that I can prepare for this in any effective capacity. So I can’t think of production that I want to do off the top of my head. I’ll brainstorm some possibilities:

Blogging

Speech

Video

Journaling

Creative writing

Summarizing a text

Blogging sounds nice, but given how much difficulty I’ve had with it before, I don’t think it’s a viable option at this point. Honestly, my favorite option might be my idea of summarizing a text. I could do it in English and then sort of translate that summary back to Japanese while referring to the original text. Hopefully this will give me practice on the most mechanical parts of writing, and once I’m comfortable with that I can move on to more creative writing like blogging. The next question is—am I interested enough in newspapers to do this? Are there other options? NHK has a lot of articles, but recently I’ve wasted some time scrolling through them trying to find something interesting.

Another idea that just occurred to me—what if I talk about education? I can use it to consolidate the learning I’m doing in my classes, and maybe I can use it to discuss with teachers, too. It might not be as useful a topic when I return to the states, since I doubt that Japanese students will be studying education at an American university, but that’s something to worry about later.

I think I’ll use both methods, but prioritize education because it’s more likely to be useful in the present, and summarize newspaper articles when I can’t think of anything else. My goal for this next week will be to write at least two sentences every day in Japanese summarizing something that I’ve learned in the most recent module of class. I will have the Japanese checked by someone. If I don’t feel like doing this, I’ll summarize an article from Japanese (with a 3-sentence minimum), and the next day I’ll translate my summary back into Japanese.

5-MINUTE PLANK

The person who inspired this goal considered it accomplished when, on the thirtieth day of her challenge, her combined planking time over multiple planking sessions and different planking positions equaled five minutes. I think that’s cheating, and I think if I tried, I could probably succeed at that standard today or tomorrow. When I measured my baseline plank on Monday, I held it for 2 minutes. On Tuesday, I held it for 2:10. On Thursday I did two sessions of two minutes each. This morning I held it for 1:40 but couldn’t hold it any longer. I’m not seeing any immediate progress, and since I only have nine days left in the challenge I’m not confident that I will be able to more than double my current record, but I’m still going to try.

DANCING

No progress for the past two weeks. I really wanted to dance yesterday though—I was dancing at school and in the supermarket. I plan to get back to it today.

PROGRAMMING

I worked on my program a little last night. I encountered a very strange bug when it corrected my typing mistakes, and I’m not sure how to reproduce that condition. I also decided that I would much prefer that my correct percentage depend on my incorrect words rather than characters. So I have a lot of work to do on that.

BIBLE MEMORY

On Tuesday, I wrote out Psalm 1 entirely from memory with only a few mistakes, which I attribute to having learned this verse in at least two versions which causes some interference. Yesterday I wrote out Psalms 2-5 as well. The first two only required prompting in a few areas, but the latter two were more forgotten than remembered. The first ten Psalms might be more of a stretch than I had thought, especially since I remember nine and ten being long and quite difficult to memorize. My more modest goal is the first eight Psalms, but I think I still have a chance at ten so I’ll keep writing them out and start reviewing the completed verses every day.

CONCLUSION

Having written out these reflections, I note that with planking and Bible memory I focus more on the goal than on the means to achieve it. Maybe this is okay for a first time reflection, but I hope that in general my reflections will concern my processes rather than the goals.

Short-term goals

I have ten habits and non-habits set up to be checked off every day, which I listed in my February 2^nd post. Most of these don’t lend themselves to performance goals. For example, I read because I need something to do at night to relax and fall asleep, not because I have a certain number of books that I want to read. Eliminating these habits left me with three—Japanese, programming, and exercise. I have already made a short-term goal for programming—to make my memory program usable before returning to the US. I think I need to make this goal more concrete though. What features exactly do I need to implement for it to be considered usable? I have some ideas, but I want to revisit my program and feature checklist before stating them definitively. Exercise is the easiest. I recently expressed a desire to be able to do a five-minute plank. I’m going to challenge myself and say that I want to do it by the end of February. I also want to have a goal for dancing, which is a bit difficult, but my idea is to choreograph an entire dance. The choreography will be loose with a lot of repetition, but even so, three to three and a half minutes is quite a long time, so I’m a little skeptical that I can do it. The main point of this is to learn how to transition between moves, as well as to demonstrate concrete progress. For this challenge, I’ll give myself until the end of March.

Finally, for Japanese I had the goal of learning 20 words over three days until I learn a thousand and beyond. Although I don’t doubt the effectiveness of this method, and I know that I will feel gratification as I see the numbers go up, this goal feels a bit useless and is definitely endless. The real goal is to read the newspaper every day as I mine for these words. It’s difficult to demonstrate or quantify achievement in reading. Anyway, for now I will stick with this goal, but I’ll try to look for something more concrete. I’d also like to have a production goal of some sort—two sentences a day or something like that. The blogger mentioned above had a goal of conversing in Hebrew for thirty minutes about the future of technology, and to that end he wrote a few sentences to express his ideas, memorized them, and pulled from them when he conversed. I thought this was a great idea, but it does require having an expert check the sentences. Come to think of it, until I move, I do have free access to experts, so I have no excuse not to try this method. When I move home, if I want to continue, I might be able to arrange classes with Japanese students at the local college. Honestly, language production is an extreme chore to me, but I know it has great benefits. I think I’ll wrestle with the idea and try to make a plan by Friday to enact on Saturday.

I have one more habit to add and an accompanying goal. I want to memorize scripture every day using my software. It’s difficult to make a definite goal because verses and chapters vary so much in length. One verse a day is almost always doable, but sometimes it’s too little, and it makes for a very slow pace. Rather than that, I think the best thing to do might be to decide on a target text, estimate the amount of time it will require for memorization based on the whole length of the text, and then set an ambitious daily goal that would allow for some days to spare. I think I’ll start back with the Psalms, which generally have short and consistent verse lengths. By the end of February, I want to be able to recall with 95% accuracy (according to my program) the first ten Psalms. This might sound like a lot, but I reviewed these Psalms consistently for almost a year when I last lived in the US, so it might actually be too easy. I only have ten days though, so it’s a convenient target.

The historical simulator and a week's worth of post

One of the classes at my junior high school was closed because of the number of flu cases. I received a notification in my school mailbox about it, which contained what seemed like a useful sentence even though it has almost no meaning in itself. 急なお願いで恐縮ですが、何卒ご理解の上、よろしくお願いします – We are ashamed to make this sudden request but please kindly understand and we are in your care. The last phrase is extremely common as well as difficult to translate into English, but the other two were unfamiliar to me. I’m not sure I will have a chance to use them, but I will look for an opportunity.

As I predicted on the previous Saturday, I found myself unable to resist the lure of the historical simulator. It allowed me to play out the situation that I read about in the history book that I’m reading now as a ruler in control of England. I conquered Ireland, Scotland, and a significant portion of France before getting bored. If I had left it at that, my reversion to video games would have been just a quick dip in my habit records, but then I restarted to play as my favorite nation in history—the Byzantine Empire. Even though the game has been updated since I last played it three or four years ago, I found this situation a little boring because I’ve played it so many times, so I looked for ways to make it more interesting.

I came across an alternate history mod in which the Byzantine Empire in 1447 sends one of the Emperor’s brothers with a few ships across the Atlantic Ocean in order to flee from the Ottoman Empire. I played as this new empire of Elysia, which conquers the Native American tribes and settles the wilder parts of the continental USA. I like to cheat when I play this historical simulator, but obviously it’s no fun if I cheat to give myself everything, so I have rules for which cheats I can use. In the first three games, I became frustrated with my lack of progress, which I attributed to my cheating rules. In the last game I finally found a cheat that didn’t feel too game-breaking but gave me a decided advantage—the instant colonization cheat. Because in 1447 I am the only one with access to both colonists and the continents of America, getting near instant colonization allowed me to grow much faster than my rivals. Even so, there are so many provinces to colonize that I couldn’t expand into Mexico before it was claimed by a rival, and South America ended up being quickly colonized by Portugal. Nevertheless, after about 120 years I returned to Europe and reconquered Constantinople from the Turks. From here it is recommended that I restore the glory of the Byzantine Empire by reconquering all of its old lands. I’m not sure I have the patience for that at this point, but I suspect that I’ll probably invest a few more hours in this game. Although I’d like to start over and see what happens if I don’t tell Portugal where I’m going at the beginning of the game, thereby giving me a better chance at colonizing South America, I think that the tedium of reconquering all the tiny Native American nations and recolonizing hundreds of provinces will deter me from doing so.

Because of this retrogression to gaming, I lost a week and two days of progress on my goals, as well as a lot of sleep. I just barely completed my school assignments on time. A week and a half, though, is not so much time that it inspires despair, and with that in mind I intend to resume my habits on Tuesday or Wednesday. A couple of notes though—despite my firmest resolve ever to give up video games, I lost my ability to moderate my time as usual. In the future if I anticipate a relapse, I need to set up some sort of moderating mechanism. This will prevent me from being too unhealthy and might help me pull out of the relapse more quickly. I’ll have to think about how I would do this. One thing that did change, or maybe that I noticed more than before—even while gaming, I wanted to stop and study Japanese or program or even work on school assignments, but I felt driven to finish my obsession. This might be attributable in part to a desire to get tired of the game as soon as possible and get back to my normal, healthy life.

On Saturday I did work on my school assignments for a couple of hours in the morning, in this break from obsessive gaming I was inspired to work some more on my Rubik’s cube technique. For a few weeks now I’ve been averaging solve times of 70 seconds with a range of forty seconds as long as I don’t make any serious mistakes. This whole time I’ve been using the beginner method, having read that there isn’t any point in learning more advanced methods until consistently breaking the two minute mark. Since I’ve achieved that mark and haven’t made significant progress, I decided that it’s time to learn the new method. The most common method used to solve by most of the fastest cubers is called CFOP. I’ll be learning the lite version called 2-look CFOP, which requires learning only 14 algorithms instead of the normal version’s 78. I found a great website that helps train specific, selectable algorithms, so I’m excited about working on that.

While looking for information about this version of CFOP, I came across a blog about mastering a variety of skills in just one month each. I don’t have personal interest in most of the goals that the blogger had, but his style of writing and tackling the challenge was infectious and inspirational. Thinking about my own goals, I can't remember making any that were concrete and less than six months away. Actually, I take that back—I think in college I had a short term goal of learning all 2050 jouyou kanji in three months, and I nearly met that goal, only getting overwhelmed at 1900. So, I have reason to believe that if I make concrete goals that are only a month long, I might be able to complete them and feel a sense of achievement. Since I have several simultaneous broad goals, my main concern is whether I’ll be able to come up with enough short-term concrete goals. But if I can just do three months’ worth of month-long goals, I will have a better idea of how maintainable this system is and what kind of goals are doable in a month.

Procrastinating procrastination

僕にとって、一番怖いいことは平凡な存在になることかな。なぜなら、人は楽しむためだけではなく、世界に価値を寄せるために生きるんだと信じています。平凡な存在というのは、価値を寄せられない存在です。

I only like the second sentence and I feel that this is far from finished, but I can't seem to put my thoughts in order enough (even in English) to adequately describe how I feel, and I suspect I'll be all written out by the end of the day. Also, I switch from informal to formal voice. Ugh, I need more practice.

Yesterday at work I worked a little bit on my schoolwork, but for the most part I wrote the yesterday's giant post and pondered over it. I also looked for no-equipment arm-building exercises that weren't push-ups (no luck) and jobs at Christian schools. The latter was interesting, and I realized that I could have conceivably gotten a job years ago. At this point though, I'm not going to do so until I finish my degree. Even though I only had two classes, after school and grocery shopping I felt a bit strung out and ended up browsing the web and watching youtube for an hour and a half. About half the time was spent fairly productively by watching dance videos. After exercising I did spend about twenty minutes on schoolwork, then programmed a bit before reading and sleep.

My current book is about the four significant rulers in the first half of the 16th century: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent.  I read about how Henry VIII invaded France and captured two small towns, then came back to England in the middle of a Scottish uprising which was viciously put down. I could see both events happening in Europa Universalis, and it gave me a strong desire to revisit the game. The name Angoulême is so evocative. Accordingly, after working on my paper for a bit, I allowed myself to download it. This took over an hour, and by the time it was done I had nearly finished one part of my assignment. I finished it, but also procrastinated procrastination by completing items from my habit list. I programmed for an hour, wrote in Japanese, and now I'm writing in English. With this finished, though, I'm afraid my only options are to try working on the last part of my assignment (I'm not sure I have enough willpower to last long there) or play my game. I had two more ideas for the weekend: shopping and talking with Big D. Both of them were contingent upon my finishing the assignment in a timely manner. Well, maybe this time will be like all the recent times that I've loaded up EU4--I try to set up the conditions for about ten minutes, despair at the complexity, and give up. I've told myself that it's a shame to lose my 15-day video game-free streak. If I were at home, I would try some kind of hobby, like sewing or woodworking. Here, all I have are programming, which I'm not interested in revisiting now, and circuitry, which seems pointless at the moment.

About a week ago I read an article about a woman who tried to do a plank for five minutes every day for a month. In the end she only managed the whole five minutes on the last day spread over several sessions, so it was a bit of clickbait, but it got me thinking (self-efficacy), maybe I could do that. I'm not happy with my posture, and it seems like planks do help with that as well as strengthening abs and arms. Five minutes seems like a decent goal, too. So yesterday I managed 2 minutes 45 seconds over two sessions. I did this during my workout, which also includes sit-ups and floor sprints which work some of the same muscles. My goal is to be able to do a total of four minutes next Sunday.

My personal narrative

Yesterday I taught four lessons in a row that were observed by the city English program director. That was really stressful, and two of them were rather tiring lessons too. In the first lesson the director was constantly interjecting, so much that at times I wanted her to just teach the lesson herself. She is definitely skilled at asking questions and reacting, so I should be happy to learn from her, but instead it’s frustrating and intimidating. That’s probably my pride speaking.

Wednesday night I finished the Clockwork Universe, and was extremely motivated to study. Of course it was already 10:30 by that time so I needed to sleep, but I was so motivated and hyped up that it took me at least two hours, because I was thinking about things. One thing that I've always lacked is a directed passion, quite unlike Newton. Then again, Leibniz was similar, although he was clearly much more brilliant. But anyway, if I had to trace a consistent passion throughout my life, I would say that it is learning languages, and if there is anything that I have confidence in, it is my capacity to memorize. If I could make some kind of significant contribution to humanity, I would probably prefer that it be in the area of learning. But then again, the reason I take pride in my memory is because of my willpower, and finding a method to make that easier would take away my superiority, so I almost don't want to do that. Ugh, I'm messed up.

In wrestling with the possibility of not having a family, I feel like I need to change the narrative of my life. I truly believe that someone who does not have a family is, in a way, wasting their life. However, if the person does so in order to devote themselves to another cause, their lack of a family a forgivable offense. Newton is an example of this. He had no family, but that was okay because he was a genius who devoted himself to the study of God’s world. If I can devote myself to something like that, then I can feel that my existence is not a waste. However, I need to make a difference in what I do, and that is difficult in an academic field, considering I’m not all that intelligent, nor do I have a particular passion. So the best way to make a difference is to be a teacher and serve students in that way.

When I interviewed Mom for my assignment on Tuesday, she was surprised to hear that I might want to go abroad again. I guess that’s reasonable given my emotional difficulties of the past year. The only thing that would make it better at home is family, but I guess that could be enough. I really do think that feeling like a valued member of the community was the main problem, and that by being a “real teacher,” that lack would not be felt. Furthermore, I would rather not teach in the US, especially not in a school that requires official testing. Private or Christian schools might be okay, but I’m concerned about the salary. If I will never have a family, I think working at a low salary is fine. Even if I might have a family in the future, if I live frugally enough it might still be okay to work at a low salary. Let’s see, comparing my current salary and living conditions with working at a Christian school, I would be making a few thousand more dollars a year, but about half of that would go to the difference in rent, plus I would have to pay for transportation. So, the amount of money that I could save wouldn’t really change. Is that sufficient? I’m not sure. I should talk to the parents.

There are two things that I miss from being settled, though. One, my residences generally lack comfortable features. I don’t mind living without a dryer and dishwasher too much, but sink nobs really bother me. Also, I will be sad to go back to living without a nice toilet seat. Noisy neighbors make me unhappy, but I’d like the ability to make a little bit of noise (and dance) without worrying about others. Unless I can choose my residence, I have no control over any of this. The other thing may fluctuate, but at least for this past year I have felt a desire to own things without guilt, to be able to pick up hobbies that require space and tools, like farming or brewing. Living overseas, farming is unlikely to be possible, and taking hobby-type items with me as I move around is usually impractical.

I think these two items can be condensed as a denial of my dream to live as independently possible in a place that I built myself. How strong is this dream, anyway? It didn’t solidify as an actual dream until about six months ago, when I started watching tiny home videos. Yet my favorite kinds of video games for the past ten years have been base-building simulation games. Even as a child I loved My Side of the Mountain, I wanted a tree house, and my favorite Boy Scout trip was when we slept in teepees that we made ourselves from fallen branches and leaves. The question then becomes, is this dream strong enough to inspire me to give up going abroad? And further, can I pick a place to stay for long enough to make building a home there a reasonable possibility? It seems unlikely.

Procrastination drops in for a visit

Last night I read about how great mathematicians and scientists almost always make their big discoveries in their twenties. It made me angry. What did I do in my twenties? I played video games. The peak of human will and focus was, in my case, squandered on developing the most time-efficient strategy to create a productive farm in Stardew Valley (not that I succeeded at that either). Looking at my records of language study, I can see that I did have enough focus to do something great, but didn’t. I hope that I can channel this anger into productivity and use it to break the hold of video games on me. Also, I’ve never had a desire to be a mathematician, but after reading about the development of calculus I really want to study it again.

On Sunday I procrastinated on my school assignment. I made some good progress on my program, mostly finishing the new interface. I had planned to go climbing, but with my school assignment looming and my body feeling a bit sore after three days of exercise in a row, I decided that I could take a break. I finished the assignment just before talking with my parents. The quality was not great, but I met the basic requirements and decided at such a late hour I did not have the willpower or time to improve it.

Yesterday I had no classes at school, so I read all of the main textbook reading and took the quiz at school. I tried to write in Japanese, but a subject eluded me. I should have looked up a writing prompt and attempted to write an actual paragraph while looking for ways to use the target grammatical structures. Next time I will do so.

After work, I went shopping and then got home at 5:20. I wrote an email to a prospective Active employee, and I must have had a bit more extra time but I’m not sure where it went. I had a great dance workout and talked to my brother afterward about jobs and an apartment and a car for when I get home. I did a very small amount of programming, designing the settings window. After entering my new vocab words in Anki and fiddling with the settings for a bit, I read some of the Christian textbook, found I couldn’t concentrate on it, and switched to the Clockwork Universe.

Japanese Wordlists

Friday night I dreamed about video games. I started playing Terraria, I think it was, and I felt ashamed that I broke my habit goals. Even though I could still remember that shame from the dream on the next day, I had to fight the urge to play, though it wasn't as strong as it has been at times. It's more or less common sense, but I've noticed that I only have a strong temptation to play video games on weekends, usually in the middle of the day when I've got a hole in my schedule. Regardless, I resisted the temptation. Saturday night, in contrast, I dreamed that Mom was interested in reading the Wheel of Time book series and was asking me about them. That was weird, though for a dream I suppose it's reasonable enough.

Yesterday I set two precedents that I hope I will be able to continue. First, I found a website (also usable as a mobile app) which I will use to track my habits. On a daily basis I will do nothing more than check them off. The website doesn't offer as many features as I would like, but supposedly more are coming, and I can export my records into a .csv file to use in other ways if I like. The eight habits and two negative habits are:

1. Bible reading and prayer
2. Schoolwork
3. Programming
4. Exercise
5. Cleaning
6. Reading
7. Writing
8. Japanese
9. No video games
10. No fanfiction

Some of them are disabled on Sunday and Wednesday (because that's my 12-hour work day).

Notice that Japanese is on the list--that is my second precedent. Last night I was inspired to look at language learning forums again, and remembered this forum topic which inspired a lot of my Russian language learning. The author advocates the learning of seven words a day by writing a list and reviewing it with some time in between reviews. It has probably been close to two years since I consistently studied vocabulary--I tried it last night and remembered how fun it was. The vocabulary must come from a source though. Earlier I mentioned that I wanted to read the news in Japanese. Last night I finally took the time to locate a news website in Japanese from which I took my first batch of words. My plan is to start waking up at 6 to give myself a little extra time, and read the news while I'm eating breakfast. When I find a word to learn, I'll write it down in my vocab notebook. Around lunchtime I will write the English translation for these words. In the afternoon before leaving work (sometime after 3 PM), I will rewrite the words to be learned using the English translations as reference. At night I will review words in Anki, and enter the new words from the previous day. At this rate it will only take 143 days to learn 1000 words. Even double that wouldn't be too unreasonable in a single year, and after ten years my vocabulary would (theoretically) surpass that of a native speaker.

Although I'm definitely more fluent in Japanese and more knowledgeable about French, I consider my level in Russian to be my greatest language learning achievement. I started studying in France in 2011, and though I stopped studying for about a year, by the time I went to Russia in 2013 I was able to converse basically and get the gist of most conversations. I read the Harry Potter books 1-5, and with a dictionary I even started reading Crime and Punishment and the poetry of Pushkin. Within a couple of months, I could follow almost everything that my students were saying. If I had pursued my studies diligently in Russia, I think I could have been fluent by the end of 2014, after just three years of serious study. How did I get to this level? First, I used the Assimil program to learn conversations by heart and improve my pronunciation. Once I finished this course, I drilled grammatical forms (mainly pronouns), did word lists, listened to a few podcasts, and watched Russian dramas. I no longer have the records from my study (how I wish I had done more writing, if nothing else!) but I'm certain that I learned over a thousand words through word lists, and I wish for that success in Japanese as well.

I didn't go to church today. As I have said before, I plan to go every week, yet sometime in the twelve hours beforehand, I am confronted with a sense of dread. Even when I went last week, on the way I felt like I was committing myself to a perilous endeavor not unlike jumping off a cliff. I think it was a good thing that I went, because I was encouraged by (and I hope I encouraged) the pastor, and I did enjoy some of the music, but the resulting feeling was more "I'm glad that's over now, and I'd rather not do it again." I should probably press through this feeling and then going would feel more natural. It's a struggle though. Today I only had to get my coat, but at the last minute I decided not to go.