Happy Mother's Day

A happy Mother's Day to all the mothers I know, including my mom, my sister, Grandma Flaxman, Aunt Joan, Aunt Denise, Aunt Ginny, Sheilah, and anyone I may be stupidly forgetting.

EDIT: As noted in the comments, I did end up stupidly forgetting Alma's mother, which is particularly embarrassing. So a happy belated Mother's Day, and my endless thanks, to her as well.

In more me-oriented news - since I know that's why you're all here - I'm trying yet another attempt at self-betterment. I've been lagging on exercise lately, in part because of acid-related issues and in part because I've been pretty busy between school and work (and moving, more recently). I hope to get back into that soon, but another thing I'm going to try is calling a moratorium on frozen dinners, which until this point had pretty much formed the backbone of my eating habits. Calorie-wise they were healthy enough, but of course those things are loaded with sodium, and while they're convenient and require no dish washing, I'm sure I can do better. For example: frozen chicken breasts and a George Foreman grill. My new place didn't come with a microwave, so that gives me a pretty good excuse to break the habit. Also, it's kind of pathetic of me to be so reliant on frozen dinners anyway. I've already made some lifestyle changes, so might as well work at another one.

I don't think I have too many readers at this point who live alone, but do any of you have general suggestions as far as things you did or do to sustain yourself that weren't microwave-related?

Magandang araw po sa inyong lahat.

So as I'm sure many of you already knew, Alma's parents are from the Philippines. As you probably also already knew, I am kind of a geek for languages. I took French for years (and still retain a slight knowledge of it) and tried Russian in college, though I didn't make it beyond a quarter because five days a week at 9 am was just not happening. But I still remember some words from that, even, and I can pronounce printed Cyrillic. I also took a couple linguistics classes in college, and so can converse intelligently on the structures of languages I don't speak a word of. But I never got to actual fluency in another language.

Well, if I don't do it now, it's never going to happen - and there's no language that's quite as available to me at the present time as Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines. I discovered a podcast and accompanying blog that teach the language in pretty small, manageable chunks - I've gone through the first five lessons so far, which has pretty much just covered greetings and a few "time" words like kahapon, yesterday, and ngayon, right now, the latter of which has proven my most difficult pronunciation challenge so far. (The two main problems that have presented so far are the glottal stop, commonly used at the end of the modifier po, which indicates respect to the addressee, and the phoneme ng, treated as a single letter in Tagalog and a surpassingly unintuitive sound for an Anglophone, since it has an N-like sound but is produced at the other end of the mouth from the English N. English has velar consonants - K, G, and W - but their pronunciations are not so subtle as ng. And we do have the "ng" sound, in words like "ring," but we certainly don't begin words with it, and we pronounce the G in every case I can think of offhand.)

I probably shouldn't weigh you down with all the details ("Too late!!"), but suffice it to say that this should be interesting. I've never had native speakers at my disposal before - although it's kind of interesting because Alma's dad is not a native speaker; his first language is another of the many Filipino dialects, though he is certainly fluent in Tagalog. In that respect it's even more helpful, because he too knows what it's like to learn the language in a fashion other than just picking it up as a baby, although there's a lot less of a leap from Tagalog to other Filipino dialects than there is from Tagalog to English; at least the other dialects are in the same language family as Tagalog. At any rate, he's been a big help so far, and I get the feeling that her parents like that I'm interested in learning the language.

So it'll be a fun experiment, and hopefully more successful than my previous false start (which failed for two reasons - one, I was too embarrassed to use her parents as a resource, and two, the book I had was basically just a phrasebook and didn't break things down in the way that I find useful as a learning tool). I really would like to be fluent eventually, and I suggested to Alma that we could ask her parents to speak nothing but Tagalog around us for a while if I get to the point I'd like to be at, a way of learning by immersion. It might also be good for Alma, who understands Tagalog fairly comprehensively but can't speak it to any significant degree. It'd be pretty neat if eventually we could all sit around, playing mahjong and conversing in Tagalog.

(Oh, and the title of the post, if you're not Alma, means "Good day to you all." With politeness, since my parents read this.)

They're wafer thin!

I bought Girl Scout cookies from a coworker whose daughter is in the Scouts, and they arrived today. Three boxes of Samoas, one of Tagalongs - which went right into the freezer - and one of Thin Mints. I remember when Samoas were changed over to Caramel Delites and how disappointed I was - but oddly, both cookies actually still exist. I thought it was some sort of PC thing, but apparently it's just two different bakeries. Why they need two different ones, I'm not sure. Anyway, Samoas are the superior cookie. They're darker in color, so you get a bit of a richer flavor off the caramel, and also the supporting cookie is white rather than yellow and a bit hardier against the teeth. Yes, I just wrote about Girl Scout cookies like they were wine.

I'm going to try and eat them over as long a period as possible, because Girl Scout cookies are just hideously bad for you. I had a theory that they only sold them once a year because if they were available year-round, people would start thinking about just how ridiculously awful they were from a health standpoint. I mean, you get 15 Samoas per box - more than a quarter per cookie these days, not that it's not worth it - which is five per section inside the box. If you eat one section, that's your saturated fat for the day. You're done. I mean, that's coconut for you, but ye gods. Tagalongs aren't a whole lot better. Is it fair that things which taste so good should be so bad for you? I know that's how it usually works, but I say no.

One thing that I will definitely need to do if I'm going to eat a lot of cookies is get back to the gym. It's been a while (and I've been paying the fat tax in the meantime, figuring I would get back soon), mostly because I've had various acid reflux issues, a problem which I seem to recall noticing at the gym in the first place. I was hoping to see if I could get the problem fixed before I went back, but I just don't think I can hold out much longer; also, losing weight is supposed to help relieve heartburn by taking pressure off that whole area, so it could be a case of killing two birds with one stone if I can really get serious about it. Alma has switched onto a schedule for spring quarter where she really won't be down in Chicago at all during the week, so that may enable me to put Monday and Wednesday towards the gym, though of course that gives me no nights to relax during the week. But then, that's why there are weekends, right? Besides, I've spent most of the past eight years relaxing every night during the week, and look where it got me. (I should clarify the above - I'm not trying to imply that Alma was in any way a cause of me not going to the gym, merely that she was often down here on Monday nights and so I was seeing her on those nights rather than doing anything else, not that I would have preferred to do anything else.)

Anyway. I'm going in to bed "early" here, since I have my first exam tomorrow. It's a lot of stuff to remember, so wish me luck.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

I've been on something of a personal betterment kick lately, brought on by a recent mental breakthrough that I was holding myself back from maturing as a person for no good reason. As a result, I've been doing things like taking the garbage out regularly, beginning the arduous process of cleaning my room (about which more anon), and taking more control of my finances. Somewhat, although not entirely, related to this is the recent realization that I seem to have acid reflux; I'd been having minor chest pains for a while and chalked it up to muscle aches until a trip to the lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant in our building resulted in me eating too much too quickly and getting the same pains as a result. After a consultation with my dad, I decided to cut 99% of carbonation and 100% of caffeine out of my diet - so long, four daily Diet Cokes - and attempt to eat slower (only some success here so far) and in more moderate amounts (more success; I actually took home leftovers when Alma and I went out last Saturday night, which is probably the first time that's happened in ten years). This will probably also assist in the eventual weight loss goal, and probably in money-saving (I'm trying my hand at bringing lunch from home, which I estimate could easily save me 20 bucks every week).

At any rate, the payoff for this is that we happen to be in the midst of the single-busiest two-week stretch of the year at work. Probably not the absolute best time to give up caffeine - I was in the office for 13 hours today, for example - but you know what? I'm sticking to it. There's little doubt in my mind that six months ago - hell, six weeks ago - I would have gotten to Wednesday and then said "Fuck it" and pumped myself full of caffeine. And although part of me feels that way right now, I think it's better for me in the long run to stick to my guns, for a variety of reasons.

Just one more week, and then it gets easier...