The Halfway Point

 I'm at Pluckers Wing Bar on Easter afternoon. It's a lovely day in Dallas and I'm out with family. That's an important detail - a gathering among friends wouldn't have allowed me room for the social faux pas I was in the process of committing.

As the other three at our table place their orders (it's dollar wing day), I politely decline to order food and ask for a water. I am in the midst of consuming something far more vital to me than wings: The finale of The Wheel of Time: A Crown of Swords, by Robert Jordan. By the time the appetizers arrive, I'm already too engrossed in my kindle to notice.

As I near the book's conclusion, I feel the pace of my reading take off. It's not unlike when you're going down a hill on a bike, and the thrill of the speedy descent morphs into a fearful surrender to a pace that can't be slowed down. 

Every book of the series has a final act that delivers a punch. This narrative structure feels intrinsic to Jordan's writing. He revels in demonstrating his ability to take the carefully threaded parallel plot lines and suddenly cinch them tight in a grandiose conclusion; a magic trick almost. I find this structure to have a canny parallel in the story's magic system, with the character's usage of saidín and saidar, the male and female halves of the One Power, described as the weaving of magical threads. The heroes and villains alike make these magical weaves permanent by tying them off, or invisible to others by inverting them.

The allegorical relationship between Jordan's writing style and his magic system is one of many connections I find between my daily life in the real world and the fabricated environment of our Two Rivers heroes. Now millions of words into this saga, I constantly find myself describing real-world phenomena in terms of the WoT universe. 

The inherently destructive yet potent nature of saidín at times seems to be an eerie allegory for aspects of my own nature; the times where I need to wrestle with my own will and concentrate. In other moments, when I have to accept what is out of my control and calm my mind, the requisite surrender of those who call upon saidar flutters into my imagination of the perfect, fantastical mirror of my own experience. The magnifying effects of magical objects like the angreal and sa'angreal also show up in my life: One chocolate chip cookie gives me a 2x productivity boost for at least an hour.

I am enjoying these books. The characters endear me, the world is immersive, and the villains are compelling, terrifying, and motivated with astonishing complexity (book 7 in particular adds so many layers here).

Nevertheless, I am already quite sure of the aspects of these books that I don't like. Jordan has a penchant for the most obscure English vocabulary, placed in the oddest of sentences. While I love a novelty term as much as any avid reader, I sometimes find these entries to be distracting or ham-fisted.

Jordan describes indiscriminately. The series is famed for having over 2,000 named characters. This I appreciate at times, as it adds color and language to the dozens of cultures and peoples in the books. However, I do find myself wishing that in moments where further exposition is not called for, Jordan would have opted to decorate the scene with some nameless extras in the background, wearing nondescript clothing.

Lastly, the true flaw, and the only one I think is a valid reason to put these books down, is the insufferably repetitive, objectifying depiction of women. While aspects of the way Jordan handles the sex and gender of the characters are cogent, every female character has to have a clearly detailed description of her bosom, her youthfulness or lack thereof, the cut and opacity of her dress fabric, and sometimes, as and added bonus, we learn if she is skinny or fat. For a series where sex and gender are intrinsic to the magic system, and where Jordan carefully splits the main cast between male and female perspectives, I find myself frequently groaning at how much of a missed opportunity these sloppy, sometimes misogynistic depictions repeat themselves book after book. For a world with some of the most genre-defining world-building, political theatre, and magic systems, you'd expect the same level of tact and nuance to be used when expressing the gendered dynamics of the cast. Unfortunately, each book has consistently left me wanting more in that regard.

Despite my criticisms, I am eager to continue the series and discover how the story develops. 

The Back Cover

What I'm listening to currently:

The Eye of the World - Reread and Ambitions of Series Completion

 Over my adult life, I have periodically attempted to reinstate my childhood habit of nightly reading. Though I enjoy many genres, fantasy specifically is still quite compelling to me, and it has the added bonus of animating my childhood nostalgia.

My reading life experienced a renaissance during the year of 2020, as I expect many others' did, and I repeatedly saw recommendations and rave reviews for The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. The series is a gargantuan, epic fantasy tale spanning 14 books and 4.4 million words. The sheer challenge reading this series would pose to me, a busy adult with a somewhat corroded reading ability, issued an intoxicating, seductive call.

At that time, I bought the first five books, and made it through the first 4. I was not reading consistently (my Goodreads review for book #3 comments that I read it "over the span of 9 months"), but I did enjoy the books at that time. I'm not quite sure why I didn't continue. I do suspect, though, the twin poisons of a suffocating work life and the ever-present distraction of less attention-hungry entertainment threatened my nightly reading habit seemingly without antidote.

Fast-forward to late 2025 - I was gifted a Kindle by a friend during our Friendsgiving, and the packaging depicted the Kindle with page 1 of "The Eye of the World," book 1 of The Wheel of Time series, upon its screen. Reanimated by this reminder of the fantasy world I had once enjoyed but prematurely departed, I decided to attempt a reread. 

I eschewed any careful consideration of whether 2026 will provision enough time for me to complete a 14-book series, and decided to jump right back in to reading book #1 as soon as the Kindle was charged. I found the mix of recklessness and ambition of my decision to be small but precious thrill - playful act of defiance in the face of the perfectionism that rules most of my life with totalitarian authority.

The process of the reread was exciting for two reasons. First, the book made the reestablishment of my daily reading quite easy. I imagine this was helped in part by my infatuation with a piece of new tech. With the Kindle's small size (I have the 6" model), carrying a 750-page novel in my pocket felt like an electric, fun secret accompanying me throughout the day. 

Second, having the context of books 2-4 somewhat preserved in my memory, I was able to more deeply appreciate and marvel at the true quality of the world-building and exposition Jordan achieves at the outset of the series. I've always heard The Wheel of Time lauded for its world-building, and the way it weaves a complex tapestry of cultures, history, and politics as a backdrop for the story it tells without burdening the reader with long passages of explanation. Having some sense of where the story was headed on my second read definitely deepened my ability to recognize this.

I fell even more in love with the main cast. Rand, Perrin, Mat, Nynaeve, and Egwene all charm in their own ways. The structural similarities shared with The Fellowship of the Ring in this first novel don't plagiarize, but pay homage, in a way that is deeply satisfying. Visualizing the world and the magic of it was more vivid this time around. Am I just reading with more focus and care than I was last time? I'm not quite sure. But each passage describing the mysterious use of saidin or saidar, the male and female halves of the One Power, left my imagination dazzled with the color and originality of this world's magic system. The conclusion of the novel, specifically, was such a collage of rich, striking, and disturbing environments and textures that it reminded me of the writing of Jeff Vandermeer (Annihilation, Veniss Underground).

As I was speeding through the final pages, I was caught up in a feeling that is far too infrequent for me these days: the increased heart rate and the pounding compulsion one feels when you're reading a true page-turner. It was exhilarating and I can't wait for more.

An Impulse for Twang, and an Impulse for Impulse.

4:31pm. Virtual meetings are over for the day. Glancing halfheartedly at my to-do list for work, I note only sub-5-minute tasks remain, work I can easily postpone until tomorrow. I leave my work laptop open, pop into the kitchen and slice an apple, then return to my desk and discreetly open a YouTube window on my iPad.

A subspecies of the scrolling hobby, meandering around various corners of YouTube has been a flavor of Internet downtime that helps retain a facade of purpose; of education and intellectual rigor. While I have recently been in one of my oft-repeated phases of eschewing what I often consider more mindless platforms (TikTok, Instagram), YouTube still delivers a nicotine kick, briefly removing me from the problems of life and work and turning off my brain for a bit.

My YouTube habits typically follow trails of hyperfixations that last, on average, about a month. June was plant-based cooking. July was terrarium design. August was bikepacking. As September rolled around, my (algorithm-guided) path took me back to a previous hyperfixation from last year: banjo.

My draw to the banjo is easy for me to make sense of. I have always loved stringed instruments. I've spent thousands of hours with my viola. Its resonance is real and tactile. Though I have a deep respect and admiration for other methods of producing sound, an invisible column of vibrating air will never quite hook me like the feeling of strings buzzing under my fingers, and the full-body calm that comes over me when all of the sympathetic frequencies of the instrument lock in.

Nevertheless, the banjo represents a nearly unintelligible dialect of string playing to me. The metallic timbre is so removed from the near-human vocal qualities of a bowed instrument. Musical aspects such as contrapuntal voicing, arpeggiation and syncopation (things that at times can be quite difficult to accomplish on the viola without restriction) are intrinsic to the banjo and how it is played. The banjo might not lend itself to melodic or lyrical playing, but that's what I have my viola for.

As with any of my temporary hyperfixations, spending my late afternoon hours watching "5 exercises to practice a Scruggs-style forward roll on banjo" is an indulgence. These YouTube fixations are catalysts for constructing an imagined futures where I too can boast a beautifully constructed terrarium collection, or stories of days out on the bikepacking trails, or a casual roster of plucky tunes on the banjo. The ease video essays and vlogs provide of transporting myself to these potential futures is pleasing and fun. Its sweetness is especially amplified after the days with even more corporate slog than I am accustomed to dealing with.

Nevertheless, I occasionally feel a reaction to these pleasant feelings. A bitterness, or a hardness, that arises when quenching soulful yearning with purely immaterial daydreams and alternate, nonexistent selves. As the hyperfixation loses its hold on me, and the fascination and intrigue becomes tinged with boredom, I develop resentment for my habit of only imagining, and not doing. I am deeply familiar with these grooves and patterns of habit and thought. At times I am resigned to it, and in others, I find myself deeply dissatisfied with the cycle of connection followed by disillusionment. 

On this random Thursday, this dissatisfaction gnaws at me much more desperately than I expect. It builds and builds. Driven by a sudden fervor of action, I search "nearest Guitar Center" on my phone. I grab my keys and slam my work laptop shut. I try not to think too hard about what I'm doing; I realize quickly I won't be able to justify an impulsive purchase with reason. I know nothing about banjos, their price points, what I might want or not want, and whether this store even has anything in stock. I hastily google "entry-level banjo cost" to dampen internal cries of caution, shoving all thoughts of planning out. I know that in this case, it is only by quickly grabbing ahold of this sudden impulse that I may end up with a banjo in hand. Too much reason, too much caution, or too much planning will likely result in me letting the desire of this hyperfixation fade like all the others, the barrier of making responsible choices simply too impossible to surpass after the toll of all my other duties and responsibilities in life are exacted.

After a short drive, I pull in to the parking lot and walk into the store a little too quickly. I avoid eye contact with the employees, my quest too fragile to risk a conversation about what I'm looking for. (Scanning the store-wide wall of lime-green, plaid, and chrome electric guitars, I imagine they won't have much to say about banjos anyway.) I make it to the back of the store, where a handful of banjos are leaned against a wall, adjacent to a small home humidifying unit for the acoustic instruments. Grab one and get out! I think to myself, pushing down a growing distaste for my own rashness.

An observant salesman notices me; he calls out from a slightly too-far distance: "Anything I can help you find?" 

"I'm looking for a banjo."

He pauses, then walks closer. "I don't really know much about banjos. They're all right here." he remarks, gesturing to the wall next to me. "Do you have an idea of what you're looking for?"

"That one." I blurt out, worried any hesitation will reveal my inner conflict. I point confidently to a Gold Tone AC-1. The top result of my Google search. He grabs the banjo and hands it to me.

"Anything else?"

"Nope, I think that's it."

I make it back to the parking lot, and in the privacy of my car, I finally relax, my rapidly fluctuating brain chemistry tugging at my cheeks, a grin impossible to suppress. 

Driving home, I begin to realize will have to deal with this decision in other ways. I know that though my inaction was frustrating me, I would have forgiven it much more readily than I will forgive letting this new banjo lie dusty and unused in the corner of my living room. I think of the new responsibility I've put upon myself, and how the instant gratification of the purchase, now over, can only be followed by the snail-paced, delayed gratification of learning a new instrument. I chuckle briefly. I am impressed with my own ability to circumvent any rational decision-making. I feel like I've pulled off a heist

6:12pm.

I pull in the driveway, and walk slowly inside. I uncover the out-of-tune instrument from its cheap cloth case, and begin tuning. I pull up a banjo lesson on YouTube, and after a brief pause, and a sigh, I begin to practice. 

Moving

For the first time in my life, I am really doing a transplant move! I've moved a lot in my life but always with family or with a end-of-semester date in mind. My university campus truly became my home after the six months that I was there. Uprooting to a totally unexpected location without a deadline in mind is truly a new feeling. Though I've always known I would be moving after finishing school, and it's something I believe will serve me well long-term, it's not an event the likes of which I had experienced before.

I spent years complaining about living in East Lansing, but I had cultivated a home there. Friendships, memories, and experiences are viscerally linked to each building on campus, and each street spoking outwards. I spent my last week collecting up some nostalgia, eating food from restaurants I'll miss, spending time with friends, and renting electric scooters and zooming around campus, fashioning empty parking garages into obstacle courses. I'm definitely homesick.

It is exhilarating to be in a new place, to have so many new parks and pockets of town to explore, so many new people to meet, etc. Though I can't help but wonder if I would feel less lonely if I had made this move a year before, under COVID-19-less circumstances, as there are not many options for meeting and spending time with new people. 

I have a list of local restaurants that I am working through, ordering take-out after long days of working from home. I have adopted a kitten, named Percival, who keeps me quite busy when I'm not working. And I am also trying to maintain many personal activities I enjoy: practicing Spanish, staying fit, practicing viola, and reading. Many of these things can be expounded upon in their own posts, which I might do if I continue to enjoy writing. :)

a reflection on three months of focused language learning

From April 8 to July 6, I took part in a language learning challenge: 90 one-hour group classes on Zoom in 90 days. Complete the challenge and the classes are free. Within the span of these three months, I knew that I would have to defend my thesis, finalize the completion of my Master's degree, start a new job, and move to another state. Even with all of this going on, I felt painfully stuck in my Spanish studies, and was eager for any chance to reignite a sense of progress.

I had done a bit of Rosetta Stone for Spanish when I was in middle school, but that was the only exposure I had had to the language before this time. In high school, I was much more interested in French, and also spent time studying Russian, Swedish, and Mandarin Chinese. I had lost any interest in Spanish and didn't see a role for the language in my future.

I started studying Spanish again around the turn of the new year in January, 2017. Multiple motivations to familiarize myself with the language once again were popping up all over in my life, so I started with Duolingo and completed the Spanish tree there. Beyond that, I didn't engage in much focused study, but did try to listen to music with lyrics in Spanish, watch Youtubers whose content was in Spanish, etc.

In 2018, I made it a New Year's resolution to improve my Spanish. I initially planned to document my progress in a series of monthly videos, of which I only made two. Nevertheless, I feel that I did accomplish my goal of improving my Spanish. I reached a level where I could exchange text messages relatively easily in Spanish, and I did this frequently on language exchange apps in order to practice. However, this was an inefficient method and didn't lead to much speaking and listening practice. Busy with school, I found myself arriving into Spring 2020 without significant change in my overall confidence and fluency in the language.

Spending an hour speaking with a Spanish tutor each day for three months completely changed my relationship with the language. These are the changes I have noticed:

1) I first began to not mind the discomfort that always set in the moment I tried to speak or express myself. The willingness to risk sounding stupid in order to improve was something I always had known I needed, but it took more effort than I realized to put that into practice. My listening improved each class as I heard daily variation in dialect and teaching style. And though each incremental improvement was small, the daily accumulation of experience made it easy to feel the progress I was making.

2) I learned that there were many aspects of grammar that I was just hoping I would passively absorb through exposure. Yet, when I was taught them explicitly, I realized that just sitting down, isolating a certain tense, construction, or set of phrases, and practicing them was saving me so much time in the learning process. For me to have absorbed these things passively, it would have taken much more time and given me much less confidence along the way.

3) I was surprised that, when asked to read a passage, I would so easily trip over my words and pronounce phrases poorly. Reading out loud for ten minutes a day before the lessons quickly improved this, but it was something I never made myself do before. It also helped me improve my accent and remove American-English fillers from my speech.

4) Disciplined, daily practice is not preceded by motivation, but it does cultivate it! Before this challenge, I was not consistently motivated to put in daily practice and use smart methods to study Spanish, but, coming out of this challenge, I feel a deep love for the language-learning process and for the Spanish language that I didn't have before. I am excited to take my three months' worth of notes (spanning two notebooks and several Google docs!) and dive in to the topics that I know I still need to practice more.

All in all, this was one of the highlights of my year so far. I am glad for a break from the classes as they were intense, and I think I need some time to review and practice what I learned, but I am proud of myself for taking on this challenge and thankful that I now can watch Netflix series, listen to podcasts, and engage in meaningful conversations in Spanish with confidence.

10 Reasons For Learning Russian

Given the astronomic scale of my duties during this last week of my third semester at Michigan State University, my time has unfortunately been siphoned away from Russian into the much more mundane activities of studying and exam-taking.

A few days ago, as I was studying for my Music History final, I was taking a study break and thought of what I could talk about on my blog, since I haven't made much progress in my Russian project recently. After a few moments of mental meandering about random topics, I suddenly had a wonderful idea. If I don't have the opportunity to learn Russian at the moment, I should at least cultivate my motivation towards learning it! Recalling a suggestion I read in a Facebook group, I sat down and scribbled out ten reasons I feel compelled to make this commitment and attempt to learn the Russian language.

Looking back, I should have had this list made months ago. Motivation ebbs and flows, and it would have been so helpful to have a short list of reasons to remind me why it is important that I persevere; that I press on. Hopefully these reasons will help me stay committed in the future, when I am tempted to give up, or even worse, spiral unconsciously into an abyss of apathy, half-heartedly studying but never learning.

Here are my reasons:

1. The language has an inexplicable, aesthetic appeal to me.

This is probably not the best reason out there, given that it is based entirely upon how I feel. After all, a year ago, I thought Russian sounded gnarly, spiky, and uninviting, and I had absolutely no desire to study it. That has changed, obviously, and now when I hear it, I hear beauty, passion, deep feeling and emotion, and conviction. The phonology which at first sounded so hostile now sounds warm and noble. The grammar and syntax, while endlessly and bafflingly complex, is eternally and irresistibly interesting. This may not be a very concrete reason to study Russian, but I feel that without this attraction to the language, learning and studying would be much harder.

2. Russian is a Lingua Franca.

Lingua Franca
/ˌliNGɡwə ˈfraNGkə/, n.
A language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.

Russian is spoken not only in Russia, but across Eastern Europe, and Russian is the predominant second language in countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakstan, etc. Because of this, Russian is the 8th most spoken language in the world by native speakers, and 7th by total speakers, and though the number of native speakers is estimated at between 150-170 million, the total number of Russian speakers in the world is estimated at around 260 million. Thus, Russian is not only a window into Russia, but a gateway language into multiple other nations and cultures. 

3. There is a wealth of literature in Russian, and much of it is untranslated.

"Noble efforts to translate and promote Russia’s contemporary literature persist, but today in the United States, only about 4.6 percent of books translated into English were written in Russian, placing the language far behind French, Spanish, and German. “Great books are being written in Russia today,” Dmitry Bykov, Russia’s leading contemporary critic and a biographer of Pasternak, said in a radio interview. “But not nearly enough get translated.” (http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/24/is-russian-literature-dead/)

Keep in mind while reading that quote that literature in translation only makes up 3% of the literature on our stores' bookshelves here in the US. Again, this reason is only what you make of it. I don't have a true need to read those books, given the amount of books written in English that I feel I will never get to. Nevertheless, it is a comforting thought to think that I am unlocking new literature by learning a language, and that's what counts.

4. Learning Russian promotes needed and valuable communication.

This is a really, really big one for me. This one doesn't just go for Russian, but for many other languages as well. In our increasingly global society, misunderstandings and strife are advancing just as much as technology and innovation. One of the most inspiring personalities in the polyglot community, Tim Doner, has remarked on how revolutionary learning Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi was in his understanding of countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and the entire Middle East conflict. There are always misconceptions from culture to culture, and when people from both sides are working towards a mutual understanding by learning each other's languages, that helps bring knowledge and understanding greatly. Even on a personal level, learning a language even in a small way can help you start to see into another way of life and get a glimpse into another facet of humanity that you will never regret.

5. The population and monolingualism of Russia.

One thing about Russian as opposed to, say, Swedish, is the sheer numbers involved. Sweden has a population of about 9 million people, and over 80% of them can speak at least some level of English. Now look at Russia. 144 million people by contrast. And only 5.5% of the population can speak English. Therefore, by learning Russian, you are giving yourself a tool to communicate to another 130 million people that you previously had no way of speaking to. (Random, digressive fun fact: Did you know that though Russia has an area 116 times the size of Bangladesh, Russia's population is only 85% of the population of Bangladesh? Interesting...)

6. Russian film history.

Battleship Potemkin. 'Nuff said.

Funnily, the film I mentioned is dialogueless. Yet I don't see how anyone can watch that without wanting to know more about Russian filmmaking. I don't know if this is a good reason or not I guess, because I haven't actually really delved into this world. My Russian History professor has, and he's obsessed though, so I think it's good. Anyway......

7. Russian music culture.

My viola professor is from Russia. I have music friends from Russia. I hear conversations about music in Russian daily. Shostakovich. Prokofiev. Stravinsky. Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov. Etc. Etc. Etc.

8. Accessibility  of resources/abundance of speakers

I. e. at least I'm not learning Greenlandic.

9. Traveling.

I really do want to go to Russia. I want to see St. Petersburg and Moscow. Lake Baikal. The Ergaki mountains. Karelia. Kamchatka. Everything.

10. To be able to see the world through a different lens.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

- Mark Twain

Said about traveling, but no doubt applicable to the effects of language-learning as well. Fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. We need less of those things. I'm all for that.

Let's learn some Russian.

Being introduced to the Accusative case (and the panic that ensued)

Duolingo Russian has been quite a blessing to me as I pursue my Russian project. But sometimes, even a nice, free course such as this can't sugar-coat some of the... spikier, less comfortable aspects of learning Russian.

So, the case system. Yes, Russian nouns are inflected with different endings depending on a number of factors, some of which come to mind are number, gender, function (subject, direct object, etc.) whether the preceding consonant is palatalized, whether the noun is animate or inanimate...

Great stuff!

I really do love it, but sometimes I also get the urge to burn my grammar book. What's great is how bipolar my attitude towards Russian grammar can be! There are moments where I feel like a kid in a candy store, and others where I feel like some cruel agent of evil is burying me alive in musty yellowed pages of grammar rules, along with the exceptions to all of those rules.

In other words, there's a fine balance.

In moments like this, I have to go back to why I'm learning Russian, or any foreign language for that matter, in the first place. A few deep breaths. Going back to how fun this can be.

And onwards.

So, I've worked through a few of the cases on Duolingo. Mostly nominative and genitive, which haven't provided many issues for me.

Then I reached the accusative. Here's a play-by-play explanation of my thought process while reading the initial notes:

"Only feminine nouns ending in -а / -я have a separate form. «Мама» is a good example of this class:
ма́ма → ма́му
Neuter nouns and feminine nouns with a final -ь (e.g., «мы́шь») use the nominative form."

Me: "What? Only one gender of nouns has a different ending for this case?! Splendid! Wonderful! Marvelous! I can do this!

Than I read:

"Now we are left with masculine nouns ending in a consonant (сок, медве́дь, брат). They use the same form as in nominative or genitive: living beings ("animate") copy the genitive. Objects ("inanimate") stay nominative in plural. This rule applies to all types of nouns.

With "substances"(mass nouns), genitive may be used instead to convey a meaning of "some" quantity."

ACK. What? For masculine nouns, the ending the accusative borrows depends on whether the noun is animate or inanimate? So depending on whether the thing can breathe or not it either looks like the genitive or the nominative, when it is actually the accusative?

Apparently so.

This may not be as easy as I thought.