It's Only A Paper Rose

Well, "Anchorage, ho!" three days ago, anyway. First class on Alaska Airlines, too - thanks, Mum! Eight-plus hours of flying is so much less stressful when you have enough room to move about in your seat. And proper food. And free drinks. (Though I cut myself off after two, and was glad I did - when I hit my layover after the first four-hour flight, I felt slightly nauseous and hungover, likely due to the combination of alcohol with drastic altitude/pressure changes.) I even, for the first time since I was a kid, managed to doze a little on the second flight - normally I can never sleep without being properly curled up on my side, but the seat was just big enough for me to make an approximation of it. And wi-fi on planes, ridiculously overpriced as it is ($21 for a day pass? Seriously, Gogo?) still may be one of the world's greatest inventions. As studies have repeatedly shown (usually in the context of trying to multitask whilst texting or talking on the phone), electronic communications are nearly as good as narcotics (and far more predictable/healthy/legal) for removing our minds from our surroundings. Which, when you're talking about cramped confines and recycled air and enforced sedentariness for hours at a time, is precisely what you need to make it bearable.

I came up to help my mother while she underwent a minor surgical procedure, and I'm glad to say that that part of it has gone very well - she's recovered quickly and is mostly off even the low-grade Vicodin they prescribed her. Really, the hardest part was sitting with her in the recovery room, which was just a little bit emotional. At one point I was singing to her, and she was helping me remember the words to "Feed The Birds" (from Mary Poppins, which she used to sing to me when I was young), but she kept drifting in and out from the drugs, and what with the resemblance to a death scene in a movie, I ended up a bit verklempt with the weepies. Still, she came out of it fine, and so did I.

On a happier note, my mother's yoga studio has been kind enough to let me use her subscription while she's recovering. They practice a lot of core-strengthening vinyasa yoga, which I'd never tried before, but holy crap - during the first session I went to, I could practically hear my body howling "YES! THIS! THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU I NEED!" I'm not even exaggerating. It was challenging, but not overwhelming, and felt goddamn good - I've been to two sessions now and have regained almost all the lung capacity I've lost from not having the staircase at the end of our street to climb every day. And I feel like I'm two inches taller. I've known for a while that I need to improve my core muscle strength, both to help posture and to keep my back from tweaking, but (as with so many other things) I don't do so great when I'm solely self-directed. I'll do a bit here and there, but if I have a class to go to or someone expecting me, I'm much much more likely to keep with it. So having someone direct a whole series of exercises for precisely what my body needed was a fantastic experience. Even if I'm sore in places I didn't know I had muscles.

The downside is that, if I want to keep doing classes, I'm basically going to need to join a studio, which is expensive in Chicago. CorePower Yoga (which has a studio right in Uptown, about a mile from my house - easy to get to via walking or transit) is running a Groupon for a month's subscription for slightly less than half-price; it's still $70, but Mum bought me one, and offered to help with the cost if I like the place and want to keep going there. I hope I do like it, because I think it might be good for me psychologically, too; if I have a class to go to, I'm much less likely to plop down on the couch with my coffee early in the morning and not move again until mid-afternoon. Which I've been known to do. Occasionally.

Meanwhile, after hearing rave reviews from both press and friends, I've been playing with Duolingo. I do like the "gamification of learning" concept (achievements and in-game currency that unlocks silly extras works just as well for reinforcing good habits!), and when I read about how the inventor funds the program (rather than selling ad space or people's personal information, he sells the individual translations people do in aggregate as a translation service for websites with multilingual branches. How ingenious is that?) I decided I'd give it a go. From both an app and a game standpoint, it's remarkably well designed; the interface is clean and easy to use, and the rewards come often enough to be an encouragement but not so often that they lose any sense of intrinsic worth. As to language-learning, I can't really speak to its efficacy vs. other methods (since I've always been too intimidated by the work involved to try learning another language - which, I guess, makes this method infinitely more efficacious than any other!), but I really like that it's geared toward encouraging consistency rather than intensity of study. It never scolds you for failing a lesson, or for failing to progress quickly enough - in fact, it has a feature where, when you finish a particular section, it encourages you to review it regularly to strengthen your knowledge. Rather than reward you solely for progressing along the tree, it also gives you XP for successfully-completed lessons, and when you do a lesson over (which you'll almost certainly have to do unless you're crazy-good at picking up terms and syntax), it doesn't give you a reduced XP award - and, in fact, if you manage to get through a lesson with a perfect score, it gives you a significant bonus. My favorite moment so far, however, was when it got to be 3:30 in the afternoon today and I hadn't logged any time, and I got a cheerful email going "Hey, check out this five-day streak you've got going! Want to see it get to six?" Seriously, it does a great job exploiting all the same triggers that MMORPGs and advertisers do while encouraging people to do something useful.

My goal is modest - I just want to get to where I can read books in a given language, since most of my multilingual friends say reading in a different language regularly is the next best thing to constantly speaking it around you. Though, since I picked Italian, I may have to settle for listening to opera. Or maybe I can read The Name of the Rose in the original? I suppose Umberto Eco might seem slightly less pompous that way...

I miss Brian a lot. I've been reading to him via Skype or Facetime or just the phone (whichever we can get to work at the time), and he's been showing/telling me all about the delicious things he's been cooking. I'd almost think he was doing it to spite me, since he's cooking more now than he has in the past couple weeks combined, but I know it's more that it fills his time and he finds it soothing. Maybe if he eats enough I'll be able to convince him to come to one of the beginning vinyasa yoga classes with me. One hour burns 238 calories, according to my tracker!