Friday used to be my favorite day of the week. I enjoy the regular work/school schedule, but I extra enjoy the anticipation of the weekend. I love the Friday afternoon, early evening feeling starting somewhere at 4 pm when you finally give up and acknowledge that nothing else is going to get done and wander around looking for a good friend, or a good snack, or a good book. Even in my hardest working days where I worked every weeknight into the night and most days/nights on the weekends, I made it a point to never work on Friday nights. These days, I get sad on Friday. Another week passes and there is no difference between anydays. We have not made any forward progress. I’m sad realizing that maybe Vince’s second year of college will look like a no-friend isolation experience. Or that Edda won’t be able to meet her buddies at school.
I’ve been trading English/Spanish lessons almost every night with a friend (Ana) I met online. It’s slow going. When I’m in a good mood, I think it’s fun and it’ll be helpful in a decade. When I’m in a bad mood, I think that it’s not going to go anywhere because my brain is very good at forgetting and I’m unable to practice enough. Every once in a while, I’ll find a blog/story of a person who learns a language well without immersion at the age of 40 or even 60. And then I realize that they are learning their 4th language and they literally spend 15-20 hours a week working on it. We’ll see how it goes.
When I’m on top of the spanish learning, I’ll switch all my music (pop), podcasts (news) and video entertainment (easy spanish telenovelas) over to spanish. It takes about 4 weeks of constantly listening to spanish-only songs for Spotify to understand that the language switch is a real thing and start suggesting spanish only songs for you to listen to on their weekly lists. When I’m not on top of the spanish learning (90% of the time), I go back to my regular podcast listening schedule. I found a podcast called: Too scary, didn’t watch where they spend the whole time telling the entire plot of scary movies to people who are too scared to watch them. I listened to the one about Silence of the Lambs (which I did watch in 1991 and loved very much) and I realized that even though I kept my eyes open for 97% of it, the 3% of the time I kept my eyes closed, I missed key plot points that I’m learning oh, 30 years later. How did Hannibal escape exactly? How did Jodie Foster exactly kill the bad guy? I just made stuff up in my head which I was content to have made up and not question. I can no longer watch these kinds of movies. I can not add distress (even fictional) to my life. Only baking shows and bullet journal tutorials and asmr videos for me now please.
We cancelled our subscription to Disney+ and Netflix and signed up for YouTube premium. This means that I gave up unlimited movies for YouTube with no ads. Every person I mentioned this too gives me the eyeball and says huh? What can I say? The boys wanted the youtube. Jeremy and Vince both watch youtube the most. I watch nothing. We still have Amazon prime, so I’m limiting my movie watching to that single platform.
And now we enter the final weekend before the election. Jeremy has yet to drop off his ballot in a ballot box. It’s not that he’s procrastinating. It’s that he wanted to bundle it with an errand and I think he literally has not left the house in over a week.