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So, I have an exercise bike I used to use to try to get just a little more conditioning back when I skated roller derby. It’s been a laundry-drying rack for a couple years, but over the weekend I dusted it off and used it. It’s a recumbent bike so it doesn’t hurt my butt, and I can sit and look at my computer while I’m on it, so. I’m trying to use it every day just so I’m not so embarrassingly behind everyone else while at the farm, since my non-farm lifestyle is basically sit at desk, sit in car, sit on couch, lie in bed, with very little room for anything else in it. I’m basically veal just now, which isn’t conducive to getting anything done at the farm.
10 miles takes me like. 45 minutes. And the first time, it went by fast, I was distracted by what I was reading. The second time it was okayish, I got bored around mile 7 but I had enough determination to get through. I had the brainwave that if I do it right when I wake up in the morning, then I’m still sleep-foggy and won’t really mind.
WRONG. Sat down, refreshed Tumblr, started pedaling, pedaled forever, got really bored, thought to myself “i must be nearly done now”, looked at the odometer… 1.5 miles. Christ. No.
I made it 7.5 miles and then just had to get on with my life. Quick answer: No, pedaling first thing is not easier.
The second thing I did in the self-improvement vein (am I improving? am I coming out the other side of this depressive episode that now when I look back appears to have lasted straight through from last winter hm maybe this isn’t seasonal? no, I don’t think I am, I’m just bored) was download DuoLingo because I keep whining that I wish my Spanish was up to snuff.
Well, using DuoLingo isn’t the way to achieve that, not for me anyway, but I guess i’ll try it for more than one day. I went through the placement thing and got 0 questions wrong, and they cheerfully told me I was 2% fluent and deposited me into a seemingly-random sea of tutorials. They’re all puzzle games, though, and I severely resent that they give you sentences to translate with the bucket of random words to choose from, and the first one of the sentence is always capitalized. Fuck, why would you just– give it away, like that, you’re not helping. (which of the following do you think is the first word of the sentence? poo, arse, The, dog, ate, the, in, )
I mean, if the point is to make an entertaining puzzle game for people to play and that’s how you’re doing this, I guess that’s cool, but I don’t think word scrambles are really how most people communicate in the real world, so it’s of limited utility. Still, I’ll take the practice, I suppose– but really, what I ought to do is pick an entertaining telenovela and watch it while I’m on the damn exercise bike, and maybe do so with a dictionary app on my phone and make myself look stuff up so I actually learn instead of letting it wash over me.
So… Spanish-speakers… if I know any… any good TV shows I should check out? Mild preference for South/Central American dialect since that’s mostly what I’ve learned.
I know I have a huge advantage in that my mother is a Spanish teacher and so if I want to practice i could just phone her, but you underestimate my hatred of phones. At work one day my coworker was talking about how often his mother calls him, and I pulled my phone out and went through my call history and showed him that my mother had actually never called this phone, not from her home or cell phones, not from my father’s cellphone. Not one time. So… Anyway I’ll work up to that, at present I can translate every sentence DuoLingo gives me but I couldn’t compose one to save myself.
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