Progress and thoughts

Progress on the Pimsleur stuff: negligible. Finished up the lesson that I was having trouble with the other day. Haven't started a new one because my girlfriend is back in town and because I'm extraordinarily busy.
iPhone App: just finished a rough first alpha. And I mean VERY rough. Like, only the bare minimum of stuff is finished to even call it an alpha release. I'm still adding features and making things significantly prettier. Lots of work to do!

Thoughts:

I've been thinking about the Aurora, Arizona shootings a lot recently. Naturally, you've all heard the story of a grad school dropout that opened fire at the midnight premiere of the new "Batman" movie, killing 12 and wounding 50+. And I think that there are a lot of things to blame for the tragedy. First and foremost, the mental health system in this country is abysmal. People have no safety net anymore for if something goes wrong in their heads. Folks, mental illness is real (I suffer from mild ADD and OCD, and I used to be severely depressed/manic), and yet there is a huge swath of our country that not only refuses to acknowledge its existence, but alienates those that suffer from these often debilitating conditions. Had there been a public safety net in place that could help recognize and treat people with serious mental disturbances, like the young man who perpetrated the Arizona shootings, things might have been different. He might have found help; he might have found comfort. HE MIGHT HAVE FOUND UNDERSTANDING. By my totally unscientific, but nevertheless telling, observation throughout my years as a high school and college student have shown me this: every person that I've ever known to have a breakdown or, to use the more common term, "snap", has only ever really been missing one thing, and that is the understanding of others.

I used to have a very good friend that ended up dropping out of my high school and going to the local public school, officially because he had a serious alcohol problem. But it wasn't really the alcoholism that caused him to drop out. It was the loneliness and paranoia he felt on a day-to-day basis that forced him to drop out. He had very few friends, and fewer acquaintances. He didn't talk to people mostly because they thought he was "weird" or "nerdy". When I became friends with him, he had hit rock bottom. Within a month, he went from failing all his classes to passing nearly all of them. He stopped drinking so much and even found a few more friends. But it wasn't enough. He had failed two classes the semester before and was set to fail a third this semester and by school policy was forced to leave. I wonder nearly every day, if I had been there for him even a few weeks earlier, would he have been able to save his grades? Would he have recovered and come back to reality and gained acceptance from others? I don't know. I don't even think I could have done it alone. But I could have helped more.

The other thing that has been really bugging me is the people that try to defend public ownership of AR-15s and other incredibly powerful weaponry. I found a great article from Jason Alexander about this problem, and he makes some excellent points: first of all, it's been well documented that the ability to buy assault weapons in this country is an absolutely terrible idea. How many more shootings in which innocent children and young adults die will it take for people to realize how stupid it is for people to own assault weapons? We've had at least five in the last 15 years that I can remember: the Columbine shootings in 1999 (13 dead), the Virginia Tech massacre (2007 I believe, 32 dead), the Fort Hood massacre (2009, 9 dead), the shooting in Arizona that nearly killed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (2011, 6 dead) and now this Aurora shooting (2012, 12 dead). So, that's...72 well-publicized shooting massacre deaths in 15 years. I don't know about you, but that's just disgusting.

I'm not saying people should stop having guns, because that's never going to happen. But could we as a country and as a people stop our bass-ackwards love affair with unnecessarily big guns and get a real hobby? I'm just saying.

Day Three of Pimsleur...

Alright, as the title says, this is day three of me on Pimsleur French. I was really excited at first, but I've kind of been discouraged. I don't know what about today is causing this, but I just all of a sudden don't feel like keeping up with it. So I stopped the lesson halfway through and I'm going to restart it tomorrow.

Here are the strengths and weaknesses of this system so far:

Strengths:

• It's incredibly easy. You repeat what they say and pay attention when they're speaking English.
• It's at a very slow, comfortable pace.

Weaknesses:

• It's incredibly easy. At times it seems almost mindless. I don't really get why it takes so much out of you, but sometimes I'll repeat the same section three or four times and get nothing out of it.
• It's at a very slow, unexciting pace.

I do really like it still, I think I just need the rest of the day off.

Just so you know, here's what the lessons have entailed so far: I can now say hello, goodbye, ask someone if they speak English, and identify myself as American, as well as a bunch of little other things like the word for "a little", and other little things like that.

Supposedly, the 90 lessons, 30 minutes a day, get you speaking fluently in three months. We'll see how well that goes haha.

So, ta-ta for now!

So, what's the point?

Hey to all my -1 readers! (that's supposed to be a joke...LAUGH! LAUGH DAMN YOU!)

So, I'd just like to introduce myself and kind of explain what the purpose of this blog is. I am about to embark on an absolutely mind-blowing journey through college, but I already know that there are things that I'm not going to have the time or the resources to learn in a classroom as I attend my big 10 state school (guess which one and win forever being a creeper!)

I'm a heartland, midwestern kind of guy, but I've always loved languages. That's partially because, thanks to my Hispanic parents, I've been able to speak Spanish fluently since I can remember. I've always wanted to learn more though: the other day, the idea came into my head: why not learn French? So, I did a little googling and found this thing called the Pimsleur language learning system. Basically, it's a series of audio recordings that you listen to and repeat, and over time, it exploits this trick in how our brains work to embed the language into your brain and attach meaning to words, not just have you memorize translations.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I've decided to learn to make iPhone apps. This has both selfish and unselfish reasons, but I'm just going to stick to the unselfish, mmmkay? Basically, I volunteer at an animal shelter and they said they needed an iPhone app. So, I volunteered because I figure, hey, I have no idea what I'm doing, but at the very least I'm good with computers and I should be able to figure it out, right? Not 20 minutes into it I bought a For Dummies book off of Amazon.

Do you start seeing what the purpose of this blog is? it's about my adventure as a college student, but also my various adventures in learning how to speak French, how to make iPhone apps, how to treat my girlfriend right, and all the other things in life that we often end up learning on our own. I love to learn, and I want to share my experiences trying to figure this stuff out with you because I think that I can help keep you motivated. To all my -1 readers, I want to give the gift of a friend going through exactly the same struggles and utter bullish*t trying to pick things up without the aid of school, and also the gift of a friend going through the utter bullsh*t that is school sometimes too.

So basically, have fun, don't feed the trolls, and enjoy these snapshots of the deep, dark recesses of my mind!