too much day
Feb. 17th, 2018 08:27 pmSaturday morning I have Japanese class, which I've been taking for over a year. My friend, who talked me into taking this class with her, is frustrated by the rate of progress, so she's decided to transfer to the next level up. Today I took the beginner class, then she and I bummed around for an hour while the advanced class is running, and then went to the intermediate class together, because she really, really wants me to make the jump as well. I'm not necessarily against the idea. What's so frustrating to me, though, is that I can watch the instructor draw kanji, the complex writing system the Japanese use, and having seen her draw one I can reconstruct it in the right order immediately... but even though I've been looking at the word for "last week" for three weeks, along with all the other reasonable date grammar, I still can't remember it. I am really struggling to force new vocabulary into my head, because I can't map english meaning to words. The intermediate class relies on a lot of vocabulary I don't know. The instructor talks in Japanese 3/4 of the time. I feel like I'm just sitting there being expected to understand and react to things she's saying, without having a clue of what I'm supposed to be doing. In the beginner class, that's not the case at all (even though, were I to walk right into the beginner class, I'm pretty sure I'd feel that way.) My friend is a lot better than I am conversationally, so she doesn't struggle anywhere nearly as much with this aspect.
So I don't know what to do.
And, honestly, a lot of my conflict is that it's because she wants me to jump up a level, that I would consider it, not because I'd do this on my own. At the pace we're going, I can easily keep up with the learning. I would have at least a month or two of very hard work if I made the jump.
After class I went over to my brother's house. They're redoing the kitchen, and working on replacing all the drywall we cut out last week. As I think I've written about before, I am probably overly self-confident about projects and jump in and start measuring and cutting, confident that I'll be able to make everything fit. My brother is very cautious and very invested in planning and considering all possibilities, and he drives my sis-in-law nuts because if he's doing a project it takes a long time to even get started. When I come over, before he can even get an opinion out, I'm already sawing something. The result is that when he and I work on something, it gets done pretty quickly because I'm working on it, and it gets done pretty well because he's planning and keeping track of potential problems. (That's where I get particularly derailed: I'll throw myself at a project until a series of small problems cascades into a problem that I can't figure out how to deal with, and then I just drop the whole thing and go work on something else that needs to be done, figuring that I'll come back later and solve the problems, and sometimes I do, but sometimes it takes a long time to come back. Like, in the case of the aluminum investment casting project, 24 years so far.)
Anyway. We finished putting up all the drywall patches. It was a horrible project. The area we were drywalling had never been drywalled, or more importantly, been intended for drywall, so it had proud nails and incomplete studs and joist-to-plate steel tie plates that stuck out and prevented the drywall sitting flat, and the drywall we were butting up against wasn't straight. It was a lot of measure-fit-scrape-fit-scrape-fit and then we'd screw a piece in and a big chunk along one edge would pop out because of yet another protruding nail head or just a stud that stuck out a bit too much, and we'd have to take it down and hammer away at the obstruction and cut another piece of drywall and try again.
I hate drywall work.
The tape-and-mud step is even worse, and I think I might avoid being involved in that, because that's the step that if you screw up it shows forever and I don't want the responsibility.
So I don't know what to do.
And, honestly, a lot of my conflict is that it's because she wants me to jump up a level, that I would consider it, not because I'd do this on my own. At the pace we're going, I can easily keep up with the learning. I would have at least a month or two of very hard work if I made the jump.
After class I went over to my brother's house. They're redoing the kitchen, and working on replacing all the drywall we cut out last week. As I think I've written about before, I am probably overly self-confident about projects and jump in and start measuring and cutting, confident that I'll be able to make everything fit. My brother is very cautious and very invested in planning and considering all possibilities, and he drives my sis-in-law nuts because if he's doing a project it takes a long time to even get started. When I come over, before he can even get an opinion out, I'm already sawing something. The result is that when he and I work on something, it gets done pretty quickly because I'm working on it, and it gets done pretty well because he's planning and keeping track of potential problems. (That's where I get particularly derailed: I'll throw myself at a project until a series of small problems cascades into a problem that I can't figure out how to deal with, and then I just drop the whole thing and go work on something else that needs to be done, figuring that I'll come back later and solve the problems, and sometimes I do, but sometimes it takes a long time to come back. Like, in the case of the aluminum investment casting project, 24 years so far.)
Anyway. We finished putting up all the drywall patches. It was a horrible project. The area we were drywalling had never been drywalled, or more importantly, been intended for drywall, so it had proud nails and incomplete studs and joist-to-plate steel tie plates that stuck out and prevented the drywall sitting flat, and the drywall we were butting up against wasn't straight. It was a lot of measure-fit-scrape-fit-scrape-fit and then we'd screw a piece in and a big chunk along one edge would pop out because of yet another protruding nail head or just a stud that stuck out a bit too much, and we'd have to take it down and hammer away at the obstruction and cut another piece of drywall and try again.
I hate drywall work.
The tape-and-mud step is even worse, and I think I might avoid being involved in that, because that's the step that if you screw up it shows forever and I don't want the responsibility.