Ich kann deutsch!

I have been such a night owl (finally waking up for extended hours sometime between midnight and 3 AM). I spent an hour or two on German today (didn’t feel like tracking). I did the first three chapters, on present tense and when the verb part goes to the end of a sentence (verbal position has always been *incredibly* natural to me and is one of my favourite things about German despite Mark Twain calling it that awful German language. (I mean even the word Gewitter is such a wussy word for thunder, I recall him saying. Even the word for toothbrush, Zahnbüste, carries more force than that, and I think his essay on German is what made me fall most deeply in love with Twain’s humour.) I got through accusative and dative prepositions.  This book really went so far, along with my German professor Herr Kaiser, in my being so ready and willing and enthusiastic to enter into an immersion experience in German in Germany after one year of university German.

I loved sometimes getting to serve as an interpreter though when they want you to explain information about how to use switchblades or chainsaws I am sure Germans fgenerally think that’s a snap even if you can’t speak any language but it is not so for me and I do not want to translate things like that, thank you very much. Suddenly images of the movie that could be are entering my head, but anyway, with this along with making spahghetti and ‘plant-based balls’ and writing this entry while all this is going on I just almost poured Dawn dish soap into the pan for plant-based balls instead of olive oil. Now that they are safely on the pan, yeah, I entered all the vocabulary  into flashcards which took the longest but now I can learn even better and faster and somehow with more motivation than I even did back then in my German classes. There were certain things I didn’t take the time to commit to learning well, like adjective endings with so many genders and cases, and I suffered for it, but now I will focus on getting those things doen and maybe my German can come back better and stronger. Stronger than a ‘Gewitter’, anyway.

Yoga went well though I slept off and on between 11 AM and a few hours ago so I am up and ready to go to the next yoga class in the morning. I was a little sore towards the end of my second class but it felt like my body just sooo not being used to all these stretches. One of the most satisfying things is that I cannot think of a part of my body that does not feel like it directly benefits from this series of postures. It is like immediate benefit plus gradual increasing return that you start to see compounding every single day, especially, I guess, when your body needs to be oiled up in a tin man sort of way as much as mine does.

I am just thinking about this thing that I am thinking about, going through a training on trading options from someone whose perspective I really trust, and I guess I am weighing if this matters to me and why it matters to me enough to spend my time on it and possibly invest in a training. Maybe, I was thinking, I could ask my mother for this for Christmas, but I always want to please my mother with what she gets me for Christmas, make her happy, and I hate that I feel like such a miserable failure at that. When I weigh the benefits versus the drawbacks of making an investment, the benefits seem to far outweigh the drawbacks, but am I going to get tired of looking at stock market charts too soon to make this worth my while? Would this be a food Christmas present? And taking time to get interested in and have fun learning about this make me feel like a kid again? I don’t know, it could be, and I hope so.

A big discernment question that comes to mind: if I get this course and take the time learning the ins and outs of it, am I going to feel guilty for the amount of time I spend learning it that I could have spent learning other things? I don’t think I would, if anything I would regret putting off not putting time into it, especially if it was a Christmas present.  The minimal but committed time investment into learning versus the potential benefits of trying? It is kind of a really easy decision but it is hard to wrap my mind around why I would choose to spend my time learning

this and not something else since I always want to feel like I am using my time and money valuably. The more I feel into it the more I feel like investing in this will create more space and time in my life.

The sense that if it were a Christmas present from my mother I would regret even less the time I put into it feels important. It makes me feel good to get to use a present my mother got for me and it makes me feel good when that present can lead to money that I didn’t have otherwise because with that money you can buy flowers. I get to find out if I am capable of this and if I am I get to buy flowers for my mama, which was like the first thing I ever asked for from Santa Claus…