you say ocd like it's a bad thing

The three reasons I haven't been keeping up with my writing:

1. The World Series. Not only does it eat up large chunks of my evening, but I also have to find time in the afternoon to catch up on all the primetime TV I would have been watching were I not the sort of person to sit through the entirety of every game, even it's a slow-ass Boston blowout. (I have very strict TV rations. I'm like a Mogwai, except I don't turn Gremlin if you feed me after midnight, only if you keep me from 30 Rock.)

2. Genealogy. Last weekend I had the idea "Hey, I'll make family trees for Christmas!" Cut to me, four days later, like some sort of family-tree-crack addict, hunched over my computer, frantically pulling Scottish and Norwegian census records and ignoring all phone calls except those from my mother. ("Hi sweetie!" "Do you remember great-grandma Mary's maiden name?" "No ...." "I'll talk to you later." Click.) I've never been particularly interested in my ancestors - mostly, admittedly, because my living relatives are a handful enough as is - but that was before the availability of online family-tree-making tools. It's like ... you know the satisfaction of going through your iTunes library and fixing all of the song information so it's perfect and complete and consistent? Building a family tree is like that. Except slightly more emotionally rich.

In any case, I'm going to Ellis Island on Sunday, so I'll write more about this later - particularly as it's looking like I was related to some very bad people back in the day. (By which I mean: turns out I'm secretly part-English. My father almost cried when I told him.) But if you're wondering just how much time a person could possibly spend on such things in the course of the week, I will just say this: I have traced a few lines of the family back to the 900s or so. It's a sickness. Thank god I never got into scrapbooking.

But then I ran out of paper, which meant that I couldn't keep printing out parts of the tree for notetaking purposes, which meant that I had to turn to my next current obsession:

3. Hungarian. I actually haven't succeeded in getting very much studying done in the past couple of weeks, but when I realized that I had less than two months left before my trip (and since someone once told me that "It only takes two years to learn Hungarian - provided they're the first two years"), I figured I'd better get cracking.

If you're wondering how I go about the early stages of learning a language, it is this:

First, I sift through all of the material I have in my own library, which is usually a fair amount. Then, my brain suddenly decides to forget that my apartment is already overrun with books as is, and I go Amazon-crazy, buying any remotely useful-looking grammar or instructional text I can find. Three-to-five days later, buyer's remorse set in as I find myself with a bunch of generally shitty language texts. I do this every time. And every time I get another yellow-labelled copy of Teach Yourself: Whatever, I remember how completely useless it is and wonder what the hell I was thinking. (Short answer: I wasn't. Amazon one-click ordering is going to kill me.)

By the way, the only consistently useful language-learning brand I've found is the Routledge series of grammars. It does vary from language to language (and from edition to edition, as a thoughtful commenter pointed out to me), but the books generally provide a solid introduction to the grammar of a language. The Teach Yourself books, however, are middling at best as instruction and absolutely fucking useless as reference. (Try looking a particular point of grammar up in any of those books. I dare you not to go insane.)

Anyway, after spending my hard-earned editing money on, essentially, bookshelf-filler, I finally remembered my own damn advice and went online. (Taking care to avoid Amazon at all costs.) Basically, if you want to learn a not-entirely-obscure language, the Internet usually has you covered. Wikipedia is usually my first stop, as it has a pretty intense group of linguaphiles who regularly police the language pages, so the grammatical information you find there is relatively trustworthy. (All the same, I highly, highly recommend clicking through to the talk page to see if there are any points of debate.) Also, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll usually find a collection of language-learning links to help you in your studies.

The two main resources I'm using for this project are Magyaróra, a pretty amazingly comprehensive collection of Hungarian study materials, and the old State Department teaching texts and tapes, which can be can found here. The State Department materials aren't new (which is the reason they're so conveniently in the public domain), but I've had good luck with them in the past, as many of the audio exercises are based on repetition and substitution, which seem to mesh well with the particulars of my brain. (The only thing that has ever got me to consider joining the military is the prospect of having access to the language school at Monterey. After, that is, I was rejected by the CIA, which I applied to for similar reasons.)

I realized fairly quickly that the problem with Hungarian for me is not going to be so much that the grammar is difficult to grasp on a theoretical level, but rather that the morphology is highly whack on account of Hungarian vowel harmony (which means, broadly, that affixes change depending on the type of vowels in the stem). That is: it's a bitch in practice. Lots of little quirky changes in endings, that sort of thing. So instead of starting out by learning the grammatical patterns or paradigms, which is my usual MO, I decided to just dive in and start memorizing words and phrases.

And here's where things start to be useful for people who aren't me. Just the other day, Lifehacker's featured Mac download was a flashcard program called Genius, which "organizes your information and carefully chooses questions using an intelligent 'spaced repetition' method that's based on your past performance." I'm still not exactly sure what this means, but I will say that so far the program seems to be performing beautifully. And the best part is, the flashcard files are shareable. So if anyone else wants to learn some Hungarian with Genius, drop me an email and I'll be happy to send you the flashcard files I create.

So far, I've only entered the words and phrases from Unit One of the State Department text (which includes lots of useful things like asking if the beer is good), but I plan to keep going up until I get on the plane to Budapest.

Just don't expect me to make too much progress before the World Series is over. (More)

that's so retrograde

Fucking Mercury, man.

Astrologers will tell you that Mercury is in retrograde nine or so weeks a year, and during these nine weeks, things are pretty much a mess when it comes to communication, technology, and travel.

In my opinion, this drastically understates the matter: I find that when Mercury is in retrograde, everything in my life goes straight to everlasting shit.

Whether or not this is a self-fulfilling situation is a question I choose to ignore.

But for the past twelve days, the tiniest and most annoying of planets has wreaked some serious fucking havoc on my life, which is why I haven't posted in such a shamefully long time.

(It is also, I suspect, the explanation for the release of Failure to Launch. That shit just does not happen during astrologically benevolent times. Even by Hollywood's increasingly low standards. You just know that everyone involved with that film is in a full-body cringe right now. Even Terry Bradshaw.)

(No, scratch that: especially Terry Bradshaw.)

Now, I realize that I might not seem the type to take much stock in astrological prognostication. I mean, I'm the daughter of economists. When I told my dad what I was going to major in at college he sort of rolled his eyes and mumbled something about "quantitative hand-waving" and "intellectual mumbo-jumbo". And it's not like I was suggesting a degree in Applied Folk & Myth or anything: I majored in political science.

But I'm a contrarian at heart. And since I was too much of a goody-goody in high school to engage in any real rebellion, I instead needled my atheistic, academic family by developing a deep affection for mysticism, witchcraft, and the occult. I collected tarot cards and learned to read palms. I cast spells and read horoscopes and was, like, totally obsessed with The Craft.

(Not that anyone should have to justify an obsession with The Craft. That's just good sense.)

I started visiting psychics in high school, too, digging for information on past lives and future loves and whatnot. One time I allowed myself to be convinced that I was being trailed by a vaguely inappropriate ghost - so much so that I spent the majority of an AP English exam covering up my legs, shifting about nervously, and glaring at a particularly suspicious patch of floor.

In retrospect, it was probably just the medium's way of telling me that my skirts were too short.

Since then, I've given up on annoying my family and have devoted myself instead to annoying my friends. And anyone with the bad sense to read my blog. Even so, I haven't quite managed to leave my spiritual self behind. I still read my horoscope religiously and occasionally I'll go see a psychic. And I still have a truly unforgivable tendency to say - in all seriousness - things like "Oh my God, he's such a Pisces."

(My favorite astrologer, by the way, is a woman named Susan Miller. Delightfully, she feels really bad when she gives you less-than-pleasant news. Like: "I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, dear Aquarius, but the next two weeks are going to see a catastrophic climate shift and widespread destruction. As the water bearer you will be, I am afraid, one of the first to go.")

But you know what? It's actually sort of nice to be able to ascribe, on occasion, my generally asshatted ways to something other than inherent stupidity. An excess of reason is, after all, one form of insanity, so why not let myself believe from time to time that I'm at the mercy of some sort of all-powerful planetary force? It may be irrational, but at the end of the day it's pretty fucking therapeutic.

And if there's one thing that anyone trying to get by in this city needs, it's therapy.

If you don't trust me, well, consider this: even my extraordinarily logical father has come to recognize the possible benefits of occasional mystical vapidity.

Not too long ago he was dealing with a few non-trivial health problems and for a couple of months he was pretty nervous - I could tell because he kept making really uncomfortable jokes about how he wanted me to dispose of his ashes. ("Dump them out with the confetti at the end of the RNC, kiddo - maybe I can infect the Republicans with good sense.") But then, one day, all of a sudden, he sounded better, calmer. I asked him if he'd heard from the doctor, and he told me no, but he had heard from his friend Todd up in Vancouver. Apparently Todd's newly formed coven had cast a get-well spell for my father.

"I realize that we have some of the best doctors in the world here," he said, "but you know what? It can't quite compare to knowing that you have a gay Wiccan coven on your side. I think I'm going to be fine."

And he was.

And even though I've had a week of unremitting illness and confusion and disappointment and chaos, I can find some comfort by telling myself that once Mercury returns to normal, my life will follow.

Mercury may only be retrograde nine weeks a year, but bullshit can be bliss all year round. (More)