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On the off-chance that your New Year’s resolution involves learning a new language, I thought this was a really cool map charting the number of jumps between a new language and English.  It’s English-focused because the information is pulled together from the government agency that trains US government employees going to other countries, such as diplomats.  If you speak a language other than English, it’s interesting to see the number of jumps it takes English-speakers to get to your language.

So French or Spanish take 575 – 600 hours to master whereas Hebrew takes 1100 hours and Japanese clocks in at 2200 hours.

What I’d love to know is the tipping point of how much of a language you should learn before going to the country and throwing yourself into the fray in order to absorb the language while it’s surrounding you.  If you enter with nothing, it’s frustrating, but if you have a base of understanding, it feels like you pick up the language faster once you’re listening to it 24/7.

Which language would you love to learn?  And where does it fall on the difficulty scale if you’re an English speaker?

As someone who recently made a hard decision that changed my life for the better (at least, I believe it changed my life for the better, though since I can only live the one choice, I really have no clue if it would have been better the other way, right?), this article in the Harvard Business Review struck close to home.  I felt like things were being done to me, though in reality, the control was there all along.  I just wasn’t exercising it until I exercised it.

Like this line: “you can choose to believe that the right actions will lead to the right feelings, rather than the other way around.”  I need to believe that more in 2018.

I’m not big on setting resolutions; not because I don’t think there are things I should change in my life, but because the biggest problems are not always apparent on January 1st.  For instance, the issue above didn’t even start until the spring, and I didn’t realize it was a negative aspect of my life until I was several months into the situation.  That was a resolution I needed to make on the fly to take care of myself.

If I had to set one thing, I need more sleep.  We were so good about getting in bed at a reasonable time for a very short period of time last year, and then we went back to our old, unhelpful ways.  We need to hang a sign in our room reminding ourselves to stick with the bedtime routine until it becomes a habit.

What are your resolutions this year?

I don’t know how I found this article on Man Repeller, by which I mean that I have zero clue how I found Man Repeller at all.  But I did and I read a bunch of women all giving life advice to 28-year-olds.

The problem, of course, is that you’re seeing 28 through the lens of a 32-year-old or a 41-year-old.  You live 28 once, but you see that year differently as each age passes, so it’s impossible to give advice to 28-year-olds that won’t be rewritten next year or when I enter another stage of life or believe something new.

It’s also hard to give advice that doesn’t come off as trite: “what an amazing time that was in my life.”  What does that even mean?  Is there ever a time in life that is not amazing considering that we can see time period through numerous lens?  At 28, I was spinning my wheels, doing fertility treatments.  At 28, I had a fantastic job teaching middle school.  At 28, I was walking around London with my husband.  At 28, I was up all night worrying that we’d never be able to afford a house.

I have no advice for 28-year-olds or 32-year-olds or even fellow 43-year-olds.  That’s the thing about life: every single experience is unique.  No one size fits all.

I am a good decision maker, by which I mean that I make decisions pretty quickly and then stick with them without wavering.  I just get a sense that X is the correct way to go, and I go with it, very rarely looking back or considering the other options.

I recently read an article about decision-making that began with this thought:

I became obsessed with this question: How do I know if what I’m thinking is coming from my brain or my gut? And if there is such a thing as gut-level instinct separate from my rational brain, how do I know that I can really trust it?

Uh… I don’t know.  I know I use rational thought to gather evidence and define the options and then I go to the gut-level to ask myself A, B, or C.  But when does the brain hand off the process to the gut, and why did we ever think the gut would be as good as a brain when deciding the right way to go?

The article mixes up using your gut to make a decision and using your gut to sense danger — two completely different jobs for your gut to do beyond process food — but it’s full of interesting thoughts about the decision-making process.

Do you feel like you make decisions well or do you struggle to know what you want to do?

It’s not the first article I’ve read with this sentiment, and I’m sure it won’t be the last: “It seems increasingly likely that our society will one day view our infatuation with Twitter, Facebook, and the like as a passing, often destructive fad.” 

It feels a little like the predicted death of blogging.  They keep telling me that blogs are dead, yet I keep writing one so I know that at least one is still alive.

Articles like these make me sad.  It’s not the promise that everyone will abandon ship soon, but because they focus only on the negative aspects of the platforms.  Are there negative aspects, yes.  Absolutely.  Beyond a doubt.  But there are also positive aspects that are being dismissed because they don’t fit the narrative.

Before I started blogging, I knew other infertile women in my area and we talked about our family building failures, but it wasn’t the same as when I found all of you online.  I could read your stories and feel part of something different.  Not different in the bad sense, but just… different.  Like there were people who conceived easily and those who didn’t, and I was part of the didn’t crowd and other people were part of the easy crowd.  Finding so many other infertile people made me feel like I wasn’t a little dot of different in a same world.  It changed the narrative.

I met people online that I would never have gotten to meet in the offline world because we lived too far apart for our lives to intersect.  There is always someone out there, ready for a conversation.  Always someone out there with advice or an answer when I ask a question.  That is social media, too.

Tonight is Christmas Eve.  Not my holiday, but I feel a part of it because of social media.  I’m not just driving by houses, seeing lights on the outside.  I’m opening up Facebook and being invited into meal preparation and decorations and funny moments in someone else’s family.  That is social media as well.

I’m staying.  Hope you are, too.