スティーブの現状 State of the Manly GW Edition

やあ。お久しぶり。

４月を以て大学院生活が開始した。それまでは忙しくて、ブログもろくに更新できなかった。

授業４週目を終えてGWに入りました。だが修行は始まったばっかり。

今日から記事読みとシャドーイングの修行が始まった。朝起きていきなりハードだった。だって、これから２週間の課題はファイナンス。僕からしたらほど遠い分野だから、なじみがないのは当たり前だと分かってる。分かってるけど・・・やっぱり悔しい。

結果は録音しといた。いずれなんらかの形で公開するけど、今日はここまでにする。

Hey. Long time no post.

I started grad shool in April. Before that, I was too busy to update my blog.

The curtain rises on Golden Week as it falls on the fourth week of classes. But my training has just begun.

This morning I started my article reading and shadowing practice. Pretty rough for a morning routine. I mean, the next two weeks I’ll be focusing on the business section. I know nothing about business, so it’s understandable that this would be difficult for me. Understandable… but frustrating.

I recorded the results. I’ll upload them someday, but I’m stopping here for today.

This is who I am (written April 8th, 2016)

I am a Christian.

I am a husband.

I am a linguist.

I am a thinker/problem solver.

I am a video game enthusiast.

I am a man-child.

I think more than I act. I don’t act enough on what I think, and I don’t think enough when I act. I am thinking about how to change this. Hopefully, you can see the issue here.

So first, I thought about how to approach this post. I read in an article about Nintendo’s creative localization team, “The Treehouse,” that the creative process is never finished, it just runs into deadlines and product needs to be turned in. So here is my first post in this format: I have until lunch to deliver these thoughts. After lunch and my ride to school, I will format.

Actually, scratch that. I have a research plan to sum up and translate. Steve Manly, you have 10 minutes on the clock to write out some thoughts, then post it. Go.

LIMITS

People give limits a lot of undeserved guff. There are many limits in place to protect us. This ten minute limit is in place to keep me focused on one topic at a time, and the first I will address is limits.

Over the past few months, I have been fighting time limits, financial limits, physical limits, mental limits, social limits, and emotional limits. I encountered all of these during my application to grad school. It forced me to schedule more strictly, to push myself beyond what I could comprehensively explain at the time to my wife, and to really rethink how I live.

I have grown as a result, but only by the grace of God. When I do not have enough, there the grace of God will be enough for me, and there is where He raises me.

More on this another time.

CREATIVITY

I spend a lot of time in my own head, but less time recording it. One of my goals is to measurably record what is going on in my thinking process to learn how to make my thinking more efficient and productive. This is one of the shapes that will take. As I mentioned, creativity never ends, it just has deadlines. Mine is approaching. Moving on.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

All of this makes perfect sense to me because it all comes from the same source: my head. My biggest challenge is getting this into an externally understandable form. One method would be to temporarily remove myself from these thoughts (hence the journal) and come back to them later. Another is just to bring this to someone and ask them, “Do you get it?” And then get them to explain what parts of the thinking process are missing from the page.

I’ve got a minute to wrap this up. 感想: This was a bit exhilarating. I’ll want to add this to my schedule as a regular exercise. AND there’s the alarm. Next time–schedules and keeping them: routine and self-control.

State of the Manly: February 18th

One thing I want to make sure not to do on this blog is make excuses. I made a lot of excuses growing up, but to make progress I must understand that ultimately I am responsible for my actions and inaction. When I don’t get a post uploaded, it’s because I mismanaged my priorities again. This happens quite often.

Well, sorry for the silence (he said to no one in particular). I’m back. Here’s the State of the Manly address.

State of the Manly: When last he left our intrepid readers…

“May I just say… hi. How ya doin?”

Sorry for the silence, all. Or just you. Hi, you. Happy New Year.

My last post was December 11th, almost two months ago. In the time between then and now, I took the top level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT N1), visited my family back in the homeland, met my adorable niece, took my wife to a neat little hotel and hot spring for her birthday, and taught a whole bunch of classes.

My results for the JLPT N1 came back, too. I passed. No big deal (it’s actually a huge deal to me), just don’t have any higher level JLPTs to take (I could totally take the kanji tests if I weren’t so lazy, so that’s just an excuse to rest on my laurels).

Other than that, I’m not sure what kept me from at least posting an update. I actually did an exercise to help me focus towards the end of last year to push myself through some work. I had an assignment to make for my students and couldn’t get started on it, so I tried to psych myself up. I started by asking myself questions about what I wanted to achieve, and I typed this all out.

Then, I started answering. Not sure how many of you can relate, but I feel like I don’t control the entirety of my brain. When I ask questions internally, sometimes I get answers in a similar voice. I typed the ensuing dialogue out, and italicized the questions. The italicized voice feels more critical but less under my control. The standard text is the voice I feel I have more control over, and it feels more like my own. You can read it after the jump.

The Joy of Cooking

I am not a great chef. I didn’t learn how to cook growing up and gave up trying in college when my roommates laughed me out of the kitchen for asking how I could “simmer” something.

Be that as it may, cooking is something that I still like to work on from time to time. The following conversation actually happened about the soup I made tonight.

Mrs. Manly: Why is the soup so brown?

Me: I think that’s from the caramelized onions.

Mrs. Manly: Ooh, fancy. Did you do it by accident?

Me: No.

Mrs. Manly: Did you forget to do it last time?

Me: No, I just looked up what “sauté” meant this time.

Thank you, Internet.

Finish what you started, Human.

Remember how I said I’d record last week? I said I’d get everything connected and prepared and I would darn sure get recording. Yup, that’s what I said. And guess what? I totally did, honest to goodness. And you’ll get to see them.

Just a few problems.

The first video came out just fine, just fine indeed. It captured at a decent frame rate, picked up my voice quite well, and provided a good frame of reference to look back upon to see how I learn to speak while taking action. The problem with this one was it was boring. I ended up going into a story sequence where there is no player interactivity, and I read everything silently with little commentary. On top of that, it’s got a watermark right smack-dab in the middle of the video. I didn’t want to pay for a product I haven’t tested yet so I got the trial. I wasn’t expecting the time-limited free trial to include something pasted over the video I took, but it happened and it bugs me. Anyway, I’ll hack the video up and put it back together and present a truncated version… let’s say next week.

The second video was great. I used my graphic card’s video capture software and it was smooth and picked up sound just fine! Well, all sound except my voice. I’ll be putting up an edited version of that, too.

My friends and I may do another capture tonight, so you’re looking at a possible three videos next week!

Also, this is my first post done to WordPress to avoid cluttering up Tumblr dashboards. This way, my text walls show up as simple links.

Finally, as for a personal status update, the week had felt a bit like the burnout I was feeling a few weeks ago. Focusing is rather difficult. Playing music when I have trouble focusing greatly alleviates the issue, but motivating myself to turn on the music is a task unto its own.

Welp, there’s always next week!