Project Goal: Escaping being so lonely and stuck, being more courageous and less like an anxious snail.
I keep thinking about challenging myself with the goal of escaping this stagnation and isolation that has taken hold of me and my life. My idea is that by sharing short posts daily I can crack open the shell that is holding me back. It’s been several months of ‘thinking’ about it, several months in which I took no consistent actions. There is no time like the present. Without overthinking this any more: Let’s start.
Hi, my name is Birgit and I am stuck; and no longer young enough to expect that somehow something will fix itself; that’s why I plan to unstick myself. With daily blog activity. Why not? I have a lot of self-doubt because every time I tried this or something similar in the past: I failed. But past failure isn’t evidence to predict future possibilities. Let’s just start and see.
Day #1 – expect books, journals, snapshots, tips, food, coffee, basically old style blogging with a sprinkle of affiliate links because why not?
Active reading, listening, watching.. I want to get more out of what I ‘consume’ and experience and I think one of the best ways is to share or respond to what I enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy). I keep trying to convince friends to read actively, which for me means: get some post it notes and write down concepts & vocabulary notes and reflections or opinions about the passages I have read and place those post-its between the corresponding pages of the book. An external notebook is also great. But I love seeing a book filled with, removable, notes.
I was just watching Mark Manson on Youtube, presenting a video about ‘How to read more and faster.’ Well my first reaction is: I love the video but I sometiems regret it when I read a book too fast. Last year I read ‘The Naked Tourist’ by Lawrence Osborne, and in hindsight I wish I hadn’t been so impatient and had taken my time more. Luckily I took notes on post-its that I stuck all over the pages of the book, so I could probably return to key passages and read them again. Now that I am saying this: I think I will. Is The Naked Tourist a book I recommend? Well, it IS written with a bit of a male perspective and some of my feminist friends might not enjoy it as much, but I think it is worthwhile especially for the passages concerning tourism and its development and impact in several places in Asia. Maybe I’ll write a response to the book another time. I have recommended the book several times to people who also travel and wonder what made travel change as much as it has in the past century.
Mark Manson asked “How many books have you read this year and how many are your goal for 2024?”
Well, it is the approaching the end of February and I have only read just one so far: Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. It was enjoyable, captivating and kept me reading, I found it hard to put this book down. Patchinko gives insights into Korean immigrant’s life and struggles caused by the social status Koreans have had in Japan. The narrative follows members of a Korean family throughout the unfolding of Japanese occupation of Korea, the end of WW2 and into contemporary times. We see how life struggles and priorities change with the times and how family structures change. The book touches on the different ways that Koreans in Diaspora adapted to their lives in Japan and the USA.
I would have enjoyed reading even more, Pachinko was reasonably long at almost 500 pages, but actually not long enough to have the space to full develop every of the characters we came to care for. I would love to see additional volumes following different family member’s life stories; and people connected to them; in even more depth.
If you have any interest in the world, travel, history, the interconnectedness of our global events of past, present and no doubt future, then I think you can’t go wrong reading Pachinko. I also think it is a great read if you have never really thought about Korea and its people, narratives like Pachinko offer a gateway into finding connection with people we felt are foreign.
I appreciate world literature as a unifying current that helps us see ourselves in the lives of people we previously thought of as strangers.
Books can be great ambassadors. South Korea is on my ‘map’ thanks to a series of chance events:
a) When I studied in London I couldn’t afford to rent a place, so I purchased a caravan on eBay and a fellow student and his wife, both from South Korea, allowed me to park my caravan on their driveway. Another colleague from the same postgraduate degree program helped me out by volunteering to collec and generously store my Art work from a gallery when I was away in America and couldn’t do it myself.
b) During the second big lockdown in 2021 I felt very down (who didn’t?) and chanced on a Standford university lecture about Growth Mentality and Different ways to Think about Maths. In it I learned that the act of trying benefits the mind far more than the act of succeeding. I wanted to put this to the test, could I restructure my brain if I embraced keping trying hard things regardless of outcome? I decided to try and study a language that I couldn’t imagine myself having any change of learning at all. I wanted to test ‘trying’ even if I was sure I would fail.
Which language should I choose? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian? Somehow I felt like I had the least preconceptions about Korean, it was the most foreign to me. (I had exposure to the other languages either through past language learning attempts, friends or visits.) That’s how it started. I picked Korean based on that I knew the least about it. Except the kind friends’ support when we attended university in London, and the couple of times they offered me Kimchi, fermented cabbage, which was new to me but I really liked. (Remind me to talk more about Kimchi another time.)
I took Korean Language lessons on italki. I learned to read Hangeul, the Korean Alphabet. It was a weird experience to be so clumsy and try to put sounds, let alone meaning, to these shapes that make up Korean words. I can’t claim that I am confident nor proficient at it. I definitely make pronunciation mistakes. But I really enjoyed getting to grips with it and the core goal of this practice was to embrace growth mentality and keep trying even if it doesn’t seem to stick.
I am sad to admit that hardly anything of all the lessons that I took stuck in my mind. I can barely introduce myself. Considering how many lessons I took I should be able to say something but I can’t even bring myself to order a coffee at a nearby cafe that is owned by Koreans. But I haven’t given up yet. I would like to resume trying to learn at least the first 1-2 levels of Korean. Maybe if I keep trying .. I might succeed.
I definitely lack a more tangible language learning goal. There isn’t enough reason to learn Korean. Learning a language is much easier when you are surrounded by it. I admire people who become fluent in a language without ever having visited the country. Absolute unicorns.
c) At the same time as choosing Korean by chance, I saw a Netflix thumbnail for what I thought was a movie about the 9 lives of a cat. (I made an assumption based on the movie being called ‘Because this is my first life’ (이번 생은 처음이라 ) and the thumbnail showed a cat. I was having a difficult time to watching a movie about an anthropomorphised cat seemed like a good idea. It turned out that there was a cat but I had actually chanced on a romatic K-Drama with Lee Min Ki ( 이민기 ) and Jung So-min ( 정소민 ), two actors who are now among my favourite Korean actors. The ‘movie’ turned out to be a 16 episode series! There is no way I would have chosen a 16 part series but this was one of the first things I watched on Netflix and I just didn’t realise what I was in for. I hadn’t watched a complete series in years; and now I have watched ‘Because this is my first life’ twice! (Because it was so sweet I felt like seeing it a second time 12 months after my first. Is this how addictions start?)
This unleashed an intense 2 year, weekly K-Drama viewing habit. I just love how characters are developed in K-Drama and I really enjoy the sound of the language. This then lead to me purchasing a Samsung phone. Yes really. I made this choice because I thought: “If Koreans are THIS good at making K-Drama series, then they MUST be great at making phones, too!”
Sadly ALL these hours spent watching K-Drama have not left behind any Korean Language acquisition. I wish I had been more studious and had stuck more with the project of developing a Growth and Abundance Mindset.
(*Tangent Alert. Sorry! Long tangent: The high quality of K-Drama and the Korean Wave, aka Hallyu 한류, is what started the process of me slowly reducing my reliance on Apple products. I am aware of customer retention strategies and making tech products sticky and difficult to leave, not impossible but it is very time consuming and requires a lot of dedication to extract oneself out of the Apple ecosystem. I will write a blog post about my thoughts about tech-SAAS-and physical-tech-product-stickiness.
Purchasing the Samsung phone was a first step to exploring if and how I might un-chain myself from Apple. Tip: Use Dropbox for cloudstorage and synching between devices; instead of iCloud and I prefer Dropbox to Google One / Google Drive as well. I have reasons = another blogpost. Dropbox has a free storage allowance, it probably won’t be enough for a lot of cloud storage but it is a great start to explore if Dropbox would work for you, too. I recently upgraded and have a paid plan, I never thought I ever would but this is part of my strategy to be less tangled up in the sticky Apple spiderwebs. The reason I don’t think that I will use Google Drive as my primary cloud is that I don’t like their file previews. For this I prefer the Dropbox interface.)
Back to Mark Manson’s question about my Book reading Goals for this year:
I would like to read at least 12 books, but I am already slow as it is almost the end of February and I have only just started reading my second book ‘The Return of Marco Polo’s World’, by Robert D. Kaplan. I got it from the libary as an audio book. So far it’s pretty interesting. I might not entirely agree with Kaplan’s perspective but that would actually be great – because disagreeing would help me read with more engagement.
I will definitely be taking some notes, which is something I find easier with a physical printed book that I own rather than an eBook that I borrow from the libary. But audio books are even more tricky. I think I need to get this as an eBook instead and use my Kobo eReader to read.
Kobo has the option of adding notes to pages but the interface is a bit slow and clunky so it is best to just highlight the passages I have reactions to and add a very short keyword as a note to help me find the highlighted pages again later.
(Kobo eReader = its effectively the same system as a Kindle but it’s not linked to Amazon and I prefer that, I got it primarily to read library books and my own pdf. I didn’t want Amazon to collect my reading habits from me, they know enough. I appreciate Amazon, but feel the need to draw my data sharing line somewhere. Hence the Kobo. Someone else can have my reading habit data instead…)
Questions for you:
Are you reading any books at the moment? Whats next on your reading list? Do you have feelings about Tech Customer Retention practices or about file storage cunundrums?
I don’t know if you like to keep digital reading list / bookshelf?
I have signed up to Storygraph, which is like Goodreads but not owned by Amazon. I enjoy the amazing service that Amazon provides but I prefer not getting locked into a single platform/company monopoly ecosystem. Storygraph is free and I am enjoying using it. If you like to see what I have on my reading list then you can follow me and check my profile there: Birgit’s Storygraph Bookshelf & Reading List
All the Links I shared in this blog post in one list for easier reference:
- Birgit’s Storygraph Bookshelf & Reading List (free, Goodreads alternative)
- Dropbox (free and if you use my link to sign up and upload some files then you get extra free storage in addition to the basic free amount)
- ‘Because this is my first life’ (이번 생은 처음이라 ), romantic K-Drama, on Netflix
- Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee *
- The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert D. Kaplan *
- The Naked Tourist, by Lawrence Osborne *
*books: Check if your library has a free copy that you can borrow, otherwise purchasing one will support the author and the publishing industry. That brings good karma.
Please subscribe to be a part of my self-resuscitation project :
I am thinking of making my blog project available to subscribers only.
Below you see the offer that Dropbox makes to people who use the invitation link to open a Dropbox account. (It’s free) I don’t remember how much the base amount of free storage on Dropbox is but you will get an additional 500MB (that is half 1GB and a lot of space if you are just storing pdf and images. If you are storing video then even a phone video can quickly take up 500MB and more)
I am quite amazed by the summary that AI created for my blog post. I tried several suggestions and I have to say: It is quite refereshing (if also highly alarming) to have a tool that took on the task of summarising my new project for me.
The other AI suggested blog excerpt was this one:
“Birgit aims to break free from loneliness and stagnation through daily blog posts. She discusses her passion for active reading and shares insights on books like “Pachinko” and “The Return of Marco Polo’s World.” She also delves into her attempts to learn Korean and her preferences for non-Amazon affiliated platforms. Join her journey by subscribing!” Also really good. Wow. Who needs writers anymore?
this excerpt was written by AI, everything else by me: Birgit over 7 seas
note: I didn’t use AI for anything other than the excerpt. This was the first time I ever tried it. Every word and thought inside this blog post is entire my own concoction. (for better or worse, haha…)
Birgit Over 7 Seas 