Day 9: Should I learn Italian? and other thoughts of being a failure...

When you ditch your smartphone, you suddenly have all this new-founded free-time. 

The same time that would have been spent mindlessly doomscrolling on social media or Reddit are now free to do whatever with. At first, that feeling was a bit overwhelming for me. In fact, it was downright depressing. But after celebrating my birthday yesterday (thanks for all the birthday wishes!) I feel I turned a bit of a curve in understanding the vibe of my new life without a smartphone.

With a smartphone, everything was immediately answered. Any small question, to big questions, I could just pull out my smartphone and get an answer within a few seconds. With that suddenly gone, my thoughts often went unanswered, and even unexplored. I'd be outside raking leaves and have a random question about what kind of bugs are commonly found in lives; but I couldn't Google it or ask ChatGPT. Instead, I had to let the thought go unanswered and unexplored. At first, this was difficult for me, because I love learning and absorbing new information. Constantly. But, maybe even at the time of writing this, I' realizing there is really something quite important about not knowing everything.

We'll circle back to that idea, but one thing I wanted to bring up today is the idea of language learning. I'm not talking LLM's or AI, I'm talking straight up learning a new language. A language that's been on my mind lately is Italian. As some of you may know, I went and saw You, Me, and Tuscany for the second time yesterday on my birthday, and something about the Italian language just spoke to me, again, and curated an interest in learning it. I only speak English, and my previous attempts at learning Spanish, Norwegian, Russian, you name it, have all failed. I was feeling motivated, so after some research, I found a website called Preply that offered private tutoring at a decently affordable price. I booked a 50-minute introduction session with an Egyptian-Italian guy named Mohammed who was giving me really good vibes in terms of learning a language. For me, someone who is kind, patient, and gentle are critical cornerstones of a conducive learning environment. Did you know I actually was going to be a pilot? Yeah, I have over 35 hours logged in a Cessna-172 (a.ka. flying shitbox that could fall out of the sky at any given moment). As much fun as it was to fly a plane and learning new information, I ended up giving up on flying, largely because my instructors were very militant; even the nice ones made me feel small and stupid. Granted, I'm glad I'm not flying because I ultimately decided to move on for other reasons, too (like not wanting a career where I sit in a chair for 10 hours a day, even if the pay is great). However, the point still stands, and I think identifying, and sticking to, what you learn under well is crucial. If someone has a problem with it, they can get bent.

Back to the story at hand. So I booked this online, 50-minute lesson with Mohammed and I'm feeling pretty jazzes. Nervous, because I don't even know how to say Hello in Italian (is it Bonjouronio or fuck I don't know, I was in Italy for 3 months and I know how to say it but aside from that, I don't know shit), but I know I'm in good hands with Mohammed.

Yet, something weird happened today. When I woke up, I felt this overwhelming feeling I didn't want to learn Italian. I changed my mind, so I promptly went online and cancelled my session. 

Can I be honest? It felt like a failure.

I've failed so many times in my life. Fuck, how I've failed. I've failed at school, failed at making friends, failed at drawing a flower. But in the same token, I've succeeded at all of those things, too. Failure is apart of life, and it is what makes us resilient to try new things and develop new skills. If we never failed, we'd be as resilient as a baby; just waiting for the world to crush us. You see people who have never failed, they come from wealthy families who have enough money to cater their every day to the whims of their child. But, nobody escapes the beatings of life, not even the wealthy and protected. And when those beatings come, all it takes is one time to send them over the edge. I've seen it time and time again; drug addiction, alcoholism, or even self-harm. These aren't weaknesses, these are signs of someone who hasn't failed enough, or has failed too much. Resilience.

So, yeah, it felt like a failure. But I buried it, and I moved on. I raked some more leaves, watered some plants, and did some yard work. I went about my day pushing down the idea of learning Italian, constantly convincing myself I don't want to. It's too hard, Italian is pointless to learn, I don't even like Italy, Italian people don't like me, the accent is weird, whatever. Excuse after excuse. But if I was truly over it, why did I keep thinking about it?

A few years ago, on a plan ride to Arizona to buy a Nissan NV200 van I aimed to convert to a camper van, I read a book titled Behave by Robert Sapolsky. The book was pretty interesting, interesting enough to cover a 2 hour flight with no WiFi, at least. Sapolsky talked about how our DNA dictates everything; hormones, our sleep-rhythm, our desire for cold or hot climates, and even whether we react to conflict with violence or passiveness. But what stood out to me most in the book was the point about Love, Hate, and Indifference:

Most people think the opposite of Love is Hate. Naturally. But truly, the opposite of Love is indifference. When you Hate something, you have the same emotions, feelings, and reactions as if you Love it; it's just wrapped up in a flurry of emotions and feelings we define as Hate, instead of Love. But when someone truly does not Love something, they are indifferent to it. They do not Hate it, they feel nothing. Like a woman who has fallen out of love with her husband, she is emotionless; cold, unfeeling. Whereas when someone is upset and angry in a relationship, angry enough to say "I hate you!", there still is room for Love, because the emotions and feelings of Love and Hate are identical. Indifference, on the other hand, is a polar opposite. It can not be fixed, when someone grows indifferent, they are too far-gone.

The same goes for all walks of life. Let's think about controversial wars; Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine. These are people who have shared land for thousands of years; literally neighbors. They have broke break, they have had children with one another, they have celebrated birthdays together. I have a lot of Ukrainian on my side of the family; my grandmother was actually born in Ukraine and came here shortly after her birth. There is a lot of hate for the Russians on their side of the family, but often I notice that hate is miraged in the same rhetoric as love towards a family member who is pissing you off ... but you still love them.

Hate takes effort. If you truly hated someone, truly, you'd feel nothing about their demise. Think about the United States, or England, or the great powers. These great powers are able to raid the tombs of the pyramid of Giza and fill their museums with ancient artifacts and feel absolutely nothing. Not an ounce of remorse, guilt, or shame. This is because these great powers have never loved these people they feel as ants, they simply feel indifferent towards them. They could watch them die in front of them and not feel a thing. That is hate. No, sorry, that is indifference. To me, indifference is far scary than hate. It's why Border Patrol agents can quit their jobs after slamming someone's head in the pavement they previously hated; their feelings of hate towards that person could just as easily been love. It's just misguided, or manipulated by people far smarter than them.

I digress.

Bringing up the border patrol anecdote reminded of the time I was stopped by two policemen outside the train station in Rome. They spoke with fast, sharp accents, of which I couldn't understand a lick of. Once they realized I didn't speak Italian, they said "Papers", demanding I show my documentation. We had left our passports at home, because of course we did we're not psychopaths who go to the grocery store with our passports, so I told them we didn't have them and they were at the hotel. One of the policemen gave me a very stern look, held out his hand to my face and said "You must have your papers on you always if you are not a citizen here, you could be arrested." and they left.

I found that very rude. Of course, I'm not naive enough to think I'm not a visitor in their country, I respect their rules, but I have often thought about that interaction, especially with the way things are here in the United States. A police officer, not even a border agent, just a run-of-the-mill police officer could never ask me for my papers and threaten to arrest me for not producing them. Well, I guess he could, but it's never happened to me no matter where in the U.S. I was. Back when this happened, I googled it and found out this was pretty normal in Italy. To be honest, Italy and Spain, and France, really don't take kindly to foreigners. Granted, they're overrun with tourists ... but that has never been an excuse. Here in America, that surely isn't an excuse to mistreat tourists, foreigners, and immigrants.

One thing I did note in my travels in Europe was just how rude Europeans can be if you don't speak their language. Blegh is how I'm feeling writing this, so I'm just going to move on to the actual point of this post...

Language learning! Fuckin' hell, this shit got off the rails, didn't it? Usually when I write these entry's, I gain some sort of clarity on what it is I started with. I have to be honest here, I have no more clarity than before. I have conflictions about learning another language, because what happens if I don't fuckin' like the people in that country? What happens if I spent 5 years learning Italian and Italians end up sucking? I mean, I really enjoyed the pizza there, and the history of Rome was amazing. When we stayed in Pietra Ligure, a coastal down in Italy near the border of France, we met nothing but the kindest, sweetest people. Italians are surely nicer than the French. And their cuisine is tons better.

Eh, fuck it. I got nothing. I'm in a love-hate relationship with language learning, I suppose. I think a lot of it stems from my Dad who would often say "What's the point of learning a language, everyone speaks English", which I funnily like to remember as "What's the fuckin' point of learning another language when everyone speaks American!" Ahh, pops, sometimes you can be quite the dense piece of bread.

We'll see what happens. Should I learn Italian? Should I meet with Mohammed? I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say. 

Oh, and I was able to FINALLY reset my 2-factor authentication. I met on Zoom with the IT department of my university, and the guy just could not fathom I did not have a smartphone. I ended up using my girlfriend's smartphone to download the app, and thankfully it doesn't need a phone number, it just is 'hardwired to the device', he told me. She doesn't even have cell-service, so I suppose we'll keep this around in the background literally just for the 2FA app.

And a shoutout to the blog's newest follower: Oliver! We are up to 12 followers, so that is super cool. And I've really been appreciating reading all the wonderful comments you all have been leaving me on these posts. Each one is like unwrapping a present, it really makes my day. I try to reply to all of them, but sometimes I feel so gassed after writing I can't muster writing anymore. But please do keep leaving comments, and I'll try to reply to them. It means the world!

Until next time, peace out! See you tomorrow!