Escape from the horrors

I'm watching my cat sleep as I write this. She keeps shifting between various cute, curled up positions on her warming pad. My favorite is the slightly goofy one where she puts her head down sideways directly on the pad, which seems to be a new one she's invented recently. Her favorite, based on frequency, is Flat Circle Cat, where she bends her whole body into a kind of circle with her tail and all four paws tucked under her chin. Her name is Shinjuku, like the train station. Her previous people named her Shinjuku, and Paul and I kept the name when we adopted her.

Having now been to Shinjuku, and Shinjuku Station, and having seen the famous Shinjuku Cat video billboard, I'm pretty sure they named her that more after the famous cat than the train station. After consulting with Paul, I decided to rename her Shinjuku, after the train station instead of the billboard. Formally, you may consider her full name Shinjuku Eki, that is, Shinjuku Station. I'm incredibly pleased that I can now write Shinjuku in hiragana, just like a Japanese six year old, and I also know that Eki means train station. Of course on serious stuff, it's written in kanji and etymologically the name means New Post Town.

I know all this because I've been obsessively studying hiragana and also Japanese vocabulary. Last week, I wrote about learning hiragana and what motivated me to start. According to my time logged in Anki and Lingodeer, I've been putting in about an hour a day. That's not a lot compared to someone who is learning a language as a full-time student, but it's kind of a lot for a person with a full-time job.

What, you may as, is the secret of my dedication? Is it willpower? Is it passion? Do I love Japanese snacks that much? Passion and snacks are involved, but I've never been that good at keeping up a habit, even when it's something I want. Nah, the secret is that I'm using language learning to escape the horrors. When I open my phone to check what my internet friends are doing and instead my internet friends feed (even on Mastodon!) is full of not just the horrible facts about a wannabe king and his neo-Nazi pet billionaire^[1] dismantling everything useful and good in the United States for scrap to sell off, but also an ongoing stream of people deliberately dooming themselves and others up about it, I have to look away. And Anki is right there.

It's not the only thing I'm doing to escape and find some peace. There is the cat, of course. There are my plants. And oh, yeah, I'm rereading the entire Twilight series. I accidentally reread the first one when researching the post about Bella and her truck and now I'm reading the whole thing. It's silly but it has its moments, and I think it is my duty to keep my spirits up as much as I can, or at least, stay sane.