meditate + asmr video to sleep
wake up at 6:30am (the one night i forgot to check if my alarm was set last night, it wasn't and i woke up at 7:10am. not the worst delay but i cant slip up like this)
eat breakfast
meditate 10 min
dynamic stretching
hyperbolic stretching - front splits
start laundry
take shower immediately after
150g protein
first of all, completely forgot about my neck pain and as i write this it's literally a zero. although my right pinkie is still at like a 1 so idk. still no idea if that's related or not.
i met my friend in yokohama today and i taught him the basic principles of lifting with a program i made up that u can do at home. then we ate a LOT!!!! of
shabu-shabu
so i'm going to just give myself slack today because it was a reasonably productive day anyway
i think in general if i plan on meeting up with a friend for most of the day, i'll give myself more slack because
- i'm not on the fucking computer all day
- i'm outside
- i'm doing something social
- i'm speaking japanese (i speak basically 100% japanese to pretty much every person i meet here, with few exceptions)
- i get thrown in more daily life situations in japan where i have to avoid being "the retard foreigner" as much as possible
doing introductory convo with japanese people is basically brainlessly easy for me and of course i get plenty of "wow ur japanese is so good" within 2 words (which you will get if you literally know "konnichiwa" and "arigatou") and even the occasional "you actually kind of sound like a japanese person"
but the moment i actually have to explain concepts or "express thoughts" my ability goes to babbling 6 year old level. explaining various lifting principles to my japanese friend straight up felt like an elementary school kid explaining to his teacher how to do something
also when i'm alone i pay attention more to uhhhh.... "facility procedures", employee instructions, form filling and the like but if i'm with a japanese person, my brain usually just shuts off and i just tell my friend to explain to me what the deal is (i usually understand what my friends say, but employees tend to use more complex words and are harder to understand). this will be a point i will need to specifically work on in the future so i can get out of "bumbling foreigner" territory
that being said obviously these kinds of interactions are actually beneficial for my japanese
also i found out i'm better at more complex japanese thoughts when i do a rough outline in english. i wrote up notes for my friend based on what i (tried) to explain to him today while we were working out.
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you can see from the message lengths that i basically wrote bullet points in english and then the japanese is in more detail than the english.
obviously a crutch but over time i won't need the crutch anymore. with these explanations my japanese gets upgraded from a 6 year old's to maybe a 12 year old's
also next time i have to explain working out or talking about it to people, i have all these new words i learned from skimming various japanese articles and trying to write my own thoughts using the language used in said articles.
the value from this experience is now i know a way to learn new vocab and get more comfortable in certain daily life situations and japanese interactions. i just need to think of as many novel daily life situations as i can, throw myself into them to get intel on what it's like in japan, and then when i get home i can backtrack and "study" it in the comfort of my room.
(for example, i learned today that i need to go and read a bunch of these types of "complex health forms". it would be straight up useful to just find more like this and read them all at home so i'm not sitting there like a fucking retard who's either 1) taking 15 minutes to read 10 questions 2) half-assedly skimming the questions and using intuition+luck to answer them 3) just telling the employee to explain it to me in dumbass japanese which ends up resulting in them telling me what to circle for a quarter of the questions and then "don't worry about the rest of this, it's fine")
will do wonders for when i start going on dates again and i have more to talk about than "omg japan is so different, this is what it's like in america!!!!!!" (although that is a good topic to get things going)
so overall, productive day even if i didn't do all the fucking to-do list items