I'm going to see The Force Awakens tonight

I know nothing about Star Wars. Well I know someone is Luke's father, and that is important. There are lightsabers, and the red ones are evil. And I think someone shoots electricity from their fingertips? Oh, and there are space Nazis, a truly tragic bikini that fanboys go nuts over (if that episode of Friends is to be believed). And some prequels that everyone is upset about (confession, I can never tell which clips are from the sequel when I see Star Wars clips).

Anyway, RottenTomatoes is pretty excited about this movie, but many of the reviews get a little . . . weird from a non Star Wars fan perspective. Like, it's almost like I'm reading a review of The Passion of the Christ from a devout Christian. I'm left wonder if I'll enjoy this movie considering I'm not entirely sure if Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader or not, though I think that was the point of those much-hated prequels.

There are drug adds on Youtube now? I bet they've been there for a while

So I was watching stand up comedy videos yesterday and I randomly got an add for a drug, which first of all, it's odd that YouTube is trying to sell me an drug for depression. What's my search history telling you, Google? Are you implying something?

Anyway, this standard/boring ad reminded me of another one I saw on TV years ago:

I'm not here to tell people if they should be taking Abilify for depression or not. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm just here to complain about the crap info in this add. I don't even mean that roughly half the add is about the possible horrible side effects since any medication ad has no choice but to do that. But this particular ad doesn't give any specific evidence as to how or why Abilify helps with depression, much less to what degree. My first thought on seeing it years ago was "huh, isn't it weird that they didn't mention that aripiprazole is anti-psychotic? I guess they didn't want to scare their customers." 

It says that "some people had symptom improvement as early as one to two weeks". How many people? From what sample size? As compared to what? How much symptom improvement? How long was the symptom improvement sustained? How many people had any of the scary list of side effects that followed? For how long? Did they have to discontinue the medication? How many people's symptoms worsened? All of this would be important information for someone considering this drug.

Drug ads are a bit of a sore topic in the medical community. I've heard doctors argue that they shouldn't be permitted at all since the overwhelming majority of patients don't have the background to understand most drugs. I'm not sure if I'd go that far. I think patients have every right to know all their options for treatment. However, I do think ads like the one above are manipulative, even if they're not outright lying. 

I mean "some people" could mean "8 out 10" or "8 out of 10,000". Would it really have taken so much more time to say "in our study, X out of Y people experiences symptom improvement in one to two weeks" rather than "some people"? Would it really have been that much harder for the layperson to understand such a figure?

Since tedious drug ads are everywhere, I think there should be some kind of class in high school about how to interpret them. For most healthy people, the ads are easy to tune out, but I bet a sick person might be drawn into asking for a medication that wouldn't be good for them. If their physician doesn't do their due diligence, they might end up with an inappropriate drug. 

My adventures in German continue

So, I've kept up with teaching myself a little German every day. It's hard. Way harder than learning Portuguese, which I made relatively quick progress with. Having Spanish as a native tongue probably helped with that more than I realized even though by now I'm more fluent in English than Spanish.

I got myself a notebook to write tidbits in German. At the moment, it looks like I've returned to first grade, though I hope my handwriting is better. Today, I worked out that "sie" means a lot more than I first realized thanks to this:

At first I was like . . . but Männer is "men" and "sie" is "she"

Then it hit me! The verb decides what "sie" means because . . . why not? That makes sense, I guess. I'm sure Duolingo tried to tell me something like that at some point, but I was like "okay, alright, I'm tired though, next exercise".

ETA on 12/21/15: Apparently there's a different verb for animals eating (fressen) than for humans eating (essen) and it's insulting to use fressen when referring to a human. This feels like something I would forget.

Nostalgia in the land of reboots

I wasn't in the USA at the height of the Star Wars craze. For the sequels, anyway. I suspect I wasn't even alive when the original movies that fans worship so much first came out. So I always get a little mystified when grown people declare, with much dramatic flare, that such-and-such reboot and/or sequel has "ruined their childhood".

Even with the hyperbole removed, imagining that a new property in a franchise I liked as a child would somehow retroactively negate my past enjoyment. . . well, how would that even work? I mean, I "grew up" on Harry Potter, actually taught myself English with the books, had honest-to-God dreams HP5 coming out after Goblet of Fire. . . and I don't care about this new thing about Fantastic Beasts or whatever it's called that's coming out. If it sucks, it won't change how much joy the original HP series brought me.

So I didn't understand all the distress about reboots of "old" classics. Until I saw this:

Is this trailer any good?

I don't know. I don't think I can judge it objectively, insofar as a work of fiction can ever be judged objectively.

See, when I was little (in my early teens), my mom brought home a VCR copy of Disney's Tarzan. For a while, my brother and I watched this movie like once a day. After the Twin Towers, our house went without cable for a while (couldn't have been long, but we were kids so it felt like forever). We watched this movie on loop for that period. Then we watched this cartoon before going to school in the morning. There was a Tarzan level on Kingdom Hearts that my brother and I loved.

When I realized this trailer was for a Tarzan movie, all the great feelings about the Disney thing flooded me. When I noticed that this trailer was going for a different tone, I got. . . disappointed. And vaguely angry that this new thing didn't make me feel exactly as the Tarzan cartoons made me feel when I was a kid.

It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think I like this trailer even when I make a conscious effort to not compare it to a Disney cartoon. The characters are out of focus. There's a little too much rambling about scary Africa for my tastes. We get to see an ape like once (will they talk like the Disney apes? Sorry, I can't stop comparing). Then at the end, there's Samuel L. Jackson, speaking in a tone that doesn't really match with the atmosphere that the trailer was going for.

But am I just grasping at straws to justify unfair feelings towards the movie for not being exactly what I remember as a kid? Maybe. Maybe the movie will be amazing.

I just don't have much hope that it will.

I've started "Veronika decide morrer"

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Since Duolingo's Portuguese exercises have gotten a little to simple to improve my skills, I've decided to spend some hours every week reading Paulo Cuelho's Veronika decide morrer. I have an English copy of the book to check my translations against.

Since every translation is different depending on the translator's skill and viewpoint, it'll be interesting to see how far I get and how much my amateur translations differ from Margaret Jull Costa's, the person who translated my English edition of the book.

I won't tell myself that I'll push through the entire book. That would be daunting even if I didn't have a million other things to do. At some point during the day, I have to squeeze in some German practice, Spanish review, exercise, keeping that Duolingo Portuguese tree gilded, studying, work, personal writing, and perhaps speaking to other human beings. I'd rather focus on what little I can get through every time I can squeeze some time for the project, or I wouldn't start doing any of it at all.

So without further ado, the first two paragraphs of Veronika decide morrer:

 I read:

On November 11th of 1997, Veronika decided that - finally! - the time to kill herself had arrived. Carefully, she cleaned her room near num convento de freiras, disabled her heating, brushed her teeth, and se deitou.

From the make-up table, she got the four sleeping pills. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she resolved to take them one by one, since there exited a great distance between the intention and the act, and she wanted to be free to change her mind. In the meantime, with each pill that she swallowed, she felt more convinced after five minutes, the boxes were empty.

I don't know what num convento de freiras means. For some reason, I want to say "near the train station", but that's not right. This might be an instant when knowing Spanish is detrimental because convento fixates my mind on convents and nuns. But I know that, in this context and in this language, num means "a". Or perhaps "an".

Se deitou means something like "stopped". More specifically, "stopped herself". Here's the thing though, I remember reading this English way bay in sophomore year of undergrad, and the closing words of the opening paragraph are something like "and laid on her bed".

So, am I remembering wrong?

Stuck in a car in lower Manhattan. At 5:30 PM. On Friday.

I visited a hospital in eastern Long Island today. It was beautiful, like what I imagine a hospital in the Capitol might look like. The interviews and tour ended at 3:15 PM, and I stupidly believed the Google maps lady when she told me I'd be home at 5:50 PM. The truth is I was tired, so much so that I ditched my original plan to just hang around the town until late at night, when the worst of NYC traffic would have been . . . less worse.

So I get on the car and, not two minutes into my fifty mile trip, Google lady starts freaking out about delays here and delays there. I see people swerving from lane to lane in desperate attempts to get home before the imminent gridlock, as if every single lane wasn't moving at the same intermittently slow pace. Me? I just drive in the middle lane, resigned to my fate. My car's too old and the accelerator is a little blown. If I tried any of that lane switching desperation, I'd just crash. I know because I did try that when I first got the car, and a truck slammed me out of I-280.

As I neared the city, I kept seeing these traffic notices on the electronic signs about a "gridlock warning" and to "use mass transit". Whatever that means. Highways, I guess? If there's a way to get from Long Island to Jersey without crossing some bridge that takes you around NYC or, God forbid, NYC itself, I'd love to hear of it. Also, I don't think anyone needs to be "warned" about a rush hour gridlock on NYC on Friday. That's just gravity. When people need to go to NYC on Friday, they don't go by car. They use public transportation. People with cars drive them to the station and rent parking nearby. Yay cost of living.

Obviously, I don't have such an arrangement because I avoid going to NYC unless it's absolutely necessary (I might be working there next year, isn't that hilarious? I'm getting rid of the car if that happens). This morning, I had to be on the road at 4:30 AM to avoid the morning rush hour gridlock, and I almost got caught up in it anyway.

I didn't almost get caught up in it this time. At around 4:55 PM, Google lady was happily informing me that I was ten miles from my domicile . . . and also two hours away. At one point, it took my an hour to get the car through half a mile of traffic. For comparison, I can run a full mile in ten minutes.

At times, I wondered if I was just a timid driver or something. Then I realized I wasn't driving; I was just parked in NYC. No one was driving. The driver next two me was on her phone, working or having a serious Facebook fight. Her expression was not happy, though that might have been the traffic jam. The cab a little ahead had a tab $50.82, and the passenger was napping. I unbraided my hair. Then rebraided it.

At the entrance to Holland Tunnel, a billboard told me that "the only thing racing in Holland Tunnel is your heart", which took me a while to interpret as an anti-drag racing PSA because it's not possible to drag race in Holland Tunnel. I've been gridlocked in that strip of hell on Wednesday night at 2:00 AM.

Do people do this, as in the sitting in the car for an hour to trek through half a block, every day? There were extenuating circumstance for me personally, but it's not like NYC traffic is ever any better. Are there millions of New Yorkers who just accept an hours-long commute and offensive parking expenses when they could probably walk the city from end-to-end faster?

Languages and Duolingo

Learning languages is my version of Candy Crush, a tidbit about myself I learned thanks to moving to a Brazilian neighborhood and Duolingo. At first, I started teaching myself Portuguese so I could speak to patients at work, but over the last year I've realized that keeping track of my Duolingo tree helps me relax during my commute. I started refreshing my Spanish, which has grown atrocious over the last decade and change.

And Duolingo works! Today, I facilitated a full conversation between my attending and a Brazilian woman eager to go home. Much to my delight, I clearly understood every single sentence from the woman (a native speaker of Portuguese). One of the first phrases I taught myself is "Se você fala devagar, eu comprendo". I didn't have to use it once today, though I still understand much more than I can say.

To congratulate myself, I decided to start my next Duolingo tree early. I'd planned to wait until my Portuguese tree was gilded, but since it looks like I can hold a conversation already, I went right on ahead and started German.

And it was a bit of a disaster. I didn't realize just how much knowing Spanish helped me with Portuguese until I read this:

From Duolingo's German "Basics" lesson. I didn't even grasp the English.

To be fair to myself, I did complete the lesson with a single error, and that was at the end of a very long day at work and after spending a good hour on Portuguese and Spanish. I'll continue at it and hopefully by next year I'll be able to understand a little bit of German.

Ever played three videogames in one? Persona Q is kinda like that

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I started playing Persona games at some point in high school. Though I suspect it was later since I don't recall playing with my brother, meaning he'd already joined the army when I first got my hands on Persona 3.

For the uninitiated, Persona 3 and 4 are about special transfer students at different high schools who must battle "Shadows" while becoming the most popular boys in school. They're part dating simulator, part dungeon RPG crawlers that really love tarot motifs.

As I understand, the first two games in the series are quite different from the last two, which has caused some . . . heated discussions in Atlus fandom. For better or for worse, 3 and 4 (specially 4) have become cash cow franchises for Atlus, as evidenced by this cute little cross over that I thought would be little more than a cheap grab at more of my money.

Don't get me wrong, it worked, but I expected to be an angry little ball of fake geek girl rage twenty minutes into the game. I could not have been more wrong and jaded. This game is really, really, really fun.