I, unfortunately enough, have spent a lot of time on dating apps. I was an okcupid user back in the early 2010s and have since then (excluding a few happy years coupled) been a longtime Bumble/Tinder/Hinge user. Over that time I’ve seen lots change about the dating apps — from Tinder’s incredible swipe interface innovation that turned finding a lifelong mate to cherish into a...
My number one best tool for learning Spanish has been the spaced repetition flashcard app Anki. I’ve written about Anki as a key component of my general approach to learning Spanish, and have talked about how important memorizing massive amounts of vocabulary is to any endeavor, but today I’m going to write in a bit more detail about the tactics I’ve developed for efficient Anki...
One habit that I’ve built up over the years that I count as one of my super powers is training myself to say “thank you” reflexively anytime anyone criticizes or corrects me. If I’m cooking something in the kitchen and someone says “you’re doing that wrong”, or if I’m showing someone some code I wrote at work and they say “that’s the...
Over the last few years I’ve noticed that one phrase that I use over and over again has had an outsized impacts on both my work and personal relationships. It’s become my secret weapon to help me be a better friend and a better to partner to everyone I’m lucky enough to spend much time with. That phrase is “how can I help?”. How can I help? In all kinds of...
Most Saturdays that aren’t post-perreo recovery days I like to spend at least a chunk of the day either taking care of chores that I didn’t get to during the week (booking travel, responding to personal emails that require long-form response, etc). This ritual allows me two nice things: for little small things that I know i want to do, I can simply note them in my to-do list app and schedule them...
For reasons I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my favorite poem — The Applicant by Sylvia Plath from her collection Ariel. This poem really blew me away the first time I read it — it was honestly the first time that I really felt viscerally impacted by a poem. Before The Applicant, I had just never really … gotten poetry. I’d read lots of poems in school, and I...
A few weeks ago I finished reading Las Muertas by Jorge Ibargüengoitia and was blown away. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I struggled quite a bit with the vocabulary in this book even though it was recommended to me as a novel in Spanish that would be reasonably accessible for an intermediate Spanish speaker. However, even with such an obstructed reading flow I have to say that...
I recently reading the Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend and if you’ve seen me in the past few weeks you probably already know that I can’t stop talking about it. The release of this book coincided well with my desire to learn more about the history of Mexico generally and about life for the pre-conquest peoples of Mexico more specifically. Before reading...
I moved to Mexico a little over a year ago and it’s fair to say that I drastically underestimated how difficult it would be to learn to speak Spanish. Before moving here I had been doing some on-and-off self study (i.e., duolingo) plus a mixture of the occasional italki tutoring lessons and two short beginner Spanish courses through Idlewild books in New York. I remember vividly being on...
I focus a lot on trying to maximize my own productivity — I always feel like I have way more things that I want to get done than I have time for doing, so I’ve put into place a number of systems that help me make sure I’m making progress on the things that matter to me without letting all of the other little things in life slip through the cracks. A number of people have asked...