(I’d rather be doing linguistics, but I don’t hate IT and I do legitimately like helping people. Which is pretty fucking good under capitalism, if you ask me.)

(The only reason I do IT now is that I had a jerk boyfriend in college who essentially force-taught me to be a Linux admin, it then turned out to be a thing that I was actually interested in on my own, and then I was able to leverage my years of running multiple OS-es into a desktop support career.)

(Also, 3.5 was that I WANTED to become a linguistics prof, even went to grad school for it, but ultimately chose to leave for a variety of complicated reasons, not the least of which was my physical and mental health.)

(The physics prof at my college turned out to be a complete jerkface and someone who was just impossible to work with. Turned a lot of other students away from doing physics, too. Fortunately for me, I took linguistics in my first semester, fell in love with that, and the rest was history.)

At least I only have one bad dad to reckon with these days. Unfortunately, he is the worse of the two.

This is pretty normal, from what I understand, but I buy and read German children’s books.

Forced immersion! Going to the Middlebury Language Schools for German helped me get conversational in a way I’d never managed before.

Oh, B) for sure. Especially memorizing noun classes for all the words.

(I realize this is not helpful.)

INTO MY FACE

The Recipe w/ Kenji & Deb (affable + low stakes), Xai How Are You? (affable + Talmud), Let’s Learn Everything (affable, very fun, not sure how low stakes you’d consider it)