A few updates

Fear not, my loyal following, for I have not forsaken you. Well, not entirely, at least.

I figured I’d do a little news roundup-style post to keep you guys posted on recent happenings.

The first order of business is the major stuff, like the fact that I’ve put Finland on a brief hiatus. Reading back through my somewhat recent blog posts regarding that situation makes me sound like a backpedaling chucklefuck (yeah, I said it), but I assure you that I have a pretty good reason for all this nonsense. I sincerely hope my friends in Finland will forgive me for my actions, but I can promise that I’ll be there at some point! There are a few reasons for this, but I had it finalized in my head a month or so before I returned home (I didn’t want to blow the lid off my plans without telling my friends and family in person first). Some of you may know that I dipped out on school a short while before (a matter of a couple quarters, in fact) I was actually finished and had gotten my degree. Before returning home, the EELLC (Eastern European Languages, Literature, and Culture, i.e. my major) advisor hit me up about finishing, and I suppose convinced me to do so in a way. Anyway, I’m enrolled for winter quarter at the UW with the intent to commit capital fraud on a head full of acid– no, that’s not it, with the intent to double major in both EELLC and my passion, linguistics.

The linguistics program has a somewhat unique requirement for graduation as well, the would-be graduate must display at least a first year proficiency in three languages, two of which not being his or her native language, while one of those must be outside of the Indo-European language family. I’ve got English and Serbian down, so that takes care of my Indo-European ones, “but what of an unrelated language family?” you might be wondering. Why, Finnish, of course! Finnish is Uralic, and therefore not related to Indo-European languages. Now, there are a few different ways I could tackle this goal, and I’m not sure which path I’m going to take yet. The first would be enrolling in Finnish 101 next fall, being that they offer the classes sequentially and I already missed fall quarter this year. That would essentially bind me into another year of schooling in order to finish (no pun intended) all three quarters of first-year Finnish. My second choice would be to simply move to Finland before that and take a crack at learning it over there, gaining at least a first-year proficiency of it, then testing out of that requirement back at the U and thus acquiring my linguistics degree. So anyway, we’ll see where that takes me.

With all that being said, I have at least another year of schooling under my belt (and a bit more, including the language instruction). And with that being said, I’d imagine I’ll be in Seattle for another year or so, although I’m really not certain on that. In fact, the only thing I am really certain about is that I’m not going to be using my return ticket back to Serbia on January 14th.

That brings us to our itemized news segment:

1) Since I’ve been back, I’ve gotten an apartment on Capitol Hill, so you other hill-dwellers let me know, I’m always free and more than willing to go meet up with folks around town.

2) I’ve developed a healthy habit of computer chess, and good lord the computer opponents are hard.

3) I got back from Hawaii recently where I visited my old friend Keli. Her hospitality was much obliged and I had a wonderful time.

4) I got another set of Bluetooth headphones (Sennheiser MM100s) with which I’m thoroughly disappointed, so don’t buy them.

5) I’m using my old cell number, so those of you who had it before, feel free to hit me up.

6) I’m drinking a Baltika “Extra Lager” which really tastes like they just poured Everclear into normal beer

Anyway, like I always say, stay tuned for updates of a non-Belgrade nature and you’ll be rewarded thoroughly.