skip to main bit
a man slumped on his desk, from 'The Sleep of Reason Produces
      Monsters'

Oblomovka

Currently:

living la vida hacker

We went to Ada’s school’s — well, I forget the correct word for it; my subconscious tells me it’s “indoctrination”, but that can’t be right. Maybe something in Spanish? Everything was in Spanish. Her teachers explained (via an interpreter) that they don’t speak English when the kids are around, so that they learn to convey their intentions in the second language. This got weird when the tallest most anglo blonde woman from Lake Tahoe introduced herself in I think a Chilean accent. Then you realise that kindergarten teachers all speak the International Language of Caring Emphasis, and it was pretty easy thereafter.

I’m fascinated to see how this plays out. I am terrible at languages. Fortunately, Ada has made me swear that I not learn Spanish with her, so she can have a secret language of her own that I can’t understand. Currently she is fairly confident she can speak Spanish fluently anyway, although she really just spouts nonsense that if you don’t know Spanish is actually rather convincing. (She can also hold down a whole conversation in fake Tagalog). I do hope the teachers can spot this kind of thing. Maybe Ada will be all like “Well, I’ll pretend I don’t know you can speak English, if you’ll pretend you don’t know I can’t speak Spanish”

Orientation! OrientaciĆ³n! That was the word. Seriously, the school seems lovely, and we all learnt a song about soy pizza. Or maybe it was “I am pizza”. I now know the spanish for “pepperoni”.

Seth points out that I got the gender of “kindergarten” wrong in the last post. I am so doomed.

I walked home over Great Big Hill (like Edmund Hilary, because it was there, and unlike him, because I couldn’t work out how to get around it). I accidentally phoned Merlin. There’s a guy out here recording us both for a documentary about Life Hacks and slowly becoming more disillusioned about how unmotivating we are. I was calling to flake on today’s appointment, and found I’d written down the wrong number. Yes, terrifying self-motivating organizing machine, me.

Merlin and I haven’t really spoken much since the book fell through, (both of us on long aboriginal treks to rediscover our mojo I think) — and it was awesome to hear him again. We failed to work out how to meet up soon, created about fifteen hanging “open loops”, and giggled far too much.

Went home and looked up URLs. Somebody had come up to me at the end of the orientation with a gleam of geek recognition in her eye and said conspiratorially, “I’ve started a blog and a mailing list for our class!” Like a spy confirming the secret passphrase, I replied “But what about the wiki?” The spanish-speaking teacher looked at us as though she had caught us speaking fake English. She’s probably right.

One Response to “living la vida hacker”

  1. I Will Teach You To Make A Documentary - Life Hacking Documentary Says:

    […] the evening, the final interview was ironically where it all started, with Danny O’Brien, coiner of the word ‘life hacks.’ To keep the irony going, he was probably the most […]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.