One of those days...

It is 12:12 AM and I'm sitting in the living room. I went to bed at about 7 last night because I suddenly felt extremely tired and bad.

By the time I got into bed and was ready to rest, I was FREEZING. We have a sheet, a blanket we use when it's a little chilly, and a quilt we usually turn down but will use it when it's truly cold out. I was wrapped up in all three, had on my sleep cap, and I was still shivering. 

I slept four hours, restlessly. Every time I woke up, it was like I was fighting a battle that was a mixture between Ready Player One's egg hunt on the OASIS, paper.io 2, speaking Spanish, whatever is going on in Andor right now, and fighting whatever I was trying to fight off. 

James came to bed around midnight, and I had stopped being chilly. I got up to use the restroom and could tell that my body was on fire. James took my temperature and it was only 101.4, so that's good. 

I decided to get up for a while and sit on the couch until I'm sleepy again (I'm very tired, but not in the sleep zone).

This is one of those times that if I had insurance, I'd probably head off to the quick care clinic tomorrow. Instead, I have an appointment coming up later this week with my primary care physician for my annual physical and I'll just talk to her about it.

The biggest problem here is that I've never been a hypochondriac, but now that I've had cancer growing in my body once (and I got so so lucky with that; truly, I hesitate to tell anyone in the real world that I "had" cancer; it doesn't feel respectful enough of people who have the kinds of cancer that require protracted and devastating treatment), when I feel suddenly very bad, my brain does go there.

When we had insurance, I definitely realized how fortunate we were. I knew then and I'm really feeling it now that peace of mind is only for the moneyed and the rest of us have to hope for the best and try not to go bankrupt. 

Having worked din property management, I understand that medical debt doesn't haunt people like consumer debt, but it's still not great to know that you have thousands of dollars outstanding, and so you have to made decisions about whether you can stay in your apartment for two more months, or whether you want the collection agency to stop bothering you.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my ginger ale, do some word puzzles, and then try to go back to sleep. Wish me luck!

Do I know Spanish?

In August, I'll have been using Duolingo for 3 years.

James will hit 4 years at the end of this month. He started studying Spanish in June 2021. I decided to go with French at first, just because that's what I studied in high school and college and I figured having some momentum from the get-go would keep me motivated.

We planned a trip to Montreal, which we took in spring 2023, and after we got home from that, I switched over to Spanish, too.

Living in Texas (and, really, anywhere in the US), this is a much more practical language. I wish I'd studied it in high school rather than French, but I think French seemed so much more romantic.

In terms of practicality, ASL would have been the most useful to me, but I shudder to think how it would have been taught, especially given how I was taught French in high school. I had to take remedial French for a semester in college, because I was functionally starting fresh. Sigh.

Now that I've been studying Spanish in Duolingo for a couple of years, I've attained a score that indicates I should be able to have basic conversations in Spanish.. but I don't feel like that's the case at all.

We're planning to visit Mexico next year, and I've started listening to an immersion Spanish podcast to see if I can gain some confidence in this regard.

What I think is happening is this: I am really good at taking tests. I can usually do pretty well in challenges and stuff, but that doesn't always translate to learning with me. I have surpassed James's "XP" within the game, and I'm further along than he is. But I'm 100% sure that he's better at actually speaking Spanish than I am.

This is a part of my personality that I wish I could turn off. I'm trying to stay focused and learn to learn, but sometimes the "gamification" here is counterproductive to why I'm actually on the app: to learn a language.

AI isn't good at human stuff like storytelling, art, or... admitting it doesn't know

I avoid using AI, but for some reason there's now always an AI summary at the top of Google search results. If you want not to have that, you can add a curse word in your search, and AI will not deign to respond.

Although it wastes so much energy and water to process AI stuff, I did try something this morning that made me roll my eyes.

Someone posted a video of search queries that were nonsense, and how AI attempted to answer them. So I typed something and got this response:

Dude... just say, "I have literally no idea. I've never heard of this and I have access to all of the information in the world.

I'm not anti-AI. I think it's great in applications that help people have more access to things, like helping blind people figure out which can is peach slices and which can is cannellini beans; taking a first run at captions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing; looking at medical imaging in conjunction with an experienced radiologist, etc. 

What it can't do is tell an original story, or make a true comment about the human condition. It steals from creators and produces a less good version of anything that a person could do.

Mal had a good time for a while giving prompts to an AI-generator for images... I hated that because I knew how wasteful it was. But he was able to work through the fun of that and stop after the novelty wore off. He learned how bad AI is at understand what people are actually saying, and how poorly it repackages the stuff it steals from.

I guess you could say that my feelings about AI are like screaming into an onion.