I Did It! (And Other Things I’m Currently Doing)
It’s been a while since I wrote a post for this blog! I have a pretty good reason, I think: I finally finished my thesis! I feel so incredibly relieved to have it done. I can finally close my Oregon chapter for good and move on.
It’s certainly bittersweet—I grew up in Oregon and lived there for my entire life up to this point, but I cannot call it home anymore. In a way I feel almost forsaken by my mother state, who let my home and my neighbors’ homes burn to the ground and yet continues to do the bare minimum in preventing another catastrophe like the one on September 8th. In the wake of the upcoming holiday, many cities have not only banned fireworks but also cancelled their city-sanctioned fireworks displays due to an unprecedented heat event (a local joke that the city of Bend sets Pilot Butte on fire every year on the 4th has become decidedly less funny as the years go by). Yet little has been done to protect those most vulnerable, merely opting for sweeping homeless camps rather than aid them and provide proper shelter. It’s frustrating to witness from my position here in Philadelphia, but I know there are folks fighting for the right thing.
While I would love to speak yet again on the impact the fire has made on me and my former community, I find it terribly exhausting and would instead use my energy to do other things, like learn how to code! When I first moved to Philly, unemployed in the midst of a pandemic, I decided a great way to spend my time was to learn a programming language. I feel that it’s become increasingly more important to become tech-literate on a variety of levels, not only to make one’s own life easier but to perhaps make everyone’s lives easier. If more and more of our lives are going to be spent in online spaces, then we need to make sure those spaces remain up-to-date and functional, as well as safe and secure. This is, of course, my very un-nuanced layman opinion. I don’t expect to be getting any jobs at cybersecurity firms with 30 hours of Javascript experience.
I’m reluctant to admit, I have an ulterior career motive for learning how to code, and that is my love of video games. Is it silly and/or unrealistic to hope for a job in game dev with only a liberal arts degree and two Codecademy classes? Quite so, I think, but maybe after three or four my prospects will look a little brighter (ha!). I was flirting with the idea of going back to school once again for a CS degree, but I’ll wait and see where this current job search takes me.
While I’d like to reserve game talk for another post, I will say that I’ve also been inspired to pick up Japanese again thanks to my pandemic obsession: the Yakuza series (Ryū ga Gotoku as it’s known in Japan). These games provide such a rich game world that feels almost like virtual tourism; it took me straight back to when I was 15 on my school trip to Japan. After playing nearly every game back-to-back over the course of this last year (8 games total in the main series), I’ve decided to brush off my three years of Japanese language classes I took in high school and become properly proficient. After reviewing most of the basic level course, I’ve determined that I could probably pass the JLPT at the N5 level. I do pretty well at listening comprehension, but I’m still catching up with my kanji (I can read hiragana and katakana without much issue).
I find it’s gratifying just to be learning again, especially on my own terms. I find myself caught, then: Do I go back to school or work for a while? I’m so anxious to enter the job market (in both the positive and negative sense of the word) but I also miss school. Like I mentioned before, I would want to get a degree that’s totally unrelated to my field; I’ve considered a Ph.D in the past because I thought that that needed to be my path, but I think going that route would also be incredibly restrictive.
In any case, I’ll leave it there for now. Maybe I’ll talk about something more fun next time!