Desperate times call for desperate measures

That’s it – I’m not shaving or showering until this damn book is finished

Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash (I don’t quite look like this…yet)

It’s a good thing I’m not teaching or interacting very much with the public these days. My poor family has had no choice but to accept deal with this. I have been left with no other choice – it’s only the way to push myself to get this done and dusted. Sometimes in life we have to take drastic measures to force ourselves into action. My daughter says I look like a ruffian, but that she still loves me. So far, not too many problems.

“Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.” Charlie Munger, legendary investor (January 1, 1924 – November 28, 2023)

The more you learn, the less you seem to know. You realise all the gaps in your knowledge. Then you have to fill them.

This is true for everyone in life. For language learners, those gaps are often vocabulary. Don’t know the word you need? To get your message across, you’ll need to paraphrase. But then you can learn the word and use it the next time.

Just when I think it’s almost done…just when I think I’ve got the formatting figured out, or that I’ve finished editing a chapter, I discover that there is so much more to learn. There are so many gaps to be filled and they are seemingly infinite.

I’ve become an active reddit user. I had hardly ever used it or looked at it until the past couple of months, where I discovered the self-publishing sub-reddit (if you have never used reddit or don’t even know what it is, it’s basically a bunch of message boards where people chat about stuff. Actually, I’m not even totally sure what it is, I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the reddit world, but the self-publishing group has been a huge help.)

It's a steep learning curve publishing a book all on your own. At times it’s a rewarding and enjoyable challenge. At other times it’s frustrating and overwhelming. Once I get the hang of something, and at the moment that’s formatting, it’s a great feeling, but there are a lot of ups and downs along the way.

It’s a similar feeling to when I first started teaching. After my CELTA in April 2005, my first job was at a summer school just outside of London. I taught mainly Spanish and Italian teenagers in the morning, and we had activities and excursions in the afternoons and evenings. And late at night, teachers chatted late into the wee hours, drank a bit, you know, the usual things teachers abroad get up to.

I was so enthusiastic that first summer of teaching. Thrilled to be doing it, full of beans. And there were others like me. But there were also a few veterans of the industry, jaded by years of teaching, cynical old-timers who were grouchy and looked at us enthusiastic young bucks with derision. A few told me that I’d reach that point one day, but I thought, nah, impossible…

Like teaching for the first time, formatting is kind of fun and I’m enthusiastic right now. So enthusiastic, in fact, that I am eager to get started on my next book right after finishing this one. I’m getting way ahead of myself here, but I’ve already got copious notes and ideas for multiple books. I’m excited, but…(Can I make a living out of this? Would I want to? Will this enthusiasm disappear?)

With teaching, because of the long layoff I’ve had, I fear I’ve become that jaded, cantankerous curmudgeon, the one I never thought I’d be, and if you saw me now with my out-of-control beard and unkempt appearance – I look like some cave-dwelling hermit – you’d probably run a mile. As I mentioned earlier, thank goodness I don’t need to interact with the public too much right now (the other parents at my daughter’s kindergarten are too polite to say anything – yet).

A vocabulary break

Let’s stop for a minute and look at those previous four paragraphs. I hope you’ve read all the way through to this point without stopping to look up any unknown words. There are bound to be a few (for some of my readers). If you’ve listened to me and your other teachers over the years, and my advice in previous posts, you will be aware of how important it is not to interrupt your reading when you come across unfamiliar words and to try to guess the meaning from context. I think I’ve given you enough context for you to do this.

If you haven’t done so already, see if you were able to work out what these words or phrases meant, and whether you even need to in order to understand the main idea (or gist) of what I am saying. If you’re unable to guess, or just to double-check, then of course you should check a decent dictionary (Cambridge online is my go-to: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ruffian)

Paragraph 1: into the wee hours; get up to (much more natural than the simple, boring ‘do’ – What did you get up to last night? What are you getting up to this weekend? Also, without getting: What are you getting up to this weekend?)

Paragraph 2: full of beans; jaded; cynical; grouchy; young bucks; derision

Paragraph 3: copious

Paragraph 4: cantankerous; curmudgeon; unkempt (appearance); cave-dwelling

(One of my potential future books is already tentatively titled The Cantankerous Curmudgeon: Grumblings of a Teacher. It would feature an infinite list of all my pet hates and bugbears – and there are many. But would anyone actually want to read that? You tell me.)

And let me point out one other phrase: I’d run a mile.

If you are a metric system user – and many of my readers are – you might be wondering why we use ‘mile’ and whether we can say ‘I’d run a kilometre’. Nope. We just don’t. That would sound weird: “If I bumped into Daniel right now on the streets of Vienna, I’d run a kilometre!” If you said that to anyone, they would take it literally.

Two other nice examples:

Ukrainian cuisine is miles better than Georgian cuisine. (I’m not stating this as my opinion, this is merely an example – maybe I’m trying to wind up a few of my dear Georgian readers; maybe I secretly think Georgian cuisine is better; let me just say that both cuisines are pretty damn good, and on a worldwide scale, vastly underrated.)

You can really get a lot of mileage out of my upcoming book (I hope).

To put it more literally: you can get a lot of mileage out of a smaller car.

Can I say that something is kilometres better than something else? Nope.

Can I say that you can get a lot of kilometreage out of something? Nope.

Have a think for yourselves: what else is miles better than something else? What else can you get a lot of mileage out of?

English is a funny language, innit?

Speaking of having copious ideas for future books, I also have copious notes and ideas for this particular post. I’ve barely scratched the surface* of what I wanted and intended to say. But I want to keep this one somewhat short, and this is simply a ‘break’ from my formatting. I shall return to this theme and offer up lots more useful vocabulary in my next post, which I’m aiming to send out within a week, give or take a day or two.

(*repetition of that phrase is very intentional. I’m sure you noticed it earlier.)

In that one, I will go into more detail about my fascinating deep dive into porn and erotica in the self-publishing world. In my ‘research’, I’ve discovered more than I ever wanted to know about various ‘niche romance’ genres like erotic horror, magic, kink, FF, FFF, ENF, tentacle/lactation/transformation subthemes, fantasy LitRPG, and so much more that I won’t mention. I don’t understand much of this myself, especially the overwhelming number of acronyms. Trust me on this – don’t go looking any of this up, it’s all NSFW.

In the meantime, my daughter continues to ask me when I’m going to shave. At first, she said I felt prickly, like a hedgehog. Then, a ruffian. And now she says I look like a бомж (she mixes up languages a bit). For my non-Ukrainian friends, that means homeless, or a bum or a tramp. (be careful with tramp – it means completely different things in British and American English; my daughter is saying I look like the British version…I think…I hope…)

Either way, she’s being a bit harsh: the bums and tramps we see in Vienna are far less hirsute than me and that man at the start of this post. And I look miles worse.

A postscript

The legendary investor Charlie Munger died at the ripe old age of 99 the other day. His book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, is one of the most influential I’ve ever read. It’s about so much more than just investing. Munger has tons of wisdom when it comes to dispensing life advice. I’ll leave you with a handful of some of his best life-related quotations.

“I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge.”

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.”

“The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.”

“Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

“I always say I want to know where I would die so I can never go there.”

And lastly, Charlie’s three bits of advice on coping with life’s challenges:

1 Have low expectations.

2 Have a sense of humour.

3 Surround yourself with the love of friends and family.