i'm still here!
I have a few new updates for you all, but I also want to explain why I'll be updating this journal less frequently from now on. So to begin with, I know I haven't updated this site for a few weeks and there's a few reasons why. The first being that I'm just kinda busy right now. School is starting to pick up the pace, I'm self-teaching myself Spanish, and also there's a lot of coding that I have to do to properly update this journal page so it's starting to get really cluttered. I know some of you reading this don't code, but just know that every time that I update this page, I have to make a new file and copy the layout that I use onto the new file and then I have to open up a pre-existing file and edit it to include the new file and link back to it and if it sounds very tedious it's because it is. I have so many files from these journal entries alone that it's starting to get hard to keep track of all them to see what the last file was numbered as, since any images that I have uploaded onto here also count as a file and I have to wade through those also.
So basically what I'm getting at is that, yes I will still be updating this site, but I will only update the journal whenever I feel like I actually have something I want to talk about. If you take a look at the other pages on this site, I've tried my best to get one or two things in there so that it wouldn't be empty (besides the stories page, since I'm not much of a reader). I'm planning to start updating the movies page because my goal for this year is to watch 52 new movies that I've never seen before, and so far I think I've watched 14 new movies and I'm thinking so far that two of them are worthy of putting on my site for review. Of course, a lot more work goes into that too because if there aren't any pre-existing banners for the movies that I want to review I'm going to have to make them myself which is a little more time consuming than just pasting in code and editing it. But anyway, yeah look forward to a new movie review or two in hopefully the near future.
Okay, other updates besides all that; so the other day I made an instagram account to use to find and follow my friends from school on. I had an instagram account once before and it was so incredibly boring for me and I never checked it ever and then eventually after a while of not using it it got hacked so I just deleted my account (which is a very long and frustrating process that takes a total of 30 days btw) so I thought that that would be the last time that I had an insta account. But then fast forward and most of my friends use that as their main (or only) way of communication and also I think it would be fun to casually see what my friends have been up to and so far it's proven to be kinda fun since I was able to get in touch with a friend that kinda lost touch with me after we were moved to different schools.
the other thing that I mentioned earlier in this entry is that I am self-teaching myself Spanish. Well, in middle school I was required to take three years of Spanish and at the time I wasn't really interested in it so I didn't really pay attention and I ended up failing like two years of it but anyway, what I'm saying is that basically I already had some professional teaching with Spanish but because at the time I wasn't interested in it I didn't do very well. But even though I failed a few years, it turns out that I still remembered quite a bit of what we were taught in those classes after I started looking into what level I am and where to go from there to become fluent in Spanish. So I'm resting at an A2-B1 level, and to really boost myself into the intermediate stage and get out of the hazy upper beginner stage I'm going to have to start actually writing and speaking in Spanish and I'm still working up the courage to do that.
But anyway, what sparked this new interest in the language is realizing that I've kind of been a real jerk for not wanting anything to do with my culture or heritage. My dad is latino but he was a very nasty and angry man so in my middle school mind that equated to that "I want nothing to do with him, including his culture". But somewhere along the line I realized that, his culture is also my culture. And by being stubborn like this was just another form of self-hate and loathing so a few months ago I decided I'm just going to start embracing it and trying to pick up the broken pieces and try to mend them and maybe then I'll finally start feeling a little more like myself. So, the largest fragments are that I am Salvadoran, and that we speak Spanish. And so, I decided that the first step in this journey would be to learn Spanish, and so far it's been working out pretty nicely. The next step in this journey would be re-connecting with my culture and heritage, and I guess in that sense I'm lucky that I live in an area where most of the hispanic population is Salvadoran, so maybe when I go back to school somebody who is very in touch with the culture can teach me what it means to be Salvadoran. So far I've just made pupusas, the most popular dish of El Salvador (and it's delicious btw).
But uhmmm yeah that's pretty much how it's been going. Seeya soon, hopefully.