The Endless Hiatus

Hello Everyone.

Once again, it has been a while. It seems like I am constantly in hiatus mode these days, but life keeps through curveballs straight to my ballsack these days, so it seems like I am constantly dealing with fatigue and low energy. That, and I'm still working on my PhD. With some luck, I might be able to finally finish it this year, and then to be honest, I don't know what I'm going to do from there. I've dealt with so many things in my life, especially in the last few years alone, I'm just incredibly burnt out in general.

I'm a divorced father of two that has to deal with a deranged, abusive, narcissistic baby mama, while somehow having to take care of two young children and balance a PhD program at the same time. I am also dealing with ADHD, some PTSD, and Major Depressive Disorder, and now, I seem to be having some chronic health issues with my colon and liver, which I can only guess is due to the extenuating circumstances I have had to endure for over 10 years of my past life.

In short, it seems I have early signs of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and what seems to be some sort of autoimmune disorder that is currently targeting my digestive system. The doctors are not entirely sure what it could be yet, but they are thinking it could ostensibly be either Crohn's Disease (which would be horrible), Celiac Disease (which is unpleasant, but not nearly as bad), or Ulcerative Colitis. I would rather not have any of those conditions, but if I had to choose one of the 3, it would definitely be Celiac Disease. As much as I enjoy bread, pasta and whole grains, I would rather wean myself off of those than have a severely debilitating condition eat away at my digestive system and drastically compromise my quality of life and shorten my lifespan.

I am hopeful that it is not Crohn's Disease, because I am not suffering from any sudden, unexpected weight loss, although I have been dealing with some other disturbing symptoms, which I will not go into too many details about.

In any case, yeah. That's life for you. Constantly full of shit (pun intended), and constantly full of disappointment. On a more positive note, I have managed to complete a "fun" little side project that I have been working on with the little bit of free time that I have enough energy to use. I have been studying Kiswahili, and I think I will apply my knowledge to start up a new website, which will offer fairy tales in Swahili for anyone that wants them for free. I am pretty sure that many popular fairy tales from The Brother's Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson are public domain by now, so I won't get into any legal trouble by offering free translations of the fairy tales into Swahili, at least, not that I'm aware of. If and whenever I get that other website up and running, I will add a follow-up post with a link to that website.

The reason why I'm planning to do that is because I feel like although the textbook I used to learn Kiswahili taught me many things, I'm surprised with how many basic terms and vocabulary I still feel like I don't know, and I also find Swahili grammar to be surprisingly complicated, compared to something like Spanish or English, so this would be a good way to refine my grammatical skills and master the language in its entirety (or as close to it as I can get, anyway). As it so happens, I have some friends from Kenya that are native Swahili speakers, and I feel like they would be willing to help me out with proof-reading the texts after I attempt translating them. I feel like it may be of some benefit for native speakers of Swahili, because then they can at least enjoy reading a carefully translated, peer-reviewed version of the story instead of a sloppy auto-translation from something like Google Translate - not that I have anything against Google Translate. It just seems to me that due to the limitations of the software, Google Translate can't compare to human translations of text, not in my opinion. I am sure as time progresses, AI will allow for very human-like translations, but so far, from what I've seen and dabbled around with, it doesn't quite pass the Turing test. I see several articles here and there where students try to cheat their way through university classes by having AI write their essays for them, but in most cases, it is still very easy to tell the difference between an essay written by a real human, and one that is written by an AI. Google Translate is good for understanding the basic gist of something, but it leaves something to be desired if you are trying to read something for its literary value. That said, I also feel like many things in general are lost in translation, and the only way to truly enjoy literature in its entirety is to read it in its original language. This is a story for another day, but one of my crazy life dreams is to have a personal library full of books in their original languages, and for me to be a polyglot so I can appreciate all of them in the way they were originally written. That said, a carefully thought out and respectable translation of the text is definitely leaps and bounds over something automatically outputted through translation software. Anyway, that's what I intend to do.

I don't know if anything will come out of it, nor exactly do I care; I'm just doing what I want to do and providing a service which may or may not be beneficial to other people. If my resources help even one person somewhere in the world, I will consider it a success.

That said, to any of you who are still loyally following my website, I think you once again for your time and patience. Perhaps one way I can ease myself back into GSAG in the future is to share some of the horror stories I have experienced in my life. Rather than being a self-help blog, this website might become an autobiographical blog for a while. That said, because I don't want to be targeted by some potentially dangerous people in my life, I will try to keep specific names, locations, etc., anonymous. In any case, we shall see I suppose. Just know that I will never give up on this website, even if it feels that way sometimes. Just bare with me, and this website will be up and running the way it was when I first started. Thank you and have a good day.