Blerg.

Lately I've been getting occasional bursts of energy and inspiration and motivation for self-improvement, which would be well and good if they didn't always occur in the middle of the night. I tried to go to sleep early(ish, at about half past midnight), but woke up around 4:00 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. Instead, I read up on the Supreme Court decision giving law enforcement officials the go-ahead to take a cheek swab of any arrestee's DNA without obtaining a specific warrant in advance, the nouveau riche class in mainland China, and a Philadelphia experimental theatre company's race-swapped adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Philadelphia. I scrolled through Tumblr for a while and reblogged some crossover fanart of John Watson à la BBC Sherlock in his soldier days with a pet Growlithe because that's the kind of thing that appeals to me these days. Then I tried in vain to find an original source for said fanart, and lamented that we live in a world where people don't think to credit artists before appropriating their work for Tumblr-fame.

Then I got sad about how much I think about Tumblr in general.

I've been trying to brush up on my French again. If I'm completely honest, a lot of that effort is driven by guilt at including "French: intermediate reading, writing, and translation proficiency; conversational speaking proficiency" on my graduate school résumé, which is...a stretch. I once vaguely considered how much I would enjoy working as a literary translator, and I still anticipate that I'll need to manage quite an advanced level of reading proficiency to take advantage of academic resources in French someday, so it's a career-driven goal in that way. I also have lofty ambitions of reading at least sections of Proust in the original French at some point in my life -- who doesn't? (People with better things to do/care about.) Part of it, too, is the stubborn refusal to let what was technically a very significant chunk of my education (six years through middle/high school, an AP class, a 300-level college course, travel in Paris and Belgium) go to waste. Duolingo has been enormously helpful in helping remind me of the basics, and I've been pleasantly surprised to realize how much I already/still understand of the more subtle nuances that don't come across so well in online software. It's also incredibly satisfying to learn new vocabulary, which is one of the most instantly gratifying intellectual experiences out there. It's hard not to brag, actually: I didn't know this word in French yesterday, and I do today, which makes me one word smarter now than I was then, you guys! Be thankful I don't tweet about it every time.

I'm also blogging again, I guess. I'm an unemployed English major; it's basically a right of passage.

Me and John Watson: SO ALIKE .