I've had this blog for quite a while—almost three years, I think—but I never had anything much to say on it, and I only gave it infrequent attention. So I archived everything and hid it from the front page. Now I've moved to Virginia, and this is the first time that I've really lived by myself. I've had residences that I lived in alone, but there was always a group of people that I knew nearby—in class, in sports, at ISU in France, while traveling. This time, out in Careerville, USA, it's different. I don't intend to complain about being lonely, but now that work is centered between 9am and 6pm with bookend time for commuting—different than the ol' 9am to 2am life of university engineering studies—I have an unfamiliar amount of free time, but no life to put into it.

I'll find a life, surely, I'm not worried about that, I suppose that it takes a little bit of time to get settled—planting my feet before moving forward. I'm not going to talk about that here. I intend to use this space for a pastime, one that I want to fulfill to a high degree of understanding: learning to speak languages other than English. I want to speak Spanish and Hindi fluently; I want to speak basic Punjabi; I want to have a moderate vocabulary in Farsi, Russian, and Arabic.

My motivation for doing this isn't interesting. I have some level of experience—in some cases, a very modest level—and friends that speak all of these languages. I have been studying some of them offline by myself. I am trying to keep it simple for now: one word a day in each language, six-a-day. I thought it would be an interesting idea to keep a counterpart journal online so that if anyone else could help me—hint, hint, the same friends I just mentioned—I could learn more and perhaps meet a few other people with a similar interest. I don't expect to be diligent enough to do six-a-day online everyday as well as on paper, but, hey, some is more than none.

Now the hard part, always the hard part: adding the first post...