A letter from Nov 28, 2024

Dear FutureMe, I hope you find this email, I know we never check our personal email but now without all those colleges spamming us I hope the inbox isn't too cluttered for you. Today, it's Thanksgiving and I had some Pondu and Semolina. It isn't the usual Thanksgiving but I didn't feel like being around a lot of people so I didn't go with CJ wherever he was going. It wouldn't be bad but it's exhausting, I'd rather just stay home and read (I'm reading Breaking the Chains of Gravity right now) and play Stardew Valley. Tomorrow, I'm going to ask my mom to get me Chick Fil A. I haven't had it in a while, and it'd make me happy. The kids are coming this weekend so I'm going to get pizza too, I always get pizza when they come without fail, so that's great too. Enough about my day. Hopefully, you made it into NC State and didn't have to pay much. Sia's friends will already help if needed but if I don't get a full ride or at least a well paying scholarship I feel like my hard work in school wouldn't have meant much. I know it still does since if I didn't get good grades, I wouldn't be able to get into the Computer Science major at NC State since I know it's so competitive. But I still feel like I should have a scholarship to show for it. I hope PackASSIST gave me the scholarships needed like expected, though getting the Goodnight Scholarship will be the best. I'm not sure if I'll get it though since even though my family things I'm so smart, I'm not that smart. And I'm not motivated either. Other people, more motivated than me definitely, probably will get the scholarship instead. But still, I hope I do. I'd be nice, especially since my mom is really stressed about, even though like I said before, Sia's friends would help. So it really doesn't matter whether or not I get enough scholarships in the end. I'm not worried about getting into NC State (unless estimating my gpa from 3.96 to 4 will make them reject me somehow) but I'm hoping they didn't give me the Law major instead of Computer Science. I enjoy law and maybe would do it as a minor but it doesn't have anything to do with the job that I want. I'm not sure why I put it down as a second choice in the first place. If we're not in NC State right now, I'm guessing you're at UNC. There are other good schools we could go to, with better ranking, but I never cared about that for some reason. It's for the best that I do but I just want to go to places I was already familiar with before. Besides that, did you get the Stardew Valley Expanded mod? It's too bad you'll have to get another copy on Steam, the first two Perfection saves will always be important to me. I still like walking through and seeing what I did. Though I don't want what I did before to affect what I do in my new farm so I try not to look too much. At least with the Steam version, you can play a lot more Stardew Valley. Since I'm sure that there's not going to be another big update after 1.6 so my second save will probably be the only one on my Switch. Too bad I can't transfer the hours. Now if I want to tell people how long I've been playing, I'll have to add my Switch hours too. I don't have a job now but you might in the future, so I'm hoping we can play more Stardew now. College might make us too busy so I assume you only play during summer break, unless you're slacking in your work. As long as you keep your scholarships and end with a degree it doesn't matter. How is our level in French and Japanese right now? I'm sure our French is great. I'm trying my hardest to improve my listening skills before Mama Nady comes to America. I want to make sure that I can translate for her and I don't want her to struggle. I'm sure by now we can watch Youtube videos comfortably, which is what I want the most in the end. Reading comprehension I don't care about as much but that comes naturally with listening comprehension, unlike with Japanese. Those I have to practice separately. Listening is the most important for me but I'm still focused on reading since it's easier. How are you doing in your Japanese classes (I'm hoping you got in?) I'm trying to go slow this time and learn the first 2k kanji by May so that will be before the break before college starts. So if all went well I gave you a good boost for learning vocabulary. Hopefully you learned a lot during that break. It'd be good to learn a lot of vocabulary and only have to worry about reading / listening practice when actually in college. I'm sure I finished Bunpro by then too so you won't even have to worry about grammar much. Japanese class should be pretty easy for you, and now you even have dedicated time for learning Japanese. You (should) already know the kanji they're giving you so that's a bulk of memorization gone. The biggest thing I want you to learn there is output. For input, we can do that by ourselves easily but just like in French class, I know we'll need the class in order to replicate it ourselves. I'm finishing up the foundations in TryHackMe right now, the Pre Security path. I didn't do it for about 2 - 3 weeks which wasn't good, but now I'm getting back into it. The machine taking forever to start doesn't help though. I'd do something else while I wait and then end up forgetting. How much of TryHackMe have you finished by now? I haven't done enough to even put a goal, but I'm thinking of starting the Blue team paths just because I've heard that it's in higher demand. Red team looks funner but realistically we'll need both so I'll probably do Blue team, then Red. Did you make any friends in college? I've been more than happy without them throughout middle and high school so I don't mind if you haven't, but unfortunately we probably should be making some connection. You know what people say, "it's not what you know, but who you know". I didn't expect this to get so long. I didn't know what to say at first but then I thought of more and more things to say. I won't be disappointed if you haven't reached any of my goals, as long as you're feeling good about what's happened. But please try to focus on your Japanese studies more if you feel like you've missed the mark, we've been learning since middle school. I know we had a long break so maybe we should say we've been learning for maybe 3 years instead, less if we count the break days, but if we don't improve enough I'd feel a little bad. It'd feel like our time was wasted. But I know it wasn't. Learning Japanese is challenging so it's expected we don't do everything right first. Just think of whether we finished Bunpro, learned the 2k kanji (I have those two covered), and learned 10k vocab. I feel like that's a good point to be. If you haven't reached that goal yet, don't feel too bad. It's just an arbitrary number. But it'd be great if you did. If we did 40 words a day, we should be able to get to 10k before summer break. But I don't want to end up not doing that, so we can do about 25 a day and finish at about October 28 if done perfectly. It'll be going into college which is what I didn't want but it's not like we're going to stop learning after 10k right? Being focused on arbitrary numbers like that messed me up before, so lets just focus on being consistent now. Before, if I was able to do the 25 per day without messing up, I would want to increase. But then I'd end up being demotivated, so lets just stick with what works. If 25 a day doesn't work, we'll do 20. I'm going to go start working on my words right now. I'm glad I wrote this letter since it got me started. I was going to wait until I got all 2k kanji down which would take 173 days (~6 months so around the end of the school year) since I decided to decrease it from 25 to 10. I could do more but now that I'm feeling less motivated, I've decided to just decrease it so I can at least do a little bit a day. I've seen other people just do a bit instead of long stretches and unlike me, they do their Anki daily, so I'll follow in their footsteps. If I did before, I'd be done by now. At least I can still focus on vocabulary during break using this schedule. The final 500 kanji isn't nearly as important, they're relatively rare. I'm not sure if I'll spend the final 2 months doing them per day or only doing them when they appear in words I want to learn and focusing on vocab instead. But doing only 10 per day, it probably is low enough that it won't hurt me just to do it. I'll have to decide when I get there. Likely just do 10 per day and be done with it. I meant that final paragraph to be one sentence but ended up writing too much again. Now I've gotten to 1700 words. I'm rambling at this point, so sorry if the paragraphs are random or doesn't make sense. I've already written about the things most important to me right now: languages, cybersecurity, and college so I shouldn't drag this on. It looks like I enjoy putting my thoughts into words more than I expected. Sincerely, PastYou