Managing unemployment

So I've been finding unemployment pretty stressful and depressing. The inability to do anything fun/meaningful/that requires even a little bit of money is horrible and limits what I can get up to on this list. I've decided to try and get through this by learning. I love learning. It's one thing I'm pretty good at. So at the moment I'm trying to learn a couple of things.

Firstly, I'm learning Italian using the website "Memrise". Essentially this is a flashcard website so pretty good for learning vocab, but also has the neat trick of visualising learning as growing a flower - so first you "plant the seed" and try and memorise the words. 4 hours later it has you come back and "harvest" it and see if you can remember the words - if you can't it makes you practice again. Then every so often it has you "water" the flower, so continually topping up your knowledge. It's working pretty well. You can also "overwater" and practice more in between times. Perhaps once I know enough Italian to string a sentence together I'll write some here... I've also had busuu.com and lang-8 suggested to me to improve my Italian, so I'll probably head over there once I can actually express myself a little in Italian.

Whilst on Memrise I discovered they have a lot of other things you can learn, but mostly really poorly done. I had a look at anatomy and physiology and Alzheimer's, but it seems they're not really flash card learning stuff, with some deeper knowledge required. The one thing that does seem to work for it is geography. Now, when I was about 3 or 4 I knew all the countries, rivers and seas in the world. I was an odd kid. As I grew up I forgot this, but I kind of want to get that knowledge back, so I've been practising that. So far I have all of Europe learned, with only a few of the Eastern European countries still giving me trouble. Incidentally, I thought Estonia was way further south than it is.

ALSO, I found out a little while back that MIT (a fairly prestigious American University) is offering their degree courses for free over the internet. So I've started learning from their brain and cognitive sciences course. Naturally I won't get a degree at the end, but that knowledge may end up being very useful in my career.

So those are my plans for staying sane whilst unemployed - my attempt at a meaningful occupation. The only one of those things on my list of goals is to learn Italian, and I don't think I'll change that. For now anyway.

Onwards and Upwards!