Let's not go down this road, Finland

I was reading the news on MTV3 and discovered that the Orthodox pastor Father Mitro has apparently been planning on running for a seat in the soon to be held EU-elections. However his church recently held a meeting during which it criticised Mitro's actions and will decide whether or not to let him go for it in the near future. In the interview, he confessed how shocked he was about this criticism and that he really couldn't understand it.

For those of you who do not know him, Father Mitro is a very public figure of the orthodox church and is often quoted in matters of religion and social issues. I have actually met him once at a christening and have always thought that he was a very warm and pleasant man.

Despite of that, I now have to confess myself, that I was shocked to hear him going for it in the first place. Yes, he is someone who has been influencing a lot of the religious life in Finland. He is most likely a good and honest man. But there is a conflict between what he represents now and what he would like to represent in the future. He stands before such ridiculous values (those of his church's) which I and a whole lot of other freedom loving Finns would not like to enforce.

Again, I have a lot of faith (no pun intended :)) in his abilities to do the job. With a lot of issues he might be solving, he would probably do a good job. But he is a man who devoted his life to religion, and frankly to something that makes very little sense. He will obviously be influenced by these beliefs that he holds. It will interfere with his decision-making.

Now why can't a christian person run for a seat then? Of course they can and have done. But father Mitro is a priest of a minority church. I have no objection to, say a muslim running for the same seat but I would not approve of him trying to enforce the Sharia law when he is holding a seat of a country in which it is not the will of the majority. Same thing with Mitro. He would take advantage of his celebrity image and probably win a seat but if he was just an average orthodox man, he would probably not be elected due to people not sharing his values!

And in the end, as much as I can feel his desire to make a difference, by getting into politics, he is sacraficing his duties as a churchman to his people and even though I personally don't think his guidance is needed, he devoted his life to this sort of thing and unless he decides to leave the church, he has no business in the elections.

#@@!$!%

As the title suggests, I'm pissed off again. Unfortunately this place will again have to be the outlet for all this fucking ridiculous retardness.

It just seems that every single fucking time I get my shit together something new pops up. EVERY FUCKING TIME!!! This time the shit sent me straight to hell and while I was on my way home after this particular incident, I prayed no one would start to talk to me cuz I probably would have killed them right there and then.

FOR FUCKING 8 MONTHS I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE TO DO WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BY LAW! Finally I was promised that shit will be sorted by this weekend. So I go my merry way and think everything's gonna be ok.

And then...

NOTHING.

ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING DONE ABOUT IT.

WTF!!!!!!

The best part however is the aftermath. It's seldom that I totally lose it. This time was one of them. I must have pretty much used all the insults I have ever learned in both lingos respectively. I pretty much threatened to sue. I don't know how I managed to stop myself from physically harming this person. The fucking adrenalin rushing through me at that moment would have easily made me explode like a nuclear bomb.

There there, some would say now. It's not the end of the world. Damn fucking right it is not. But it fucking pisses me off I get fucked left, right and centre ALL THE FUCKING TIME! It is inconvenient to say the least, let alone putting me through more drama trying to sort the shit out caused by someone else's utter and disgusting lazyness. After fucking everything I have done to help when times were rough and all I get is more SHIT.

Sigh.

Right, better get on with this shit again I guess. Some day I'll just stop trying.

Motivation issues

Things that I should be doing:

• Reading 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood'
• Writing my reading journal
• Going through source material for my two philosophy essays
• Getting ready for my Fall of Athens exam
• Catching up with Literary Genre stuff

And all I want to do is to drink coffee, read shit on the Internet, watch TV, smoke and sleep.

Someone needs to give me a good kick.

The Making of a Finn abroad

While working on Friday I learned that a Finnish girl is due to arrive to my neighbourhood pretty soon. The big change which is ahead for her made me get all nostalgic and think about all those things that were surprisingly easy or difficult when I first came here and how the significance of those things has changed.

For me, leaving Finland was pretty easy. To be honest I could not wait to get out of there and was determined to cope and intergrate. I was aware that things might not work out or I might be very lonely but that certainly did not stop me.

Probably one of the hardest things was to open up to a completely different culture. Me and certainly a whole lot of other Finns can be very quiet and private in comparison to the foreigners. It wasn't so much that I didn't cope with it, it was harder for the people around me. They did not understand where I was coming from and took me as a bit rude and depressed in some way.

Another thing which caused some hassle was the different mentality. People seldom keep their promises around here and it took some practice to know when something was actually gonna happen or when people were just saying shit. Also the lack of order in a lot of things was overwhelming.

These days those things are not quite so difficult. I have changed and people around me have got used to my personality. I doubt I would have wanted to stay if I hadn't been so determined to change and adapt. That is not the case with a lot of other Finns I know around here.

To me the change has been so significant that I feel like an outsider whenever I go back home to Finland these days. I seem to have lost my copy of the Social Conduct. I don't think I'm very Irish either but some sort of odd mixture. Not being (mentally) from anywhere makes me happy, it means I'm not stuck here or anywhere.

Language crisis

Grammar police in action

Last night I had the ever so delightful task of writing a letter to the Finnish social welfare office. While the issue was pretty straightforward, the task wasn't. This time it wasn't the bureacracy that was killing me but the unability to write in my native lingo! I kept writing and erasing and rewriting but it just seemed to me that I wasn't making any sense. This led to paranoia even with familiar and easy sentences and everything I wrote just sounded...wrong somehow.

I don't get to use much of my terrible Finnish these days. In fact, the only time I use it is the once or twice a month conversation I have with my mom and the odd Finnish friend I talk to on Facebook. I guess it's pretty normal to be out of practice in this situation but what worries me is the longer I refrain from using it on a constant basis, the harder it will be to ever manage to write and speak fluently.

It would be little less painful if my English would have replaced Finnish as the native lingo. But it seems I still struggle with words and grammar and even though I'm well able to survive with the every-day business, I still feel like I'm academically retarded when it comes to language. It's particularly difficult as writing was always my best skill and now it just seems like I can't get it out anymore.

It doesn't help that a lot of my fellow students and even the tutors are not any better. I'd love for someone to look at my essays and correct even the little bit of confusion and error in them but at the present situation I get essays back and even I can find the grammar mistakes that the tutor did not notice. Finland in this aspect is completely different, and I've never met so many people completely ignorant and uninterested in writing the proper way and with proper lingo as I have in here. Academia in here seems to consist of fancy words with stupid apostrophy mistakes in between. They have the likes of Joyce and Yeats in their proud literary history but the modern university student can't even spell 'benefit' correctly.

So how do you expatriats (I know you've been lurking around) manage to cope with the lack of Finnish lingo abroad?