Compliments

P: You are probably one of the toughest and most stoic persons I've ever met.

M: Why thank you. Obviously I will have to suppress any pleasure that statement might have given.

P: And that is exactly why I like you, hahahah

Chance

Do you know someone who has had too many chances of putting things right but has continuously declined to? Someone who doesn't let go of the pride holding him/her back.

My mom has been guild tripping me to reunite with someone like this. I can see that she wants to make things better before it's too late.

She doesn't understand that this person has contributed absolutely nothing to our relationship since donkey's years ago.

I sometimes wonder if I will regret blocking this person when he is gone. I wonder if I should let go of all the things that were said and done. I wonder if things would be better and forgotten.

But when I have swallowed my pride and put the cat on the table myself and only got pathetic answers in return, do I really want this person in my life? Everyone gets a chance, most people get two but this person has continuously ignored or laughed at this situation. Why would I bother?

Why should I be the adult when he has had so much more time to act like one?

A Bad Day

Seeing as no one is listening:

FUCK

The Truth

This thing was inspired by a competition one of my family members was holding. The task was to write about our great grandmother who would have been hundred years old this month and then other family members would vote for the best.

My input was obviously too unflattering to ever end up on the webpage. But censorship only reaches out to the domains they own…

I’m way too young to remember my great grandmother; in fact I think she passed away several years before I was even thought about. Hence I can only imagine what she was like; put together with the little information I have been told over the years.

My great grandmother was a hardworking and traditional Finnish housewife. On top of her numerous children, she also adopted an orphan ignoring the fact that she was struggling to feed her own, let alone someone else’s kids. She married my great grandfather, who was born blind and remained so for all of his life. These facts seem to suggest that she was a loving and sympathetic woman who extended her love for those who had nothing.

While she probably kept the family together with a padded version of an iron fist, not much can be said about the people who were supposed to continue her legacy. If she was ever to return to see how we were getting on, she would be utterly appalled.

While most people have managed to break out from poverty and the constant worry over money, few have found themselves carrying on any of her sympathy. The large family she left behind and which kept extending long after she had passed away has disintegrated.

“What do you mean?” I hear the loudest crying out now. And yes, I am dying to give you some very cruel details of people doing horrible things to others in this family but I will most likely be excommunicated. I too am as greedy and soulless that I want to keep that very weak thread around our petty family, for my inheritance sake.

But without going into TOO much detail I can point out the things that are laid right before your eyes. For years, one of the oldest members of this family has been completely ignored. This seems to be due to a certain problem she has. Her direct family can’t seem to put up with her behaviour. Fair enough. However if they had bothered to investigate this matter a little closer, they would have found that her problems are directly linked to loneliness and the fact that no one seems to go over and visit.

These people who quietly judge her behaviour have in the mean time extended their “give hassle and I’m gone”-attitude to their children. With few exceptions, we find ourselves looking at people who have literally abandoned their offspring due failed marriages and teenage trouble. Some of these people have moved on and accepted that their parents have emotionally discontinued the relationship; some have crept through the darkest holes and fortunately found some new people to rely on.

There will be a time when we all get old and when everyone else has passed away. It is then when the spark for reviving these broken strings comes back to life. And that is when you find that you are the despised, lonely and troubled person you had ignored for most of your adult life. And believe me, no one is coming to save you.

Weeds, the reality version

She obviously did not watch the show carefully enough!

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.

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?

The "You know you've been in Ireland for too long" thingy

Due to endless requests blocking my e-mail I will once again review the strange habits and customs of the Irish.

You know you have been in this country for too long when the following doesn't cause any disturbance or wondering of any sort:

Doors and locks - it's completely normal that your front door opens inwards, not the opposite like in Finland. Also, you might have a huge lock on the door but you could easily remove the hinges with a screwdriver.

Carpets - They are everywhere, you have begun to defend their existence in the bedrooms etc and you're completely ignoring the health risk factor.

Drinking - You're disgusted if the pint you ordered is not so full that you're spilling the drink everywhere. A pub offering only one brand of beer on tap would make you laugh. You now consider jagerbombs cocktails and think people requesting blue lagoons etc, are uptight snobs.

Personality - You no longer think it's weird if a complete stranger starts to talk to you. In fact, if you're trapped in a place with someone else, the silence which didn't bother you before, feels unbearable. You're also able to have lengthy conversations about the weather multiple times during the same day.

Food - Eating fried eggs and bacon for breakfast seems appealing. Lunch consists of sandwiches and crisps and you drink tea with your dinner. You add salt and vinegar to your fries and a batter sausage no longer reminds you of heart attacks.

I might update this at a later stage for your reading pleasure

I love love love Image

That freaky looking woman, my dear friends is the latest Finlandia book award winner

Ah the blessed Finnish journalism. I finally took a closer look at the xmas edition of Image. If you can put aside all the obvious elite shite, this piece of printed stuff is bloody genius!

I'm currently writing down a list of all the interesting stuff I found in my beloved Image, music, books and what not. I keep going "ooh aaah" while I look at the state of the art photojournalism in it.

If anyone wants to buy me a subscription, I will love you forever and be your ultimate housewhore for decades. Anyone?

I've been brainwashed!

the Christmas lights of the circus town

After my trip to Finland I have

• seriously considered colouring my hair darker and getting some crazy hair cut
• thought about buying an account on a webpage that streams Finnish TV-shows
• rediscovered some Finnish music and films I used to love
• understood the true meaning of the word honesty
• remembered how it feels like to be really close to someone
• ate nothing but rye bread with some crazy cream cheese on it
  
• realised how different I am now than I was when I left Finland...

...and it makes me wonder if I was able to live there again some day.

The Feeeenland Xperience

Well well well.

Finland, my dear motherland has been somewhat interesting this year. It seems that since the last time, a lot of my old school mates have settled down (eek), had children (eek) but are otherwise still exactly the same they were before.

I have been nearly able to keep myself from cracking up, but I must admit I seem to be going through some sort of a cultural shock, even though I know how things go here. It's still hard to get used to the uncomfortable modesty, straightforwardness and the polite minding one's own business attitude

I've adapted a tiny bit though. I've relearned not to say hello to people and I didn't think it was too weird that my ex boyfriend pinched my ear while passing by instead of saying hi. After a few fatal incidents I've learned not to joke around as freely, as people here have a completely different sense of humour, so it seems.

It has been good to catch up with people and do absolutely nothing all day. It'll be even better to go back to Ireland, and re-realise that maybe the little shitty green island isn't that bad after all.

News and what not

I booked my flights to Finland. I shall be arriving on 22nd and leaving on the 29th of December. If anyone over there wants to meet up, e-mail or ring me.

In other news, nothing. I've literally been sitting here trying to write essays for the last 5 days. I've two more to go and a group project which I'll hopefully get done this weekend. How pathetic. I need some entertainment soon.

Talking to a friend the other night, the topic of Christmas inevitably came up. As said I'll be doing the family Christmas again which I hate. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike my family but the minute it's Christmas Eve my mother turns into a lunatic and that lasts up until after New Year's Eve. She loves Christmas and always wants to spend it in the most traditional way ever, where as all I want to do it eat nice food (not Christmas food!, have a couple of drinks and relax. But as it is, I usually end up escaping to one of the many parties held on Christmas Eve by people equally annoyed with the whole thing.

One year I'll just get all my friends together and have that for the whole of Christmas.

Until then I'll have to try and enjoy the usual celebrations. If it wasn't for my mother, I would have probably stayed at home on my own this year. Nothing beats a night when the house is empty and you can lazy around in your pyjamas all day. Maybe next year ;)