#silly finns

[gralloch-the-creepy]

There’s something very Finnish in standing in line for 25 minutes in rain at 2am on a chilly October day to get into a bar.

[tiikerikani]

When the cantor asked me after practice tonight whether I wanted to sing a solo, and wrote down the name of a song to listen to and consider singing, boy was I glad it wasn't "Olen suomalainen". Not that it'd even be a possibility in this context, but for some weird reason whenever people have written down names of songs that I should learn, that is always on the list.

I have no idea why the lolFinns always felt I had to perform that song.   ...actually, I do. It's because they never considered me an actual Finn at heart so they felt I had to do things like sing that derpy song to "demonstrate" my Finnishness or something.

But anyway, this Jaana Pöllänen song is more contemporary in style than I'm used to singing solos for, but okay

[tiikerikani]

Iltalehti headline (paraphrased): OMG IT SNOWED IN LAPLAND LAST NIGHT

“Snow could be seen on this traffic camera … just a bit, but some nonetheless.”

“It was not measurable, so it is not officially the first snow.”

Calgarians everywhere: Ahahahahahahahahaha remember Sept 8, lol

[tiikerikani]

Read reports on Facebook that it rained so hard on Saturday night at the LOLFinns cabin in Canada that they couldn’t even get the bonfire started. It was forecasted to be cooler and rainier than usual in Finland, but it was nice and dry most of the weekend in the Saimaa region (and ONLY this area) and when it rained hard here it was overnight. Not interested in bonfires and fortunately I skipped parties with them.

Also, doesn’t ANYONE use bug screens on their windows here? I’m getting dead mosquitoes all over the rug.

[tiikerikani]

Things That Are "Different" in Finland: Splitting logs

In Finland, I get to run the log splitter all afternoon too and I don’t even have to ask, nor be questioned about it, nor be relegated to stacking wood or doing housework instead. Just sayin’, lolFinnSoc. Real Finns™ are equal-opportunity people.

[tiikerikani]

"Well you see, if you give a Finn root beer, they'll think it tastes like toothpaste."

"What brand of toothpaste?"

"All of them."

[tiikerikani]

I don't know if it's being alone in my parents' house, or paper-writing stress, or keeping an eye on the flood stuff, but absolutely nothing productive has gotten done this week except for shipping my box of books and stationery for Markus to take care of until September, recording the shitty cover of the mandolin song the other day, the Skype meeting with my prof, finishing a card game rulebook translation I started 3 years ago, and reinforcing the holey bits on my patchy canvas messenger bag (which has been retired to light duty only). And that paragraph last night, which is the only actual work of immediate necessity.

I feel...melancholy. Waking up anxious. I'm caged inside myself. I hardly know him but I wish I could be with Markus. The presence of non-strangers.

The silly FinnSoccers are back from their silly cabin now, and the pictures are slowly coming on Facebook. I'm trying not to care: it's six hours away by car and it's not like I was there last year either. But it's hard. There's still something bitter in me about that, though I keep telling myself that I'll soon be among real mökkejä, real saunoja, real järviä, real metsiä, real suomalaisia. As real as can possibly be, and more real than the quaintness that those men never in good faith allowed me to be part of.

I want to hold my student visa in my hand so I know that it's really happening. But I won't have it for a few more weeks.

I don't feel like trying to get drunk again just to get the inhibitions away long enough to write another paragraph for the article, so I'm going to call it a night.

[tiikerikani]

I was about to make a further comment about the last post. About the way, to silly expats, knowing how to speak Finnish completely overrides any other deficiencies in adhering to the stereotype, but then realized that the analogy I was about to make was to what happens when Antti and I throw the prepositional complements for my research verbs into the logistic regression model.

The preposition says too much about which verb goes into the sentence, overshadowing any semantic considerations. That is, for example, if the preposition is on, that practically tells right off that the verb is most likely to be reflect by a huge margin. Sure, think on and ponder on are okay too (and show up in the data), but it's too heavily weighted toward reflect on that nothing else about the sentence context really matters anymore. But it's those other things that are actually interesting and tell us something about what those verbs mean (while choice of preposition is more of a syntax thing). So we decided to leave the prepositions out of the modelling equation.

In other words, for the silly expats, speaking Finnish is the gold standard for "acting/being Finnish". No matter if you hate bonfires or binge drinking or rye bread or going to the cottage, or, hell, even if you hate sauna. If you speak the language fluently, you are in their minds a legit Finn. Nothing else matters.

Let's see what happens if we leave that out of the equation. You might better understand what being a Finn is really about.