Pelko ja kunnianhimo
Sep. 3rd, 2008 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
I've been putting off writing this for almost three days now (since I moved back here to the dorm) - in fact, I'm still struggling with procrastination - but these things in my mind need to be said. I keep forgetting them so I'm now making a list to make sure I get through all of them.
The last two weeks have been really difficult for me. Both weeks were difficult in their own ways. In the first week, my aunt was visiting from Vancouver. She's never been to Calgary and she wanted to check it out. She was disabled by a stroke a number of years ago, and so she has problems with body-temperature-feeling and food-impulse control. The last thing I'll say about her condition is that her mentality has slowly decreased (since the stroke) to that of a child, so imagine someone sounding like a bit of a broken record with utterances of the Cantonese equivalent of "apua mua" or "jumalauta" (or something like that) in every other sentence, having tantrums over being denied junk food (or any food that isn't either really sweet or really salty), complaining about feeling sweaty when it's a freaking comfortable 15°C outside, not wanting to walk and exercise, doing nothing but eating and sleeping (and going out) and you get the idea. No, really.
I bit my tongue for the first few days and tagged along, but by the end of the week the metaphorical tongue had been bitten through and I just stayed home when my parents went to tour guide her somewhere. I don't have the kind of patience my parents have for this sort of thing. I envied my sister, since she was working during the day all week.
Then last week we went to Vancouver to visit the rest of the relatives and get my sister ready to move back to UBC. In the meantime, since we're staying with my uncle, it was time to check up on his condition as well. He had been complaining of a pain in his leg which had started after commencing the radiation treatment. My mom accompanied him to his doctors' appointments (and acting as his back-up interpreter when the real interpreter didn't show up), so she found out a lot of stuff that my little-educated uncle was unlikely to (understand or) tell us of his own volition.
We found out that his cancer has spread to his bone and weakening his spine, which rather explains the pain. His doctor fast-tracked the treatments and added on chemotherapy, which starts this week. But the thing that worries us the most is just how much his condition changed during the week we were there. On Monday he was able to walk on his own; by Friday he was so weak he was using a cane (or wheelchair if available) and slept for most of the day, having almost completely lost his appetite.
Upon asking, the doctor told my mom that there's only a 2-3% chance of remission.
I think by this time we can tell (and in my parents' educated opinion), it's highly likely that I'll never see my uncle again.
And with this in the back of my mind, I moved back here to iHouse.
On Sunday, as I was trying to unpack but preferring to sit here trying to write this post about my uncle (and getting neither done), I suddenly felt a strange lethargy, a strange restlessness, a strange fear. One that was rather familiar, from the long days of singing and insomnia and reluctant engineering.
This was when I realized that if I don't handle this kaiho carefully, it has the power to destroy me as the other thing came close to doing.
I look around my room and see myself surrounded by all manner of Finnish things, including the copy of my timetable which I made this morning (A4 paper wins again!).
As much as I *know* that I am Finnish, it's difficult to be comfortable with that fact here because I know also that practically speaking, I am not and I never can be completely Finnish in a way that would be accepted without question, as if I were of their race. It is because of my colour that people at first think I'm just pretending, or that it's just some infatuation. The dreaded "Suomi-freak".
And the more I tell people that I am not what I appear to be, the less authentic my identity feels; As if telling is a compensation for fakery or not believing hard enough.
But I know too that I have interesting classes this year and there's really no doubt that I can do what I need to do in them; and thus this is all I have to push the dark side of kaiho away. It's my last year in the B.Sc.; I can't cop out now.
I gotta keep thinking of actually really really wanting to teach in Finland. That's what it is. That's the one thing to long for, after I made it to the previous thing I longed for.
And so in that spirit:
And there you have it. "Sisua Perkele!" ("[have] sisu, goddammit!")
P.S. They were putting up world posters in the hallway, and there's a Finland poster, which coincidentally ended up diagonally across the hall from me (instead of next to my door where I think it ought to have been).
P.P.S. I've scanned all of the pages in my scrapbook. Contact me if interested.
P.P.P.S. I'm using my shiny Nokia phone full-time now :D
P.P.P.P.S. My Finnish hockey logo t-shirt is the most comfortable shirt ever. The material is so soft! Totally worth the 24,90€ I paid for it (which, at the time, felt like a bit too much).
The last two weeks have been really difficult for me. Both weeks were difficult in their own ways. In the first week, my aunt was visiting from Vancouver. She's never been to Calgary and she wanted to check it out. She was disabled by a stroke a number of years ago, and so she has problems with body-temperature-feeling and food-impulse control. The last thing I'll say about her condition is that her mentality has slowly decreased (since the stroke) to that of a child, so imagine someone sounding like a bit of a broken record with utterances of the Cantonese equivalent of "apua mua" or "jumalauta" (or something like that) in every other sentence, having tantrums over being denied junk food (or any food that isn't either really sweet or really salty), complaining about feeling sweaty when it's a freaking comfortable 15°C outside, not wanting to walk and exercise, doing nothing but eating and sleeping (and going out) and you get the idea. No, really.
I bit my tongue for the first few days and tagged along, but by the end of the week the metaphorical tongue had been bitten through and I just stayed home when my parents went to tour guide her somewhere. I don't have the kind of patience my parents have for this sort of thing. I envied my sister, since she was working during the day all week.
Then last week we went to Vancouver to visit the rest of the relatives and get my sister ready to move back to UBC. In the meantime, since we're staying with my uncle, it was time to check up on his condition as well. He had been complaining of a pain in his leg which had started after commencing the radiation treatment. My mom accompanied him to his doctors' appointments (and acting as his back-up interpreter when the real interpreter didn't show up), so she found out a lot of stuff that my little-educated uncle was unlikely to (understand or) tell us of his own volition.
We found out that his cancer has spread to his bone and weakening his spine, which rather explains the pain. His doctor fast-tracked the treatments and added on chemotherapy, which starts this week. But the thing that worries us the most is just how much his condition changed during the week we were there. On Monday he was able to walk on his own; by Friday he was so weak he was using a cane (or wheelchair if available) and slept for most of the day, having almost completely lost his appetite.
Upon asking, the doctor told my mom that there's only a 2-3% chance of remission.
I think by this time we can tell (and in my parents' educated opinion), it's highly likely that I'll never see my uncle again.
And with this in the back of my mind, I moved back here to iHouse.
On Sunday, as I was trying to unpack but preferring to sit here trying to write this post about my uncle (and getting neither done), I suddenly felt a strange lethargy, a strange restlessness, a strange fear. One that was rather familiar, from the long days of singing and insomnia and reluctant engineering.
This was when I realized that if I don't handle this kaiho carefully, it has the power to destroy me as the other thing came close to doing.
I look around my room and see myself surrounded by all manner of Finnish things, including the copy of my timetable which I made this morning (A4 paper wins again!).
As much as I *know* that I am Finnish, it's difficult to be comfortable with that fact here because I know also that practically speaking, I am not and I never can be completely Finnish in a way that would be accepted without question, as if I were of their race. It is because of my colour that people at first think I'm just pretending, or that it's just some infatuation. The dreaded "Suomi-freak".
And the more I tell people that I am not what I appear to be, the less authentic my identity feels; As if telling is a compensation for fakery or not believing hard enough.
But I know too that I have interesting classes this year and there's really no doubt that I can do what I need to do in them; and thus this is all I have to push the dark side of kaiho away. It's my last year in the B.Sc.; I can't cop out now.
I gotta keep thinking of actually really really wanting to teach in Finland. That's what it is. That's the one thing to long for, after I made it to the previous thing I longed for.
And so in that spirit:
me: [10:59:02 AM]kyrasantae: how would you say "have sisu!" in finnish? (it's my motto this year) [11:00:20 AM]
And there you have it. "Sisua Perkele!" ("[have] sisu, goddammit!")
P.S. They were putting up world posters in the hallway, and there's a Finland poster, which coincidentally ended up diagonally across the hall from me (instead of next to my door where I think it ought to have been).
P.P.S. I've scanned all of the pages in my scrapbook. Contact me if interested.
P.P.P.S. I'm using my shiny Nokia phone full-time now :D
P.P.P.P.S. My Finnish hockey logo t-shirt is the most comfortable shirt ever. The material is so soft! Totally worth the 24,90€ I paid for it (which, at the time, felt like a bit too much).
