rakkauden ja epätoivon laulu

So I became quite sick today drinking about half of a glass of beer and eating a veggie sandwich and a bowl of curried soup. And by sick I mean drunk. And by drunk I mean breaking into a sudden sweat and the feeling in my arms and legs became very very sensitive, that is, even the smallest pressure on them like resting my head on my arm or crossing my legs would make them numb. And feeling woozy. And a very scary disorientation when I got out of my chair to make a run for the washroom. Staggering, the world spinning around me.

Needless to say, I pretty much found myself needing to sit down for a while (not gonna lie down on a restaurant washroom floor. No. Just no.) and time speeds up and I try to drink water with a straw which is hard when you really want to just put your head down on the table. (I have come to expect at least some disorientation with drinking alcohol, which is why I try to remember to carry a walking stick if I go anywhere with the intent of possibly drinking.)

I messaged CFJ to ask him to please come carry me outside or walk me home or whatever and he just seemed so...resentful about it. He has a habit of hiding his feelings when he shouldn't, and speaking his mind when he shouldn't. (That's why we semi-amicably broke up at the end of the summer. I mean, I know I've been super-clingy since and still showing up at his place a lot when I ought to give him some space, but.. ) He was like "sigh I'm coming now" and he comes to get me and he says "You know, I was in the middle of a Magic tournament online" and it's just ... like he's BOTHERED by having to help out a buddy in need.

I've stayed home for the last couple of days, but as evident from the time at which I'm posting this, I get all this ennui and don't want to go to bed until very very very late and my body just wants to shut down when I'm here; while if I spend the night at his place I usually go to bed between 10:30 and 12 because he does and I feel tired and I wouldn't want to keep playing Guild Wars 2 on his TV screen while he's trying to sleep (muting just won't do). On the other hand, I can better take care of my skin care needs here, but better my dental needs there. So I don't know. In the grand scheme of things I think maybe good rest is a little bit more important than good hygiene, though both are important.

He was struggling the other day with finding a nice way to tell me to go away, and it's obvious that I got the message and stayed home, yet he seemed very indifferent when I admitted that every day without seeing him still really really sucks.

I've asked him before how and why he still puts up with me, and his only answer is "I don't know". But I see now, that "I don't know" here really means "I know but there's no point telling you because it's not going to change your mind about whatever you have in mind". But sometimes you need to know, right?

As for the drunkenness - something similar happened earlier this year and I also wasn't able to finish one serving of alcohol before I got similarly sick but not quite as drastically. The only other thing in common? Eating curry. So I think alcohol and curry don't mix. Anyone know why, and maybe it's related to my sensitivity to spicy food and how that makes my hands numb?

(I suppose today I was also very famished; the server remarked that I finished eating my meal very quickly. It's likely that I drank too quickly while I was at it. I don't remember what the context was the other time.)

[CSG],

Grr, coworkers. They make me want to run away to Finland, or at least to live closer to you so I can have Nordic energy and values around me.

~tuuli

SHE still can't stop talking about being excited for Vegas. SHE counts down the day and hours. SHE also can't stop talking about getting drunk. i.e. SHE was drunk last night too because she gets free drinks at one bar where SHE knows the owner. SHE is one of those people whose only idea of a good time is one of total intoxication and only pride is that SHE doesn't get hangovers. In fact, SHE is upset that her mother won't let HER sleep in while they're in Vegas because her mother has planned every day out already. As for herself, SHE already has plans on how to get drunk in Vegas because she's only 20.

If you're looking for your typical Canadian redneck, complete with Canadian redneck values - beer, hockey, conservative, masculine in deportment - perfect specimen right here. That SHE has worked quite a lot of jobs, all of which (as far as I know) are male-dominated, only serves to reinforce that.

This week I've only really spent morning break with them for $1 breakfast, and a couple of times I sat with them for lunch, but afternoon break I always spend alone sitting in the workshop. I don't recall even eating anything for lunch all week, opting just to buy a glass of juice if I consume anything at all. Partly because I spend too much eating out in the evening, and partly because I'm just not in the mood to eat. In fact, today I made it through the entire workday on one cup of coffee alone.

And then at the little "gathering" with a couple of the IKEA girls at the bar after work, we all sit down and BAM! guess what they're talking about: DRINKING and the different kinds of delicious drinks and stuff. SHE gets a Kokanee (eeew! I told you about her redneck-ness!). SHE plans to get drunk with her friend here and then go to a movie after. By this time I just wanted to strangle HER. GEEZ, EVEN THOUGH YOU GET FREE DRINKS AT A BAR, MAYBE THIS IS WHY you had to go pick up college money from your estranged father??!??

I knew that something like this was coming (SHE had already been talking about this movie date a couple of days ago), so I actually wore my sword necklace to work and kept it in my pocket as I was working, because this drugs/alcohol talk and failure to communicate was really getting to remind me of those days back in first-year and the VERY REASON I used to carry a hunting knife with me under my shirt (which my necklace later replaced). It's a symbolic ornament for me and I feel vulnerable in this kind of situation without it.

I don't enjoy drinking alcohol either for the taste or for the, uh, "fun"/"entertainment" or for the uninhibiting effects (I admit that it helps a little with keeping my knees from shaking with nerves when I sing solo, though). It's just something that happens and is done and is not a centerpiece. After I said something to that effect and the response was "you just haven't been drunk enough," I just gave up and wanted to go home, but I had to wait for Artsy Guy to drive me.

I gave the server a freaking $1 tip for a less than $3 coffee because a) I didn't have any change; and b) I felt I had to make someone happy since I felt like such an outcast at my table.

Since SHE is going to be away until next Friday, I'll be the only female on the crew next week, aside from the IKEA people. I'm not sure yet whether it'll be more or less awkward, though while it's more expected that guys talk about drinking and guns and that sort of thing, that content itself may still trouble me just as much.

Who wants to bet that SHE will come in Friday morning saying how drunk she was before she got on the plane back from Vegas?

It's one thing to not let workplace stuff affect me, but this is like for 9 hours a day I'm stuck in a room where I don't want to listen to people talk, people don't want to listen to me talk, and I can't even entertain myself with Finnish songs in my head because of the v*tun pop music, which in return gets stuck in my head so I can't even sing Finnish songs in the shower when I come home (not that I actually sing in the shower). It's 9 hours a day that I'm forcibly reminded that I'm stuck in redneck Alberta with nowhere to run, even in my imagination. And the forcible deprivation of my imagination was the root of my depression after The Sundering in junior high school.

Right now I'm just going to sit here angry and frustrated, like my German teacher (with whom I had my kind of socialization later in the evening), listening to Trio Niskalaukaus (not that it's angry music - it's mostly just pessimistic but it sounds angry).* Geez, this REALLY IS LIKE FIRST-YEAR UNI ALL OVER AGAIN.

My German teacher says that someone she knows managed to get a job teaching math for two years in Sweden at an international school. Sweden wouldn't be half-bad, I guess. It's pretty close to Finland, but I'd make neither head nor tail of the language. Plus I'd probably end up on a booze cruise-ship crossing the Gulf. Gah! :p

Items assembled

• UDDEN wall cabinet x2
  
• some other small UDDEN shelf that I can't find anywhere online
  
• BRAVAD glass-door wall cabinet
  
• ARHOLMA table with 4 chairs
  
• GASELL highchair

__________
* Fun fact: I'm taking a liking to the song "Surupuku" again. It's one of the first songs I ever heard in Finnish (this would have been in Summer '02, I think, close to when its album was released). But now I can actually figure out what it says, and it's still good in that way.**

jos oikeutta enemmän vain nähdä saan / voin verhoutua vaikka lumenvalkeaan
mutta jos maailma jatkaa pimeän matkan taivallustaan / ylläni on surupuku ja surupuku on musta
[If I could only see more justice / I would dress in snow-white
but if the world keeps going in this dark direction / I wear mourning-dress and mourning-dress is black]

** It always happens like this: often when I suddenly have an urge to post random Finnish lyrics and then I go translate them for the benefit of my readers, it ends up being something actually kind of relevant.

OK, so I just drank a whole litre of Strongbow cider and just had a shot of my awesome salmiakki vodka this evening. I think I'm out of it. More out of it than I've ever been.

Just ignore me for the rest of the night, mmmk? Headache... need water... need to sleep...

I've already banned alcohol from my room since last year, so that I'd only have reason to drink when I was with friends at bars/pubs.

I considered getting a drink at the pub with the German Club today, but then I thought about salmiakkikossu and how wonderful it was (even a Swede agreed today!) (not to neglect Long Drinks, which are pretty good too but not as good) and how no drink here could ever replace it, and I thought, maybe I won't drink tonight.

But when I saw the new price list at Dewey's (given that minimum drink prices were set up this summer - but they're not really all that high), I couldn't figure out what happened to $4.75 pints (the price of a glass of draught beer is comparable now to the price of a bottle of import beer, almost) and was even a little shocked, so I think I'm just gonna give up drinking altogether for the time being.

Somehow paying 5€ for a glass of beer doesn't feel so bad - maybe it's just knowing that everything costs more in general over there makes it feel more okay.

The European imports shop I like to visit here in Calgary has a limited number of Finnish goods, such as FinnCrisp, Turkish Pepper, Salmiakki, Fazer Vodka-filled chocolates, and Jenkki chewing gum (I could have sworn they used to have Sisu candy, and since when did Fazer make crispbread?). I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DON'T HAVE THOSE GIANT BLUE FAZER CHOCOLATE BARS.

I'm now the owner of a small tube of Turun Sinappia, of which I totally should have bought the 'Hot' mustard, because I think this tube of 'Strong' stuff must mean it's stronger in sugar than the 'Mild' stuff I had in Finland. :P

P.S. For purposes of freaking people out: 500g packages of Juhla Mokka and Presidentti coffee both cost $13.95 each. Plus tax (5%). Ouch. Yeah. Dude, the Presidentti I bought that came with the tin was only 6.90€. Geez. And that's *with* a bazillion percent tax. Darn import costs.

Friday night gemigemi had a friend over, so the two of them didn't sleep all night. On Saturday afternoon it was eventually decided that (after the friend went home) we'd go to the city to get food and then gemigemi would go practice and Kaarina and I would go to the Linnanmäki amusement park.

At which time it started to rain. Slowly, at first. We actually wandered around the park until it was 6PM, so then we could buy the evening passes (24€) for the last 3 hours of the day. And we had to go on the wooden roller coaster first, which I'm so deathly afraid of but I guess I've needed a good scream for a while now. I think I'll stick to avoiding roller coasters, thank you.

After two hours of rides it was pouring and we were both sopping wet so we got some groceries and went home. I find it interesting that eggs are stored close to, but not in, the refrigerators.

As mornings and afternoons typically don't exist here (after Friday night, gemigemi slept quite soundly), this evening another of their friends showed up for some meeting of their dance gaming club... online. That's right - the meeting was on IRC, but this friend was over to come to sauna afterward.

Apparently, for the residents, it costs something like 6,50€/month to book the sauna for an hour each week, but there are also open sauna times when any resident can go. The latter are gender-segregated, but when you're just with friends or family, it's often mixed. This was a fairly large brick-lined room in the basement. It's traditionally the men who throw water on the stove, but gemigemi didn't get it nearly as hot as we had it at Kiviniemi. We also brought some Coke to drink (my nausea seems now to be just caused by drinking while walking) inside and that's kinda fun until your can gets too hot to put your lips onto. Maybe that's why plastic bottles are preferred, though I can't vouch for the safety of or melting points of the plastics involved. But yeah, this place was rather large as it's designed for groups of [(nerdy)] students. [Aggh! Attack of the Nerds!!]

Not long after I finished drinking my pop, I totally got the whole thumpety-heart-feeling, like I've just had a beer, but without the horrible taste. If drinking pop in sauna gives me that feeling, I don't want to imagine what would happen if I had something alcoholic. Although I think it might just be a matter of my body being still rather stranger to it. I mean, I quite like sauna, even though my black hair gets super-hot in there, but drinking anything in there just isn't for me, I guess.

Before going to sauna, I was talking with someone on the phone or on chat about being all emo and desperate from packing and thinking of the inevitable thoughts, and he said "I wouldn't recommend cutting your wrists." Well, I was cutting up some black sausage (Note to self: very similar to stuff at O'Byrnes) when I cut my finger. No bleeding, but ya know.

[So long, and thanks for all the mustamakkara]

Well, I'm on the train again, this time all by myself, with far too much luggage to befit a Finn, yet given a ticket for the upper floor of the car.

This time I'm heading to Turku, and the conductor wouldn't accept my registration paper as proof of studentness, so I had to pay the other half of the fare also -> but J says I should talk to the people at the Turku station when I get there, so maybe I can sort this out.

The car is so well air-conditioned I really don't want to think that it's actually 20 degrees and sticky outside.

It was relatively quiet up here until Tampere, and I guess it's also normal for men to drink on the train as a couple of guys have independently popped open a beer each. One of these guys looks a bit like Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi but with darker hair and a small handful of dreadlocks at the back of his head instead of the silly Jedi padawan braid at the side. Finns are such hippies. I wish he'd give me a beer too.

The other guy with a beer is partly the contributor to the unquietness up here. His group of friends is responsible for the chattering.

I'm just sitting here writing and eating from a small bag of Nordic Haribo Goldbären. Guy with friends has finished his beer; Hippy Obi-Wan is doing some number puzzle on a sheet of paper. Guy with friends takes out a beer for his friend, and another one for himself. He smiles at me. I'm trying not to stare at them too much in shock of them having beer. It's not a conscious stare, it's just that it's so deeply ingrained in me that that's just not done on public transport that I can't help but have that obvious wide-eyed look when we accidentally make eye contact.

I suspect that you've all gotten so tired of my moaning about the drinking culture here, but not only is it very interesting anthropological study, it's also the most striking difference between here and Canada. The buildings are older, the bathrooms smaller, kitchen cupboards more clever, but the landscape isn't all that different from Northern Alberta. People look different too, but one expects that. And all that isn't really "culture", it's "how things work".

As for the stuff about student fares, no one checked J and me for student ID when we went to Tampere and the bus driver on the way back accepted my papers. J said I should claim ignorance that one's supposed to show a Finnish student card, but yet some people seem to take papers so I dunno. I guess it makes sense, though. After all, proof of registration isn't the same as my OneCard in Edmonton, either. But then again it's not like student status gets me half price on the Greyhound (only -10%) (Darn you, capitalism!). So it's fair. I don't care. [It's not worth the lie.] I budgeted for this anyway.

Speaking of observing Finns in their natural environment, what better way to study their natural drinking habits than to be stranded without a place to stay in a large city like Tampere the night people graduate from high school and get totally and completely wasted all night? Well, perhaps it's not so good to study the extremes. But the fact of the matter is, it's almost 3AM, I'm sitting in a Hesburger, and the line to get food shows no sign of subsiding, and it is dawn.

Earlier J and I did the drinking at the park thing with a can of cider each and we spent too long at it, so by the time we got to the amusement park it was _just_ closed so we went to a public sauna instead. Unfortunately, we found out after that that the last transportation back to jkl had gone at 2115, 30 minutes before, and J's friend (whom she called) was being unkind and not lending anyone a place to sleep.

So we walked a lot in circles and observed some, uh, natural Finnish drinking behaviour. Then went to some karaoke bar (no fanclub) and had the most expensive rum and coke ever, which tasted a bit like grass jelly with syrup. Then walked in circles a bit more and ended up in here. I feel that we won't be here for long, though. Earlier we tried to sleep in a park but because I'm not wearing long pants the bugs were giving me a hard time.

We stood around outside for about 45 minutes and then wandered to the McD's, where these guys next to me are swearing a lot.

Observation: people don't get stupid until 4:15AM.
Observation: on a day like this even McDonald's has a bouncer.
Observation: at this hour one doesn't _line_ up at McD's. One _mobs_ up.
Interesting habit: People mixing pepper into their ketchup.

I may be seeing Antti again tomorrow, so I can ask him some questions about this exchange student/Finnish drinking problem (the former more than the latter) and how he deals with it, since he doesn't drink at all. Because I'll be talking to him I likely won't be available to go to the campfire that evening. All the better, because I need a photograph taken downtown, and I'll bet money that the fire would be just another excuse to drink. It is not the drinking itself that bothers me, it is the motivation. It would still be uncomfortable but less strange if it were just Finns doing it, but now that we have seen them do it at sauna last week, I know others will follow in their stead. it is not that they go to extremes (they don't) - it is the "I shall do it because I can" attitude, forgetting that gatherings can be just as enjoyable or even more valuable without it, and especially so when it is a conscious and deliberate decision to abstain.

As for the canoeing trip on Saturday, I did not sign up for it either because 1. it costs money, 2. it's possible to do it in Canada, 3. once you've seen one lake, you've seen most of them, 4. who wants to bet that there is beer involved somewhere along the way? 5. I just want some time to myself. Even if there's not much to do but pace around my room, it would be good to actually have some time to think and write in here without falling asleep, without being under the pressure of talking to people all the time.

I'm tired, barely keeping my eyes open, bored, and generally just really bummed out today. I think it started with the rain, but I always feel really awful after I accidentally say something that I later realize might have been extremely rude. I'm just at a department store paying for my stuff when the clerk asks me something, which I don't understand. There's a gift wrap station behind her so maybe I thought she was asking if I wanted it wrapped (since it *was* a gift item, after all), so I said "ei". She kinda gave me a concerned look and said "ei...?" as if waiting for an explanation. Only later did I slowly realize she must have done a Wal-Mart and asked if I had found everything I was looking for - which would still be accurate because I didn't *quite* find everything I wanted.

As stupid and trivial as it sounds, accidentally saying something really stupid like that makes me feel awful. I don't know why.

Not to mention that J has gone home for a couple of days and that means no piano or facebook here, because she locked her door. I also have no meat. I may not eat a lot of meat, but it's important.

And I have reason to be concerned about everything else -- I can't seem to be at the right time to get to the laundry room, and the N. Americans talking about their plans for the pubcrawl tomorrow are really bothering me. (real)Tuuli said that she thinks people won't be too drunk because we all have commitments on Wednesday but I'm not convinced because I think I know Canadians better. They're already proposing to ask our teacher if we can start class later on Wednesday. But I feel compelled to go because they will be stopping at the karaoke bar, and I need to get a photo of myself in an anxious situation for an assignment: maybe I'll just go outside and busk on my flute or something if I get too uncomfortable.

So I was sitting at Cheers tonight with the "group" and I heard all of the above that brought me concern, and then I typed desperate text messages to Harri. After a few long desperate phone calls today I need to buy more time for my phone...