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we academics have our own social niceties.
so i went to a christening today: friends of mine have recently become parents, and they've settled on a name for their child [1]. as is custom for finns and other peoples, this warrants a celebration with family and friends.
that said, i have found finns to be incredibly welcoming. in comparison, i often feel uncouth and ill-mannered.
having ( Read more... ) -
brief post: a late winter's night
it's 1am on an april evening and it's snowing outside. i guess winter doesn't end so easily in helsinki. it's not cold, though, not as cold as the days in february when, every day, i looked up the temperatures and wondered how many sweaters to wear ( Read more... ) -
habits of silence, of different kinds.
so it's been 3 months, a little more, since my last update. somehow acknowledging that fact seems damning, in some way ..
either that this platform is on its way out, for me,
or that i'm on my way out, nothing new in my life to write about.
that isn't quite true, though.
i'm moving to new york;
i'll write more about it, soon enough.
my mind feels quiet, ( Read more... ) -
about the smiling girl.
so recently i met a girl, but now i'm a bit mixed up.
the best way to describe it is a kind of infatuation which, according to ze google, means:
Be inspired with an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for.
as for the other online dictionaries, most of the entries qualify this as an "unreasoned" passion .. which sounds about how i would ( Read more... ) -
a mundane meditation.
at the moment i find it too troublesome to write about helsinki, simply because i don't know where to begin. instead i thought i'd write about something mundane in my life.
if i have one gift, it's how to discuss the obvious.
* * *i like classical music. it's not that i know very much about it, but i find it soothing. this will probably offend ( Read more... ) -
from negative to positive, in a negative way.
it's just past 3pm and i cannot see much daylight outside. the sun is setting. it looks bleak, almost hopeless .. not that i feel hopeless about my life, but ( Read more... ) -
snippets from a foreigner's life.
so it's been 3 months in finland, close to 3 weeks since i've found my own flat and arranged things to .. close enough to livable.
before moving here, i thought i'd be posting every day about my new experiences and tribulations and about the new sights that i'd witness, with my "foreign" eyes. i thought that you'd all be sick of hearing from me ( Read more... ) -
i see the mermaids singing, each to each .. fvck it. i'm eating a peach instead.
this just goes to show you that nothing is foolproof. for example .. it's 4:24 on finnish time. in any circumstance i should not be writing any kind of blog post .. still, i seems that i remembered my password and could steady my fingers well enough to start typing in this text box that will become a blog post ( Read more... ) -
while in finland: cooking's my new deal.
my habits are changing, even after just one week in finland.
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i'm eating out less. restaurants are more expensive here. since i got off the plane, 8 days ago, i can count the number of times i've eaten out with one hand ( Read more... ) -
math is easy; t-shirts, though ..
i still intend to write about california, but lately i've been busy (again) with packing. maybe i'll write about it on the flight to helsinki.
speaking of packing: for a while yesterday i was completely fixated on t-shirts.
despite the length of the stay, packing for finland felt much like packing for a long workshop.
the odd thing is that my ( Read more... )