track en

bilingualism protects the brain, may slow development of dementia. the UK alzheimer's society welcomes the findings, but their remarks that "the results of this particular study need to be interpreted cautiously as they were comparing groups of individual of different nationalities, educated in different systems" seems like a fairly big caveat. however, the findings are suggestive and exciting anyway!

i totally didn't chicken out on an opportunity to come out today. it pretty much always comes up when people ask me about coming to finland - it's either how i like it here or how long i'm staying or why i came in the first place and then it always comes back to wax, but she'd already come up in class as the appropriate swedish term, "my cohabitor", which is gender-neutral, so the girl i was chatting with said "it was a boyfriend, right? did you meet here or there?" and i miraculously produced the requisite "girlfriend actually" as part of my answer! not in front of a whole classroom of people though, just three girls named laura, mirjo and stampan whom i quite liked.

mirjo sits directly in front of me in two classes, and i had her pegged from the first glimpse last week as half japanese, but then i was like, "you're probably crazy. there are very few half-japanese people in finland, let alone half-japanese and half swedish-speaking finn, and finns themselves are already known for slight 'mongoloid' facial features". i couldn't get rid of the suspicion, though, and today it turned out that i was totally right. i suppose in that kind of question (eg name the nationality of that asian person!) i should trust my instincts!

counter-intuitive business sense

you'd think that since finland is the last country in the eu with free higher education, even for exchange students and foreign students, they would want to keep it relatively quiet, or even discourage people from coming, wouldn't you? i figured that was why it was so low-publicity, when i was going through the application process. which is admittedly a drag. i understand it may not remain free, that it's come up for discussion, but there hasn't been much noise about it so it can't be anytime soon. and meanwhile it turned out i was wrong.

my university is in the strange position of looking for new ways to advertise itself internationally, even though more students in theory should just stretch its somewhat limited resources. (thinking about the university as run on a somewhat iffy budget and public funds helps to understand the differences which make it hard to deal with in certain ways.) in fact, their advertising is so limp and ineffective that i didn't realise they were at all until, well, today. it makes sense now, since a few weeks ago a family friend enlightened me that their funding is a function of the number of students they graduate. they are not an organ of the government, meanwhile, but a private university - so they have every reason to want more international students (and to make it more efficient and easy for people to graduate, but let's not get too hasty) and none in particular to discourage them.

more possessive than public fellatio?

"We need to do something more possessive."
 
Bodie smiled to himself, he just bet Ray didn't even hear himself. "More possessive than public fellatio?"

this story is so bad that i remember it even though the last time i read it must've been three years ago at a minimum - to the point that incidental character names at the beginning looked famiilar.

also i'm totally going to work that into a conversation sometime. "more possessive than public fellatio?"