Cimorene

I'm taking an art history course with Finnish technical school and technical college students who study art-related disciplines at my school. We have to pick elective modules like that to take for extra Finnish practice.

Okay, but the course, for some reason, meets once a week only, but for four hours in a row. Besides the ludicrously long class meetings though, it also moves at a ludicrously fast pace. Today in under 4 hours (because she filled part of the time with introductions and stuff) we covered:

1. Ancient Mesopotamia


2. Ancient Egypt (in a total of like 10 slides maximum. Sphinx, Gizan pyramids, King Tut's mask, bust of Nefertiti, statue of Akhenaten, two painted statues, 1 frieze, and that was literally it)


3. Ancient Crete (6 or 8 slides, I think?)


4. Ancient Greece


5. Ancient Rome


6. Early Christian art starting in Roman times and leading through the middle ages


7. Latinate architecture in 2 slides and Gothic architecture in 2 slides, only 1 stained glass image, some wall paintings, 0 medieval statues, relics, or illuminated manuscripts)

All of us immigrants are missing next week because of our Finnish class and the teacher said in that meeting she is going to cover the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and basic art criticism o_O.

The teacher is a good speaker, but she wouldn't have to be for me to be interested through the lecture, even given that I know quite a bit about art history from Artist Parent Osmosis. Like, there definitely was new information to me, but I am still interested to hear experts talk about art history that isn't new to me. So I don't lay any of it on the teacher when I say that the formatting of this course is exceptionally stupid.

What I can lay partially at her door is the racist European-central nature of the curriculum. She didn't choose it herself and she did mention it, and even acknowledge that it's both problematic and contentious to exclude every other culture in human history from "art history", but she didn't do anything about it. She didn't even give like a textual overview of other significant art traditions, and she justified the ultimate choice on the grounds that the traditional focus is on the art of cultures which are supposedly the 'direct ancestors' of the western European artistic cultures. She had a row of pictures along the wall that included Hokusai's wave, but it was the only work (out of maybe... 25?) from outside the All Europe All the Time Party.

I shudder to think that this school graduates students in the arts with qualifications (media journalism, graphic design, stuff like that) who have THIS curriculum as their whole serving of art history (there aren't any higher-level sequels or anything; it's a small school).

Like so many other people, I was instilled with a deep hatred for doing sports largely through the efforts of sub-standard physical education teachers who forced us to play tons of under-supervised ballgames with little to no instruction. (Not everybody also acquired my level of resentment for sports fan culture through growing up in the college football capital of the country though.)

Would it be remotely possible to count the number of times I was forced to "play" "softball" in long, itchy, sun-crisped brown grass when it was actually too hot to be outside? No.

I mean, I hear people talk about sports being boring to watch, and it's true that I don't want to watch them and have occasionally seen them and been bored, but since nobody ever forced me to watch them, I don't have any flashbacks to bad memories there. Obviously other people enjoy watching them. They should keep doing that (although many times in my hometown I've felt that they should take it to a sportsbar so that ordinary restaurants and grills weren't suffused with sports noises). Watching sports is just boring to me, but talking about them (so many years of not telling all the crazy rival-team-trashtalkers to stfu) and mandatory participation in them (WHY) is what really gets my back up.

RIGHT WAY TO DO CASUAL SPORTS: "Anybody who's interested can come out for a casual game of softball after lunch. No need to have played it before, we'll teach you."

WRONG WAY TO DO CASUAL SPORTS: "After lunch we're gonna all play softball on the lawn, but if you can't run don't worry, there are positions in the outfield too."

Guess which one of these my Finnish course pulled today?

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if they simply accepted that when they arrange for these non-Finnish-lesson activities like scavenger hunts and music trivia people will opt not to join in, and that's their right and there's nothing wrong with it. Obviously people do this anyway and it's not like they can stop them. But the point is that you don't need an excuse, because you're a fucking adult and you're here under your own willpower and you might not want to participate in something and it's not like you're getting paid for it.

ME: I'm going home at lunchtime because I hate softball :).
TEACHER: Ugh, *eyeroll*. You know what I've heard all day today? "I didn't bring my sneakers", "I can't run", "I have a headache", "I have trauma", "I didn't bring sports clothes with me"...
ME: Haha. Well, I have a trauma too!
TEACHER: If you don't ever play softball again, you won't ever have a chance to work through your trauma though and you'll just stay traumatized forever!
ME: Heh, well, that's completely fine with me. Bye!
TEACHER: Okaaayyy, bye.

I don't need to "work through" anything, here (though if I did it would be none of her business if I indicated a desire not to today).

It's not keeping me awake at night. It just taught me, with about 100 hrs of overkill, that I am not good at aiming, catching, running, or any other sporty things; that the desire to win and "team spirit" make about as much sense to me as pickles on icecream; that standing around waiting for a ball to come flying towards me, or alternatively for my chance to fail to hit a ball with a stick, is even less fun than getting nettle burn all over my feet; and that trying to pay attention to the action of a ballgame is even more difficult and painful to my poor brain than trying to pay attention to the names of all the utterly unmemorable plants in my mom's garden (but at least nobody wants me to remember where the plants are going or why, or predict these for the future).

I have needed a loooooot of distraction over the last couple of weeks and have temporarily kind of run out of fanfiction (there's still Hobbit fanfiction out there, I've just gotten kind of fed up with it for the time being) (and then I read some Javert/Valjean from brodinson's recs on Tumblr, which was kind of funny because I had no idea what happened in Les Miserables before I read it, except that there was a big deal about some bread and Russell Crowe wore a uniform and everybody was miserable; but I ran out of those pretty quickly too, because it's not exactly a giant fandom, which is probably a good thing because I don't have a very big appetite for misery).

I haven't finished watching all of Ask This Old House, but when I feel anxious I usually feel too fretful for watching television, and also I don't want to run out of online episodes, since it seems there's no way to obtain any more of it, not even for money. (Also the shipping situation was getting a bit dire. As of 1½ weeks ago, I actually have a premise and a plot and several fragments of an imaginary slash story in my head, and it isn't even crack. It is debatable whether this is truly dire, of course, but I definitely was in mounting danger of actually trying to write drawerfic.)

So I have mostly been obsessively looking at shoe websites. I do this periodically anyway, obviously. But this time I've also been trying to shop for shoes for myself, and it isn't going well. I simultaneously DESPERATELY want some new shoes and can't make up my mind to buy even one single pair, because even if I have the money I have an internal limit for how much I'm willing to spend on a pair of shoes based on how much I'd actually wear them. Basically, I want every pair of shoes that I own to personally speak to me and that makes it hard to choose. It's working well as a distraction, but a compulsive vortex is an awkward place to be. I tend to forget to eat and drink.

I've managed to slog through the final month of Finnish class in spite of every day being way more torturous than usual, thanks to the fact that we can't really learn anything new so we've been reviewing stuff for the last module test. Our class size is 9 people now, and Asshole Who Always Complains Whenever He Has To Work or Speak is only there about half the time so it's pretty peaceful, but instead of making me exasperated the painfully obvious questions of my classmates are mostly making me sad. I am still irritated, of course, especially when Racist Girl is all 'I asked Cim the answer, and she didn't immediately tell it to me! She was just giving me HINTS!' OKAY FUCK YOU, NEXT TIME I WON'T HELP YOU AT ALL - but anyway. I've applied to a summer Finnish class and I've got the application for another two next fall, and all the arrangements have been made for another work practice placement in between. April and May I'll be working at a downtown after school program 7 hours a day.

My current Finnish course will end in March, but my Finnish isn't good enough to take any sort of further professional training courses, like the practical part of my school assistant classes, in Finnish. (It would probably be good enough to work in a shop or something.) And in general, although I feel good about my progress, I'm not satisfied (I mean, confident) with my skills yet. I need way more vocabulary and practice. When I had the work practice interview at a local daycare, I got the gist and the keywords but I had to completely give up on big swathes of phrases where I couldn't pick out enough recognizable bits to start parsing the grammar and guess at the meaning: people who are talking about real life things and not just smalltalk or shoptalk don't use the same sorts of simple, bite-sized sentences.

So I'll probably be applying to the next level Finnish class, which will mean a significant reduction in support from social services down to, I think, 300-something €/month. Right now I'm getting full unemployment with all the extra options 700-something €/month, as one does when engaged full-time in professional development mandated by the employment bureau; for the second level course you only get the regular government allowance of student support, but it's still 35 school hours a week which makes working at the same time difficult.

Wax is still going to secretarial school. After learning the Microsoft Office suite at the basic level - like she hasn't learned macros, which I can't help feeling would have been quite useful - they moved on to torturing them with Business Swedish, and the school made her study it even though Swedish is her native language. It went something like this:

WAX: But I already know Swedish because it's my native language.
TEACHER WHO IS NOT EVEN A NATIVE SWEDISH SPEAKER: Ah, but this isn't just ordinary Swedish, it's BUSINESS Swedish.

She was still made to take the exams, and in order to not have to take lengthy weekly vocabulary tests and sit through hours of painful instruction, she was ordered to write "an essay" on a topic of her choice, with no further guidelines. Obviously this should be easy, but it isn't because she's too angry about the whole thing.

So after finishing Business Swedish, they moved on to...

... Business English. Only, right, everyone in her class is competent to the basic Finnish high-school-graduate level.. except for one, so they actually started with conjugating "TO BE" and "TO DO".

Her unemployment/winter/this sucks depression has consequently spiraled to the level where she is almost entirely nocturnal and can't always force herself to suffer through her horribly painful homework assignments. Instead she is reading a lot of hockey fic and has even started reblogging things about hockey on Tumblr. I'm mostly worried about this because of fear that she might actually get further into sports. As long as it's just the players it's fine, but if she watches any actual sports on purpose, we will of course have to get a divorce.

But on the plus side, we have a lot of yarn around the house and Canonical has just announced they're releasing Ubuntu for phones next year, which is exciting because we were previously worried that Nokia's N9 might be the last Linux phone in existence, but neither of us could bear to use Apple, Windows, or Android. Sometime next month you should be able to install Ubuntu yourself on the Nexus Galaxy, though, which means by the time one of our phones breaks (they're currently 2 years old I think), the early adopter bugs should be ironed out. They say they hope to release the first manufacturer-partnered shipping-with-Ubuntu phones in 2014.

1.

The fashion highlight slash teachable moment of the last few weeks was when my Thai classmate asked the Bangladeshi one why she doesn't wear jewels dangling from her nose/ear/face daily. There were other related questions but this one stuck with me the most, possibly mainly because the lady in question tried to answer by miming the amount of stuff that would be dangling in her face if she had worn it. ("Wedding! Wedding! Only wedding." "Why?")

I pointed out that although our Thai classmate also owns some large and elaborate jewelry, as do many of the rest of us, she doesn't wear it out every day with jeans and a t-shirt either, and she ceded the point reluctantly with a wistful protest, "But it's so pretty." Well, this is true.


2.

It's Father's Day in Finland today. American Father's day was in July and when I talked to my dad on the phone I told him that I thought of writing him a haiku in Finnish for the occasion (he's a poet so there's a lot of poems-for-occasions going around in our family), but my Finnish hadn't got very far and also I wanted to say "poet", which in Finnish is 5 syllables by itself (runoilija). I had to ask Wax how to say it; at the time I'd only been learning Finnish a couple of months. But now I was able to write one completely on my own (although Finnish word length was still a bit of a stumbling block)! And I was even able to make it a science fiction haiku (he's been into those lately)!

Isäni kulta
Tuoli nopeampi
Kuin aikakone

("Darling Daddy, chair faster than time machine.") (Finnish doesn't have definitive pronouns, so it could be a specific time machine or a general time machine; context doesn't specify.) (My dad's power wheelchair has the ability to jump curbs and zoom around really fast, possibly not actually faster than a time machine, if one exists, but assuming that one doesn't I guess it is still faster. My sister and I both enjoy standing on the back of it and riding around. In San Francisco this summer she banged her knee on the frame twice and I did it once. It's not a completely hazard-free hobby.)

3.

I know that Red Dwarf is crack and has about as much concern for continuity as Gene Roddenberry or Arthur Conan Doyle, which is to say, less than none unless continuity looks like it would be useful for a good joke. But still, even on second watch-through, it is quite hard to deal with 7x02 "Stoke Me a Clipper" when Rimmer leaves, because it lends a (perhaps ludicrously out of place?) bittersweet note to latter seasons to know that Original Rimmer is still gone, even though Resurrected Rimmer is right there (ludicrous because everything else is already rather sad/bleak/bitter-along-with-the-fun-bits by definition, written right into the basic premise and everything). There's badfic where Original Rimmer comes back and he and Lister have a variety of action-packed, tear-streaked, porny love stories in consequence, but aside from any other potential drawbacks to them, they also leave me feeling badly for Resurrected Rimmer. (Except for that one where it actually was Original Rimmer who had traveled back in time after 600 years of immortal badassery to go undercover as himself and he wasn't really resurrected at all.)

4.

I've mentioned my Ideal Dress before, the dress I have exalted above all others and always wanted since childhood. (It's the green flapper dress that Cyd Charisse wears in the Broadway Melody dance number of Singin in the Rain.)

Well, waxjism and I still haven't got around to making a formal replacement-for-the-nonexistent-wedding portrait of the two of us that we didn't have taken when we eloped three years ago. (Wax has a suit that would work alright, but I don't have anything I could wear for it, not even a white blouse that fits to stick under a waistcoat in a pinch.)

(NB to waxjism and people who hate descriptions of clothes: skip this paragraph) I mean, I have my old bridesmaid dresses: a black satin evening gown from Amanda's wedding, a black twill dress such as a sexetary might wear to a 1940s funeral from Aubry's, and a Grecianesque number in eggplant-colored chiffon from pierydys's; I also have the raspberry chiffon cocktail dress I wore to Marre's wedding, and my favorite dress has served at both hollsh and guinevere33's weddings, but the straps literally broke OFF both times and it's waiting to have a third set sewn on. And basically, black glitter lace over nude and black twill and black satin and red-wine-ish chiffon are all way less apropos for one's OWN pseudo-wedding portrait than they are for somebody else's. I don't want it to look like a PROM portrait.

So sometimes I toy with the idea of using this as an excuse to get (let's be real: make) myself something like this dress. (I've never really had anything close, except for the sequin-trimmed green satin leotard I performed a tap recital in at age six... I've only ever even owned two pieces of green formal wear, an ill-advised forest velour overall at age 10 and the metallic dark green party dress I wore to bexless's wedding.) So even a piece of only semi-dressy stuff in a shade from the emerald/malachite-green family would be a hugely exciting event in my wardrobe. On the other hand, as much as I love that particular shade of light-malachite-emerald-with-a-dash-of-kelly green, sequins aren't really me. For that matter, formal wear isn't really me.

That's why after we became obsessed with knitting and uh, spent our first 50 euros on cashmerino silk-blend yarn, it occurred to me to maybe interpret my Ideal Dress in the form of a dressy pullover sweater, like maybe a tunic-length one with a cable design echoing the shapes of the sequin embellishments. Obviously we can make a silk-blend pullover for Wax too, but the design is complicated by her refusal to have favorites of anything. She doesn't even have a favorite TYPE of shade of green, let alone an Ideal Dress. She'd be quite happy to go out dressed as a bag lady whose entire wardrobe had fallen into a random selection of different green dyes.

The last few days I've been pondering the linked diamond designs on the Cyd dress and the 30's-inspired design of Keira Knightley's Atonement dress, which would look better on me, and is just as beautiful, although it doesn't have the same nostalgia attached. (The neckline of the latter is certainly easier to interpret onto a long-sleeved sweater.)

DAOPRAKAI: Indian and Bangladeshi people eat lots and lots of Kali.
ME: Huh?!
DAOPRAKAI: Curry, curry.
FARJANA: Yes. Well, I don't know about Indian people but Bangladeshi people do.

...She appears to use the same method for remembering vocabulary as my mom, which is weird because she's a competent speaker of multiple languages and Thai has tons of weird sounds that Finnish doesn't. But maybe still only one sound for l/r I guess.

One of my classmates was so cranky after a full two days of learning nothing whatsoever that she was scowling and ranting at the bus stop. I mean, she has a point, I didn't learn anything either. Knitting is pretty good anger management but it can't convert 8 hours of desultory practice with like <20 new vocabulary words (none of them difficult or NEW) into a challenging language lesson.

Unlike Azra, I don't think bad teaching is the problem; I think we're just moving too slow and, essentially, being held back by our classmates. But it got me thinking about it and there are definitely 4, maybe more in our class who could legitimately benefit from a completely different group.

I think the four of us could probably go at 1½ speed, accomplish a lot more written and spoken work, etc. It might even be possible for us to do that if we just like, asked for extra books and sat in the corner. Or maybe if we went together to the course organizer with our complaint they could find something else to do with us. Because as it stands we're wasting a lot of our time and it's not like our Finnish is so good that we should be resting on our laurels right now? We're hardly employable or anything.

We went to my oldest friend's wedding on a mountain outside San Francisco last weekend.

According to the news, they've been having the same weather as us lately: around 20°, kind of. On the day of the wedding it was actually way hotter than expected, but when we went back into the city on Sunday it went back to the forecast. The problem is that Turku is nowhere near as windy as San Francisco in this time of year, apparently. (In the autumn and winter Turku is VERY windy, though.) There was a constant hard, cold wind that made it feel like it was firmly below 15° the whole time, and I didn't have adequate garments for layering with me at all.

Sunday we went to the Aquarium of the Bay. Then I went with my family to Ghirardelli Square - we wanted the old factory to still be open but apparently all it is now is a collection of giftshops so crowded you can barely walk into it. It used to be home to a tea salon I have been dying to visit for over a year called Crown & Crumpet, and I was super excited to go there, mainly because you can't order the teacups with the pink crown teapot over the internet; but when we got there we looked up their website and found out they're closed for moving and I didn't get any awesome tea swag at all. :(((


I want this teacup and also I want it on like a shirt or possibly on everything

Monday we were supposed to just meet Dad's internet fandom friend (his fandom is original sf poetry and it's mostly old people and doesn't overlap with our circles much) at an sf bookstore in the Mission called Borderlands, and then spend the majority of the day exploring the Castro. But some things came up: ( Read more... )

The Return Journey from Purgatory

We had to wake up at 4 am for our trip to the airport and I was out of cash to tip the bellhop, and then there were no Starbucks in our concourse. My earbuds had started to hurt my ears so badly that we only watched 1 episode of Game of Thrones, and we were unable to locate a deli with bagels OR a Starbucks or indeed ANYWHERE to sell us tea during our layover in NYC; and the world's rudest, most obnoxious American jerkface lady had the seat in front of Wax on the Helsinki leg. She kept her seat all the way back, which is so far that to get out of our seats we had to climb OVER THE ARM, the entire time, and had to be told by the flight attendants to straighten it up when they served food both times. To which she responded respectively "Why?" and "Who, me?" So her seat was literally pressing against Wax's knees the entire time and Wax is only 5'5". There LITERALLY wasn't room between the seatback and Wax's abdomen for her laptop!

So after this 7-hr interval of BOILING RAGE we got to Helsinki completely exhausted and promptly got lost on the way to baggage claim. While we were trying to find it and on the verge of collapse, Wax's backed-up SMSes arrived and one was from her mom saying that the dog hadn't drunk or eaten anything since Thursday! Making 5 days! And we were still trapped in the airport. When we found someone to lead us out, Wax was freaking out because they delayed us TWICE at the stupid passport control even though we'd ALREADY BEEN THROUGH IT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE, and the said someone gave her attitude about it (srsly fuck you dude; she wasn't even flailing at YOU). Still not having eaten, we piled onto a (VERY HOT) bus for a 2½ hour commute...

...and then went immediately to meet Wax's mom to take Perry straight to the vet. I stayed there with him for two hours or so, almost completely zombified and having come out the opposite side of hunger so that I didn't even know I was hungry, while they gave him an IV to prevent him from shriveling up and floating away, took a blood test and urine sample, and ultimately prescribed some antibiotics for a UTI.

I gave him his medicine and he ate and drank Wednesday night before I fell asleep, but I think I got a broken 7 hours of sleep altogether, and Thursday morning I kept staring at the computer, unable to remember when I needed to leave to catch the bus.

Purgatory Still Not Over

So I was late to class, and then I found out that we hadn't learned anything all week and the substitute didn't intend to start now. It was so boring (and overcast outside, and nearly deserted inside the school) that I sort of felt like I was dreaming, just floating along blankly through everything with a severely delayed reaction time. That is, until I got home and found out that THE DOG HAD STARTED PEEING BLOOD! I didn't really have a panic attack, but I think I just couldn't anything anymore. I just sort of sat there moaning and nearly crying in response to every single thing that happened, including when Wax started (FINALLY) playing the latest episode of Teen Wolf.

Eventually (after talking very incoherently on the phone to the vet, and giving the dog some pain meds) I took a Xanax and slept. And, yes, we did spend 3 hours today covering 'to get from [person][case]' and 'to give to [person][case]', which, yes, we had actually already seen before, and, in fact, the substitute DID demonstrate using the clever device of pretending to hand her pencil to at least six different people, and she did explain 'take' and 'bring' a LOT of times and tell Loud Girl to be quiet when, for the first time ever, I didn't even want her to shut up because nobody was actually saying anything that conveyed any information at all; but at least I finally got to come home and sleep another four hours. Oh, and we didn't even do so much as a worksheet in that time, just looked at the overhead while she yapped. I'm bitter.

But whatever, at least it's the weekend and the dog seems to be getting better. And my mother-in-law did the dishes for us while we were gone. She's a champ.

Our homework is to talk about our home and how Finland is different from it in Finnish. I've written up a bit of stuff here that has tons of mistakes and, to quote Wax, "my cases and tenses are all over the place" (which is because we haven't actually learned all the cases and tenses). Even though I have a bed-lexicon, I won't let her correct the text for me because a) teachers don't like that and b) in most cases the differences are beyond my ability to master.

My Finnish friends laugh a lot/ think that my bad Finnish is cute/funny so I thought I would type up some of what I wrote.

Suomi on kylmämpi kuin Alabama. Alabamalla on myös monta metsää, mutta Alabama on lämmin ja kostea. Alabamassa ei sata lunta, vain pari sentimetriä, noin joka toinen tai kolmas vuosi. Alabama on meksikonlahdenrannalla. Meksikonlahden vesi on lämmin ja Itä-meren vesi on kylmä. Minä en halua uida Suomen meressä koska vesi on kylmä.

Suomalaiset ovat varautunut. Eivät puhu paljon vieras kanssa ja eivät hymyile paljon. USA:n etelävaltiolaiset ovat seurallinen ja ystävällinen. Alabamalla on vieraanvaraisuus ja kohteliaisuus kultturi. Alabamalaiset hymyilevät paljon.

Alabamassa ja USA:n etelässä paljon ihmiset menevät kirkkoon 3 kertaa viikossa. Ihmiset ovat uskonnollinen. Etelävaltiojan oman ruokan nimi on Soul Food (sielu-ruoka). Ruoka keittetään pitkä aika, tai (upo)paistetaan. Tässä ruokassa on paljon sokeria ja öljyä. Se ei ole tervellinen. Suomen ruoka on tervellinen. Alabamassa ei ole busseja, kaikki ajavat autoa. Talot ovat isompia ja seillä on paljon ilmastointi.Paljon ihmiset tykkävät amerikkalainenjalkapaloa mutta minä en tykkä.

Kevät on aikaisempi Alabamassa kuin Suomessa. Alabamassa on paljon kukkia. Huhtikuussa minun isän ja äidin kotilla on monta atsaleaa, kurjenmiekkaa, tiikerililjaa, pääsiäisliljaa, leijonankitaa, ja hortensiaa. Alabamassa on myös monta visteriä ja magnoliapuuta. Seillä on myös pekaanipähkinäpuut ja mustasaksanpähkinäpuut.

My dad and I walked my mom through signing up for an RSS feed of my journal a couple of weeks ago so she could follow my profound thoughts, such as they are. So I guess I could try to update a bit here.

I've gone to a month of Finnish classes now, and I've adjusted more or less to sleeping slightly less and even to running errands after class is over rather than collapsing in an unconscious heap. I'm hoping that I'll manage to adjust still further to a) being more active in the remainder of the daytime so that I can go back to collecting/posting plebefic and shoes and updating my Poirot blog on Tumblr and b) start meal planning so that I'll be able to cook during the week again instead of subsisting on sandwiches, cereal, and frozen food 5/7ths of the time.

I've also adjusted (sort of) to being more social! Adaptations that I have made to my natural inclinations include:

• I don't put on my headphones at the bus stop, because I share the bus stop and ride with Natalia, Azra, and Farjana. Usually the four of us sit on two seats out of solidarity, but mostly we're too awkward to have very much conversation - like, an average of one exchange every two days, I guess? Also, though, Finnish is our strongest language in common, and we don't have very much Finnish between us yet (though I have my suspicions about Natalia's English... I can't shake this feeling that she gets more than she lets on, because she has this composed, subtly and deeply amused air that just very strongly reminds me of Black Widow, even if, as mentioned, she's not QUITE that deadly/hot/red-headed).



• I don't read at the lunch and coffee breaks. Instead, I join the largest group or second-largest group of my classmates at the table they share and take part occasionally in the conversation, although it is necessarily dominated by the Russian-speakers. We've had some fun exploring the different Thai, Russian, and Bosnian words for different things, though. And listening to Daoprakai's anecdotes about her husband, who has some extremely intense opinions about very weird stuff.



• I sit with my classmates in the café at lunch, when they're there. I'm there the most often, though. I think it's a kind of cultural difference. The more Finland-integrated you are, the more you take cafeteria-lunch prices for granted and the more you're willing to pay. Pepe, whose better half is also Finnish, is the second-most casual cafeteria customer. Ksenia and Maria go once a week or so, but I think this is because they are each eating for two, and they're vocally dismayed by the prices vs. quantity and selection. Whereas from my viewpoint, the food is cheaper and better than the Finnish average, so it's doing fairly okay.

In terms of the class material, we've reached the Talking about the Weather unit and are 3/5 done with how to conjugate verbs in the simple present tense (we're spending way, WAY too long on this, considering how regular Finnish verbs are: they're pretty regular). We've started to learn partitive (which is necessary for direct objects and some types of plurals, among other uses) and genitive (possessives), but we're not done with them because they are each formed in a variety of different ways, so we're slowly practicing the different categories and going over the explanations again and again for the benefit of the slower classmates. We even briefly brushed over some of the more complex cases that deal with spatial relationships ('-ssa/ä and -sta/ä is for the inside of a house, and -lla/ä and -lta/ä is for places related to a house, but still outside, like the patio. Except when it isn't, which is a lot of the time'): just enough to cause intense headaches, in other words. Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that a limited selection of past tense would be more useful to us, considering the amount of off-the-cuff conversing/explaining we're supposed to be doing. After all, this class is immersion for everyone who doesn't speak Russian.