Cimorene

Hey, today I remembered that I totally forgot to tell anybody about the funniest part of the disastrous board meeting last week at which low blood sugar, no air conditioning, and injustice nearly led me into a meltdown!

Obviously, by the time I made it home, yelling 'AAARRRGG' had erased the lighter side of proceedings from my memory!

However. The funniest part of the board meeting, and also the surrealest, came when the board members were checking an online event announcement I'd created and fixing the grammar of the Swedish and Finnish versions of the text. Then they moved on to the English version of the text, and while I watched in bemusement and struggled increasingly not to laugh out loud, proceeded to collectively "fix" my English text so that it was a more literal and word-for-word translation of the Swedish original.

Aside from the fact that any native speaker is a sufficient authority to produce a better and more natural text translation into their native language, provided they understand the original, which is theoretically something some Boomers who haven't studied language or linguistics might not know, these guys all literally examined my resumé together before deciding to hire me, so they all know I've done professional translation!

I don't have any emotional investment in the text, which they quickly made into a grammatically correct but weird-sounding blurb like you often get from Scandinavian-language speakers without enough natural English practice. So when my neatnik boss glanced at me as an afterthought, quirked her eyebrows and asked if it was okay, I just shrugged and said "It's not wrong".

They moved in on Friday and Saturday and have started painting and unpacking! They also discovered that someone did an extremely thorough and professional job of sabotaging the new air conditioner that is at the house! They had an HVAC contractor and an electrician out and got it fixed to the tune of over 800 bucks, and both agreed it was probably done by the installer: both of them thought probably after whoever hired the installer didn't pay them. We have no proof of this, but it seems the likeliest scenario. They signed an as-is contract so the sellers, even if they did cause it by stiffing someone, aren't legally liable, which was my first thought. And apparently it was done after final inspection.

However, that isn't my point. Insurance will probably pay. My point is that this is why I love my dad's contributions to conversation.

me: I mean... the universe is infinite, so while money is the most likely cause, it's not the only possible one.
[CUT a long discussion between me and my sister about how much the sellers suck, what else they did wrong, and the bad renovations that were done in my and Wax's house]
Daddy: The universe probably is infinite, but our part of the cosmos, with galaxies and stuff, [h]as well defined but unknowable limits. So some possible things may have never actually happened.

ION, Wax's younger brother visited this weekend from Seinäjoki with our youngest niece, who is now seven and has started school this year but is still just as crazy about animals as ever! She spent a lot of the visit staring at the bunnies and following Tristana around, but she had a lot more success this time. Tristana spent a lot of time playing with her and Japp and Rowan both let themselves be caught, held in her lap and petted for a long time, so I think it was a win from her point of view!

She's bilingual and she still refuses to speak Swedish - they live in a Finnish-dominated area and her mother is a Finnish speaker, and they do the standard thing where each parent speaks their own first language to the kids. Her older sister speaks Swedish with him and with us, his family, but the littlest niece refused for years and she mostly just answers everybody in Finnish, with her dad translating if necessary in the past, but now all her cousins (14 and 16 respectively) speak better Finnish than I do, it's fine. HOWEVER, she doesn't 100% refuse to speak Finnish anymore! Brother in law says that the one time she speaks Swedish to him is when she's really mad at him, like she wants to make EXTRA sure he understands her!

This is adorable and I think she's hilarious. I can't wait to see what she's like as she continues to grow bigger.

I usually can't keep my attention on audiobooks because it's so much slower than reading, but I had a brainstorm the other day: SWEDISH audiobooks! I process it slower, so hearing it read aloud can't be frustrating in that way. Plus, the intonation and so on of the reader will help me get unfamiliar words from context. I found my library card to borrow the audio Moomin books in Swedish, which I've started reading a few times and not finished (apart from the first volume of comic strips).

It's better to be listening than watching when I'm following cable charts, anyway, and I really want to finish this hoodie.

Christian Christensen on Twitter: "1) Reporter @Frisund at expresen publishes one of most important stories on #COVID19 in Sweden, lost in much of national & intl coverage. Namely, how #COVID19 has spread and impacted Stockholm residents in poorer, diverse districts. Key points here. https://t.co/hlNXxinBgP" / Twitter

Despite warnings in mid-March that certain segments of Stockholm were disproportionately impacted (with many cases involving Somali-Swedes), authorities were slow to react. Of the first 15 deaths in Stockholm, 6 were Somali-Swedes. A week after that, the number had doubled.

Thread summarizing the racist and incompetent bureaucratic trainwreck going on in Sweden's response to ballooning hot spots of pandemic in densely-populated low-income Somali-Swedish immigrant suburbs of Stockholm via LexiAlex.

Finland managed to act early in the trajectory of the disease and the measures seem to be helping thus far, but there were delays in appropriate action too, which were dealt with pretty promptly and apparently much better than this, as Wax pointed out: when they had to throw out their initial models and estimates the Prime Minister announced she had lost confidence in whoever was in charge of them and replaced them promptly, and apparently they're investigating? So although they're apparently continuing on trajectory for a min. 2-week lag before recommending face masks - still not an official peep in favor - on the whole it seems light-years better in terms of responses to changing situations, honesty and transparency on the part of officials etc (to say nothing of Sweden still sticking to leaving everything open, which has been discussed elsewhere).

We were speculating about what the differences are, and I think it might be down to the strong strain of what I call Fairness Kink in Finnish culture. Finnish culture strongly emphasizes the importance of fairness, and this leads to a logical focus on equality, and, I would argue, the relatively direct and plain-spoken norms are perhaps also connected. Finland has problems with corruption like everywhere, but the rates of corruption are lower; Finland has lawbreakers like everywhere but overall higher confidence in government and interest in following the rules. Finland has bureaucracy like everywhere, but it's maybe less obstructive and impossible to navigate. (Swedish culture does not share this. Sweden is big on egalitarianism and lagom - that is, moderation, restraint, reasonable medium, perhaps? - but there's a cultural trend to insist on upbeatness, far less plain speaking, much bigger problems historically with corruption, and far less equal gender distribution in the workplace. Wax says you even see it on customer service phonecalls: both artificial cheer and sometimes repellant amounts of passive aggression and indirectness.)

A WEEK AGO:
ME: Induction isn't that much more expensive, and did you know it heats way faster?
WIFE: You're thinking glass top, right? You don't need induction?

NOW:
ME: Okay, if you think about it, I've never burnt myself on a burner, so it's not like we really need it...
WIFE: My brother says he's not sure how they ever lived without it and look, this one's on sale... and so's this one...

---

We still can't really do any planning until we sign the deed Tuesday, take measurements of the rooms, and get a quote for the most urgent renovations, but that obviously hasn't stopped us from thinking about what to do in the kitchen (luckily for me, kitchens aren't one of the things that give Wax the proverbial "I can't have opinions in a place like this"es, but she's not argumentative or aesthetically opinionated).

Wax found out when she met the seller last week that the house, like most houses from the year 1950 or thereabouts, does have a name: it's called Knypplinge. -inge is an ancient place name ending that's especially common in Swedish-language place names in the Finnish archipelago, but as far as we can learn might not mean anything; and Wax says that "knyppla" is the verb "to tat", as in making tatted lace, although who knows, it could also mean something completely entirely different, but it's fun to say. The 'n' is pronounced in Swedish and it has a jaunty three syllables, with the final 'e' making the 'ng' sound extra fun.

I bought some dk-weight alpaca-blend sock yarn from Norwegian brand Sandnes, and it's called Spøt.

SPØT!

My intuition that this sounds hilarious from the Swedish point of view as well was borne out by Wax's reaction. I tried an inter-scandi dictionary and wiktionary to no avail, but finally a text search turned up the info that "spøt" is Nynorsk (the less common (?) closer-to-traditional-less-modern (?) standard Norwegian - they have two) term for "knitted fabric".

ETA: Spøt produces an incredibly soft and squishy sock, in spite of 20% nylon. Alpaca's silkiness and airiness make it feel a bit fluffier and smoother on the skin than pure merino (it's 40/40), but the merino still provides that buttery, cushiony surface/density/springiness that merino is known for. These socks are great! I'm wishing I'd chosen a more basic pattern so I could finish them faster - I'm stuck doing cable twists on the front center motif now which is slowing me down since I have to check that I'm twisting the right direction and at the correct interval... I should've left the cable socks for Wax, who is so much faster than me, and just hurried through so I could be reveling in my new bluey Norwegian-fir-green heathery socks.

Sooooo, what's going on with me is that I'm with the Red Cross for the next... 6 months or so.

The last time I was in a work practice placement it was a daycare ( The equivalent of The Previouslies, a short summation of how I wound up switching Employment Goals ) I decided to do some retail for the time being, because I have some experience of it and it's doable without any certification or training, unlike many other fields.

My Finnish isn't perfect - it's what you'd call "fine" or "pretty good" probably, and I'm still terrified of someone unintelligible due to mumbling or regional accent coming along, but I don't have trouble ordinarily. It's also been 13 years since I was a cashier though, and the technology has changed since then, and I've never done it in Finland anyway. So when the little group of social workers, employment bureau caseworkers and mental health professionals that my therapist's workgroup belongs to heard my explanation, they swiftly concluded that a few work practice placements in different areas of retail would be best, because it would provide the best chance to polish my Retail Finnish language skills and appease my anxiety by familiarity with environment and expectations of the field.

They also sent me to a new department of the Employment Bureau, which - okay, let me just pause here to note that this is amazing as fuck: The Employment Bureau has a SECRET DEPARTMENT where they give slightly more help to people who need slightly more help. In the ordinary run of things, caseworkers there have 500+ customers apiece and are overworked and underfunded to death. I've had like four caseworkers in the last few years before this already. And when you go to their information desk, or to their ordinary caseworkers, and ask for more help, they typically send you to that Career Planning course that I was sent to a couple years ago, which wasn't useless but was aimed at people who needed help navigating the bureaucracy and things like that more than people suffering from social anxieties and culture barriers and uncertainty about their language skills.

But even though I had previously inquired in multiple places about help, nobody at the Employment Bureau had been empowered to tell me about the existence of this department, which I gather you get sent to only with the referral of a psychologist or psychiatrist? That's where the representative came from who was at the the meeting with my psychologist I mentioned, and he immediately put in a request to have me transferred to that department. I got a new caseworker from there who was calm, friendly, brisk, and reassuring. She said that if I hope to work arranging the little showrooms at Ikea there's a certification for that (Somistaja, a window dresser/display maker) which depends on the certification for being a salesperson.

So she sent me to the Red Cross's thrift store, Kontti, which is staffed with students, volunteers, work practicants and people eligible for the thing where social security reimburses the employer for their salary. So it's almost entirely charity, with most of the proceeds going to the Red Cross's various projects in Finland (50%) and abroad (25%), plus it's very diverse and friendly and generally a pretty nice place. Their reputation as a training ground for retail and warehouse workers who then move on to employment elsewhere is so good, in fact, that they are fairly selective with their new trainees - the big boss told us in our introduction on Tuesday that our group of 8 represented over 100 applicants over a couple of months, which is like... a Harvard-like acceptance rate. (The Swedish language got me in the door here, I'm pretty sure: EVERYBODY who hears that I'm interested in retail and speak fluent-ish Swedish gets excited, because there's a huge demand for that skill due to the legal and practical requirement for stores to have someone who can speak it on hand - there aren't really many Swedish monolinguals around, but there are still a few.) You can also get salesperson certification on the job there, as well as a long list of other certifications - the lady who was supervising me and my fellow new-cashier trainees yesterday is on the verge of finishing one in business admin. (Hence why it was my caseworker's first choice.)

We spent the first couple of days on the warehouse side, where the donations are processed, sorted and priced, and it has to be seen to be believed. It's just such an unbelievable quantity of stuff. The area around the station where the bags are emptied and unpacked is just like something out of a movie, walls made out of racks and shelves and carts packed solid with bags of donated stuff waiting to be opened - cases four feet deep and six feet tall, banana boxes towering up towards the warehouse ceiling, and an overflow area with just a five or six foot high mountain of bags just... piled against the wall like a heap of snow. But that's only the beginning of the journey, because once they're unpacked and sent to the proper departments there's yet more sorting to do. The front half of the warehouse is also packed with racks, crates, shelves and bins of objects on their way to the store front, so it's a bit like an antique mall except cleaner - one little room of china, one little room of books, one little room of paintings, one little room of toys, one little room of electronics - where the walls between them are once again made of storage packed solid on both sides with stuff. Walking in for the first time felt a bit like, I don't know, visiting Willy Wonka's factory, or one of those quaint little Museums of Curiosities.

(I didn't get around to posting about this extremely irritating day until yesterday, when I posted it spontaneously on Tumblr in response to a post about gender-neutral toy marketing in Sweden, where someone mistakenly stated that Swedish doesn't have gendered pronouns and my wife corrected them. I thought I'd repost it for posterity and because it relates to the ongoing narrative of my Finnish class adventures.)

waxjism: It's Finnish that doesn't have gendered pronouns (all people are hän). Swedish has "han" and "hon".¹

That said, that magical language quirk has not stopped gender essentialism from hanging around like a bad smell. Sweden is working much harder on that shit.

Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns but it has exercises like this one I had to participate in last Thursday meant to practice the approximately 100² different forms of the plural partitive (one of several types of objective) case: 'What are women like, and what are men like?' (The point is to make a list of adjectives in plural partitive form.)

CLASSMATE: Women are beautiful! Men are handsome!³

CLASSMATE: Women are short!

OTHER CLASSMATE: No they're not!

ME: Women are adult people.

CLASSMATE: Oh, you mean 'adulter'! Women are adulter than men!

ME: No, I don't mean that. That is not true. Men are also adult people.

CLASSMATE: Right, not all, just most women. Men are more childish!

ME: No, I don't mean that. That is not true. But! Women ARE paid less money for the same work.

TEACHER: That's true! The 'women's euro' - 80 cents. [...] Right then, what are men like?

CLASSMATES: Strong! Tall! Funny? Handsome.

ME: They're more violent, especially towards their own wives, than women are, and also in Finland, they're more violent towards their wives than in many other European countries.

CLASSMATE: I don't think so!

ME: Yes, they are.

TEACHER: Is that true, did you read it somewhere?

ME: Yes, in a sociology course at the university, 'Gender and Sexuality in the Nordic Countries.'

TEACHER: Oh I see! Actually, that makes sense: I remember that there was a lot of domestic violence in Finland when I was a child.

CLASSMATE: Probably the explanation for what you read was that nowadays Finland has many immigrants from different countries, like Africa, but the police statistics can't say which group is which.

ME: No, that's not true. They can say. It's Finnish men.

TEACHER: Yeah, it wouldn't be new immigrants; it's Finnish culture. Because I remember it was already the case a long time ago, when I was young.

ME: Finns are more depressed too.

So basically I'm the one that's always killing the mood with angry feminist opinions.

Later:

TEACHER: What doesn't a little girl need?

EVERYONE: Uh...

ME: Over 100 pink toys.

( Footnotes )

FUN FACTS! Did you know that anti-depressant prescriptions expire exactly 1 year after they're written? I didn't!

Usually you would never have reason to find this out. "How on Earth, Cim, could this come to happen to you?" you might be saying, especially if you have my experience of the withdrawal symptoms from an SSRI. Well, dear reader, it basically happened like this!

1. From the time I first moved to Finland I was a student, and students get better public healthcare than regular members of the public.



2. In summer 2008 I dropped out of school and had to stop seeing my psychiatrist. He told me that the waiting lists to see a public doctor are quite long. He gave me an extra-long prescription to make sure I didn't run out before I got in to see a doctor.



3. This prescription lasted easily until the following January, when I made an appointment with a GP. I saw her in March 2009, at which point my extra-long prescription had nearly run out.



4. The GP agreed that since I was doing well on my current prescription, but still needed it on a day-to-day basis, she would write another scrip for it without immediately putting me on the psychiatrist-waiting list. She said to go ahead and use up the rest of the old scrip before hers, which she wrote for 6 months.



5. Because I am an airhead and my former -iatrist would write me a new paper scrip whenever he asked if I had plenty left and I said "I'm not sure, I might be almost out", I subsequently discovered three or four paper scrips with one or two fills left on them from him. And since anytime you see a GP it's a game of Russian Psychoactive Drugs Roulette whether they will try to tell you that you "shouldn't continue to need an SSRI indefinitely"... I used all of them up before I filled the GP's scrip for the first time. That was in September 2009.



6. Because I am an airhead with a wacky sleep schedule I frequently go 24-36 hours before I remember to take my psychoactive drugs (usually thanks to the onset of withdrawal, yay!). So I only ran out last Monday.

I had already gone without a little longer than usual when I got Wax to the pharmacy with me (getting 100 pills at once still costs €75 or something and I didn't have that in my account) on Wednesday for my last 6-month refill. So I was unmedicated when I encountered in the person of the pharmacist, whose English sucked by the way, a Rude Angry-Glaring Unhelpful Person. (This is all too common in Finland.) Her method of informing us that we can't has medicine was a) too long, b) delivered partly in angry Finnish over my head to Wax, and c) confusing.

So I've been dealing with a lot more background anxiety over this (and the fact that I now have to sign up for the psychiatrist-waiting list) and also rediscovering the joy of My Brain Without SSRIs: Frequent food cravings! Slightly increased sex drive! The black spiral of "I am worthless" thoughts! Periodic crying jags, tears welling up whenever anyone raises their voice! Yeah, I haven't really missed it.

When I was trying to talk to someone in the public healthcare system about getting my medication back yesterday, I accidentally dialed the health center's switchboard instead of receptionist (mainly due to confusing design of the website, but also my confusion because I've never before encountered a doctor's office where the switchboard was anyone other than the receptionist... or at least not where they had a website, but the number for patients to call was not clearly displayed/labeled), and the switchboard lady didn't speak English or Swedish (whatever, but you actually are legally guaranteed service in Swedish from any branch of the government) and was equally as rude as the pharmacist to Wax, once Wax took the phone from me. However, when I dialed the 24-hour Advice From A Nurse hotline in exasperation because I couldn't figure out how to get my GP's receptionist, the nurse was INCREDIBLY helpful (she made the appointment for me), and also sweet.

This caused me and Wax to reflect on how Finland, being a country utterly without the concept of customer service, basically has 2 kinds of people in customer service:

1. The people who should never, ever be allowed to answer the phone (possibly including their OWN phone) because they treat every conversation as an armed battle in which the other person, by speaking to them, has been the aggressor, and is probably fighting dirty. Everything you say to these people is received with an air of surprisedly outraged hostility, as if you've offended them not just egregiously but so unprecedentedly that they're still having trouble wrapping their brain around it. These people are frequently cashiers and bus drivers, but there are a surprising number of them in the human resources industry.



2. The people who are genuinely nice, so their helpfulness is quite unlike the helpfulness you get from an American who is good at customer service. There's something earnest, never rehearsed about their helpfulness, because it springs not from any kind of training, but from actual niceness. I've talked to plenty of Americans in customer service who WERE genuinely nice (counting among them quite a few nurses and pharmacists), but the Finnish ones have a charming naïvete of approach because they've had to reinvent the Wheel of Polite Assistance.

...that's where my normally-sort-of-daily posts went. Hopefully your regularly scheduled programming will be returning soon.

PS: I'm totally making that shirt that says "Medicine Is the Best Medicine" now. Fuck yes.

I forgot to post when, a couple of weeks ago, our local¹ paper reached New Lows in Headline-Writing, which is saying quite a bit for the worst source of headlines I have ever seen, with the following lead front-page headline:

Suicide among youth upsetting
(Självmord bland unga oroar)

O RLY? You don't say.

You might think this is the opposite of a human interest story and skip the whole thing, which would presumably be presenting the results of some sort of study, from the headline. But in fact, the headline is worse than it looks at first glance because it doesn't actually convey what the article is about. In fact, it was concerned with current events - a few particular recent teen suicides in Finland.

1. Hufvudstadsbladet is the main Finland-wide Swedish-language newspaper, so most of the "local" news is concerned with the Helsinki area. However, the total Swedish-speaking population of the country is in the 200 000 s, so "local" is still rather accurate. Swedish Finns themselves call their community "the duck pond" (the Finns are the surrounding pigeons)(Hufvudstadsbladet had a pretty brilliant series of billboards a few years ago with a little yellow rubber duck in the middle of a crowd of grey pigeons with a voice bubble saying "Is there anybody here who speaks Swedish?").