I Once Killed A Fly With My Eyelids

An actual live photograph of my teeth btw

"stress" by yoan capote - made of bronze and concrete

When I am listening to songs in Finnish or whatever, I often get stuck up on translating some of the words to english. Not like in an "I cant think of a translation" kind of way, but in an "I wonder how translating this like that would affect the flow of the song" kind of way.

Anyways, today I was listening to a song that had the words "olen surullinen", or "I am sad" in English. I noted how the Finnish version is much longer than the English one, that "sad" translates to "surullinen", a much longer word.

Then I that rabbit hole of a thought went a bit further, and I realized that the the Finnish word for "sadness" is much shorter, "suru", even though it is longer in English.

A nice enough thought on its own, but the hole goes deeper. I went on to think about why this is, and realized that in English, the adjective "sad" is the base form from which the language derives the other forms. In Finnish though, the base form is "sadness", which basically is the essence of being sad, the noun, from which the language gets the other words. And from this perspective of having the noun be the base form, being sad could be interpeted as having the essence of being sad. Thats what the "-llinen" ending in "surullinen" (the adjective, the feeling) means, having something or similar.

Not really sure if there is a point to any of this, just reflecting on how different languages "think" and also discovering a part of why translating songs between English and Finnish is so hard.

Whenever I look at brazil on a world map I cannot unsee it as a fart pillow with uruguay being the opening.

I was once at one of the busier stops of the 510 bus line (one of the busier lines in Helsinki) and on the stop opposite to me was I think 15 or so people, and iirc only 2 or 3 people were actually under the actual stop (it was like a double sized one)

Peak Finnish behaviour is waiting for a bus and the three people closest to me all standing 2 metres away.

Mind you I was standing basically in the middle of the area. And by a quick calculation we were ~ 17 people.

Im trying to get somewhere but my cat just decided to snuggle up against me.

... I guess im not going

Im catsitting two cats rn and they are just these two little rats running around yelling at each other.

One of them is chill about me

The other one is quite avoidant, basically taking the longest path from me, and then suddenly just climbing on my lap to purr and lick my hair, and then back to avoiding me.

Ooh I've done this too. Some of the ways we had people lying down instead of injury (though im pretty sure we had that too) were basking in the sun on a deck chair, swimming (we obviously didnt have actual water so swimming was done laying down), backing off in fear I think??

If i recall it used to be the hardest to justify someone sitting down constantly (or transitioning from sitting to laying down), but that then makes those the most fruitful for the improv.

Today my students were playing a theatre game called "Sit, Stand, Lie Down" (it is known by other, similar names elsewhere) where characters must perform a scene where someone must always be standing, someone else must be sitting, and someone else must be lying down.

So if a character begins the scene sitting, but then stands, the standing character must sit so every position is filled.

Today there were a few scenes where the way characters would choose "lie down" was always injury. "Oh ow I sprained my ankle," "I tripped on this big rock" etc. and a challenged them to show me a scene where nobody got hurt.

VERY next scene they improvised a cursed mummy's tomb where the curse was somebody always had to be laying down, so if the mummy arose from his sarcophagus, somebody else was cursed to lie down instead.

4) from what I've learned from all the queer spaces I've been in, the boxes dont actually exist and the best spaces are the ones that dont put you into a box, and you kind of forget that the boxes exist in the first place. Straight is just another sexuality, and a queer space that doesnt make a divide between cishet and queer people feels usually the most comfortable. Just people facing each other as people, not as members of a gender or a sexuality.

Now that I read this again it doesnt actually read like an added point to this list, more just me dumping my thoughts. I kinda like it that way.

I'm kind of at a point where the "queer spaces" i feel safest in are the ones that have a pet cishet dude or two hanging around

well maybe YOUR language, that is WEIRD and FOREIGN, does that, but MY language, that is PERFECT, makes complete sense and is perfectly understandable, and is also the default and best way of experiencing the human life.

Why does like every language do things with their R sounds that nobody else understands

To me, one of the core finland experiences is walking a long ass distance in the dead of night in freezing temperatures, on a quest to find the nearest bus stop that actually runs this late.

Just did that (still like 40 minutes away from home, but in the relatively warm bus now (bus also an integral part of the experience)) and I haven't felt more finnish in a while.