Re: Divorces, compatibility, and wages

Daniel recently brought up a point in my previous entry about how it was insulting to divide wives into trophy wives and achieving wives and that I completely discarded the domestic stay-at-home wife. Short answer: yes, I did discard the group from the discussion, mainly because it was of no interest in this scope. As Daniel will also note, the article from The Times that I referred to was also speaking about the alpha males. I can with quite a safe assumption say that I nor any of the people who read this blog qualify in that category of (U)HNWIs. In the same way it is insulting for us normal men that I didn't cover us.

As for the domestic stay-at-home wife... Well... Different people have different values. I can sort of see the point of an arrangement like this. I personally do not prefer one, since in my view in a family both spouses should engage in both working and domestic lives. It's a question of balance. Managing a household is obviously not easy and I can imagine it must include tons of tensions, be they political, financial, or whatever. And if one spouse works and the other runs the household, the overall setting is in imbalance and might trigger outbursts when they start questioning the amount of effort that each puts into the overall (an analogy might be how marketing and R&D never seem to get along in corporations). However, here again holds the point that there are different types of families. Some families require much household effort (households with e.g. many children, pets, etc.) whereas other families/pairs may not put any effort on household issues and prefer to subcontract them to third parties.

A family that resides in an urban setting and employs the services of cleaners and nannies, amongst others, the role of the stay-at-home wife is at best questionable. One might argue that with (U)HNWIs, these are often the cases, meaning that while simplifying the situation, two archetypal roles arise: the achieving wife and the trophy wife (which has the questionable workload of drinking wine and spending their spouses' wealth).

I hope this helped to alleviate some of Daniel's concerns.

Divorces, compatibility, and wages

It appears that the amount of divorces has been accelerating in Britain quite drastically recently. It's not really that surprising considering how the banking industry is in quite a turmoil and all the trophy wives are packing their bags and leaving while they can still take a part of their spouses' fortunes with them.

But on a more positive note, The Times ran a story a year and a half back about how successful men are ditching their trophy wives. This is of course a nice thing and personally I'm also a believer in the view that my wife should also aim high (i.e. I'm not taking any freeloaders with me). So hopefully in the future the time for gold diggers in this area will be over. Of course this spawns new questions (or old questions) about gender equality, values, and compatibility. What sort of people are compatible? Why? Where's the balance between home and work lives and how the children are raised? And so on...

Anyway, the article from The Times brings some other interesting views. Previously the concept of trophy wife has been a pejorative one, but now that successful men are looking for successful women, worries about equality and elite "power couples" arise. I guess we can never be satisfied with any sort of state we're in. And in a related topic, wage equality has been a big topic in Finland again recently with some journalists writing about how women should demand higher salaries. And this is a very good point, since women should demand higher salaries if they feel they want and deserve higher salaries! Actually, that guidance is not even gender specific, since that's what I also do.

Related to the wage equalities, Helsingin Sanomat recently released a story where someone had interviewed male and female graduates and asked them how much they would like to get paid in the initial job. Men were asking for over 4 000 euros per year more than their female counterparts! Additional studies suggest that men are able to increase the wage disparity by switching jobs often and achieving raises that way, whereas women are much more loyal to their employers and do not move as much. So, in light of this, I'm all for gender equality, but right now I think that instead of just bitching and moaning about it, women should actively pursue higher wages by actions instead of just pointing fingers around. It may be that previously the playing field has been biased towards men, but the field is evening out right now, so the old excuses of gender-based racism just don't cut it anymore.

And on an entirely different note, I recently ordered some fabric samples from the UK, so I'll hopefully be able to get my suits for this autumn ordered pretty soon! And I'm waiting for my brand-spankin'-new, custom-made shoes from Left to arrive some time during next week. Life's certainly good right now.

On the Forgotten Art of Brunching

Brunching is one of the best ways to spend a Sunday, hands down. It is a brilliant way to start a slow day by enjoying an early lunch or a late breakfast with good friends and other acquaintances in a decent and relaxed setting. And at the same time you can pamper yourself with the small luxuries in life--maybe have a glass of champagne while casually chatting and observing the world move by.

But alas, we're in Finland, and the culture of brunching never really got on here. That itself isn't anything surprising considering how ill-customed brutes Finns are. Sophistication shouldn't even be mentioned in the same paragraph. But maybe, just maybe, this will slowly change, too. And other people can also slowly start appreciating how relaxing it is to just spend time in this elegant way.

One of the biggest reasons, perhaps, why brunches haven't caught on with Finns is because brunches are typically served on weekends, and more importantly during the morning. The culture in Finland is one where people typically end up staying awake until the early hours on weekends, getting entirely hammered more often than not. So again, this brings us back to the question of cultivated drinking habits and elegance. I'll say no more of that, as I've previously made my sentiments fairly well known.

But early mornings are in fact great by themselves. During my sick leave thus far, I've learned to appreciate them as I get up a lot more early now than when I was working. It's not uncommon for me to get between five and six o'clock these days and just lounge around for a while. This is one habit that I should really try to move into my everyday routine after I end my leave in a few weeks, too. But in fact, there isn't anything new here that I didn't unconsciously know before. In retrospect some of the greatest times in the past have been early golf rounds on weekend mornings when the weather is still nice and cool and the course is very much empty.

Maybe this all just goes to demonstrate how sickened my way of life has become during the past few years and how I can improve my overall level of happiness by just rotating my sleeping schedule a bit. Or maybe it's just the fact that the past week has been unique in the sense that for the first time in quite a while, I've done neither real work or school work and just been idling along and doing quite a bit of reading and enjoying life (to the extent that one can enjoy life while being dosed up on painkillers and attempting to recover from an osteotomy to the facial region).

The Thomas Crown Walk

Just about everyone is always capable of devising a list of improvements for themselves, be they cosmetic or otherwise. Whole industries have been born around what is in essence mere vanity. And people are in fact willing to put in a lot of time, effort, and money to achieve these improvements. Of course the motivators can be intrinsic or extrinsic and a debate could be spawned around which is better. But it's precisely the reason why women take so long when getting ready to go out on a Saturday evening. Everything has to be perfect from the outset, even though tradition and experience tells that more often than not, especially with younger females, the nights typically end more or less badly. But regardless, it's the mental image from the outset that matters.

But fortunately not all things can be bought with money and not all things related to vanity are productized. I'm a huge fan of The Thomas Crown Affair (both versions, although I slightly prefer Brosnan's interpretation as it isn't as outdated, if you will, as the McQueen version). Thomas Crown is more or less the epitome of style, elegance, and understated chic (ok, this last one is debatable). Granted, I wouldn't mind having his town house or his Jaeger-LeCoultre. But what I really envy is his walk. It is just brilliant.

Very early on in the Brosnan interpretation, Thomas Crown enters the office after leaving his briefcase in the museum. This is the scene where you can see the walk. The posture is good and upright. Very balanced and graceful. It oozes a certain type of sophistication. But then it is also very American; it's strong and assertive, something that you would indeed expect from a great 21st century industrialist, in this case a banker. But it isn't rigid. Through an analogy, his walk is sort of like what a good handshake should be like: firm but gentle, enough to signal that you are powerful, but not a brute. And that's what I like about his walk. Maybe I'm digging into it a bit too much and it is certainly a vanity thing, but still... Check out the scene if you have the movie and you'll see.

Minorities

These days it seems that the middle class is a minority that nobody really identifies with. It's so... Mediocre. The people who are so boring and bland that you just can't remember their names or any interesting bit about their lives if your own life depended on it. The people who in primary school used to make up the bunch of people who you never even knew existed. All the jocks either went to work as mechanics or went off to some school on some scholarship. The geeks will undoubtedly found multi-billion dollar companies and rule the world. The prom queens, who knows... Married their high school sweethearts and are now in a dead end relationship with two children and a low wage job.

I was recently invited to a class reunion for our junior high class. I still haven't decided if I can be bothered to go, but it got me thinking about what ever happens to these people you never remember. I guess they go on to live a more or less decent life and don't make that much noise about themselves. One could say that because it's such a middle of the road solution, the value systems and the entire lifestyle is sort of, well, ok. And considering this, it's amazing how in the elections, for instance, all the runners are more or less promising perks and benefits to all other groups, especially those of low income. I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but why should I care about those groups at all these days? All the political correctness is making sure that these lower classes are not forgotten when all the while the quiet and hard working middle class is baring the hits in the form of double taxation of dividends, for instance.

All the while the value systems have also changed and it's no longer trendy to just be a part of the middle class or the upper middle class. It's so bland; everyone has to be a rock star and everyone is optimizing their life over the next 15 minutes. Or, that is, everyone who's in any way visible, at least. In my opinion, why should actually start promoting the mid class way of living more; add some spice to it and market it off as the preferred way of living. I know it's harsh and I know that many people have many different types of problems which mean that they might be at a slight disadvantage and need to be subsidized by the state. To some extent. But seriously, offer a level playing field and stop pampering the classes who won't pull their weight around. Maybe it's harsh, but why should the hard working, middle class blokes pull around the dead weight of everyone else while the low class bitches and moans about their situation without actually doing anything about it and the upper classes can rely on wealth management specialists to keep themselves going strong forever. It's just so ironic that the majority of citizens who make up the middle class of a nation have all of a sudden gone mute and become a minority and are just going along with the increasing amount of freeloaders.

Day 3

Well, Tuesday came and went and some jaws were moved and some titanium was inserted. Not much recollection of the day, in fact I guess I slept most of the day. Which in retrospect might've been a very good thing as hospitals aren't really my favorite place to spend the time. That said, the Surgical Hospital in Helsinki is decent enough with its historical atmosphere.

Anyway, it's such an unreal feeling. It's back to basics; speaking is difficult, eating is nigh impossible and it just feels that even though you're offered more than enough painkillers, there's no real point in abusing them. And worst of all is the numbness. When you feel your lip, you know something should happen, you should feel something. But you don't. You try, but to no avail. All in all, it's a very disturbing feeling.

Two factors seem to contribute toward the difficulty in actually keeping any sort of edible substance in your mouth for long enough to allow you to swallow it: firstly the complete lack of control and feeling over your lip means that you have no sense of when things start going wrong, i.e. when all that liquid-y stuff is starting to go towards your shirt. I know, it sounds quite humorous and I guess it sort of is. The second factor is that in all honesty, even if you could move your lips and have any sort of feeling from them, you still couldn't move your mouth that much.

I guess I could go on and describe all sorts of other interesting situations that an operation of this type operation leads to, but I fear that it wouldn't be that interesting. Suffice to say, I survived the six hour operation in a more or less decent shape. And slowly but surely I'm pulling myself back together. I was in fact thinking that tomorrow I might as well go for my first "long" walk outside and see if I can get my energy levels back to normal.

Oh, and I did start unwrapping my work mailbox, but it appears that the instant you step out of the office, things fall apart. So I guess I have my weekend's work cut out for me.

Feelings before the storm

Well, in a bit more than 24 hours I should be embarking on the quest to have my jaws spliced and diced a bit. And up until now I haven't really had time to think about it that much. The surgery itself has just been an annoying blip in the radar, something that forces me to temporarily skip work. But for the past couple of hours I decided, for some unknown reason, to read a bit about the experiences of some other people who've gone through or are starting to go through the same process as me. Interestingly enough it seems that most of the people writing are women and most of them are complaining about all types of complications that have arisen.

It's only now for the first time that I've actually thought about the fact that maybe I won't be fully up to speed again in two weeks time and maybe this thing will take a bit longer. And that is an incredibly annoying thought, since I really want to get back to work. Being idle is not fun and the end of 1H08 is coming up and I still need to earn my bonuses.

So, to sum up some feelings, I'm not really worried about the surgery. But I am worried and annoyed about the possibility that things will take time. Oh well, time to go face the (preliminary) music in about 7 and a half hours, so I might as well sleep a bit before that.

Pain and suffering

Pain and suffering just got a new definition after today. Mental pain, emotional pain? Those are for wussies. Real men get their pain in the only real form: physical pain. Todays experience in pain originates not from previously mentioned maxillofacial surgeries, but instead from the Helsinki City Run, the half-marathon little sister of the Helsinki City Marathon. Sufficient to say, the time was appalling; 2 hours and 31 minutes. Some people will know that I was targetting 2 hours and 30 minutes, but deep down I was somewhat confident that I could achieve a better time. But disaster struck in many forms and ultimately it was my own stupidity that caused me to get knocked from my 2 hour target down 25%.

First of all, saying that I've neglected my training would be an understatement. This is the primary reason for the headaches lateron. No explanations, I just dropped the ball here. Secondly, my approach to eating properly and getting enough energy right before the run (i.e. today and yesterday) was very appalling and at the starting line I was already cursing for not having had more to drink earlier in the day.

The race was started in three waves, which depended on the target times you had given the organizers. I was in the third wave, more than halfway behind the front. The start was slow due to the amounts of people running. So my first mistake of the run was when I got fed up with the situation and started passing by people while trying to clear room for myself. Silly idea; I ended up starting too fast. At the ten kilometer mark I noticed that I was doing a respectable one hour per kilometer pace, but that was obviously way too fast for me. The problems for me started at around the 13 kilometer mark, slightly before the third watering point. This was when my pace started to drop a bit. At the 16 kilometer mark I hit a wall, just one kilometer before the last watering point. I couldn't help but slow down and walk. I had more or less killed my legs.

Deciding to walk is in no way a shameful thing, in my books at least. But it does bring some new problems. The temperatures were already falling, my legs were burning acid, and I passed the last watering point and drank too many (two) glasses of Gatorade. I didn't feel like running, so I continued to walk with a quick pace. But I was walking for too long, since the coldness hit in and after that even thinking about running was pretty much out of the question. Only half a kilometer before the finish line did I decide to start running. So this more or less destroyed all hopes for a respectable time.

Some other practical issues further helping with the downfall was that for some reason the chest plate of my heartrate monitor wasn't working and I wasn't getting any heartrate levels, so I was feeling with gut instinct, which in my case is pretty much nonexistent. Additionally I wasn't able to spot any rabbits or pacesetters of any sort nearby and I didn't have any sort of method of getting feedback on the pace that I was running, aside from doing basic divisions at every kilometer mark. It is, of course, very debatable whether or not I would've understood that I was going way too fast in the first place, even if I'd had access to some sort of speed information.


So to sum it up, the experience was... Horrible. But teaching, in a way. I'm not sure that I'll even attempt to run a marathon this year, but I was thinking of seeing if there is some other half-marathon later in the summer in which I could participate...

The Son of Man

I'm on the right. The anonymous business man with a bowler hat. My friend is on the left.

And on a completely unrelated note, I've posted my BSc thesis, On Offshore Outsourcing Motivators, online. It's not a terribly good paper, but oh well. I guess it will pass anyway.

Wrapping things up

As an exercise it is quite a unique project to try to tie up all the loose ends in your life. The scenario is one where you put your life in pause for about a month and you have to leave it in a shape that is able to survive the pause without everything falling apart. It's not as trivial as it sounds, in fact. It's surprising how many todo-items one can have in a life and not really recognize it, and the rate at which new ones appear is even more amazing. One thing I've learned in the past few weeks is to just say no to things that I do not have time to do.

My personal project over the past years has been one which is reaching is culmination in about a week and a half and carries the name of orthognathic surgery. To summarize briefly for those of you who are not aware of the types of oral and maxillofacial surgeries, the purpose of the operation is to move the upper and lower jaws around to create a better fit. The motivations are primarily medical and secondarily cosmetic, although it is by no means a vanity affair due to the long time and quite a bit of pain associated with the process.

I personally classify facial surgeries amongst the most risky surgeries. The basis is in the fact that people create their self image based to a decently large degree on their face. If you look at images of people's bodies with faces covered, it is fairly difficult to determine who is in the picture. And when you wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror, you should always recognize yourself. But when you start changing things about your facial structure, the affects are enormous, especially on a psychological level. You may still recognize yourself from the image in the mirror, but regardless of how small the change, you're still not fully able to comprehend that it's you in the mirror. That sort of happened during the last surgery a bit over two years ago. And it will happen this time, too, with the exception that the changes will be slightly bigger.

But as an exercise in humility, I do warmly suggest taking part in operations like this. It does get you thinking quite a bit about who you are and how you define yourself. The positive part is that according to academic studies, the cosmetic enhancements afforded by the surgeries are also often very positive and while in Finland, you can also get the state to subsidize the otherwise very expensive process to a very large degree.

As for wrapping things up, I guess I have quite a way to go still. For some odd reason I'm still accepting more action points at work and I just noticed that I will not have the time or the energy to do all the exams that I had planned for this exam period. But regardless, I think that I will be able to get a satisfactory closure to this chapter by the end of next week. After that it'll be painkillers and golf for quite a while.

And on a completely different note, Nanda got my portrait finished recently and I'll be getting it to my flat in a couple of days. Hurray!

Savile Row Revisited

I've been neglecting my blogroll recently, but it turns out that Thomas Mahon has in fact been busy again and there's a rather interesting 20 minute video on what he does and about bespoke clothing. I won't be a bore and drone on and on about this, so I'll just paste the video here...

Competitiveness

We've all engaged in competitions from time to time, some of us more often than others. Some people enjoy competing and some shun it entirely. Usually the first forms of competitive behavior appear very early on as children. The competitive aspect might be argued to be one where the child feels that it has to compete for the attention of an adult. And then comes football (no, not the vulgar American version, but proper European football). And ice hockey. And golf. And school. And work. And so on. To say that I'm a competitive person would be worthy of an Understatement of the Year award.

Competitive situations, however, get out the bad things in me. In fact, that is one reason why I stopped actively engaging in sports competitions: winning wasn't everything, it was the only thing. Anything beside the first place was a disappointment and I was a very bad loser. So eventually I found the error of my ways and decided that competing is just silly and that I should just steer clear of such situations.

Recently I've taken a slight u-turn again and I've been thinking of where this non-competitive path has been leading me. In fact, even though I've been saying constantly that I'm not competing with anyone or anything, that's not entirely true. On some subconscious level I just couldn't turn the mode off. But, that might not actually be such a bad thing after all. I think that instead of treating competitions as something inherently bad, the problem was indeed with me and how I handled victories and defeats.

A life without competition is in fact terribly boring. Competitions don't even necessarily have to always be against other people. You can compete against yourself, also. Identify and push your own limits. Ayrton Senna has been quoted as saying (to paraphrase a bit) that every day a person should explore their limits and boundaries and push them a bit further, ever so slightly past the breaking point. It is this which in turn allows a person to achieve continuous development, an evolution of sorts. Some clever bloke could, for instance, tie this view to Nietzsche's teachings or alternatively to the views of growth by subjecting oneself to situations outside of one's comfort zone.

So in light of this, competitions are not only fun, but they're very useful. Granted, if competition is overdone, it might have some negative side-effects to it. But then again, overdoing anything is often bad. My fear is, however, that if one continues to avoid competitions, the end result is that of boring mediocrity. Of course different people perceive this topic differently, but I just have this feeling that either people who are able to elevate themselves above competitions are very smart or then they are very dumb. Maybe some day I'll figure out which. But in the mean time I just got my ticket to the Helsinki City Run, a half-marathon that is taking place next weekend. That's a new frontier for me in which I can push my own limits and at the same time see how I fare against a friend of mine, who has apparently been ever so slightly (*cough*) more active in training for the event. So if I lose, and I most likely will, then it just goes to show that I've neglected the proper training routine and that I'm worse at running half-marathons than my friend is. But fortunately the positive thing about losing is that it is always very annoying, and the trick is to not make a habit out of it...

I'm a bad man

Recently there's been a prominent debate going on in the Finnish media surrounding women's studies and the related shebang. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I have no clue about the subject and the rationale behind it. Apparently it has something to do with the idea that sciences in general have traditionally been dominated by men and that they are based on the point-of-view of men and that because of this all things should be considered questionable. I don't see how gravity is a matter of opinion, but oh well, if it gives you kicks, go ahead and question it all you want.

Another view that I kept stumbling across that men have always dominated women. I'm of course young enough that I don't have any sort of real feeling about this, but I've been led to understand that traditionally men have indeed dominated the world more than women. These sorts of things can, I guess, be seen in the overall patriarchal way that the world has previously been run (e.g. men dominating politics, economics, etc.). Right now, however, it seems that things are going in the better direction and things like universal suffrage are considered obvious things. The problem I have with all this is that the previously mentioned views and the discussions tend to revolve around how badly women are treated and how unequal the world is--but only from the men vs. women axel.

Maybe I'm just stupid and dumb (and this is in fact very likely, all things considered), but I don't really see the point of the fight and how it is more important than just saying that inequality of rights between different groups is bad. Of course if I say that I think it is silly to continue fighting about how bad off women are thanks to the manipulative and bad men, I am of course an ignoramus and a racist. And of course the debate is important, at least to a certain extent. But how is it more important than if gaining equality between different races so that e.g. Jewish people wouldn't need to live in a world with anti-Semitism and that handicapped people wouldn't be disadvantaged when applying jobs.

And on the parallel of me being an idiot, I, for the love of life, can't understand why the discussion about genders is at all interesting. About half of the people are born as male, the other half as female. I'm a Finn and a friend of mine a Brit. I was born with green eyes and another friend of mine with blue eyes. Yet when discussing nationalities and the different colors of eyes, I don't get the feeling that I'm getting attacked. But every time the discussion turns to genders and women's studies, I get the feeling that by default I am a bad person, mainly because I happen to be a man.

But, maybe I've misunderstood the whole point. Regardless, I still have the gut feeling that this whole thing is more about pointing fingers at people than anything else and that the effort spent here could be used to accomplish more concrete results if people would just snap out of the pedantic asshole mode and start actually thinking about real problems that don't revolve around the fundamental question of what types of internal and external organs different people have. And do note that I've used the term "people" as opposed to "men and women". Because in the grand scheme of things, it shouldn't matter what gender you happen to be as there are more important problems at hand right now.

Satisfaction

A core thing in life is happiness and everyone is making a scramble for it. It's a land grab, essentially, with the exception that whereas landgrabs are typically zero-sum games, happiness isn't. It's in fact a very typical case of a game where synergies can be witnessed. You can become happier when making other people also more happy--win-win. So everything's fine and dandy and we can all live happily ever after.

There are views that one way to achieve happiness is to be satisfied and content. The idea, I guess, is related to finding your own inner peace and silencing down your inner voices and discarding want. In an optimal situation you would be without want and just content with everything, at balance.

The general idea is good and again has plenty to do with finding equilibriums. But I can't help but reflect a bit on satisfaction. I'm of course nowhere near any sort of balance (in fact I'm more or less recklessly flying from one maximum to another), but I still get the feeling that whereas you're supposed to calm down your wants and search for satisfaction, I can't help but think that instead of traveling in a train full of screaming children, I would be a lot more content and satisfied with traveling in a quiet and elegant Jaguar XF while listening to Astrud Gilberto sing The Girl From Ipanema. This also extends to many other aspects of life as well. Now the holier people will point out that I'm again wanting things, but oh well. I still think that if just being "satisfied" and "content" is the key to happiness, I want to be satisfied and content in peace and quiet, and in style.