The problem with Finnish (or: Why we should all just be engineers)

We went to the theater last night with R to see Teatteri Takomo perform Ihmeellinen armo. It was about the rise and fall of an Evangelical-Lutheran preacher. I won't actually go into the plot too much, but sufficient to say it made me think of There Will Be Blood more than a few times. And they also played the National Coalition card; nothing's easier than to poke fun at the upper classes. Anyway, I have to admit that I'm not a very big fan of Finnish television or theater. Or very many art forms in general. My issues are multifold: on one hand I always feel that Finnish as a language, while average for literature, is entirely appalling and unsuitable for any sort of verbal artform. On the other hand I feel that an average Finnish actor has the stage charisma of a shoe. The starting points are thus not too good for the Finnish "intellectual" artforms.

Maybe it has something to do with the overall Finnish attitude and temperament. We've traditionally been very sparsely populated as a country and very much oriented towards survival in a climate where the winters are dark and cold and agriculture stands firmly on its own, as long as the European Union is supporting it. I talked to a Polish acquaintance a few years back and he explained that they see Finns as good intending folks, who may be slightly naive and like to cut trees, swim across rivers (as opposed to using bridges) and then drink vodka to get warm again. And once a Finn starts to do something, s/he will typically do the best s/he can. So it's not a surprise that once a Finn decides to act, it will be something that you will remember: "Now I am acting and I am going to let everyone know that I truely am acting." Not too good, especially if acting is supposed to be the act of pretending or portraying someone who you are not. If acting is deception, then Finns will be unbelievably appalling in lying.

And then about the language: this is slightly difficult to elaborate on, since it's just something that personally annoys me very greatly. I don't consider Finnish an especially beautiful language. It lacks the finesse that some other languages have and the language is difficult to master. I've never read Douglas Adams in Finnish, but I somehow feel that if I had, I would've had to contemplate hurting myself to ease the pain. There are some famous Finns who have been able to make beautiful and great things with Finnish (Mika Waltari comes to mind, for obvious reasons). It's just a shame that had they had access to better tools in the form of other languages, they could've potentially achieved very much more and on a more global scale.

Then there is the general problem that amateur theaters have to struggle with: building credibility and getting noticed. This isn't necessarily applicable only to Finns, but based on personal experience, it just seems that Finnish theater, especially on the lower levels, is very much based on silly gimmicks and plots and dialogue that has been written for the sole reason of trying too much to be controversial, thought-provoking, and intellectual. Or if it doesn't aspire to the former of the three, then it's because it wants to be so artsy that it will be credible in the right circles. This combined with the "I'm acting now!" trait, as described above, can result in very... err... well, something.

Now, I know I might be fairly cruel. And I have to admit that Ihmeellinen armo was surprisingly decent for Finnish theater. And I know that theaters have trouble to compete with other entertainment forms in the contemporary world and for the niche that is still left it's a cutthroat competition to the end. But that does not change the fact that more often than not I just cannot stand Finnish theater. As an experience, I much more prefer the opera.

And one last thing: I seriously hate it when the actors start interacting with the audience. The audience is often very courteous and respects the presence of the fourth wall, but when the actors break the wall, I personally have a very big urge to also abuse the broken wall and throw something at them in return...

On deltas, again

I was watching the latest episode (S02E19) of Gossip Girl on Tuesday morning and I noticed that indeed the most interesting things in life often do revolve around change. We hosted a very interesting seminar at work where we benchmarked various things and there also the most interesting tidbits of knowledge were concerned with trends, or deltas and amounts of change over a time period.

As with benchmarking trends, Gossip Girl is also interesting because of the deltas. My favorite character from the start onwards was always Chuck, who on the surface is a very superficial and manipulative chap, but it was obvious from the beginning onwards that this setup would afford the most juicy character development prospects, at least from my perspective. And now with season 2, things have come true. I won't spoil anything for the Finns reading this blog who are following the series on Finnish television (and thus lagging 18 episodes), but I will say that right now Chuck's situation is interesting to say the least. And it's all thanks to the deltas.

Count your blessings, not your problems

Now I've pretty much seen and heard it all. I've been called a lot of things by very many different people, but I've never been called a Count before (well, the closest one prior to this incident was when I was told that I had a slight resemblance to the Count of Monte Cristo; I don't necessarily entirely agree with this...).

Anyway, we were checking out the new entrants to the Helsinki nightlife with Istvan on Saturday and thanks to his magnificent charm and exotic appearance, my friend was gathering the attention of the fairer gender for the most part of the evening. We eventually found our way to the recently opened Tiger where we ran across some of the people from the previous destinations. I kept myself out of the discussions and let my friend enjoy the ride while I kept myself preoccupied by working on my recent Twitter addiction and trying to figure out what I would like to drink next with an additional constraint that the generic, but still very friendly, bar staff would actually know how to make (it turns out that Manhattans are way to exotic). The bomb of the night arived when I briefly rejoined the conversation my friend was having: our new pals were very much intrigued whether or not I was a member of nobility, a Count perhaps. Unfortunately I had to admit that to the best of my knowledge I am nothing of the like. Nor are my ways in general very noble, so there we are...

I didn't get around to asking what this was about, but I have formed two mutually non-exclusive theories regarding my supposed promotion. The first is that Finland is still not entirely ready for any sort of dandyism, and I would very much argue that what I was wearing wasn't very dandyistic in the first place--a black blazer with grey buttons, a white-and-blue striped shirt, relaxed jeans, brown oxfords and a black Ascot tie with slightly slicked back but still wavy hair. My second theory is that I might've come off as slightly arrogant by excluding myself from the conversation and also exhibiting a decent posture and restraint of unnecessary facial expressions.

Now, asides from these two theories I'm still very much baffled. But this begs the question as to whether or not Finland is destined to be doomed; are Finnish men really so lost that Finnish women will mistake a semi-decently dressed person as a person with class and are youngsters so ill after being exposed to hip-hop-pop that they cannot hold a decent posture? Now that one actually begins to think about it, maybe it seriously is so...

Moving on, surprisingly enough The Tiger seemed like a semi-decent place. It's still essentially Lux but with a slightly different colorscheme and women who are more aggressively trying to steal drinks that your group has positioned onto a table. Then again, it was opened on Friday, so I guess we'll need to give it a month or two and see what it turns into. Privé opened up again a while back after being closed for a few years. The opening event saw the place packed up pretty tightly, but last Saturday it was more or less empty. Is it so that trying to position yourself in the upmarket amidst a recession is a foolish thing, or is it just that the places that are truly founded in the upmarket are ones that stay around year after year and are not even competing in the same category as the fad-ish clubs that come and go in three year cycles... Anyone see the parallels to the fashion and art worlds?

Spaces and decorating

I was watching an episode of a Finnish home decoration/renovation series last night and they were renovating the home of one of the hosts of the program. His home was a large loft apartment and being an interior decorator or something of the like, he had fairly solid views about what he wanted and what he didn't want. The outcome, while technically ok, was not something that I would've done.

I really like loft apartments thanks to the vast amounts of space they provide. But in my opinion the whole philosophy of a loft apartment is to be industrial and minimalist in some way; in the show last night the end result was very much crowded and looked like something that was forced into the world for the sake of doing something "different" and making a statement. It just didn't work, in my opinion. There were too many tricks and gimmicks to keep the open and spacious nature of the loft intact.

But I guess there might be some issues with decorating large areas. A person I once knew lived in this quite decent sized apartment, but the problem there was the typical Finnish mentality of decorating: put all of the furniture along the walls. There were other issues with not having any continuity or having interesting details, but the main turn-off for me was that by piling everything against the walls, it looked empty and soulless. As if no effort and creativity was used at all. In smaller spaces it's more difficult to place furniture due to the constraints, but in open areas this constraint doesn't exist and things should be a lot more easy. If you want to go for minimalism in open spaces, you should take very bold stances and not fear about placing furniture in the middle of the room.

But I'm nitpicking here and provoking a fight. While I have strong opinions on these subjects, ultimately I guess the core point is that you have to feel at home in your apartment or house. That said, you can decorate things in an interesting way, or then you can be a Finn...

On support

All in all I would say that I'm fairly responsible as a person. This manifests itself in various different ways and when I typically start doing something, I want to do it properly and strive to keep within the given timeframes. In practice this means that occasionally I put in decent amounts of time and effort at work, which I guess most people do. It's also sometimes called commitment.

Based on empirical evidence, the reactions to this sort of effort and commitment are interesting, to say the least. They vary very widely from just acknowledging that "yeah, that's life" to the oh-so-traditional "you're working too hard, you should take it more easy". It's very seldom that I've heard very many encouraging things, which has led me to wonder why that is. It's actually surprisingly often that I encounter the "you should take it more easy" reaction, and somehow I always get this impression that this is just something that you should say to attempt to discourage the person from putting in more effort into something and as such tries to inhibit the progress of the other person. I know that this may be quite a strong interpretation and that there are others as well, but on some level it just feels that when someone tells you that, they're in fact trying to tell themselves that it's ok that they're not putting in as much effort and obtain some sort of better consience. It's something that happens when the other person feels that they're not ahead in the game and might be feeling threatened.

And as usual, this has been slightly provocative in an attempt to bring out another aspect to this phenomenon. So take it with a grain of salt...

Pensions

There's a very populist debate going on in Finland right now about what to do with retirement age of people. For a few years now it has been 63, but now the government is suggesting that it should be raised to 65 on the grounds that with the declining population and other factors related to the financing of pensions, it is very possible that this bomb will blow up in our faces sooner or later and that we should attempt to counteract that by getting a few extra years out of people.

According to recent surveys, the majority of people are very much against this turn of events. I am not one of them. It's very selfish to assume shove the problem on the people who will be financing the pensions of tomorrow. In the past the retirement age has been even higher than 65. Additionally Finland prefers the model of pension financing where a part of the pensions are paid directly from the taxes collected each year and a part is paid from funds collected in the past. Obviously with the current financial crisis the situation is slightly more difficult with all investments deep in the red, so even on these grounds I think the raise is somewhat warranted. Although I have to admit that I haven't done the math myself; but then again, I get the impression that the social democrats have flunked their math too.

In fact, because of this debate I've started to wonder why we even have this central system of pensions. Why do I have to be a part of it? What if I want to arrange my future pension myself? If I think that I can get a better ROI on the money I currently pay to the government myself. In that case the argument about the retirement age would become smaller: you should be able to retire when you feel so yourself, and if you can afford it. If you can't afford to retire, that's of course a problem, but one that you should have thought about before. Now the social democrats will rush in and tell us that we can't leave anyone behind and we have to support the weakest. And they do have a point in that, but I'm increasingly fed up with their populist arguments and the fact that I have a feeling that I'll be one of the poor souls who will end up as part of the upper middle class who will be paying for the mistakes of other people.

If you think about it: the people who work the hardest earn the most. Not always, but there is a correlation, I would say. They also get taxed very much, thanks to the progressive taxation that is in place in Finland. At the same time if you work when you study, you cannot get any support from the government, unlike if you just decided to be drunk all day, every day at the campus. Then you graduate and start earning money, out of which you finance the elementary school dropouts and drug addicts. Then you also pay the retirement taxes to finance the pensions of people who are retired, either because of age or because they're in such a bad shape that they can't work anymore. And by the way, you won't ever be able to enjoy any of the benefits because you'll die of a heartattack at the office when you're 45.

So let me apologize, but I do not always understand how the world is fair. The current system, at least in Finland, is penalizing you for trying to succeed in any way. If we want to keep the current pension system working, then by all means raise the age requirement to 65. I'm quite convinced that I personally won't reach that age, but I am certain that whether I want it or not, I'll be contributing my fair share to the health and wealth of the nation at large. I'm, however, increasingly starting to feel that maybe I should go make my contribution somewhere else...