When silence is aggravating
02 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
in Personal Tags: memories, ponderings, revelations
I know that in times like these, families should come together more stronger than ever, and help other family members to cope and get through difficult times… But seeing the way in which my parents (and my mother’s parents) deal with conflict has continued to make me want to move out and be my own person as strongly as ever.
To understand this, there are three fundamental things about me that come from my upbringing as a child: firstly, my strength as a person. From a very young age, my parents have instilled in me the quality that if there is someone or something I don’t want to play with, then I do not have to. I don’t have to comply to anyone else’s wishes. As a child and a teenager, this made me the dominating figure in most of my friend groups and the games we played as children — I remember that very, very often, we would play the games I came up with, completely original, wonderful things. I was a benevolent dictator, sometimes reluctantly allowing kids to vote to do things that they wanted, instead of the things I did — but a dictator nonetheless. Even as a young adult, this trait leads me to seem intimidating toward most people with the strength of my opinions and with how I refuse to take any shit; it still leads me to dominate and control some conversations, even if I do it far more subtly than I sometimes used to. I’ve gained humility with age, but I still would never do something morally distasteful (for there are other and more complex reasons I would do things for other people; but thankfully, I also like seeing people happy, so sometimes doing things for other people I would not do simply for me also allow me to do things for me in a sense) to me solely to the benefit of another person.
Secondly, my inclination to take instructions instead of using my own incentive to do things; even simple things (think of the few times I’ve announced that I’ve written a blogpost because my significant other has requested it). I’ve recently realised that my way of being a control freak stems from somewhere — my parents. In keeping the house clean and taking care of bills and travel arrangements and the like, mother is in control of the logistical side of my household, and father is more passive, laid-back, and nonetheless controlling of the more… emotional side of things. I’ve been told how I have been scolded pretty hard as a child for simple things such as cutting up newspapers instead of the magazines I was supposed to. Of course, there’s also the matter of my hobby, ice skating (synchro, for anyone who knows the sport; I may have mentioned this before, but I competed for a total of six years, two in minors and four in novices — though the last year I competed, my team was almost on the junior level [minors, novices, juniors, seniors, for the confused], for that’s how good we were), which took roughly ten years of my life. Especially in the four years I was in novices, skating took up my entire life; with middle school and practice 13 hours a week, mostly within five days in a week, I didn’t have much spare time to myself. What’s more than that, even on the minor level, you weren’t allowed to miss practices for simple reasons such as somebody’s birthday party — and in novices, it heightened in the sense that first and foremost, you were a skater and represented your team, took care of yourself; all else, even schoolwork, would come next. It was a very strictly controlled lifestyle, and there wasn’t much you could influence. You did as you were told. With between my controlling parents and this sport, I became very good with just that.
Thirdly, my independence. It could seem confusing that I have just explained why I much rather follow instructions (even if general ones) and use my ability to best perform and elaborate upon them, and then claim to be an independent human being. With independence, however, I mean that I much rather take care of problems and things that arise by myself than let someone help me or take care of them for me. It applies to those clear situations in which it is apparent what has happened and what needs to be done; such a situation, for example, is shopping for certain supplies etc. This comes, most likely, from both of my parents’ tendency to do the same: their inability to ask for help, instead preferring to do everything alone. This is a quality my parents and I — before 2010, for last year taught me much about the value of communication — have taken so far that it has impeded the communication in my family. Especially now, when it would be most crucial that my parents express whenever they need us, whenever my mother needs some sort of help with her current workload… nothing. Silence. And occasional breakdowns in which me and my sister are accused of not helping enough around the house; helping my poor, suffering mother who has to do absolutely everything, even the things she had no prior knowledge of, since father would take care of them for us.
It is this lack of communication that I despise — the expectation that we should help, without any real instructions or help in HOW to do so. I confess, my life has probably been easier than most, because I have never had that many chores, and if I have, they have been all very clearly laid out for me. My parents have just usually taken care of most things by themselves. And don’t get me wrong — I do wish to help my mother, and I would really like to see that she would not be so stressed about everything all the time. But when you consider her way of controlling the household obsessively, taking care of everything as SHE wants it taken care of, how could I possibly even dream of doing anything? Should I just stand by and be there whenever she needs me? But even then, I wouldn’t know that she needed me, because she expects me to do the things, to help her around the house, without telling me. It’s the fact that she has to tell me that she doesn’t like.
Oh, the contradictions of my upbringing. I want a straight-forward family and a straight-forward household and home in which I don’t have to tread on my toes and guess about the things I’ve left undone… I want an environment in which everyone is open and honest with their wants and needs, simple and straight-forward, not one in which everything is repressed and taken care of in silence. Even before father’s illness, I often felt uneasy at home, for exactly these reasons — for the expectations my parents seem to have on me (though they deny them, whenever I try to speak up about this), and for the repression of emotions and needs in my house.
Never should one underestimate the power of healthy communication — nor take it for granted.
Peace and good, long talks, everyone.
I swing a lot of ways, but not in that one
14 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Personal Tags: 35 days, memories, music
Today was simultaneously a very frantic and a very tired day — and as you can guess, those two things don’t always mix together very well, as the few almost-fainting bouts during the day have proved very well. For one, my hand still hasn’t fully forgiven me for all the questions I made it write out yesterday — and I suppose that it didn’t really appreciate how I then forced it to write various essays and things for a few other subjects (I’m trying to keep the boring specifics away from you; boring specifics are boring). What made it even worse was that at one point, someone announced that our chemistry teacher would not even turn up for our period — which turned to be both true and false, because he did turn up; just late.
See, you’d know if he hadn’t turned up, because there’d be all these huge headlines of nuclear explosions in Australia, caused by the spontaneous combustion of a late-teenaged girl’s knowledge-swollen head.
Speaking of knowledge-swollen heads, we were having a rather interesting conversation on the subject on the journey from school to the station (it wasn’t raining today, either — must’ve been because I had the gay umbrella with me) with an equally tired friend of mine. I said that I supposed that I was feeling sick and having this weird, seemingly pressure-induced headache because of the fact that I have been doing excessive amounts of schoolwork this week, leading to the accumulation of knowledge into my brain with a far more rapid rate than with which it leaves (or replaces old knowledge, if you believe Dr Cox [oh how I love that guy] from Scrubs), meaning that, combined with the almost nonexistent time in which I’ve done something else than updated this blog or done schoolwork, my brain is currently bloated with all the excess knowledge, causing both headaches and incredible amounts of stress. This stress may also be causing the recurrence of the annoyingly persistent symptoms of flu or whatever that I’ve been having.
BUT then I got home and got to lie down for a while, reading some Cracked (I linked to it in the post before the previous one, go search there if you’re interested — one massively awesome site with some massively awesome articles, I’m telling you) and taking some pain medication (despite swearing that I wouldn’t, because I’ve been living on it for the past week or so; me and my addiction to ibuprofen), I began feeling like a human being again, so I went with my mother and sister to listen to one of the school bands play. Jazz, at that. I’m more of a metal sort of person myself, and that’s pretty much the only genre of music I have any knowledge about whatsoever — and even that is based on wide listening experience than actual knowledge based on music. But I’ve been to a few of the concerts now, and I’ve got to say, that even though I don’t understand one bit of musical theory, I think I can distinguish things that sound bad from things that sound good, and by dear God in heavens, does that band sound good.
And because I’m especially biased (and because I really like percussion — I’ve always liked it, but have never had any real way to express what it is that I like, as my expression was limited to “I like a strong beat, you know?”), Christ but I love watching and listening to my significant other play. I’ll spare you of the details, though I could gush over it for hours. Instead, I WAS going to go all technical and talk about how I used to be an ice skater and how ice skaters, quite like dancers, become proficient with picking up beats from different songs and often develop a liking for strong, distinguishable beats, but then I realised that that goes a lot into musical theory, again, of which I understand nothing and maybe I should just be quiet. I can find that tempo I would skate to, that count to eight (though the speed in which you actually count to eight varies with each song, hee), usually in every song that I like to listen to, with very few exceptions — but with this music stuff that this band plays, I’m completely lost. I kind of hate that feeling, because I have no clue what is going on, not even from a more sportive point of view. Makes me feel kind of inadequate.
Anyway. They rock. Or swing. Is that how you say it, with jazz?
Day 04: Four moments that changed your life
Why is it, that every time that you’re expected to talk about life-changing events, people always talk about moments, or other really short spans of time? Even in fiction, it seems to be that sort of blink of an eye after which nothing was the same ever again. I say that’s a load of bullshit. If there’s any defining factors in any changes in my life, it’s more likely people than individual events — and even if they’ve been individual events, like beginning that ice skating (which pretty much ended up defining a lot of me as a person and a long span of my current life) or, eventually, quitting ice skating have been gradual processes that have kind of built up in significance and ideological value. I mean, when I started ice skating as a wee little 5-year-old, of course I wasn’t expecting that at from the age of 11-ish, I’d be doing it some 13 hours a week. And when quitting it, I wasn’t really expecting to fall into near-depression in the summer following that decision, and having such difficulty piecing my then non-existent life together. When going on my confirmation camp in between grades eight and nine, I think I was just trying to get it over and done with, and not to be so moved by the things they taught there as to want to go back, to help out on someone else’s camp as an “isonen” — something that really helped me out in that bleak time after quitting my previous lifestyle. When moving from Finland down to Australia with the attitude of “well, I’ve got nothing to lose” and “There’s no harm in just trying it out, right?” I wasn’t exactly expecting to be proved wrong. And maybe I was expecting least of all the incredible depth and importance of the relationship with my current significant other. I wasn’t exactly planning on it, as he would be able to tell you — another gradual realisation that I’m Australian now, and Finland’s somewhat out of my reach.
Four, was it? Was that even four? It doesn’t really matter, since they’re not exactly bullet-speed heart-stopping moments, which was what this question here was likely looking for. But like I said, nothing in my life ever happens in moments, and if it does, the realisation that it has happened in a moment will only appear with time, which kind of defies the whole definition of a life-defining moment.
Day 05: Something that makes you smile
Day 06: Someone who makes you very happy
That’s all I have for today, I suppose. Love and jazz and stripy socks, because stripy socks are ultimately probably one of the most awesome things in this world. :3
Remembering the beliefs of tiny me
10 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: 35 days, memories
Hi, I’m here again. I know, I’m really confused about this updating spree of mine, too, but it might be just the fact that if I wouldn’t be updating right now, I should be studying for a two-hour math test for tomorrow, and since I’ve been doing that for the entire afternoon, doing something else takes my mind off it and stops me from panicking too much. I mean, I’ve done most of the questions allocated for the chapters, and that should mean that I’m adequately prepared… right? RIGHT? It’s not possible to know everything, or know how to do everything, even if I kept myself up studying all night… right? RIGHT?
Ok, quickly moving on: I’ve been searching the web for some blogs for inspiration to write, and while I’ve been doing that, I’ve also run through some Finnish blogs. If you’re not already familiar with this, I’m actually a Finn who’s now lived in Australia for two years and a bit in one go — however, during my entire life, I’ve lived here for four years and a bit. The remaining fourteen years have passed in Finland, which means that I am well versed in the Finnish language, too. Anyway, so when I went through some of these blogs, I found this, uh *checks* 35-day questionnaire in which you’re supposed to answer one of the questions each day. It’s in Finnish, but since I speak adequate English also, it shouldn’t be a problem to translate. This here’s the first question/statement:
Day 01: Some concept/person/object you believed in as a child
Aw, why’d they have to ask a question about my childhood first? Me with my memory of a goldfish…
The obvious answers to this would be Santa Claus (who, by the way, totally lives in Finland, and not the North Pole — oh, and in Finland, he comes in during the evening of Christmas Eve, instead of in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; there’s a huge “santa industry” in Finland for people to rent Santas for their kids on Christmas Eve, it’s really cute), the Easter chicken/bunny (in Finland, it’s a chicken that lays chocolate eggs in a hat you put underneath your bed for the night), uhmmm… probably THIS guy:
who is from the same show the characters in my … gravitar? gravatar! … at the moment (the picture on the right-hand side from here). It’s a sort of Finnish kids’ show that you really can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t seen it, since it’s so weird and filled with these odd adventures that you’d think would take place in some Studio Ghibli movie (insert some Hayao Miyazaki love here). Anyway, that guy (or girl? I have this sneaking suspicion that she was a girl, but I can’t remember) there is a sort of monster/boogeyman of the show. He would appear whenever there was something mysterious going on in the house of the main characters, and everything froze in his footsteps. Like, you didn’t want him to touch you, because he would probably turn you into ice. Also, he liked hiding behind doors and stuff, and looking at you from there all creepily when you’d go outside to see what’s going on. *shudders* Anyway, he’d also appear during very stormy weather, so when me and my sister were small kids, and it’d be stormy outside, I’d grin at my sister and tell her that it was “mörkö weather” (yeah, his name is mörkö in Finnish — it translates to something like “boogeyman” or “monster”) and she’d be really scared and angry at me.
Oh, I was a mean child. Sometimes. Most of the time I was a good little thing.
Other than that, I’m really not sure what else I could say. Even though I grew up surrounded by lutheranism in Religion at school, and in the few, scattered masses we had to attend before our Christmas and Easter holidays, I didn’t really believe in God as a child. I suppose I just didn’t think about it — I remember that the stories in the bible were just philosophical exercises for me in primary school. I was very vocal during RE, *grins.*
Well, that’s me done for now. I’m going to translate and post the next two prompts (because they’re not really questions) every time I finish answering one, because I really can’t be bothered translating and posting them all at this time — also, suspense is a good thing, right?
Day 02: What do you think of God and religion?
Day 03: Three concerts you would have wanted to/want to attend.
Just a quick question before I go away and go distract myself in other ways: how do you like the new look? I’m still in the process of getting rid of old posts that I don’t like and getting my head around the introduction post, but I’ll get there, eventually — especially if this fleeting interest of mine doesn’t turn out to be fleeting after all.
Peace and toast for all~
EDIT: I’ve now updated the tags on all old posts that I’ve decided to keep, and hidden the rest of them. I didn’t delete them completely, because I thought that a terrible waste, so they’re now lying in my wordpress account as drafts, if there was something you remembered in some of them that you would have wanted to keep. Or something. … I just thought I’d inform you. Anyway, moseying along now ->
