Change is a good thing!

Posted by on 04/01/2010 2 comments

In the spirit of spring and one of my very favorite foods, I have taken the time to give tekkah.net a layout with some personal flair.  The last one was only meant to be a placeholder until I had time and inspiration to, at the very least, create a custom header and color scheme for the site.  I like what I’ve come up with, it’s fresh, easy to read, and hell, who doesn’t love strawberries?

Let me take a moment to tell you about one of my very favorite things: mansikkasoppa.  It’s hard to describe — well, hard to describe eloquently, anyway, as I tend to get a bit “mmmmmmm” and “nom nom nommmmm” about it — but it’s a delicious strawberry soup that my paternal grandmother pretty much has the market on, as far as I’m concerned.

One of my most vivid memories of my childhood trips to Finland is that of my grandmother’s kitchen.  She’s one of those people who just has to feed you every time you visit, and for the entire time you’re there.  She’s a woman who looks at her curvy, well-fed granddaughter and turns to her mother and says, “What are you feeding her? She’s too thin.”  I remember my siblings and I sat together at the table, each of us holding a cheese grater, and going to town on a freshly opened package of Oltermann cheese with the same flavor-high feelings that adults enjoy when sharing a good bottle of wine.  And I remember most of all sitting at that table as my grandmother ladled out warm bowlfuls of mansikkasoppa, not daring to temper it with cream like my father, barely having waited for it to cool down enough to eat without burning our mouths.

My brother, in his culinary experimentations, has tried time and time again to make a mansikkasoppa of his own, but the boy can’t help himself.  He’s always adding other berries.  Blueberries.  Raspberries.  Blackberries.  Things That Are Not Strawberries.  Now, I have nothing against other berries, but mansikkasoppa is called mansikkasoppa for a reason.  Mansikka (strawberry) and soppa (soup).  It’s not mansikkavadelmamustikkasoppa.  That’s a mouthful.  But that’s not even the reason Henri hasn’t managed to replicate grandma’s mansikkasoppa, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s the strawberries.

I am completely convinced, as are all the other Finns I know, that there just isn’t a strawberry good enough for a true mansikkasoppa outside of Finland.  They just don’t grow the same anywhere else.  In Finland they’re impossibly sweet and exceptionally juicy.  Mansikkasoppa made without Finnish strawberries is just lacking.  Perhaps it’s the atmosphere, perhaps it’s the feeling of aaah, motherland that comes with enjoying Finnish things in Finland, but it just isn’t the same no matter how much Finnishness you have in your bones.

In any case, since I can’t get a bowlful of that delicious, delicious mansikkasoppa for myself, I thought I would at least celebrate the strawberry with my layout.  May this year’s berry harvest produce good souping strawberries the world over!

Three little words.

Posted by on 03/24/2010 2 comments

“I love you.”

How many of us have, at one point in our lives, told someone that we loved them when we didn’t?  How many people consider the depth and meaning of those three little words?

I say that I love stuff all the time.  I love my bed.  I love books.  I love sparklers on the fourth of July.  I love watching the Olympics.  I love the Beatles.  I love sushi, spaghetti, mint chip ice cream, and my mother’s meatloaf (it is suddenly very apparent to me that perhaps just saying I love food would be a bit easier here).

But when it comes to people… well, I try to be a bit more careful with the word “love.”

Back when I was in the eighth grade and dating for the first time, J. and I said “I love you” to one another a few weeks into the relationship.  I look back and I realize we said it in the same way that a lot of teenagers do — we didn’t love each other, we couldn’t possibly.  We’d only just met, so we didn’t really know each other very well.  But we’d been taught by tv and movies and books that love happens all the time and very quickly, so like Romeo and Juliet, we completely confused “I like you a lot!” with “I love you.”

Ah, the follies of youth.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had very little reason to use “I love you” in the romantic sense.  I didn’t really date through college — I got my flirtation out in high school, had my heart stomped on freshman year of college, and retreated into a rather comfortable life of Not Really Looking for Love.  I didn’t avoid men, certainly, but I didn’t really reach out, either.  But I still said “I love you.”

I say “I love you” to my family members.  I say “I love you” to my closest friends.  I love them, and I feel like you should tell people that you love them when you do.  People deserve to hear about it when you care for them.  However, over years and years of not dating and only using “I love you” to mean familial and friendly love, the weight it held in the romantic sense got completely pushed to the back of my mind.

Cue my fumbling re-entry into the dating world.  Girl meets boy, girl finds boy interesting.  Girl and boy start dating… boy says “I love you” almost instantly.

Girl freezes stone solid.

Suddenly I was in the eighth grade all over again.  “He can’t possibly love me, he doesn’t know anything about me.  We only just met.  There’s no way.  Why did he say that?”

The worst part?  The first few times he said it, I said it back.  I may as well have been telling him I love strawberries and cream for all the emotion I put behind it.  I didn’t love him.  I barely knew him.  When I realized what was happening I stopped myself and didn’t say it again, because I didn’t love him.  We went our separate ways not too much later — it just didn’t work.

Despite all that, I’m actually really glad he said it, and here’s why: it reminded me of the weight those words are supposed to have.  It reminded me of the meaning those three little words should carry when said to a significant other.  At the age of 25 I was re-learning a life lesson I first learned when I was 14 years old.  Here was something I already knew, deep in the back of my mind, coming back to the fore.

And now I ask you, readers — have you re-learned something recently?

Nerdfighting!

Posted by on 03/11/2010 2 comments

About a week ago, my friend Josh told me about the vlogbrothers. They are author John Green and his brother Hank (of ecogeek) and they are, quite possibly, my new favorite people on the internet.

I have to admit, I’ve never read a thing by John Green (though his books have now mysteriously found their way to my wishlist). Until Josh linked me to vlogbrothers I’d never even heard of him. Once I started watching, though, I couldn’t stop. There’s years of correspondence between the two brothers on YouTube, and it’s inspiring to see that their project began as an experiment: two brothers agree to no textual correspondence for one year. They chose to try to keep up with each other via videoblog, and they succeeded. While they did so, they became an internet sensation with a dedicated following, and over the years their project has evolved into something that can only really be described as Crazy Awesome.

I think I like the vlogbrothers so much because not only are they doing what they can to make the world better, but they’re freaking entertaining as well. Both of them are crazy smart: John’s a liberal arts kind of a guy, while Hank’s a science geek. And they’re both supernerds. Harry Potter jokes, literary references, “Live Long and Prosper” hand signs, and more litter their videos. It’s so refreshing to see smart, funny nerds making an impact in a world where people tend to value, or at least pander to, the lowest common denominator. Most refreshing of all is the fact that no matter what they’re talking about, they always, always come across as relatable — even when giving very strong opinions on things ranging from politics to literature. And while they talk about serious business things sometimes, they can also be incredibly normal — one of their most recent exchanges (an accusation of Nintendo Sabotage and a rebuttal) reminded me vividly of my own sibling rivalries, though we didn’t have any pets to blame things on when we were young.

Beyond being simply enjoyable, the vlogbrothers have made me think of how I keep in touch with my siblings. We’re all in the Greater Atlanta area for now, but we are getting older, and our correspondence is mostly facebook messages and random, sporadic phone calls. It certainly makes me think that perhaps we could try a little harder to keep in touch now, before we find ourselves in our thirties and barely familiar with one another.

Count me as a brand-spanking-new Nerdfighter. DFTBA!

Incubating. It’s what I do.

Posted by on 02/21/2010 2 comments

Maybe a week ago, give or take a couple of days, my roommate Sarah linked me to this article on CNN: Are you a procrastinator or an incubator? Her commentary as she linked me the post?  “Oh my god, it’s SO US.”

I’m a graduate student.  I know the pressure of deadlines.  As I read the article, I found myself nodding along.  I put my assignments off to the last minute, but when I do them, my work is solid.  My completion of my tasks is never in question — everything always gets done, and it always gets done well.  I just have trouble doing anything ahead of time.

What’s interesting to me is how I spend my time leading up to the point where I finally buckle down and start working on my assignment.  I don’t whittle it away in front of the TV — I find myself productive in other areas of my life.  I clean.  I organize.  I exercise.  I do other homework.  The hours leading into any deadline are the most productive hours of my life, because not only do I get the ultimate assignment finished, I also take care of other tasks that I’d been putting off.  One can always tell when I’ve had a paper due because my apartment is significantly more organized than when I have nothing hanging over my head.

The checklist at the bottom of CNN’s article asks you to rate six signs that you might be an incubator from one to four.  If you score over 20 points total, you may be an incubator.

I scored 24 points.  How about you?

The Meaning of Love

Posted by on 02/10/2010 3 comments

It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge — they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion… love actually is all around.

-Love Actually

This past weekend was, quite possibly, the longest weekend of my life.

Over the holidays, my dad suffered a concussion while on a business trip. Six weeks later, his brain began to bleed. My brother took him to the ER last Friday and he was admitted into the ICU.

On Sunday, I got a phone call from my brother saying that dad’s situation had deteriorated and he was being admitted for emergency surgery later that day. My sister came to pick me up and I went to the hospital to wait with my family. The official serious business name of what was plaguing dad was a bilateral subacute subdural hematoma — basically, there was blood in his head putting pressure on his brain.

When I arrived, not only was my family there, but my dad’s best friend and his fiancee were there as well as one of my mom’s coworkers. Before dad came out of surgery, my parents’ neighbors appeared, having heard through the neighborhood grapevine that dad was in the hospital. All weekend long mom has been fielding worried phone calls and inquiries from family and friends, each of us has been getting texts and calls from people asking after dad’s condition, and my brother’s best friend is driving down for the upcoming weekend to be with us.

Dad’s been moved out of the ICU, and now that he’s back to his cantankerous old self, it looks like the worst is behind us. It’s been a long weekend for sure, and one I will never forget. I don’t know how they do it but I swear they make hospital beds in some strange alternate universe optical illusion factory. My dad looked so small in that bed. It’s one of the most jarring things I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it’s an idealistic thing — no matter what a dad actually looks like, to his daughter he’s always daddy. Even at twenty-five I tend to think he’s got the answers for everything, he can fix anything, if I can’t lift it daddy can. Seeing him all small and broken was heartbreaking.

I’m so, so thankful that my dad pulled through this, and I’m so, so thankful that the support network around my family is as robust as it is. I never expected such a huge outpouring of love and concern, and I’m thankful for all of it.

It’s a nice reminder. Love isn’t flowers, or chocolate, or sex. Love isn’t setting one day a year aside to tell the person that you love “I love you.” Love is every day, love is bringing food to your friend when their husband is in the ICU. Love is playing scrabble with your brother to keep yourself from crying in the waiting room. Love is taking the ten seconds to tweet “thinking of you” to your friend when you can’t think of anything better to say.

Love is being there. That’s all it takes.

Peeves is not just a ghost at Hogwarts.

Posted by on 01/21/2010 7 comments

Jules participated in this Girl Talk Thursday thing and in the interest of actively blogging and getting some venting on (because who doesn’t love venting?), I have decided to take part.

The topic this week? Pet peeves. Pet peeves! I have so many of these! Here’s the first couple that come to mind:

Nervous laughter. There are people in the world who cannot stand silence on some psychological level and they cope by laughing. Softly. To themselves. It’s creepy, particularly if you’re alone with them and their chuckling.

Errant punctuation. If you’ve made it to the second grade you have been taught at least the basics of the English language. So why is it that there are entire blogs dedicated to things like apostrophe abuse and unnecessary quotation marks?

Chain emails. No, forwarding that email to your entire contact list will not cause the name of your crush to appear to you in the next piece of toast you put in your toaster, nor will it win you the next lottery, get rid of your plantar wart problem, make your hair stop frizzing in the rain, or anything else you wish would happen without any effort on your part. Step away from the forward button. Step away.

Public restroom sinks. Why is it that people can wash their hands at home without getting water absolutely everywhere, but the second they go to a restaurant or a sporting event, they can’t seem to do it without leaving Lake Erie in their wake?

Doing something after being asked to stop. I am ridiculously ticklish. However, there’s something about people that, when they find out about this ticklishness, compels them to reach out and tickle me. 99% of the time I will then say, “dude, don’t tickle me.” It is not fun. I do not like it. When I say “stop tickling me,” I don’t mean “stop tickling me and wait until I’m not paying attention and tickle me again.” Stop means stop means stop.

Getting personally offended based on someone’s opinion of a book or movie. If you think that my dislike of Twilight or Dollhouse has absolutely any bearing on my opinion of you as a person, then there’s a pretty big problem there and it isn’t mine.

“You’re Finnish? Do you know Aija-Marjatta Väinämöinen?” Look. I get that Finland’s a small country and all, and the fact that I’m a Finn means I am part of a fairly small handful of the world’s population. But Finland still has five and a half million people in it, not to even get into all the expats living here in the States. There’s no way.

Slowing down in traffic before you get to the turn lane. IT’S THERE FOR YOU TO SLOW DOWN IN. DO IT THERE.

People who park it in the crosswalk. I’m a pedestrian in downtown Atlanta. There are many of us in the areas I frequent, because it’s right around my college campus. Just about every single day, I have to play Frogger with my own life because of all the people who don’t understand that the white-painted stripey thing that crosses the street there is for me to walk in safely without being in the intersection where the other cars are crossing.

I think that’s enough of those, though I could go on for ages. Join in the fun at Girl Talk Thursday!

Removing Distractions

Posted by on 01/17/2010 10 comments

Ladies and gents, I want to introduce you to my new favorite program, Ommwriter.

I’ve always been someone who is very easily distracted.  Whether by the ping of a new email, the Tweetie icon in my taskbar turning blue to tell me there’s a new tweet to read, or because someone says something to me that gets me off on a wild tangent, I am always getting distracted.

This makes it very difficult to just write.

Now, Ommwriter can’t tell people to leave you alone, nor can it keep your eye from wandering from your computer screen.  But what it CAN do is push out all the computer-related distractions.

First of all, it’s a full-screen application.  It is specifically designed to keep you from seeing your dashboard and your taskbar, meaning that even if your email icon tells you that there’s something new in your inbox waiting for you, you can’t see it.  Tweetie can turn blue and you won’t notice.  Unless you have a program open with pop-up notifications, you won’t get sidetracked in your other programs when you’re trying to write.

Secondly, it comes with a few tracks of white noise to keep your mind at ease.  Living in the city, there’s no such thing as complete silence — there are constant distractions like sirens, the sound of my neighbors dragging something up the stairs, the barking of a dog two balconies over.  Ommwriter tries to help you leave these distractions behind by providing different tracks of white noise (ocean waves, falling rain, pastoral bells, and others) to keep sudden sounds from pulling you out of your concentration.

So far, after having found Ommwriter, I’ve gotten a lot of writing done.  I was skeptical at first, but I’ve found that it really does help me to have such a simple program in which to write.  It comes with a word counter and a couple of different background images, and on top of all that, it’s very simply designed.  Why is it that so many programs for the Mac are so pretty?

And the best part?  It’s free to download.

On Resolutions

Posted by on 01/03/2010 2 comments

2009 was a good year for me.  Honestly, I think any year would have looked like a good one after the absolute mess that was 2008, but 2009 was actually very good.  I left Home Reports, I started grad school, I moved in with my best friend — life was good in 2009.

For the last few years, I’ve been pretty anti-resolution.  I suppose this came from the fact that every year, I would be seized by a romantic Disney wraith and in the subsequent delirium I would resolve to start dating again and fall in love with a brilliant, bespectacled man who would let me name our future babies with traditional names my grandmother in Finland would be able to say.  Since that’s just a hair beyond crazy, it never happened, and I would thus break my resolutions.  I am not Princess Buttercup, nor is my life directed by Rob Reiner (awesome though that would be).  So I gave up on them for a while, thinking maybe I’d get my head out of the clouds just a bit.  And I did… mostly.

Anyway, this year, I want to make some resolutions.  Some realistic, attainable ones.  None of this fairy tale business, but stuff I can work toward and attain.  So here they are.

  1. I know that as an introvert, I can get to be something of a hermit.  In 2009 I made a pointed effort to spend time with my friends on a fairly regular basis, and with a handful of them I managed it pretty well.  Perhaps this year I can broaden the net a bit and see more of my friends regularly.
  2. Up until 2005, I kept regular diaries.  Paper journals.  I filled them at a regular clip and never really neglected them.  However, when I got back from England, I lost the drive to write in mine — mostly because I would read the England parts instead of adding to the journal every time I opened it.  I lost the regularity of it, and I stopped writing.  I hope to pick it up again this year and use my journal regularly.
  3. I want to keep in better touch with the friends I have who aren’t local.  I have quite a few friends who aren’t in the Atlanta area and keeping in touch with them can sometimes be difficult (especially if they’re not on twitter or facebook) so I would like to try to maintain those connections.
  4. I want to get into better shape.  Being a history major, my life doesn’t really lend itself to much in the way of physical activity, so I need to create it for myself.  My roommate has a Gazelle, so as long as I keep myself using it I am good for cardio, and in the past I have found that I quite like yoga, so I hope to pick that up again.
  5. I would like to find time in every week to read one book for fun.  This may be hard, particularly in the end of the semester when I’m working on term papers, but I feel like there is time in my life to read one book a week that isn’t assigned to me by a professor.
  6. This one is a resolution I have been making year after year, and have yet to truly adhere to — I would like to stop biting my nails.  I do it when I’m anxious or upset, and often I won’t even realize I’m doing it.  It’s something I definitely want to stop doing, though, so here’s to yet another year of trying!

I may not attain all of these things, but I feel that they aren’t unrealistic goals to set for myself.  That’s already a step in the right direction.

tekkah: an introduction

Posted by on 12/31/2009 1 comment

Well, this is my new blog.  I want this to represent me as roundly as possible, so it won’t really have a set theme.  I’ll talk about any number of things, from academia to books to politics to food.  Anything is game!

As for me, I’m Teija (the “j” is silent, like a ninja in the night).  I’m a twentysomething graduate student getting my masters in history.  I’m one of those girl geeks, one who wears brainyspecs and likes computer games like Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare is amazing; I loved KotOR to pieces as well!) and World of Warcraft just as much as books by J.R.R. Tolkien, Kelley Armstrong, and Peter S. Beagle.  I am more often or not found with my nose in a book, and if I’m not reading, I’m probably writing.  I love to bake, especially traditional Finnish Christmas foods that remind me of my childhood and chocolate chip cookies to give to my friends.

I hope to really develop tekkah.net, so here’s to 2010 and a new blogging habit!