The Other World

Näytetään bloggaukset huhtikuulta 2010.

Wake up.
Turn on the computer.
See today's headlines.
"Hallitus myönsi luvat kahdelle ydinvoimalalle."
"Kaikki puolueet lupailivat maksuttoman koulutuksen säilyttämistä" (bullocks; political memory is clearly very short since the very same people pushed for the exact opposite!)
Go back to sleep.

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The following will sound just downright cruel. Sometimes I wish my paternal grandfather was dead. Not for myself but for my grandmother. First her father literally sold her (at the age of 17) to my grandfather, 13 years of her senior. She has been put down all her life, threatened with never seeing her kids again if she divorced, and now when she's on pension her husband, my grandfather, age 80+, is dementic and requires constant care for which she gets no support (monetary or otherwise) from the state. It makes me so angry. Even now he has some kind of power over her: she's afraid to speak of things in front of him. She told me she'd like to see Budabest; I agreed to go with her and settle everything, but now she's backing up. I phoned her today: she said nothing of the trip at all and towards the end her voice became a whisper. Later she sent me a text message explaining she couldn't talk about the trip because my grandfather was there.

I'm angry. Her whole life she's been a servant to others and their whims. Even now, during her last years she's tied to home so much she can't even take five days to do what she's dreamt of. I am so angry at the people and the state that make this possible.

Visually...

I just had a stomach-groping feeling not long ago. I was paying my grosseries with three bills. The girl, however, said it was about ten euros less than I was supposed to give. I looked at the money again; I'm sometimes absent-minded so it's possible, especially since I had just handed in the wrong bonus card. But in my opinion and with my maths I was correct and I said it. She disagreed again. When we disagreed for the third time I was already worried: had I finally lost it? Luckily I hadn't. For some reason she was mistaken.

What I kept wondering on my way home was my own reaction. My first thought was that there must be something biologically wrong with my brain if I'm seeing a 10€ bill in a 5€ bill. It's just so weird that my first potential disease was the worst: "A brain tumor!" Why is it that when something's wrong people tend to assume the worst? Statistically brain tumors are rare and therefore a hallucination is unlikely to be caused by a tumor. In everything else we think according to Occam's razor -the less assumptions an explanation requires, the more likely it is to be the right explanation- but not with illnesses. Brain cancer, bening tumors, haematomas, strokes... it seems that being wrong just isn't an option.

So embarrasing...

Emphasising universities' life depending on capitalists' sponsoring. Making higher education something to sell. Making education submissive to capitalist rules of making money no matter what the quality of the education.

It seems that all of Kokoomus's attempts (and achievements) to undermine Finnish higher education system are thought stupid in SYL and in every other university than the one I attend to. It is so embarrasing to keep reading all the argumentations against these Kokkari "ideas" but my university's student union embraces all these ideas apparently without the slightest questioning. It makes me SO EMBARRASED to read about the rest of the higher education student unions in the whole fucking country to unite against these things and then read all the statements from the student union saying the exact opposite.

How the fuck do we have such a Kokoomus board running the whole fucking university short-sightedly but according to whatever whims the party comes up with? Do they have any brains of their own to THINK?!

What is it that normal people have?
Where do you find friends? Where do you find spouses?
How can you develop either type of relationship?
How can you understand what other people want or don't want, especially since people don't say it out loud or even say the exact opposite?
How do you understand what they mean?
To what extent can you form a relationship with the assumption that all they've just said might be not true but that the other is just pretending because of the stupid social rules that dictate so?
What are all those important questions you should ask right away so that you wouldn't waste time and energy for something that seems to be going fine and is then demolished by a fundamental characteristic in the other that is something you can't accept?
To what extent can you accept the other's faults?
What do you speak about with a stranger yo want to get to know better?
Why can't those topics be of some importance instead of something completely useless like the weather?
Why do people want to talk about these types of things anyway?
Who cares about a notion of weather you can see for yourself?
How do people meet others?
Techincally speaking the likelihood of encountering someone with similar objects of interest and morals are so small that it would require meeting so many others with utterly incompatible characteristics which in turn would take so much time and energy?
Is finding friends and spouses really worth all that trouble and if so, why?
Why do we have to have cravings for social relations, friends and lovers, when at the same time we have severe incababalities to have and sustain them in the first place?
What is it about people others look for?
If I'm supposed to tolerate others' faults, why are my faults so much worse than theirs?
Why do I even have to have those faults?
What kind of faults are people willing to tolerate better?
What can you talk about with strangers?
How can you ignore the pretentious and lying nature of that very conduct, small talk, that people seem to think is the only way to connect with others?
Why is that worth the lying?