Happy Val-Ain’t-Mine’s Day

Ahh, February 14. Hearts and flowers, chocolate, cupids and dinner in a restaurant. Pink – my least favorite color. This is one U.S. holiday I can seriously do without. The Finns have it right. Here it’s called “Friends’ Day”, and it’s not particularly romantic. Everyone wishes each other a happy day, not just couples, though I suspect the more Americanized version is catching on.

This day has always been disastrous for me, starting with the first one I can remember. It was 5^th grade and I had a crush on a boy named John. I got my parents to take me to a store where I could buy him the biggest  valentine available – covered with flowers and delicate script -- and I had my dad sign it from ‘your secret admirer’ so my handwriting couldn’t be detected. I snuck it into the school coatroom during lunch, though someone probably caught a glimpse of the huge envelope. John’s face burned red as he opened it, and immediately after, the most obnoxious boy in the class said, “I’ll bet it’s from you, Kathy!” My face must have given me away. After that, all I remember is that I somehow got home and lay on my bed in tears, trying to figure out how I could arrange it so I never had to go back to school again.

What was I thinking?

It’s not gotten any better since then. Valentine’s Day builds up so many expectations: the perfect gift, the perfect mood, the perfect outing. Perfect communication. Wonderful memories. No wonder reality can’t compare. When I was first dating the man who would become my husband, we were on a trip together on Valentine’s Day. I could tell he was already regretting being together on such an important couple’s holiday when we weren’t really a couple yet. So when we exchanged cards and gifts – the SAME cards and then the SAME gifts, as it turned out – I think he acted coldly and distantly for the rest of the weekend just to get some room to breathe. I suppose the fact that I can’t remember any other Valentine’s Days spent with him is significant.

 

There’s something that really bothers me about Valentine’s Day, and I think it’s this: if love is a wild force or, as some philosophers have claimed, an illness, one that makes us crazy and irrational and able to commit murder out of jealousy, how can you possibly dedicate one day of the year to celebrating it in fairly prescribed ways – going out to dinner, for example? Shouldn’t these celebrations be more crazy and irrational themselves? And above all spontaneous? 

I dislike Valentine’s Day so much, I’m going to switch topics, though I suppose you will draw connections between them. I wanted to talk about loneliness. But before I do, I should explain this entry’s title. When I was in college, I briefly dated a man named Val. Our relationship ended a few days before Valentine’s Day, and I was relieved, so my roommate at the time and I wished each other a happy Val Ain’t Mine day. We still do.

In the U.S., I was fairly certain that I was the person in my circle of friends who needed more alone time than anyone else. It didn’t seem to matter how much time I spent by myself – I was never lonely. Perhaps it was the perception of the wide circle of acquaintance in the town I lived in for 20 years, the knowledge that I could end my solitude at virtually any time. And – probably not insignificantly – I had pets around all the time. At the height of their population, there were six animals in my home, three dogs and three cats. In addition, I had neighbors whom I knew, and I could see them working in their yards or eating meals on their decks. 

Here in Finland, I live in an apartment building in which almost no one says a word to the other residents. The one exception is the older gentleman with a gentle dog who lives one floor below me. I live far enough from downtown (a 40-minute walk) that it’s not convenient to come see me, so I haven’t done much entertaining, not wanting to inconvenience people. The bus runs between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays, so going out to do something in town takes planning, energy, and/or money. Added to this, many of my colleagues live two hours out of town and are not even in Joensuu on weekends, so the pool of potential activity buddies is small.

This all adds up to a lot of lonely.

But I am not wallowing in my sad little diaspora. I’ve signed a rental contract to move to a neighborhood closer to the university and downtown. The best part about this neighborhood, I’m told, is that it’s more like a community than other places. There are work parties, sauna nights and impromptu gatherings. And two of my colleagues live there. I have a feeling there will be less lonely and more activity in just a month or two.

And I’ve given myself a strict talking-to. Solitude is a gift. I’ve always been very good company for myself, so why don’t I simply enjoy this good company a little more. The only constant in life is change, so they say, so this phase won’t last forever.

So – Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Friend’s Day, or just plain Happy Day. Really, February 14 is simply another calendar day, and cultural expectations don’t have to be yours or mine.

Though I have to admit: I wouldn't mind if George Clooney -- or his Finnish equivalent -- knocked on my door this evening and asked me out to dinner.

(c) Kathy Saranpa 2014

Year's end

It seems I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write anything for a while, and now New Year’s Eve is here – and I’m quite certain I’m not the only person who feels this compulsion to somehow tie a ribbon on the year as a whole on December 31. But 2013 hasn’t been a compliant rectangular package, easy to decorate – wrapping this one will be more like trying to put a golf club, a CD and a cashmere sweater into a neat box. Impossible!

So what to do? Reading other people’s stream-of-consciousness is rarely entertaining, at least for me. So I think I’ll focus on twelve different things that left their mark on me in 2013, something like the Twelve Days of Christmas (which an alcoholic aunt or family friend, Marion, used to make us girls sing in its entirety at Christmas every year. I wonder whatever happened to her?).

1. New status: I’m a Finnish property owner. The twists and turns of how this happened are being put into a book, so I won’t say much about them now. But when I think about how I first saw the family cabin, built in 1857, when I was 22, and how I am now its owner all these years later, I am filled with awe and gratitude. For the first time in my life, I own a piece of land outright, and my head is filling with plans, possibilities and projects. I was interviewed for the local paper because the notion of an American coming back to roost a century or so after her forefather/mothers left makes for good reading here. And none of this would have happened without the support and love of my relatives. More on this later, I promise.

2. Friendship: I have such amazing friends, and they’re all so different. I couldn’t have made it through this year without them. The ones who helped me move out of my house. The one who has driven me around countless times to look at places to live in Joensuu. The ones who won’t let me lift a finger when I come visit in St. Wendel. The one I talk to on Skype every Sunday and who helps me keep my head on straight. The one who took me on my first mushroom hunt and who patiently looks through inspection reports in Finnish. The ones in Helsinki who take such good care of me when I prepare to leave Finland and who welcome me so warmly upon my return. The one in Tampere with whom I once again become an adolescent and with whom I laugh so hard I’m hoarse the next day. And the list goes on. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I couldn’t have made this move without friends. Period.

3. Music: In line with Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, now that my life is working a little better, I’m hungering for more music in my life. First a disclaimer: I am fully aware that I am probably the most privileged mom in the world. I can go to Zurich to hear my son sing. I can go online and hear my daughter playing in an ensemble or orchestra, through the miracle of streaming, from Pittsburgh. I’m so grateful for these opportunities. However, greedy me, I want more. Maybe my Finnish is now good enough to get involved in a community choir. Perhaps I can find an inexpensive piano somewhere. I’m still dreaming of buying a keyed fiddle again and spending a month at a workshop in Sweden. Or maybe I can just go to ‘my’ cabin and sing my heart out for a weekend. In any event, if I believed in New Year’s resolutions, one of them would be to have and make more music.

4. Love: This year has shown me that I can survive, and thrive, without a partner. It’s a small miracle. OK, a mid-sized one. I find myself less opposed to having one than I’ve felt for the past three years, so we’ll see what happens in 2014.

5. Religion: My church life has had a rocky year. Perhaps I’m still angry about having to leave my United Lutheran family in Eugene. This is something to work on for 2014: coming to terms with that loss. I was confirmed there this past summer, so I can join the church in Finland if I can wrap my heart around that. However, I’m still resisting a kind of fellowship that reminds me of bureaucracy more than anything else. I’m going to be going on a mission trip to Mexico in the summer along with our pastor. Maybe I can steal some time to talk to him about this while we’re there. Stay tuned.

6. Language: I can’t let this year go by without saying something about Finnish. I’ve been taking the class that is required in order to become a Finnish citizen (not because I have definite plans about that), and I am, amazingly, at the head of the class. It’s made me think that a lot of my difficulty with Finnish has been a lack of confidence more than anything else. So the best result of the class so far is that I’ve become more ‘self-starting’ when it comes to using Finnish. I conducted all of the business regarding the cabin, for example, in Finnish (though I did check things out with a Swedish-speaking attorney before actually signing any papers). True, I can’t read Facebook comments in Finnish and understand the dialect/puns/cultural references with 100% accuracy. That doesn’t mean I’m not trying, and my Finnish friends and colleagues are so kind when I do.

7. Home: I’ve spent a lot of energy this year looking for a place to live. I still haven’t made up my mind. This amuses and perplexes me. I know it’s a function of not really knowing what I want (see previous blog entry). However, when I bought my first house in 1993, I knew it was mine the moment I stepped through the front door, and it was a wonderful place to live for 20 years. I have a feeling I haven’t found ‘my’ house yet. I’ll keep looking.

8. Home?: This year I’ve still, with surprising regularity, stopped in my tracks to say, “What the heck am I doing in Finland??” Even so, touching down in Helsinki yesterday after spending Christmas in St. Wendel, it felt more like coming home than it has before. Being in Finland feels right, somehow. Of course I’m not alone in my apartment yet, back in the work day. But I feel like progress is being made.

9. Winter: we have some talking to do. I’ve decided that I’m not going to risk riding my bike in the snow, so it was put away in my storage locker until…uh…May. But I bought some second-hand skis and poles, and I’m going to get boots next paycheck. I want to get modestly proficient at some kind of winter sport. I took an ice-skating class in college and really liked it. I wonder if I can still keep my balance. In any event, winter isn’t so scary anymore. Last year I obsessively looked at the temperature to plan my wardrobe. I’ve gotten a bit more casual about it now. (Of course, the ‘winter’ so far has been rather warm and snowless. We’ll see how I fare when it gets truly cold.)

10. Health: a few days ago, someone I hadn’t seen for a while exclaimed when he saw me, “But you look so young! What happened?” He brought it up several times, so I think there must have been something to it. He mentioned the pure Nordic air; I'm inclined to think it’s the fact that I experience less stress. My stress level on an average work day is lower than what I've had for many, many years. I loved teaching high-school German, believe it or not. But it was a part-time job fraught with insecurity that required my full-time presence. So I worked in the evenings as well at my translation business. My work hours are more sane now. I also don’t have a car, so I get more exercise. And my eating habits are more regular – a warm meal midday and light food (sandwiches or yoghurt) the rest of the time -- probably because I actually have time to think about what I'm putting in my mouth instead of simply finding whatever calories are lying around.

And I have to admit, I love intellectual challenges, and having to speak Finnish is, in a way, just the kind of challenge I need. I don’t think I had enough intellectual stimulus as a high-school teacher. Creative challenges, logistical and emotional ones – more than enough. But in terms of pure thinking and puzzle-solving and abstraction, not quite enough.

11. Family: It doesn’t get any easier to live far away from my family. Thank heavens for Facebook, where I can go ‘see’ my family from time to time. But my mother hasn’t been well, my sister’s attempt at rehab failed, and there are new babies that can’t be hugged from a distance. On the bright side: Zurich isn’t terribly far away, and I’m scheduled to see my son next month again. My daughter is having a recital in April, and I’m going to tuck away money to make that trip. And summer will mean another trip back to Oregon to pack up the things in storage for their voyage to Finland. That will mean I’ll get to hug all those babies, and their parents/grandparents.

12. Blog: This year has also meant kind and encouraging comments from YOU about this blog. It started out as a way to let family and friends know what I’ve been doing, but it’s been sent on to others, and I’ve heard the nicest things from people I don’t even know. Several people have urged me to work it into a book. I’ve listened. I’ll start putting my copyright mark on the pages. We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m planning to keep writing, if for no other reason than to try to wrap my thoughts – occasionally in neat boxes, more often in lumpy bundles. Happy 2014 everyone!

©Kathy Saranpa 2013

What do you want?

Have you ever been asked this question? In a kind way, not an irritated way, I mean? I imagine most people appreciate being asked that. And my Aussie friend tells me to focus on it as I continue to look for a place to live. It makes sense, of course. I don’t want to commit to another mortgage for a home that doesn’t feel like home.

But I have to admit that I don’t like that question. Because of all the tasks I have in life, of all the decisions I have to make, it’s the hardest thing I know: how to figure this out.

You may think I’m joking. But I am deadly serious. I envy greedy people sometimes, because clearly they know the answer. I never know what I want, and often not what I need, either. And I’m not sure why this is so.

It probably has something to do with growing up in the pre-feminist era – when girls read things like this in magazines: “Ask him about his hobbies and let him decide where you should go on a date.” All this talk about how to get a man, and how to keep him once you’d got him. When I was married, I worked very hard to figure out what my husband wanted. I may have taken it too far, because I recall the time when we were remodeling a bathroom and I had three binders of wallpaper samples. I knew exactly which two samples my husband was going to pick (and we ended up using one of those). But I had no clue which ones I liked.

That was scary.

If you don’t know what you want, it’s easy to bury yourself in others’ wants and needs. SO much easier. You don’t have to look at your own messy self, at the neurotic parts and those bad habits and vices. You can bury that whole conversation under rushing around doing things that have to get done. Being a single mom was perfect for that. There was always something to mend, cook, or wash, always someone to ferry, nag, kiss…you get the picture. 

So here I am in this new land, with a full-time job that actually has reasonable working hours, and I suddenly don’t have to spend all of my waking hours making money or taking care of children. This leaves all kinds of time for the uncomfortable pursuit of ‘what I want’.

The truth is, I do know what I want on a more universal level – things like beauty, justice, health friendship, love -- not to mention all those things I want for my children. It’s those issues that aren’t quite as significant that I have trouble with: do I want to live in a smaller place closer to campus, or a larger place farther away? Do I want to spend my spare time on music, writing or volunteering? Should I buy a car? etc. etc.

Writing this, the thought that comes to me is “Well, isn’t THAT a first-world dilemma!”

Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Rephrasing it, I could say that I am open to the discovery of what I want. I’ve realized that living in this new country has made me much less afraid of the unknown. I really don’t have a choice -- it’s not like I have a ‘safe’ place to hunker down in. Everything makes me vulnerable – the weather, the language, the new job requirements, the new people. And in this openness, there is a rare freedom to explore options I might not have thought about before. I could decide to live in an absolute minimum of space but travel more frequently. I could die my hair purple (as a frightening number of middle-aged women do here) and start to wear red boots (I bought myself a pair for my birthday). I could start bar-hopping…OK. I definitely know I don’t want to do that. But the freedom of fantasizing about the possible options is an unexpected benefit of moving 5000 miles...I mean 8000 kilometers... from home.

Sick

A little over a week ago, I woke up sick. There was no warning, no harbinger, no inkling the day before. All I can remember is that I had gotten caught in the rain on my bike, and was so warm from the ride when I got home that I didn’t get out of my wet clothes right away. (My son scolded me for that.)

This illness was different in other ways, too. I wasn’t able to gargle, sleep or pseudophedrinate it away. I took the bus into school on Wednesday because I wasn't up to biking and I taught my classes, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the rest of the things I had planned that day. Thursday I felt too weak to leave the apartment and cancelled my classes, rescheduling one and offering an alternative activity for the other. I thought, OK, I’ve got the weekend to recover, and my other classes won't suffer.

The weekend wasn’t enough. I dragged myself to my Russian doctor on Monday, and he told me I had the flu and that my asthma was exacerbated. He also wrote out a certificate commanding/permitting me to stay home from work for the week.

I was flabbergasted, and I realized that what my friends said on Sunday – when I was pretending to myself that I was well enough to go to an afternoon tea – was true: I am too American.

In the US, when you get sick, you do everything you can to deny it at first. Then once you know it's a fait accompli, you do everything you can to make it hurry itself through its paces. Illness is not productive, and in a capitalist society, everything needs to be productive. Add to this the fact that some people, myself included from time to time, don’t have the money to go to the doctor, and you can see why we are in denial about illness, why illness can be a catastrophe. If you have no insurance, or a huge deductible, a $100 office visit is only the beginning of the impossibilities. Antibiotics at $50 and more a cure, maybe even an X-ray at $200 or more, blood work, etc. No, far better to “man up” or “suck it up” or “chin up” (why do these expressions always have “up” in them?) and get on with your productive life – even if you’re working at only 50% capacity because you can’t stop coughing.

But this isn’t all. There’s also the sense that you’re letting down those who depend on your work. Your students won’t get the lessons you would teach. You’re the only one who knows where those important files are that your boss needs for a meeting. How will the meeting go without your brilliant ideas, and who will look out for your interests?

There’s another way to look at this. Why, in the States, is your work more important than you are? What kind of twisted arrogance is that?

Here in Finland, people find that attitude difficult to understand. My Australian friend said, “Stop being so American, get to the doctor and take care of yourself!” My other friends echoed this. Take care of myself? Isn’t my job to take care of others? How can I not meet my BA thesis students for two whole weeks when they are just beginning to work out their research plans? How about those exercises on writing definitions in English for my first-year students? What about the department meeting now that we have some serious curriculum revision work to do?

None of that matters if you’re sick. In fact, teachers are under no obligation to reschedule classes they miss because of illness. You’re also not obligated to find a substitute teacher. The material is either folded into another lesson, or it doesn’t get taught. And nobody considers this a catastrophe here. It’s just part of the reality of life – people get sick, have accidents, can’t do what they’re supposed to do for very good reasons.

Yes, I’m very American. I have guilt feelings because I’m lying here on a couch watching movies for what seems like days on end – even though I’ve been feverish for a week, I have no appetite and I feel generally miserable. And I realize that it takes a while to dismantle decades of a different attitude about work life, or work vs. life. But I can get used to this. I can get used to going online when I feel sick to pick an appointment with a doctor the next day, and then cancel classes by sending a few e-mails. I can get used to walking into the building, sliding my Kela card into a slot that automatically tells the doctor I am here, and waiting for at most 10 minutes outside his door. I can get used to ‘my’ doctor (I call him that now since he’s the only one I’ve seen since I arrived in Finland) looking at me with a slightly amused expression as I croak “away from work for how long??”. I can get used to being able to sit with a pharmacist who puts together my medicines before my eyes and talks to me as long as I have questions. And, perhaps best of all, I can get used to a boss who says “You just focus on getting well” when I try to tell her that I will work on things at home as I am able. I can get used to being treated like a human being, and not like a guilty sinner, when I’m sick. This is one area where I’m very willing to be less American.