and that meme, again

[iceinyourmusic]

hetrez asks, I stumble right into excess verbosity again:

1. How many languages do you know, and how/when did you learn them?

um. Five, give or take a few. The mother tongue, obviously. Then German (10 years in school, three summer stays in Austria and Germany - but it's horribly rusty now), English (8 years in school, television, television, fandom, television, and other reading material), Swedish (6 years in school, and really I do understand it quite well even though my spoken Swedish is apparently completely incomprehensible), and Hungarian (university major since 1998, also one summer course and one half a year in Budapest in 2001). Also French for 3 years in school and one summer at the uni, and Dutch for a year at the uni, but I don't really know any of either on any reasonable level so they don't count. And maybe German and Hungarian don't, either. And maybe Swedish doesn't either. And there are days when English and Finnish don't.

2. What do you like to look at? This is, in fact, a shameless rip-off of your picture question, but I'm interested just the same. What's your preference? Textures? Colors? Patterns, squares, circles? What makes your eyes feel happy?

I like many things. But. Patterns, I like patterns, and ornamental shapes - Art Nouveau, I like - I like simple shapes - I like seeing texture, yes, clumps of paint and fabrics with uneven surface - heavy Baroque darkness - wallpapers, I mean real wallpapers that go on walls, those I like - and black-and-white photographs. And messy, earthy colours all over. And other things. The only turn-off for me, as a rule, is cutesyness and excessive lightness, and then again, there is a time and place even for that.

3. What's your secret fandom of shame? The one you love truly and madly but don't usually tell people because you'd lose all your indie street cred?

Mwahaha. What indie street cred? - I do have fandoms of shame, that is true, but I'm not very good at keeping them secret; I'd never get away with it, for one, so I prefer to embrace my lameness. But, perhaps, as I think I already said in some other meme a couple of months ago, The Sentinel, and to some extent due South - not because of anything they are as much as because of my motivations and reading habits when it comes to them. Because, heavens, jokes about TS will never get old, as far as I'm concerned, but there is also the genuine love for, well, the cliché, and the cliché is what I'm looking for when I go there. I mean, frankly, especially since I've only seen two or three eps of the show ever (and not a single one of dS), I can't claim any intellectual interest in it as such, or even that I'm in it for the "good writing" - because, no, I'm in it, when I am, for the Jim/Blair first-time "omg I am gay and in love with him and he'll hate me if he ever finds out" "but I'm also sekritly gay and love you back I hope you never find out" and cooking and thorough sex and "omg Jim don't zone on me now" and, you know, the works, that I can trust. So perhaps that.

4. What animal have you always wanted as a pet?

Cat. Cats, even. I love cats with an undying fury and I will never be complete as long as I have no cat. (Also, sometime around my first year of university, or so, I once thought I'd like to have two cats I could call Freud and Marx, just so I could write "Freud is licking Marx's bits on the sopha", and it would be true, and that felt very important at the time.)

5. What's a disease you would be really interested in having? Pretend being sick isn't a miserable experience, what symptoms would be fun? What cause?

Mmmm, consumption. Consumption would be good, a tried-and-true all-purpose disease, though I'm afraid it'd lose much of its charm if one didn't intend to die of it.

and unwinding asks, and I try to find a balance:

tell me about helsinki in the summer? why does nothing else quite compare to the sweet finnish summer?

Helsinki in the summer is beautiful and it smells of the sea and it rains and then people are so grateful when the sun shines that it would be utterly comical if it weren't also so not. And the cafés drag chairs onto the sidewalks and people drink beer and try to figure out what's happening and it's all so much more perfect than I can say, and green, and. I've never really learned to appreciate the traditional Finnish summer, with the birches and the lakes and the summer cottages, the way I should, but Helsinki, yes, and because it's here.

and speaking of finland, have you ever had a winter with kaamos? how does it change your thinking, knowing dark days?

This is the northernmost place I've ever lived in, so I've never gone through kaamos for real, only this what we have here: that it's night when you go to school and work in the morning, and it's night again when you leave for home again, and in between it's just gray. And, see, I think it's also noteworthy here that I've never known anything else. But. It makes the default colour of the world the pink of the street lamps, and it makes time very arbitrary, sometimes.

and speaking of apartments, what and where is your perfect one?

Apart from the pink walls. The one I have right now is almost as near to perfect as I dare to dream. I like that it's in the city, proper, and that it's not a new house, and that there's space enough to move and wooden floors. But I'd also like space enough to have bookshelves, and as long as we're going crazy, a miracle flat where I could keep cats (see above) and also smoke indoors. But somewhere in the city, definitely.

and speaking of tallahasee & the ever slowly breaking relationship contained within, what kind of love is involved in this destruction? and, as writers (which you undoubtably are) why is it this picture we keep looking at?

1: this is not a meme question, this is an essay question.
2: I can't think of an answer that wouldn't be inherently dishonest.
3: the first line on Tallahassee that really got me (I was listening to it on the night bus back from the Tampere airport) was "people say friends don't destroy one another / what do they know about friends". I think this is part of it; that the love and the destruction are not mutually exclusive, and the acknowledgment of that.
4: is it something to do with obstacles? Wherein the obstacle is the same thing as the objective? Do we like that? I wish I had a clue.

what is the space in between things changing and things staying the same?

Chance, I think. A throw of the dice will never abolish etc.

Comments

[hetrez.livejournal.com]

Randomly. Have you seen any Aki Kurismaki films? I really want to watch Calamari Union, but 1) haven't been able to find it, and 2) don't know if it would be worth extensive searching for. What do you think?

I am thoroughly impressed by your knowledge of languages. Which of those is your favorite? Would you teach me some?

What is Tallahassee?

Also, what you said. about the colors. Just, yes.

[leksa.livejournal.com]

Tallahassee is an album by The Mountain Goats. It's all about these scratchy and furious and heartbreaking little songs that tangle up together and track the falling apart of these two people in, you know, Tallahassee, and it's maybe one of the best albums ever.

And I like something about every one of the languages, and I like our school system for being so much with them. Though I do have a special visceral fondness for Finnish and Hungarian, mostly, I think. (What do you want to learn? :))

As for Kaurismäki: I'm far far from a connoisseur, and it's been quite a while since I saw Calamari Union, but I don't think I cared for it all that much; personally (boringly?), I think I prefer his newer flix, Drifting Clouds or The Man Without a Past, which are probably much more easily available as well (unless you've already seen them, of course) - or The Match Factory Girl (from 1990), which probably isn't, but.

[hetrez.livejournal.com]

I will look for that album, definitely.

I don't know which language I'd like to learn. My luck with them is scattershot: I'm good at Swahili, but terrible at Latin, and moderate at Spanish and the other Romance languages. I don't think I'd ever get to the point where I could converse, but the thing I love is the system of a language. Like the way that Swahili works almost all with prefixes, and learning about possessive cases and the different verb conjugations. Whatever you want to tell me about the languages you know, any of them, I'd love to hear it.

I'll definitely look for those movies. I haven't seen any of his films, actually. I worked for an indie cinema a few summers ago, and they had a Kurismaki month, and so I read all the reviews of the movies and tried to get in to see some of them, and failed miserably. And, yes.

[leksa.livejournal.com]

the thing I love is the system of a language

Yes, yes, yes. Yes. And there is such an infinite multitude of those, and. yes. I envy you for the Swahili, because that's yet another whole new place to be. But what should I tell you, hmm. Did you know that we, the Finno-Ugric ones, then, conversely, operate all around with the suffixes, above all. And cases. Hungarian has 15 to 30 cases, depending on how you count them. And sometimes all the things get stuck inside one word and the words just keep spilling on and on. And Finnish has a verb form for things that are likely to happen, and what possible purpose that might actually serve I've never figured out. And and. I'll make a non-scientific comparative language post one of these days, just to bore everyone to tears. (And you should, too.) :)

Also (if you're not opposed to such things in principle, which is cool if you are, but I find that I'm not) I'll burn you a copy of Tallahassee and stick it in the envelope with your books if you like. Because I'm in this place right now where everyone absolutely must have it.