Month: January 2015

Toe-dipping

Okay, so January has been unexpectedly hard. Work has been stressing me out for a number of reasons, but today I got to work from home since we finished our main project a day early, and I had some database work to do that can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection. And it was so relaxing! I could listen to music, there was no one talking around me (and I didn’t have to talk!), and as soon as I was done, the weekend could begin. I wouldn’t want to work from home all the time, but every now and then it is just peachy, and today I think I really needed it.

I’ve been pondering my relationship with my job a lot this month. It has been harder now than it was last year, and there was a moment earlier this week when I genuinely felt like I wanted to give up. Instead I chose to consciously change my attitude towards it, or at least try my damnedest from now on. I have a plan for February now, and hopefully towards the summer things will become easier.

Eventually, however, I do need to decide what I want to do with myself, career-wise. Maybe not this year, but I can’t wait forever with it, either. What I’m doing now is fine for the time being, but it’s not a long-term solution, and I need to find something that could be. (This subject deserves a longer, less vague post, but I’m tired and I’ve stared at the screen way too much today as it is. Plus there’s the fact that I still don’t know how detailed I want to be about work-related things here. Still, I predict more musings about this in the future, so stay tuned!)

34

I used to write a birthday post every year, as a type of “looking back” thing. My birthday is sufficiently close to the start of the year that I could easily make it about summarising the old year, the way people often do at around the start of a new one. I think it’s a nice tradition, and a useful one, too. I forget things so easily, and looking back can give necessary perspective.

So, my 33 was chaotic, to say the least. I don’t remember much of the start of the year. I was looking for a job and had been for half a year by that point, and it seemed like there was no resolution in sight. I was desperately in love with someone who lived far away from me, and sometimes the only thing that seemed to keep me sane was the counter ticking towards our next meeting (which were months apart). I also worked out fairly actively back then, which was another sanity-reinforcing thing in my life.

Things changed abruptly when I applied for a job in Denmark in late June, and was interviewed and accepted in early July. Suddenly I needed to move my entire existence from Finland to Denmark within a month, not to mention move in with someone I knew well, but had only met a handful of times. I couldn’t have done it without the absolutely invaluable (including financial…) help from my parents, and all my dear friends who pitched in as well. That one month was stressful beyond belief, but somehow it all worked out, and by the end of July I had moved to Denmark. The next week I started at my current job.

It has been an adjustment, for sure. The first months were a blur of trying to get all the necessary paperwork taken care of, learning the job, unpacking a life’s worth of things and fitting them into an apartment that already housed someone else’s life, healing hurts (including a nasty infection on my second week here, and a toenail I managed to partially rip off while unpacking things), starting the language course to learn Danish (twice, because they put me in an advanced class first, when I didn’t speak a word yet…), and not least, learning to fit our lives together with M, who has been amazing through it all, I have to say. As has his family, who took me in with open arms.

Eventually things have settled down more. My work contract got renewed at the start of the year, so for now, employment is secure. It’s not a job I want to spend the rest of my life doing, but it sure beats unemployment, and I have a great group of colleagues I enjoy seeing every day. (I got several different happy birthday songs today in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and even Somali from my colleagues, which was surprising and extremely delightful.) I’m starting to learn Danish, although I still find it very challenging, and it’s going to be a long road before I’m anywhere near fluency. I’ve even taken my first somewhat floundering steps towards physical activity again, after six months of no regular exercise of any kind (besides riding the bike to get from one place to another). And M and I… We fit together. We make each other happier than we are alone, and we’re both pretty happy alone, too.

I miss my friends and family sometimes, but I’m home now. It’s not an entirely familiar home, but it feels right, and I haven’t regretted the choice I made to come here.

As for what I’d like from my 34:

  • Basic fluency in Danish, i.e. the ability to run regular errands and hold a conversation without needing to resort to English much or at all.
  • Regular exercise routine that I find enjoyable and sustainable.
  • More good times with M. I’m especially looking forward to my first Danish summer!
  • Friends’ visits. I already have two scheduled, and hopefully there will be more.
  • Visiting Finland in turn.
  • Learning my way around Aarhus more, so I can find nice places to visit/shop in (and take other people, too), get a library card and other things I still don’t have.

Come what may, I’m looking forward to it!

Æbleskiver

Whenever I used to come home from my Danish class, I felt like I had done a hefty physical workout while simultaneously working on a particularly demanding translation. Simply put, I was exhausted, and usually also socially drained to the point that my response to everything was irritation and hostility. I have told M countless times that I hate both the Danish language and Denmark as a whole, neither of which is actually true. Both frustrate me from time to time, but more often than not, I enjoy them. Yes, even the inane language.

Towards the end of last year, the classes left me less crippled. Tired, definitely, but not the same way as before. At some point the teaching turned from complete gibberish to understandable words and then sentences. I still don’t understand everything, but I do get the gist of most everything that is said in class. It’s considerably harder for me to actually produce Danish, but I’m getting better at it. It’s hard for me to tolerate the mistakes I inevitable make, especially when trying to talk, but I keep trying.

Today was my first class after the Christmas break, which ended up lasting for over a month because I couldn’t attend class last week. And boy, does it show! Whenever I was asked to say something, I struggled. The words I needed would pop into my head in Spanish and Swedish, but certainly not in the language I was supposed to use. So frustrating! By the time I got home, I was totally beat. Granted, it’s not as bad as it was when I only just started the classes, but there’s still a clear difference to how it was in December. Still, I did manage to borrow a book from the library all in Danish, which made me immensely proud. I’m learning, and while the pace is snail-like in my own mind, the progress I’ve made is undeniable.

(The post title is the first word I learnt in Danish a long time ago. It’s the name of a typical Danish Christmas dessert that M adores. Æbleskiver are small pancake-y spheres that are eaten by hand after dipping them in strawberry jam and powdered sugar. I’m not a huge fan of the Danish way of serving them, but I quite enjoy them with apple marmalade, no powdered sugar required… Of course, M thinks I’m a total heretic.)

Ladies with a Voice!

M heroically battled (and won) the domain war yesterday, which means that Write Words is finally where it’s supposed to be (i.e. .dk instead of .fi). Apparently you can’t own a .fi domain unless you have an address in Finland. No matter, .dk works just fine for me. Well, it does now, anyway. It took several hours to actually configure everything so it works right…

It’s been storming like mad for the past 24 hours, but at least it stopped raining now. The wind is still quite impressive. I’m not planning on setting foot outside the apartment today, so I don’t much care, but it had better calm down for tomorrow, as I’m finally starting the Danish language course again. It started already last week, but I was sick, so I missed the first class. It’s bad enough that I have to ride the bike uphill all the way to where it’s held, so I really don’t need the wind to complicate matters further. (Also, may I point out how odd it is to not have any snow in January? The temperature has been pretty steadily at around 5-8 degrees, which is just unnatural. Not that I’m complaining. I don’t miss the Finnish winter one bit, for now at least.)


Okay, what I really wanted to write about:

Lately my taste in music has veered towards the electronic quite a bit, especially when combined with female vocals. A while back I stumbled upon Lydia Ainsworth, whose Hologram made an especially strong impression on me, although I do like Right from Real as a whole. I also bought Imogen Heap‘s latest release Sparks and listened to it until I practically wore it out. Only a few of the tracks were new to me by the time I got the album, since she’s been releasing them online while working on the whole thing, but it was still a delight to add the CD to my collection. I’ve gone through several phases where different tracks have been my favourite for a period of time, but ultimately I think I love The Listening Chair the most, not only because it resonates on a personal level, but also because the idea of it is so delicious. I look forward to hearing it evolve in the coming years, as Imogen is planning to add a minute to it every seven years.

However, right now my number one “listen to death” project is Emilie Nicolas and her debut album Like I’m a Warrior. It started with Fail, but now there’s also Us, Charge and Put Me Down, and frankly, the entire album is just really, really good. (You can find it on Spotify.) She played a gig in Aarhus in October, but back then I knew nothing about her at all, and now I’m just so miffed I missed it! Here’s hoping she’ll be coming back this way sometime soon.

If anyone can come up with recommendations of other artists in a similar(ish) vein as these ladies, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Sink or Swim

I’m home sick and feeling guilty about it. I always feel guilty about it even though I know it’s ridiculous. I didn’t get sick on purpose, and I couldn’t do my job right now even if I tried, so there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Yet… Yeah. So, I decided to try and do something worthwhile with the unexpected free alone time. I’ve been meaning to get this blog running ever since I moved to Denmark almost six months ago, but you know how life gets in the way of all the things you allow yourself to procrastinate over?

See, there are some issues that I haven’t managed to resolve yet when it comes to this blog project, and so it fell entirely dormant for much longer than I had intended. Originally I wanted to document the whole “moving to another country” experience, but frankly, I had enough on my plate just trying to live through it. I had neither the time nor the energy to write about it, too, which is also evident in how little I’ve written to my friends and family back in Finland. It was simply too overwhelming. It’s something I still worry about, because I’m afraid the blog will simply never take off properly. I’ll write for a few weeks and then it’ll be a few posts each month, and then one, and then none. It’s happened before.

I’m also quite unhappy with the way the blog looks right now. It’s been a long time since I designed anything more complex than a single webpage here and there, and I have no skill when it comes to actual graphic design. I have ideas regarding how I might like the blog to look, but I don’t have the skills or the patience to actually pull any of them off, and I feel like the important thing right now is to get the words flowing instead of polishing the site until it glows while there is still no actual content. So, either I’ll end up leaving it as it is, or it’ll go through all kinds of changes in the future. We’ll see.

So, while it’s entirely possible this poor thing will die a sad death before it ever gets off the ground, I’m going to give it a try anyway. I wrote a few blog-like entries on my very first days here, which I may or may not actually end up publishing retroactively, but beyond that, I’ll set myself a goal of posting (at least) once a week. It doesn’t have to be anything grand and exciting, but there needs to be some sort of consistency to the pace or there’s really no point in this. So there we are. Welcome aboard.

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