Combatting the Poo Brain

More than one post in a month! I must have come down with a brain fever!

As I said in my previous post, I feel to be suffering from the poo brain, an affliction where in my brain does basically nothing and my facial expression is similar to the posted picture of everyone's second favourite Batman (because lets face it, those two movies with George Clooney as Batman are pretty fantastic). In light of this, lately I have been trying to work my brain muscle in some way or another and you know what? I feel like writing could be a fun thing so here I go on another rambling gallivant through my cranial spaces in search of some sort of coherent thought. Oddly enough I'd like to say a quick little thanks to Team Petootz and one C. Doom-Hammer for providing enough thought provoking blog material between the three of them to actually motivate me to do something, which is something teachers have been trying to do for close to 20 years. Good on 'em.

Otherwise, let try and unclog some of this poo from my brain. One would think that starting a project would be a good way to do such a thing and being a manual labour kinda guy that would generally entail making something. Sadly in my current circumstances I can't do that because I have no access to tools and I'm moving in less than 2 weeks so I'd like as little stuff as possible (but I'd still really like to try may hand at some blacksmithing) so that leaves me with trying to pump the old mind muscle with some other endeavors such as the ramble you're reading (or at least skimming), drawing and attempting to learn Finnish whilst skateboarding.  Now writing is pretty self explanatory, what with this blog being the form it's taking and all that jazz so I shan't go into that and I'm guessing a majority of my readership (do I even have a readership or am I just writing to no one?) already know that I have spent 4+ years doing drawing as part of my industrial design education so I feel I'd really just be telling you junk you already know there as well. Which leaves me with the interesting field of learning Finnish and skateboarding at the same time.

Now I should probably point out that this isn't some hilarious concept for learning a difficult Finno-Uralic language with enough variations for each word to make your head spin. Mercy me no, not at all. I just happen to have made friends with a local group of skateboarders and curiously enough they tend to speak to each other in Finnish swapping to English when something important comes up. As a result I don't have much to do while they're talking (other than skateboarding) but listen to them and try and figure out what's going on and the result of that is me slowly gaining an understanding of this rather mind boggling language. I certainly wouldn't understand a full conversation and I certainly can't say much but I have been very proud to confuse the hell out of various Finnish people by commenting on conversations that they had assumed I wouldn't understand. So far I can only really do this while talking about skateboards and a few other basic subjects but hey, that's a start.

Now one would think it would make logical sense to take this chance to listen to Finnish all the time by supplementing it with some book learning and you'd be right. However that's not how I roll, preferring instead to piece together an understanding of the language through reading whatever I can get my hands on (I've become quite good at deciphering fast food menus) and asking questions because sadly I'm not a guy that can be trusted to study on his own. Which is something I should really work on because I'm probably missing out on a whole range of educational benefits. But I am really finding that in the last month or two that I have been hanging with these cool cats, my understanding of the language has drastically improved. It probably has a lot to do with Finnish borrowing a lot of words from English when it comes to skateboards but whatever. I find it quite irritating that in all my months prior to meeting these guys, I had made very little head way with my linguistics simply because Finns are so accepting of the fact that their language is so god damned difficult. When they meet someone for the first time they'll talk to you in Finnish and the second you don't react they automatically switch to English and it's very hard to get them to change back, thus throwing away any chance you had to practice your Finnish. I have literally had Finnish people tell me to not bother learning Finnish because its too hard if you're not raised with it and everyone speaks English anyway. Which is a shame because its a pretty cool language with a lot of letters that most folks can't pronounce. Here's an example for you from my favourite internet famous Finn.

P.S. Some of the controls for this blog are in Finnish, how neat is that!