Internet, love!

I am doing an Experiment. I am Experimenting with my non-existent love life, trying to make it... existent. I suppose. I suppose that is the ultimate goal in online dating. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have created a profile on a site that deals with such matters. Under pressure and at first unwillingly, but I did get excited about it whilst writing my profile but that was only because I could write about myself. That always makes me very excited; when writing, I can try and fool people thinking I'm Cool, which I am obviously not in reality - goodness gracious, I just wrote 'cool' with capital C. Nonetheless: filling out a profile questionnaire, what more could a girl want?

Well, apart from boyfriend, of course. If you're single, there's a reason you're single, and this current society we live in seems to think the reason is something other than your own decision. If you're single, it means that perhaps there is something wrong with you when you haven't been able to get someone to agree to regurlarly exchange saliva with you. (In the case of many a gentlemen on the site in question, the reason most likely is absolutely appalling grammar.) Coupling up with a suitable fellow being seems to me quite a natural thing to do, socially and from an evolutionary perspective. I get that, yes. It is what we do, an instict over which we have no control. Nine months or so of counselling have taught me that we are, in the end, very emotional creatures and despite pretending to be logical and rational, we are anything but. It's very fundamentally human to wish to have some love, back scratches, and a Netflix mate.

What baffles me in this game of boyfriending and girlfriending is the strange, complicated social rules that determine how it is done. As a side note, let us not even talk about the highly public demonstrations of love, both online and out in the wildnerness of asphalt, concrete, and stone. It makes sense to have these online dating things, as you can do nearly everything else on the Internet as well, so why not look for a cherished one as well? I can't say it would not be strange, though, with my flatmate's words are echoing in my head: "What happened to meeting people through mutual friends? Or in bars? Or bookshops?"

It is not the fact that it is happening online but rather that you are actually, actively, doing it. And it's weird as fuck, for reasons I cannot fully explain but may have to do with my personal insecurities and such. I am not just used to being so open about that sort of thing. Yet, there I am, my profile is available for anyone to look, judge, despise, favourite, or wink.

That's the creepy part, the part that makes me grimace, lift my shoulders to my ears, and vomit verbally. Winks? Favourites? They're not even favouriting my clever puns or witty remarks like they might on Twitter, but just me. Me. They are evaluating how attractive I am as a potential date and then announce it by favouriting or winking. Naturally, they can also message me, which is a lot less creepy. You're straight-forwardly appoaching someone you're interested in, like you would in real life, whereas favourites and winks just seems like you're watching someone from a distance and thinking all sorts of nasty things you'd do with them, probably involving whips and fedoras. I am convinced those are the sorts of guys who wear fedoras, complain about friend-zone, bitch about girls being sluts and going for the douchebags while trying to assert they are "nice guys."

Right, of course you are, you misogynistic, self-centered twats.

All this leaves me confused. Fine, confusion is my default state but this time my it has a clear direction. I will sketch some questions that arise regarding this whole business of online dating, and they are as follows:

1. Does online dating really work?
2. Do normal people meet other normal people there?
3. Or would it be safer to go to bars and bookshops, despite the fact it means entering the Outside World?

The nature of online dating is very forced; it's like going shopping and trying out different tops until you find the one that fits. But, in the end, are you absolutely certain you need the top? Most likely you already have very nice clothes at home. Perhaps not the type of top you thought you wanted, but you can look perfectly nice in your old clothes as well. On the other hand, it is nice to liven up things a little. Change is good and refreshing. Buying new clothes just to entertain yourself is not very environmentally convient, so I will try and make my way out of this rather clumsy metaphor.

So your life might be perfectly alright as it is. Mine is, at least, or-you-know-sort-of-is, and I am rather doubtful that a boyfriend would actually make it better. Yes, it would be a new aspect, but new aspects in one's life can be acquired by other means as well. I may be quite simple in this matter, but for me, sometimes reading a new book can be enough for a good while. Of course, the book would need to be fantastic, but the excitement you get from a really great book, especially if you share it with someone (recent experience: reading Waiting for Godot out loud with my flatmate while wearing suitable hats, she Didi, I Gogo) and reading is far less complicated than trying to have an actual, interactional relationship with another human being.

I am tempted to go back to my old habits, perhaps with added going out where there's people. I mean, that's why we go out and get drunk. To have fun and to meet someone who is likewise funny and cute and likes Doctor Who and then in the morning awkwardly exchange numbers knowing you'll never hear from one another again. Ah, the life!

The Middle

Sometimes it's half an hour past midnight on a barely Wednesday and you should be going to bed but there is still tea left in your cup and your mind wanders. It leaves the room, scrutinises the sitting room for a while – nothing to see there either – and then ruthlessly, with permission of only its own, takes the keys and walks out the door. The November night is clear but chilly, crisp, nearly crunchy, like the leaves on the footpath. It's quiet and only artificially light: it hardly ever gets truly dark in the city.

Countryside, on the other hand, is different. One time during my few days of au pairing, I was walking back home in the dark. It was November then as well, I think. The family lived outside a small town and although modern development had delighted the residents of the somewhat rural outskirts of the town with an asphalt road, it had not (yet) brought street lights to that country road that was and still is, I presume, going through fields and forests and fields. I suppose that could be called metaphorically and literally one of my darkest days.

There are small burns in my hands, two or three, careless use of the oven, and the polish on my finger nails has started to come off in irregularly shaped bits. I care too little to do anything about that.

I have read some Donna Haraway and sociolinguistics today. I have read about the outrage to do with that one scientist's slightly tacky shirt (had we not better focusing on the actual causes for women's oppression, marginalisation, and objectification rather than on an individual shirt?) and the controversy around Lena Dunham's autobiography (had we not better criticising, should we want to do so, Lena Dunham for what she does or writes rather than for what she is – amongst other things, a woman, that is?) and I don't feel much like anything.

Continuous existence. Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow, tomorrow's tomorrow and so on.

On nights like these when you don't sleep even though you should, when you're actually resisting sleep, things start manipulating themselves. They distort, they lose their usual measurements. I don't want to go to sleep because I know I need to get up and the day will not be different from any other.

You are the one making the change. If you are not happy with something, change it. Change your attitude. Read a self-help book and/or find Jesus and/or have a baby.

Sometimes you do not want to let go of the nothingness. It's become a feeble equivalent for familiarity. Familiar = good, safe, secure, keep holding on. There might be a drop or two of self-pity but that's also just as familiar and nearly undistinguishable from the overall feeling. Certainly it's constituting for that, so it is. But it's not all and there's more and it's more complicated than that. I want to think I'm stopping the time even if for a very brief moment, even though according to my vague understanding of timey-wimey things that is largely based on pseudo-scientific articles on the Internet, that would mean that we would somehow die or stop existing or so.

Well, I can fairly confidently say that I would like to exist indeed, but I would like to enjoy a moment of not getting anxious over college, stressed about money, guilty of being a bad friend and poor daughter. It's in front of others I define myself but sometimes I just wish I didn't need to do that. That I could just be without explanations, obligations, responsilibities. No expectations, no failures.

Nothingness, mere nothingness; there is everything in nothingness.

9 to 5 or so

Office doth harm to one's wit.

My daily routines include for instance going to the loo fairly often, for the simple reason that I drink so much water and coffee during the day and we all know how them liquids go through one's body so. I go to the toilet to do what I need but I also amuse myself by making funny faces in front of a mirror; there's so much fatty skin on my face that my face does indeed stretch into quite amusing formations. Sometimes I have to wash my fringe in the sink. It gets really dirty really quickly, just the fringe, it might have something to do with the coconut oil I use for my face, regardless of the reason, the end result is that I need to wash my fringe in the sink and dry it under a hand-dryer. That's fine. Then I read the news and learn new things. The other day, for instance, I came to know that elephants actually comfort each other. If an elephant is upset or anxious, its peers gather around it and hug each other with their trunks. If that is not adorable, then nothing is and I'll leave this planet immediately. Yesterday I searched for Tobey Maguire gifs as a joke to forward to someone who detests him, because I'm just that funny, although the task was not too pleasant for me either, I don't have anything against him, he's a fine Spiderman but his crying face is not exactly pretty. Tom Hiddleston's face, on the other hand, is always pretty, and I would not be surprised at all if he turned out to be some kind of Saviour or Messiah that some religious peeps have been waiting for some time now. All day long, I've been rolling back, forth, and around on my chair, mostly because it has them little wheels which are annoying if something gets caught in them but rest of the time are good fun. After completing said activities and doing some actual work as well if it's a good day, it is probably time to pee again.

Undeniably, I have perfected the art of copying and pasting by now, certainly. I have also learned that lying in job interviews about knowing how to use Excel is not recommended as it does bear consequences. They may, indeed, make you use Excel and after that, email your efforts to about fifteen hundred people. Oh come on, I was thinking during the job interview, of course I know how to use email. I mean, seriously, like, you know, who doesn't.

To my great disgrace, I must confess that I spent half an hour attaching the laborious Excel table in the effing email.

Eight hours a day, staring at the arbitrary messes of meanings that flash before your eyes screen after screen after screen. Your only comfort being the owls of different shades of pink staring at you from your mug, which you had to buy (in Penneys, where else would you go) because you needed a reminder of what you truly are, not a corporate slave plugged in your computer, but a pink owl, unique ball of beaky wisdom, a little feathery snowflake.

You truly can feel the desperation spread across the world, it's curled up in the corners of multinational emails, it's hiding in between of the lines in purchase orders PDF, it's in the undertones of good-mornings and see-you-tomorrows.

Makes you, or makes me, to say the least, wonder how did we come to this. As a society, a structured version of humanity, where people have been diminished into mailing lists and basic human needs are covered under layers and layers and layers of complicated tables, charts, calculations, and abbreviations. Somehow we need to do all this so that we can go home in the evening, buy our daily pasta and pumpkin seeds, feed our loved ones and ourselves.

I do understand the harsh realities of the word, yes, thank you for asking. We may not always choose what we do and things could very well be a lot worse. But is this all really worth it, and what it even is? The guaranteed continuity of our current level of being, perhaps?

Suppose you could add sarcastically something along the lines of what do I know, I am doing these only for a couple months before the joyful days of university commence again in September.

In the end, we make it what it is, do we not? These sort of complicated institutions exist for the simply reason that we have created them to more efficiently satisfy our own needs, well, wants I believe is a more accurate term here. I think Rousseau, who longed back to the nature, did not actually plan on physically going back to the nature, abandoning the modern devices and returning to the state of cave-dwelling. That would be just silly. What he truly meant, I never learned when I took one module in modern philosophy last year. Nonetheless, he may have been onto something: maybe there's a link between things getting very complicated in the modern society and people becoming too picky and bitchy. Simply put, my interpretation of the matter is that they're merely frustrated because they are trapped forty hours a week in their tiny cubes and cubicles; a vicious circle of continued and forwarded misfortune. And to think that Rousseau's time was some 300 years before ours, my heavens what he would've thought of today's world!

Office workers of all countries, unite! To the revolution! Let us build fancy robots who will free us from office labour and allow us to pursue our artistic, creative, humanistic, and altruistic tendencies until we end up overruled by the robots, in which case I promise to assist in the resistance movement according to my best abilities although I doubt I won't be very competent in robot-fighting but since this was kind of my idea, I suppose I ought to help out.

The Foreigner Speaks English

It is me, the Foreigner. A Northerner, I’d like to call myself. I like the echo of it: a smell of ice and snow, a sight of windy mountains (or, you know, they’re not technically mountains, but that’s as close as the English language allows me to go), a feeling of solitude in the rough beauty of nature. That is how I’d like to present myself, as an independent, strong figure from the mythical North, wandered off to the green island of Smithwicks and hash browns to experience wild youth days outside the familiar, expected and pre-approved. However, that is not me. I am from hopefully only a metaphorically inbred small town, terribly afraid of snakes and sudden noises and certainly would not survive in the wilderness. I need the Interwebs. I don't think the coverage is all that great there. Saying so, I disappoint even myself.

Nordic I am still, not one of those stunningly good-looking Scandinavians with long legs and fair skin but a potato-nosed, thin-haired Finnish girl. I have inherited my grandmother’s nose via my mother, and I believe it will get larger as I age. I have my father’s thin hair that sometimes seems to require even a bus ticket of its own, so independent it is of me. While my youth days may not actually be wild in the sense how the word is commonly understood, life is far more surprising and, oh yes! see how I dare, exciting in Dublin than in my hometown where time has got stuck in the sticky dance floors of the only night club.

I have a tendency to ramble on and repeat myself, which probably is one of the main reasons why I cannot keep short stories short – let's not even begin with the long ones, while we still can move on. An escape from myself, so to say, moving on so quickly that there's not time to start pondering what length of a story still qualifies as short, or how to decide whom to betray when making cuts in a story. Is it more powerful to say a thing or leave it unsaid? I am with Chekhov on this one.

If I open my mouth, there’s no knowing what’s going to get out and how long the never-ending string of consecutive but necessarily not related words will last. My Facebook posts have become increasingly long and nonsensical, which is why I thought it might be about time to use another channel for all that. Posting all that on Facebook would just be silly. To describe it pointless might be more accurate. Twitter, then, is an arch enemy of mine, largely because of the character limit. 140. 140. Useless, I'd like to add, murmuring and squinting and feeling profoundly incompetent when it comes to compressed wittiness. I truly admire those for whom it is enough. Also, stalking people on Twitter is less fun that on Facebook, or maybe I just don't get how it's supposed to work, but I sincerely believe that blogs are the best sources of information used for... purposes. Conclusions. Don't pretend, you know exactly what I mean.

I enjoy writing. In other words, if I didn’t write, within 30 days I’d be found in a padded room chewing my own toes and ah well, why not someone else's if I got the chance. I’d like to become a better writer than I am now – you can only imagine my excitement when I found out that my college offers a module in creative writing. Oh yes, thought I, I am definitely going to take that! Despite English being my second language and occasionally on an awfully fragile basis, I am definitely going to take that. So besides a platform for my self-centred waffling, I consider this blog as a writing practice. Let us not speak of the previous blog that was supposed to be something similar as well but now it's been months and months since I've last written anything. How amazing would that be, though, if someday I actually learned how to transfer the irrational ends of thoughts into coherent, sense-making combinations.

That being said, there’s my goal. It is to be doubted, though, will I ever reach that. It is approximately sixteen years since I learned to read and write. My collection of successfully finished essays, short stories, and poems has not quite been what one would’ve hoped. I could say I only write for myself and for my own amusement; and yet I keep posting all that all over you-know-what. What do I want, I have asked myself, but I cannot bring myself to admit the obvious.

Notice me! Listen to me! Like me! Even a little bit, if by any means possible, if not too much trouble for ye.