Come in peace

The sun is yet again growing and thus I am somewhat late with my wishes for a good beginning for the new year. Well, with the unnatural lifestyle of our time there is yet a week, so prepare, and anyway, the brightening days probably don't bring along a brighter future. Oh and merry Christmas too.

Salutations (Baldur's Gate pronunciation)

Because I am not able to write about the things I have on my mind, you'll have to make do with reading about the things that ought to be on my mind.
Like my confused daily routine (=the lack of any) and the following lack of sleep. Well OK, 4 hours isn't that little, and surely you can take some nights with only 2 without any problems, eh..
Or the exams I've got next week - the real thing for the phonology&morphology exercise course, the grammar exam for Introductory Sumerian and the intermediate exam for my spanish basics... I haven't even had a look at the books for spanish, phonology or morphology, and although I've read the stuff for sumerian, I need tons of practice for that. And I've missed half the spanish lectures (for many reasons, some of them good, like not having had the book which really was needed to get much out of most of the lectures). Well, I'll manage, or even should I not - what is done is done.
Then there of course is the ongoing, insignificant little inconvenience of having no money (as in 0 euros)- no big deal for me, most of the time, only the rest of the world doesn't see it like that :P.
The problem is, sometimes I just don't care. I guess I'm just hoping that if I keep building up this awkward construction of barely solved problems (most of which, with a little more effort or a swifter reaction, would have been solved better, or often avoided altogether), someday I'll push it too far and everything will come crashing down. Sounds crazy, does it? Well, I see it this way: in a situation where I can't solve any problems, I don't have to solve any. Then I can just let things go by their own weight and have a decent night's sleep. I don't feel like I'm really able to cope, so why should I even try? It's just that those bastards, self-esteem, curiosity, others' expectations, my own dreams, and the like keep whipping and urging me on and on and on...

Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather

So it is. Keeping up this blog is weighing heavily upon my shoulders and its death would not be grieved by me nor by any other clearheaded being.:)
But a jedi's gotta do what a jedi's gotta do...
So here's your routine update of the year:

My life is like ever it was, or at least since I've been enrolled at the University (of Helsinki). Nothing important has happened recently (i.e. I haven't got any new Miyazaki movies, although by now I've seen most of his Ghibli-productions, only Porco Rosso is unseen as of yet; unfortunately I haven't seen any other Ghibli/Miyazaki-related movies), just some parties, concerts etc.

A short, massively incomplete list of minor happenstances is hereby provided:

-Coeurage, one of the groups I play in, and the only one active at the time (unless one counts Coeurage's alias King Eats King, which is reserved for everything we do, which is fun but too embarrassing to associate directly with Coeurage) has progressed some - at last we have some songs in playable condition (at least the acoustic versions are) and we even had a small acoustic gig at a corner bar in Kamppi, Helsinki - Eerikinkulma it was called if I'm not mistaken (we also played for friends a week before that :P)

-I got to watch a concert of the final round of the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition, and it was very good, although sadly the winner, Alina Pogostkin didn't play that evening - I saw part of her performance on TV and she seemed put so much of herself into the Sibelius, yet never detracting anything of the original - such creativity deserves praise; well, at least I saw the winner of the second prize, Jiafeng Chen, and his performance was no less magnificent, he really lit up the audience with his Tchaikovsky, and of all the performances I saw either live or on TV, his seemed to show the greatest technical proficiency; combined with his skillfull interpretation it made me think I'd seen the certain victor, and I sure was a little baffled when he only came second - until I saw aforementioned part of Alina's Sibelius (it was only after the winners had been announced) - that really made me stand with the jury after all, tired as I was, I almost wept for the beauty of it..;)
(oh, what an unorganized mass of spittled babble I've produced)

-I've been lazy at school, but somehow I've still managed until now - it really makes me wonder

-Aspekti RY, the student organization for linguistics/computational linguistics (or whatever it's called, language technology or whatever) students at the Helsinki University celebrated 'pikkujoulu' ("little christmas" - an excuse for drinking too much for most finns - or in the case of Aspekti, for playing games like actionary or hopscotch while drinking more or less moderately) the same evening Coeurage played at the bar, which caused me some minor inconvenience, such as missing the IPAri-game (everybody gets a piece of gingerbread (pipari in finnish, short for piparkakku) in the form of an IPA-sign (International Phonetic Alphabet) and has to explain what sound the sign represents - how it is produced, where the articulation takes place etc. - and then has to try to produce the sound themselves - an alveolar voiced implosive, anyone?).

-Probably something else, but I can't remember


Yeah, well, bye then.