Becoming Paula

Lately I have come to accept that I am not intended for marriage. This is not a sad reality. I think that marriage is sometimes over glorified. Marriage has benefits,yes, all sorts, physical, spiritual and emotional. As the Bible says something about a stone sharpening a stone so we can grow putting up with the annoyances of another person. When we look at this we seem to forget Paul recommending not marrying. He did great things for God. With no wife.

Why am I talking about this? Was I not exceedingly happy while I was marrieds? Yes, and no. It was the best I had ever known. The reality is that I have always felt that marriage was not for me. As a child I really wanted to be an old maid. Even as a a teen I did not think I would marry. This was in big contrast to the fact that I had a really strong sex drive. My sex drive was not the kind that was okay with just sleeping around. All my fantasies, then and now include committed loving relationships with love. My body and spirit had contrasting desires.

Did I marry my ex-husband for sex? Yes and no. I also married him because I loved him and had intensely committed to him and up on marriage I was willing and able to love him until one of us died and that was the case until the divorce.

There is another reason I married. I was profoundly mentally ill. What I needed was therapy and medication and a reliance up on God, not marriage, or relationship of any kind. When I am in a relationship my spiritual growth becomes profoundly retarded. I give too much of what is God's to my partner. I love intensely all consumingly and committedly. My love is the stuff of romances. It is also suffocating and unhealthy.

Sometimes what we most want is the least good for us. I never grew up nor figured what I wanted because I was so intensely committed to my husband. Now I am thriving and scared that I will jeopardize all the wonderful things I have accomplished by falling into another relationship. Also it is quite clear that I have terrible taste in men. My standards are fall too low. Clearly the common factor in my dismal romantic history is me and I have to accept the blame and that God's blessing has not been up on any of it.

In contrast I am blessed and productive and growing and happy with myself alone. Unless God finds me the perfect man, I am not interested and perfection does not appear in reality, so I think I am safe. Just call me Paula, the female apostle preaching the gospel of Jesus and remaining unmarried. : P

Business

The problem with me is that I have no concept of "business" as in whose business something is. My business, your business, nobody's business all become everybody's business. Am I gossip? Yes, but I do not believe my motives are malicious. Am I untrustworthy? In a way I am.

This does not primarily mean I will go tell your business to everybody. What I do mostly is I tell my business to everyone. I have no concept of why this would be a bad idea. I tell people all about my sex life, or lack of it. I have zero problem talking about sex. I think the problem is that people assume that if I talk about it I will have it, with them. This is not the case. I just am very comfortable with myself.

I accept my mistakes and I am comfortable with myself. I do things I am not proud of but I have no concept of why I should not share these things with practically everyone, anyone. Why not? I just have no filter.
I think people assume there is more I am not sharing. I have juicier secrets, like them. Secrets they keep secret. I have no secrets. Believe me. Ask me anything. I may not announce it online but I have no secrets. Maybe I am somehow disabled.

You may say that this is fine. It is my business who I tell my stuff to. I am an idiot but what ever floats my retarded boat. The real problem comes when your business and my business intersect and become the same thing. I have to exert quite a bit of will power not to blab my business, because it is your business. I try, but every once in a while it jumps out. It probably does not comfort you when I tell you how hard I try to keep it under wraps because people usually just see that one time when their dirty little secret was shared by me.

The Invisible Illness

As my name on this blog tells you I consider myself a skeptic but I do not do scientific skepticism here much, and I will not do it here either. I want to talk about how grateful and blessed I am by modern medicine and the scientific method that has provided us with this ever changing, improving medical science.

I have always been very healthy in body most of the problems I have ever had are pretty much in my head. The health problems I have can not be seen on the surface, even by medical professionals sometimes. This does not mean they are incompetent, this means they can not read minds. You can not see pain or mental illness on the outside often that is why they are misunderstood by observers, and sometimes even by sufferers.

I was very lucky. When I had my breakdown and I descended into my dark place of depression and psychosis I received treatment but every step of the way I had to fight to get it and advocate for myself. I seemed calm rational and sane even as I was breaking down. I tried to explain to doctors that I was breaking down but  they just saw someone who seemed to be alright. When I was at the hospital the psychiatrist was not sure I necessarily needed anti-depressants. I had to explain to her this was not a temporary condition that would go away as the initial stress went away. She believed me and medicated me. 

I got so lucky. The first medication I was given worked. This does not happen every time, often people have to go through years of trial and error to find the right medicine. Thank you medical science, thank you God. It also worked fast. After three weeks I felt like I turned a corner. One day dramatically things looked different, less enormous. It was like the elephant I had to eat was chopped up into bite sized pieces and I saw that there was a possibility that over time I could get over this and the task in front of me could be accomplished with time. I was cautious. I made them keep me another week. They wanted to send me home after a week at first, then two, then three but I had to make them keep me until I was ready to go, until my medicine was working, until the feeling of facing the world outside did not fill me with unspeakable terror.

 

My struggle continued outside. Things got harder as I got out, as they tend to. I had to face the world, face my husband and the stresses of being out on my own for the first time ever. I still miss being at the hospital sometimes. It was so safe there. I had to now convince a whole new set of people I was sick. I was optimistic and full of enthusiasm to get on the path to my new life but every one had their own idea about what I should do and they did not ask me what I needed.

 

I had to convince a new mental health nurse I was sick, and eventually that my depression had worsened and I had regressed several months and had to up my medicine, also I had to convince a psychiatrist. They were not incompetent, or blind, or anything. They just could not read minds. I was clean, my clothes were nice and I took care of myself and I felt better when I talked to others. How could they possibly see the dark moments of depression and loneliness I experienced? They were not in my messy apartment as I forced myself to make something to eat and broke down crying in the middle of slicing vegetables, collapsing to the floor and swearing tourets like: Bastard, fucking passive-aggressive douche bag! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fucking asshole!

The real difficulty was convincing the non-medical people. I have been told by so many people that I should not have tried to kill myself because suicide is a sin. Really? Wow, you know, I did not grow up in the Christian culture so I really had no idea. (What is the font for sarcasm?) My parents, every time my medication comes up, are still trying to convince me I should stop taking it. They do not understand. It was even worse in the beginning listening to my father's two hour lectures about the evils of psychology. Don't get me wrong, my parents are great and supportive in this time. They just do not understand, or even in some cases, acknowledge my sickness.

People tell me I should just pick myself up by my boot straps and clean my home. After all, it won't take that long, it is a small apartment. Just pick up after yourself. I wish I could. I really wish I could. Get a job, any job, earn money and quit living off the government. Even immigrants who do not know how to speak Finnish can get jobs in cleaning because they want to. People are poor in Kosovo and things are bad there but they have no depression.

That is what I hear. It is hard, I am alone in my sickness in a lot of ways. Make no mistake about it. I am ill. Just because I am not visibly ill does not mean I am fine. If you were to take a look at my brain under an MRI you would find that my hippo campus has drastically shrunk from what is normal for a 31 year old woman. The functioning of my frontal lobe is different and impaired. I have a drug to treat the chemical imbalance and slow the re-uptake of serotonin but only by taking it for a long time and going to therapy and in general living a healthy happy life can I hope to fix the physical changes in my brain. There is a hope that one day I will be fully cured and my depression will go into remission forever, but I may have to be medicated for the rest of my life. The first possibility is what I hope for but I am alright with the second. I am willing to take my chances.

What about the long term side effects of anti-depressants? We are not aware of all of them. Some may say. I answer: What about them? I have a friend with diabetes. There are long term side effects with having to take insulin too, but no one worries about that because it is necessary for her to live and they understand she will take it forever. I do not see how my case, if I am medicated for the rest of my life, is much different.

How my Life Fell Apart 2, The Crawl Foreward

When someone asks me when I am Christian I usually tell them the story of when I got saved when I was eight and tell them that God spoke to my heart in love and asked to let him in and to become his beloved daughter. He asked nothing from me, only that I love him back. This loving back was not a condition for me to get his love, no. He loved me anyway.

He had created me and watched me grow and knew all my weaknesses and strenghts and saw me at my worst and at my best through out my life, before and after I met him. I have failed so many times in my life to love him back properly but his unconditional love has never wavered, lessened nor drawn back.

Tree months ago I tried to kill myself as a result of my husband leaving me for another woman and completely shaking and leveling my whole world. My family was all I had. I had nothing, I could not sleep or eat and I suffered from crippling axiety. 

Suicide is a big no-no in Christianity, the unforgiveable sin, almost. In this case God not only forgave me but protected me and loved me even more noticeably than before because I needed it so much. He made sure I was picked up by the police who took me to the hospital where I recieved good care and recovered from the physical results of my suicide attempt. He also was with me in that dark place that I fell to. 

After my husband pulled my entire world out from under me I was alone and could see no light but I was with Jesus in this lonely darkness. He held me as I wept in shock, sorrow and rage. He bore my childish fits of screaming "WHY!" He loved me not because I was so special but because he is love.

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8

I think I have come out on the other side of this tragedy. I have accepted that my once happy life with my family is over. I am making a new life for myself wth its highest goal being to find God's plan for me. If I am in God's will, I know I will be happy because: "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God" Roman's 8:28

I am still in the all things phase but I am starting to believe strongly that they will work out for good, soon. 

I do not usually include verses in my posts but I have been gaining a great deal of comfort from these verses because I am missing a lot of tangible love that I once had in my life. It was ripped from me suddenly with no warning leaving me experiencing withdraval symptoms. So I hope you will indulge me posting one last verse that made me cry earlier because I was overwhelmed by its beauty.

38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:38-39

How My Life Fell Apart, part 1

I wrote this essay/blog entry a day before yesturday. I did not post it because it did not feel like the right time yet. Now more has happened and it does seem like the right time to talk about my feelings I had then. I will write more soon, and tell more.

When I wrote a research paper in the ninth grade I did it because I suspected I was depressed and I knew next to nothing about the subject. The first sentence of my paper was a quote: “Depression is like a murky pool.” I never understood the quote at the time but I thought the imagery was neat. For years I thought it meant that understanding depression was like groping around in a murky pool, you never knew what was underneath there. Now I understand, years later, that being depressed is like being in a murky pool. You are alone, you can’t see much. You cannot see the light above the surface clearly, if at all, and you can’t breathe. You are being weighed down with lead weights tied around your ankles. I was in that pool for years.

The main reason I got out was my husband’s help and support. He made me feel a love and acceptance I had never experienced before and in that positive environment I felt like I could be myself and slowly those lead weights came free. I did not even notice the ropes slipping free and how I began to float towards the surface and for the first time in a decade I was able to take a breath and see clearly in the free light and air with my head above water.

The terrible thing in this story of beauty and triumph is that in my wonderful recovery I hurt my husband a great deal. All those days, months and years of living with a depressed person, wondering if they have hurt themselves or will you find something worse when you come home, is very draining. Your life starts to revolve around that person’s disease. You lose yourself and you chop off little pieces of yourself to take care of your sick loved one. That is what happened to my husband.

He not only became burdened down with the weight of my lead weights he forgot who he was and forgot why he even did it. I was like a vampire or a parasite slowly sucking away his happiness and sense of self to gain those things for myself and I never noticed that. We were happy. We loved each other. Our marriage, despite all the financial and social things, was the real consistently good thing in our lives. Or so I thought. I projected my happiness onto him. I thought: I have become a better person in the course of this marriage; he influenced me for the better. I must have done the same for him. We grew together.

Well, that is what I thought. It felt amazing to be liked, loved and accepted by someone so completely, warts and all. I did have this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind, somewhere in the worst fears section of my brain, that he did not like me as much as I liked him. I figured it was just my old low self-esteem talking. I mean he was so great, kind, patient and nice. He was so talented, capable, funny and smart. I was a loser with no real talents or skills. My IQ was painfully average, my humor was often bristly and mean and not nearly as funny as I thought. On top of that my youthful good looks were not nearly as youthful or good as they had once been. Come on, that is just my old self-esteem and fear. I am great, people like me, I like me etc. I had all this new found self-esteem and he told me he loved me like a million times a day, of course he liked and loved me. 

Wrong, so wrong, I had created my happy marriage as a work of one sided fiction. I just really wanted this wonderful person to love me. It turned out all those little worrying red flags I had experienced really were signs that not all was right. My husband’s occasional signs of depression and not being able to keep friends very actively. He was feeling like an old loser after he had stopped doing things and hanging out with people because he felt he needed to just take care of me and cater to my needs. There was the way he never complemented my personality, intelligence, sense of humor or anything internal like that and how all the compliments on my looks just stopped coming, even when I specifically asked for compliments. I figured he did not need to do that, he loved me anyway and it was ridiculous to need compliments, I needed to have my confidence standing independently.

Now here I am, I have to peer to the surface of the murky pool and stare the plain truth in the face. I am a loser. People like me only when they don’t know me. The one person who truly knows me does not like me and this not liking has worn down the love over the years making his responses of “I love you.” as hollow and empty as a looted tomb. I just fell off a cliff, how are you doing?

Hi, and bye again, see you later.

So, I am sorry I dissappeared for so long. I am not here to promise more posts soon, in fact I am here to say my blog will unfortunately continue its hibernation. It is not dead but in a coma. I am sorry to my three readers. Luckily I set my stuff to outo filter spam comments and those that make no sense in the context of the blog because I came back to a bunch of those. Nigerian spammers are into spell casting now. Here is a sampling, minus links because you don't want any of that.

"my husband left me 4 months ago and move to another state leaving me 2000 miles apart from him . I have tried everything possible i am very sad and hurt suddenly he started to hated me it seems one sec he love me the next he hate me when ever we connect he gets really angry for no reason and in a big rush and can't breath around me and as soon as were apart he is fine he says i am very hot and it makes him uncomfortable to hold me all i know is i sleep sleep sleep when were together cant seem to wake up when he is away i am awake something is wrong.But just some few weeks ago, someone introduce me to this spell caster on [somescammer]@gmail.com and the spell caster did a reunify spell for me, just as i am writing now, if my husband dont see me in a second he would rather do everything to meet me. I really want to thank the spell caster for his great works spell. i owe him.you can met with him on [somescammer]@gmail.com."

Can you understant that. I really can't. Not only is it BS, it is unreadable and from what I can tell turns into a story of a human rights violation in the next post.

"My Name is Alex..I never believed in Love Spells or Magics until I met this special spell caster once when i went to Africa to Execute some business..He is really powerful.The woman i wanted to marry left me 2 weeks to our weeding ceremony and my life was upside down.she was with me for 3 years and i really love her so much..she left me for another man with no reason..when i called her she never picked up my calls and she don’t want to see me around her…so,when i told the man what happened.he helped me to do some readings,and after the readings he made me to realize that the other man has done some spells over my wife and that is the reason why she left me..he told me he will help me to cast a spell that bring her back.At first i was skeptical but i just gave it a try…In 5 days,she called me herself and came to me apologizing..I cant believe she can ever come back to me again but now i am happy she’s back and we are married now with lovely kid and we live as a happy family."

If I believed this I would be terrified. This is worse than the Mormons babtising the dead. Creepy. I will make you love me with magic because how could you not love me? I mean that must be some crazy lesbian black magic and shit, cause I am so awesome.

From the US, you say? Skeptigirl is so very skeptical.

"My name is Diana Rossay i am from United States, I was in a relationship with Ben and we loved and cherished ourselves for 3 good years and every thing was going on smoothly but February 14, 2012 a day i can call a lovers day we both had misunderstanding because i answered a call from a guy that is asking me out for a date but i refused,and he told me that the relationship is over and that he is fed up with me and i begged him because i love him so much but he refused me i was so down cast and i felt the world has come to an end for me but my friend told me about a spell caster that helped her sister out in getting her relationship back,a good job and favor in any of her endeavor but at first i was scared but i have to give this man a trial because i love Ben very much and i am not willing to loose him to any woman,so i ordered returning my love spell from this great spell caster that made me a happy woman again to say it all my ex came back to me with much love and a caring heart."

Well, go read something good now to cleanse your palate. I recommend snopes.com, it is a classic and  http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ is on point and giving useful information.

Accessinf IMDb in Finland makes me Angry

I would like to state I really hate imbd here in Finland. In case you dont know it is a really handy website for answering the age old question of "Who is she? She looks so familiar. What else have I seen her in?". The problem with it here in Finland is it translates all the titles of the movies into their Finnish versions but leaves the text intact in English. I hate this because, first of all this is annoying as you can see here:




I was looking up a show, (Undercover Blues) someone mentioned, wanting to know what it was about and if I had by any chance seen it. This makes me gringe but not go all She Hulk, but this does:

I was looking up roles of the handsome Lou Diamond Philips and also his bio to figure out his ethnicity after watching an episode of Numb3rs last week. As you can see in the picture above, below his name it says 'Photos from "Luopiot"' this, unlike the main page does not have the original movie title written below it. Have I seen this movie? I have no idea, don't recognize the title. In order to know this I would like have to do another search to know what movie this picture was from. So pissed off. Going She-Hulk!

Got some acreen shot software, had to use it on a post. Greenshot is its name and not what I was looking for but seems to work pretty well.

In more serious news, something that does not make me go She-Hulk but rather makes me blink back tears, a friend of mine passed away last night. We were not the closest friends but he was a great person and a key person in our community here and I will miss him and already do. I just talked to him Sunday last time. I was working security and opened the door for him, because it was inconvenient for him to do it because he walked with crutches. I chatted about some plans I had and how I was worried I would not be able to find the coffee shop and he offered to have someone else going there for the same event meet me and help me find it. He was a really great person and we will have a giant hole in our little English Service community now.

Update on my life

I am in a fairly boring kind of depressing part of my life. I am really just waiting, waiting to apply for school. I have a fairly good chance of not getting in. You see, I went to a really good high school in the USA, which was a big mistake. Why, how could that be? You got a good education right? Yes, I did. I got an excellent education. I enjoyed all the stuff I learned and loved my teachers who worked very hard to make my grammar and spelling understandable and tutored me on their off periods to help me pass trigonometry, which I both hated and never understood. This top notch education never did any favors for my grades. I went to public school for most of middle school where I was never in danger of failing anything and even got into the junior honor society and on the honor roll with no effort on my part. This excellent education never did me any favors when it came to getting into college and it will not do me any favors getting into the school of applied sciences social work program either, which I am trying to apply to, or will in a month or two.

Other than this I am idle, very idle and slothful. I did sign up for the security team at church, they needed more women and all I have is time right now, I could technically work all services and events, I won’t but I will work many at first because I want to learn the ropes. Later, if I do a good job, they will pay for me to get licensed as a security guard which means I can get paying work also so I am not volunteering just from the goodness of my heart I think it would be a good way to earn a little cash if I get into school next fall, or especially if I don’t. My resettlement aid will run out this fall so if I am not getting student aid I have to get a job. The only other job I could get is cleaning and that is not what I really want to do, well, I could do warehouse work, that would be good.

Last night I worked security for the first time. I did not do much, mostly sat on my butt and asked questions and chatted in general. I did get hit on by a slightly douchey guy. He had a rhinestone encrusted cross of bishoply proportions (as in Catholic bishop), two gold stud earrings in one ear, he was about ten years older than me and asked me for coffee. I mean not at a coffee shop but after we literally exchanged like three words and I said I was waiting for someone he asked me if I wanted to go downstairs to get coffee with him. I said no. According to the other security guys he usually does not stay for the service just the coffee, but he did last night. After the service he came to talk to us and basically said that he was the only one in this church who believed the whole Bible, he was not ordained by the church, but by God and he was a future missionary but not sent by the church but God himself. So, I gather he is not perfect, just better than everybody else.

Like I said, I am in a boring and kind of depressing place right now. There is a lot of stuff happening, or going to happen without my control. I really am not sure what to do with my time; the house is actually clean, which is an indication that there is something really wrong.

The Guilt of a Super Massive Coward

I did not want to say anything ever about Mark Driscoll on this blog. The man deserves no attention from anyone but sometimes I have flashes of feelings that say “In a world with a Mark Driscoll, how can there be a loving God?” I can explain suffering but this jackass is beyond me. I know I am not a real woman and regardless of this ministry pissing me off I did not care, until it got personal.

Mars Hill has potential to become a cult: Absolute authority vested in one man, punishment to those who stray, minute control over the lives of those in it. I mean, I could see them buying some land somewhere and drinking some cool-aid. I will let you in on a secret. I am terrified of cults. The truth is anyone not aware and thinking could end up in one.

I have an old friend from college. She is such a nice sweet humble woman. She seeks after God’s will and never judged me, as far as I knew, I mean I experienced some hefty judgment in college by other Christians in college. Then I found out she goes to Mars Hill, well not Mars Hill but one of the satellite churches. What did I do? I got mad at her, well actually when I first found out about a month prior to getting angry I could not believe it and ignored it. I mean this girl was my friend, she knows how my husband and I choose to live. Not that it is really out of the norm but absolutely wrong when compared to the Mark Driscoll definition of a real marriage.

So I got angry. I figured, if I found out someone was a member of the Nazi party would I not unfriend them in disgust, even if they were my good friend? Yes, I would. Sure Mars Hill is not the Nazi party and Mark Driscoll is not Adolf Hitler, it is somehow worse because it claims to be Christian. I thought weather I should say something to her before cutting ties to her, I mean, it is not like we are BFFs or anything but whenever she has the opportunity to visit she does. She has rerouted flights to get to see me and driven through my town on cross country trips and spent the night. No one else has done these things. No one else has actually put forth that much effort to see me. Still there can be up to a year between us having contact and catching up, so not like she would notice anytime soon. I have cut off one other friend before, for different reasons without telling her, and it took her over five years to notice and it was only when I accidentally e-mailed her. I decided that since it is not like anything I had to say would do any good I just cut off ties, no word. One reason that I did this was because I am a coward, a big, huge, super massive coward. I am scared of cults. What if I said something and she told her cell and then they like started sending me hate mail. I mean, not that I matter so much, they probably would not but I have seen what the Driscollites have done to people criticizing them. They are not nice folk. Add to that, I am like the opposite of what they define as a woman.

Then I felt sad, really sad and guilty. I cried and prayed for my friend and asked God for forgiveness and guidance. Now after a week or two, I still have no answers and tear up whenever I think about her. I mean what if they do drink the cool-aid and I did nothing? What if she wants to leave and I am not there for her? What if? This is neither the first nor the last time I have felt upset due to cowardice. The only times I experience guilt and regret is when I act out of cowardice.

Have you ever been a coward? How did you feel? Do you think I should go back on my decision?

FIrst Vlog!!!!

So, made a vlog. My accent in English has gtten atrocious and stuff but hope you like it. My face also looks super long and other self criticisms but I think I did pretty well. I used the abilities gained from talking to myself all the time so I felt pretty comfortable talking to the camera.

Victorian times

Sometimes I get really angry that I am a woman. I can't go pee in the woods with out exposing my bottom and the risk of getting my shoes wet. I am incapacitated for a day with extreme stomach pain once a month and gush out great quantities of thick blood after that for a week becoming anemic. I have had a human being grow inside of me and stretch me out and leave me scarred. I have to spend more than 50euros to get a contraption to hold my chest fat in place just so I can run with out pain. When my house is messy I am terrified people will see and judge me because society places all the responsibility on me as the woman to keep things neat even thou there are two adults in the house. I cannot cut my hair short because a shaved head would probably kill my mother, even thou they are ever so comfortable. People judge me more on appearance, something I have very little in control over, more than they judge me on intelligence and ability. I have to maintain my looks, it is considered my duty to my husband even thou a person has relatively little they can do to halt the ravages of age.

When ever I have these thoughts I try to remember I have so much more freedoms than women used to. I can wear comfortable pants, I can vote and I do not need my husbands permission to make simple decisions and legally I have the same rights as a man. If I cannot remember these things I read a Victorian novel, like Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells. Then I remember how lucky I truly am. This story is about a smart biology student named Ann Veronica who wants her human rights. She is in her early 20's she is smart and does well in her college classes. Yet she has to live with her father and ask permission to go to costume balls with her friends and can't even get a good answer as to why she cannot go. As a result she runs away to London hoping to get a job and freedom. Unfortunately neither is to be had for a woman of her times. She was never educated in the sexual politics between men and women and accepts a “loan” from an older man that is not considered a loan by him and he practically tries to rape her and she apologies for punching him ion the jaw and feels guilty for it. In one part she gets in a heated exchange with her male teacher. He is against votes for women, more or less, but mostly just enjoys the argument. She accuses all of mankind as treating women as a joke and not giving them any freedoms and that he, her teacher, could never understand the confinement until he tries to run in petticoats.

Reading this book made me appreciate comfortable foot wear, pants, the vote, and having full legal freedoms just like a man. I truly hate the Victorian era and it is a great contrast in its attitudes to mine. I wonder how women can faint with out the aid of corsets? I think it does not happen.

Älä alistu!/Don't submit!

So, I found this video because it has caused quite a bit of controversy in Finland and caused 500 resignations from the Lutheran Church the day it was released. It was not put together by the Evangelical Lutheran Church but it was done with their money.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfPjTvTx5-U

Campaign official pages: http://www.nuotta.com/kampanja

If you do not speak Finnish here is the over long and tedious video in a nutshell. "Anni's Story" is the title it is from the "Don't Submit" video campaign. Anni was a bisexual girl. She realized in high school and became quite involved with gay rights and dated a girl in the ninth grade and then they broke up. During this time she was having some problems and met a girl who wanted to just help her with them. One day this girl asked to pray with her and Anni saw the holy spirit. She went to a religious youth camp and became saved. She prayed hard to leave her unholy desires behind and God heard her and she stopped dating girls nor did she really want to. She has been engaged to a man for a year now, she is twenty. She said that being with a woman never really made her feel like a woman, because one had to take the man's role etc.

What really stood out to me is that it is so simple to be rid of lustful impulses. Just admit what you are and give it to God, he will heal you. I would like to say, I do believe that God can heal everything from gout to cancer and it is very much in his power to change a person's sexual orientation or to curb lustful impulses. That being said, lets talk about the practical implications for a young person who hears this. I bet any God believing young person who has this or similar problems has prayed for them. Asking God to change a perceived flaw in you is nothing new. I cannot count the hours I prayed as a teenager begging God to change me, to cure me from this or that affliction. Lustful thoughts were very much featured in those prayers, as was my laziness and other assorted general "badness". God did not cure me, at least not then, of one single one of my flaws. I felt like crap. I felt like a failure. I felt like a bad Christian. I prayed everyday for God to take me to heaven so I could stop constantly failing and sinning. I was tired, I was desperate. What would have Anni's message of easy, reachable fixing have meant to me? It would have meant an ever compounding sense of guilt. It would have isolated my lust for women as an even more heinous crime than my lust for men. Here I had been beating myself up for both indiscriminately.

I call this a suicide inducing flick. Say, it is wrong! It is Sinful! Älä alistu! Don't submit! It can all be made better. God is waiting for you to give your burden to Him and heal you! All that can hold you back now, sinner, is your own lack of faith! Only one you have to blame is yourself. Maybe Anni has more willpower, maybe she has more faith, maybe her prayers are special. Maybe I am failing at this like I fail at everything else because I am too damn lazy to change. Way to rip old wounds open and make me feel like that girl again.

As an end note, God did heal me, but not in the way I expected. He healed me by giving me perspective, understanding and self acceptance, flaws and all. I was good enough for him to die on Calvary for my sins when I was at my worst. Not because I was special or good but because he was and he loved me. He cleansed me when I accepted his cleansing. It does not matter that I am lustful. It does not matter that I am lazy. I am exactly as he created me. This does not mean I need to whore around and not do any work because that is not how he intended me to behave. He intends me to strive for a healthy balanced life. My flaws are really the other side of my virtues. I am lazy because I am laid back. I am content to contemplate and not worry too much about having a spotless house there are more important things in life. I am lusty, but I love my husband and it can be a very positive quality in a marriage when channeled properly and understood for what it is. Now that God has healed me from my low self esteem and depression I can no longer really care about my flaws and can really give them to God, and you know what, stopping the demonization of that part of me has allowed me to not be trapped by lustful thought. When they are no longer forbidden or wrong they take a backseat to more important and interesting thoughts. I am no longer paralyzed by fear and anxiety due to my laziness and am actually able to break the inertia and do what really matters and needs to get done.

Self-acceptance is a wonderful thing. Do not submit to thoughts of self loathing and accept that if you do seek help from God for your problems, which I do recommend, he may not give you the quick fix you want but will allow you to walk down a longer, harder path that will make you a better person and accept yourself, and in the long run that beats a quick fix.

Update on Blogging

So, my posting has fallen off as of late, yet again. I have been worrying about my final exam but it is tomorrow and have some ideas for blogs and maybe I can churn a few out in the interim before my next session of classes starts and that will be a heavy load.

A Late, but Great Valentine's Blog

Happy day after Valentinesday, which is called friendship day in Finland (ystävän päivä). So I guess if I was writing this in Finnish I would be sharing my insights on friendship, but I am not so instead I will share my insights on love, companionship and marriage.

I am not a romantic person. I do not believe in romance, I do not even know what is romantic. I do believe in love and marriage. I have been married a mere seven years, or will be this May. I have had a lot of time to think about the nature of marriage and of life long companionship and this official friends with benefits arrangement. Not as long as a person who has been married longer but I can say that I have had a happy successful run of seven years with my husband and do not see that changing in the near future.

I know two things about marriage and how to make it work: You have to pick the right person and you have to work on it. All the marriages I have seen fail have failed for one of these two reasons, they chose the wrong people or they failed to work on it.

Lets start on the foundation of a good marriage. Well I think the foundation of a good marriage is having good self esteem and knowing who you are and what you want even before getting into a potential life long relationship but I will skip that. Picking the right person is so important. It is a lot harder to work on it when you are with the wrong person, it makes you feel like you are just wasting your time. Sure, arranged marriages can work with the not right person but the basis of an arranged marriage is wholly different than a love based western marriage. All I know about are the love based ones so that is all I can talk about.

How do you know who the right person is? Well, my husband was my really good friend and we had fun together. He was caring interesting and reliable. I saw in him the qualities I wanted in a life long companion. The partnership, the sharing of responsibilities, the support of the decisions I made and not making them for me. He was truthful in his opinions but kind. Most of all he was nice and he was my friend. He also was interesting so I could see not getting bored with him. I mean the important part for everyone is seeing the qualities you want and need in a spouse and being able to put up with them through the years. Also it is important to accept that they may not change. Their flaws may persist until they die. You cannot change this person. They may change but if there are qualities that are just plain deal breakers, and marriage is too important of a commitment to just hope they will go away. If he sleeps around on you before marriage, he will keep going after. I mean marriage is not some magical thing that changes everything for the better. It is a gate you walk through together but all the same stuff will be on the other side. There will still be pretty girls and hot guys and you will still notice them so nothing changes, you just make a decision and that is all. YOU make a decision, you do not know what the other person is thinking. You cannot expect your spouce's behavior to change one bit. So, as the most annoying psychologist on television says “past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior.”

Let me tell you a story about choosing the wrong person. It is not really my story to tell, but I have my husband's permission to tell it. He has been married before and they were wrong for each other. It was a marriage that should never have happened. He does not even remember who proposed and how and how they arrived at a relationship. I guess it just kind of slid there from comfort and the craving for companionship. When they met he was living in a small town with his grandmother and had no car and was miserable and she had a car and was willing to get him out of town. They had a lot of common interests when they met and he liked her friends and they became his friends so a great time was had when they went out. They both wanted to be paired up, I guess, I cannot speak for her. So they got closer, moved in together and eventually married. You think, common friends+common interests+good times=good match. Well common things are not the only thing there is. There are values, goals and personalities. They did not like the way the other reacted to things, they did not respect each others life philosophy. They argued a lot and the good times stopped. They were driven nuts by each other and discovered that what they had in common in their everyday lives was not as much as they had wanted to believe. They divorced with in a year of getting married. Now, a good match does with the right person does not break with in a year even with out working on it, barring some extraordinary circumstances. They sputter along for a while before disintegrating, where as a bad match with the wrong person can keep going for a while with work, but really what is the point? If you can't stand the person and you never really could and you just married her because she was hot, or you had the same friends or because you were lonely, or whatever, what is the point?

I also believe in working on the marriage. Even when you are with the, or a, right person you have to put some work into it. One sigh that you are with the right person is that you want to work on it instead of avoiding it because you do not want to lose that specific person. If you just don't want to be alone, that person could be the wrong person, or you need some help. Working on it means talking about problems before they become problems. Never letting the marriage get to the point of divorce or of needing marriage counseling. I mean, marriage counseling is good, but you can't just let things go and then think, we can just work t out later with a therapist. By the time you have deep rooted resentments that you cannot talk about with out a professional mediator, it may be too late.

My husband and I have had some problems, but we usually can talk them out and most of our fight are out of frustration because we thought the other person's tone was condescending or impatient so the other gets a condescending or impatient tone and then we argue about it. There are also the arguments about me not getting hints. He thinks I just don't care about what he wants, I think I am just not a mind reader so he should just tell me already! We really have a good old shouting row very rarely. I think the secret is we talk about our problems and accept the other's short comings. He is not perfect, and I most certainly am not so we just have to deal with it. He is my best friend and I love spending time with him. He is still interesting, and funny, and sexy and very very nice. Most of all he tries to be a good husband, it is very cute.

School

I like to think I am a pretty good writer, sure I do not have a huge following here or anything. Still being able to express myself well in writing has always been one of my virtues. So it feels fairly humiliating to have to take a class recapping elementary and middle school Finnish grammar in order to take high school Finnish classes. Well, I really need to as evidenced by the grammar, spelling and etc. Test taken on the first day. Under 50% success is nothing to brag about.

We have our first writing assignment. I am looking forward to it but I feel nervous. I have not taken an academic class in six years. I am afraid that I will let myself down again like I did back then. Back then I failed out of college. I locked up and was unable to do the work. I was unable to study and to complete the course work. Now I know I can do better and I am just taking one class, one class I really need and am finding reading the course text rather challenging. I am scared of the writing assignment. I have to write it by hand, all high school work has to be in Finnish classes. I have a strict limit for my final draft. If it runs long, how am I going to shorten it with out rewriting it? What about writing mistakes? Can I just write it in pencil? An erase able pen? Or do I just write it in pen and draw lines over my mistakes. I have to ask the teacher. I am also worried that I will get too nervous about it and not finish it like so many other assignments in college. That would be humiliating. I really have to do well in the class to gain back my academic confidence.

When ever I have the time to work on my assignment I seem to be too tired to think so I can't work on it very much. Like now, I was going to work on it but I feel really tired. It is about nine in the evening here. I will have to try earlier tomorrow.

News and some meme at the end

My oldest reader, not age wise but the guy who started reading this the earliest asked me how I was doing. I am doing well and was going to write a blog about racism in Finland but got involved in looking for a blog I thought I had posted on my old MySpace blog about the subject. Was thinking of reposting it on here first before writing my new blog. This blog seemed to be a figment of my imagination.

In other news I swallowed my pride and went to social services because we were out of money and the kotiutumistuki (homing aid) was not materializing. I went there yesterday and got the money in my account today. Now we eat FOOD, you know versus not food or something. We are moving to our new apartment Sunday. It will hopefully be warm, as this one has failed to be.

Just to be more fun, I found this thing on http://holynpoly.blogspot.com/2010/11/47-down.html and decided to do it for me.

"Here's a list that originally came from the BBC but I picked up from Ganching.
You copy the list and then bold the books you have read completely and italicize those that you have partly read or dipped into.

Apparently the average person has read 6 of these books. Yes six... frightening"

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

Okay, so not counting them, but I am patting myself in the back. No more memes I promise. I will get down to business and write about racism and all that soon.

The First Week, Briefly

I have been pretty busy, well not literally just a lot of new stuff has happened in a short time.

Interesting aside, I am really sorry not to have a picture, it was just so shocking and happened so fast, we saw a Finn in black face. No, not a black Finn, we have a few black Finnish citizens but a white guy dressed like '70 black fella. "Play that funky music...white boy?"

It has been a proper cloudy damp fall here. Yesterday it was sunny and pretty but other than a walk to the store we were stuck inside cleaning. Cleanliness it a part of the contract to stay here, still they can't send anyone over to fix the fracking bathroom sink. This is an expensive residence.

Today we went to Jarvensivu, the part of town I grew up in. We had a good walk and felt shocked that the late '80 are alive and well. Teenagers are idiots.

Here are some things that are way better here than the US:

1. Everyone walks so the side walks are a single car lane wide and the crossing spots on the roads are ample and convenient.

2. Busses are frequent and easy to use. They are not only taken by the really poor but even by middle class working people and upper class teenagers. Even elementary schoolers take them unsupervised.

3. No one pities us for not having a car. Do you people realize how annoying that is? It is not a hardship not to have a car, you are just lazy. STFU, offer us a ride, thanks, but hold the side order of pity.

4. There is a lot more international food at the grocery store.

5. The food is a lot healthier, lower in salt, fat and sugar with out being much more expensive.

6. Getting Marcus's paper work to say here indefinitely done will take 120 euros, a few hours of our time to fill out the paperwork tomorrow a trip to the police station Monday, 7euro photo at the photo booth, turning it all in and a few months of waiting.

Things are already looking up. I will also get my unemployment application in Monday. I was not able to do it before because it takes a few days for my new residence to get to the central database and can't get Tampere benefits when I am not a Tampere resident.

Not very interesting, I know, but have been too preoccupied to think of a good blog to post. For something more interesting and comprehensive go to soremoose.blogspot.com. My husband has written a few good and interesting posts about his first impressions.

I have had plenty of ideas for blogs but have not written them. I have been busy, my computer has had an identity crisis, my husband installed Vista without my permission and lost a blog I had written for later posting then the pirated version messed up and he had to go back to installing Linux, interesting times for Frodo, that is my laptops name. He did just download a program for posting blogs with out going to blogger. I am trying it out right now.

I guess some of you, my four readers, may want an update on my move. We will fly to Finland Monday. Tickets have been bought, arrangements made for temporary housing etc. Tomorrow a drift store will pick up most of our remaining possessions that are not coming with us. I have been experiencing some stress from the move and have been having some stomach upset that will not go away as long as I seem to be making terrible dietary decisions. Well, the Long John Silvers was not MY idea but the Wendy's was. Today the bacon wrapped chicken REALLY was NOT my idea but the cake was. So I can not entirely blame my sisters in law or my husband for all of it.

I have been thinking of some blog ideas lately. I have an idea for a Valentines blog. I think I will write it early because I have to write these things while I still want to. I had written a blog for European Father's day but that got lost in my husband's rogue re-install. I have no real ideas for immediate blogs. My husband should be posting often after our move, assisted by his new blogging consultant Adam, our son. He is planning on writing a blog a day to help him adjust. That should be fun if he can stick with it. Check out his blog at soremoose.blogspot.com.