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.

Worst Ways to Evangelize

1. Yelling at random people on a street corner calling them whores and whore mongers.

2. Trying to outsmart them by using clever turns of phrase which really do not make your case, just make your opponent unable to answer.

3. Quoting scripture. What is scripture to someone who does not believe in the Bible? Also scripture quoting is usually employed in a barrage to show off and to try and remove any possible personal discussion from the witnessing.

4. Using "Science". God cannot be proven via the scientific method, the other good news is that he cannot be disproven either. Here you think: Wait, I am sure she meant to say "but the good news is". No I believe that not being able to prove the existance of God is a good thing because the second we prove him belief is no longer neccesary defeating the whole point of seeking Him.

5. Handing out tracks. If a person is supposed to be brought to a personal knowledge of Christ you need something personal there. Come on, would be Apostles, get your hands dirty. Get down there with the sinners like Jesus did. Open up. Give of yourself in order to give God.

Witnessing is a personal act that requires you to care about the person on a personal individual level. I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God. When people figure out it is just about winning souls they will became jaded with Christians and what a person thinks about Christians they start thinking about Christ.

Edit: I noticed a typing error which changed the meaning of what I was trying to say. Originally I had said "I mean, you must care about him as a person, as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." What I had intended to say was, "I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." It has been corrected in the post to reflect my sentiments. 09:46, 25.8.11

Don't Leave your Brain at Home When you Go to the Health Food Store

My blog is, at least based on the title, supposed to in some smallish way, every once in a while, promote scepticism and critical thinking. So, as Brian Dunning, my favorite skeptic, would say: let's turn our skeptical eye to nutrition. Nutrition is one of the fields most rife with pseudo science. Everybody seems to think that because we eat all day how we feel about something should be good enough evidence what we aught to do. Well, the scientific method still aplies to nutritional science. So I present you with my favourite episodes of Skeptiod about health and nutrition. I recommend you choose the listen option on the transcript page because Skeptoid is a podcast and meant to be listened.

Just because some people have a glutein sensitivity and should stay away from it does not mean it is not good for the rest of us. Bring on the glutein!

Organic food is good, right? Well, that does not mean non-organic is bad.

Do we really know as much about what we should and should not be eating?

Then there are fads. Most of them blow over, many are harmless but useless, others are weird but many are even dangerous, in my opinion.

Then again, how many of us truly understand how our bodies work and go out and buy into immune system boosting supplements.

As you can see, I have discovered the joys of putting links into my text. I commend anyone who has decided to begin a journey to better health but don't go in like a country girl into a big city or you gonna get raped.

My Other Blog

(Note: Feb. 4 2012 This blog no longer exists. Fitness magazine no longer hosts reader blogs.)

I started a blog on fitnessmagazine.com. I figured that I would post the first entry here. It is going too be about getting into shape. Sorry, St. Cynic,I do not mean to rip you off by starting to write about health and stuff too. I am sure your posts will be much more informational.

Here it is:

Sneaking Into My blog

I felt pretty lame when I chose “Ninja Fitness” for my blog title. Still I think it works. It is eye catching and describes my love of martial arts and my habitual sneaking around at the gym. I try to slip by unnoticed as I go to work out. I have been working out on my own for years, running under the cover of the night or lifting weights in my living room. Other than mixed martial arts class I have not worked out where other people can see me for years.



I used to be a really shy teenager. I was scared of other kids I felt awkward and fat and stood back listening to other people talk and emerged my self in this fantasy world where I was fit, strong and gorgeous. Not only that, I was powerful and confident. I was a hero. Rescuing babies from burning building and fighting of an entire street gang on my own. You know the usual fantasies of a teen loner. I read about health and fitness I wanted to take martial arts classes and be more like the girl in my head. When I was a senior in high school I got the chance to sign up for Taekwondo at my school. I worked harder at it than anything I had ever done before. I thought I was terrible but it meant so much to me to succeed and I did. My teacher told me I was a great student and at the end of the second trimester commended me for helping and encouraging the new students that had joined us after the first one. All this gave me fantastic self confidence and made me feel a little closer to the girl I wanted to be. After three years I was a brown belt but unfortunately had to stop taking classes because I could no longer afford them. It was sad but fortunately I had discovered along the way that I was athletic and that I liked running and all sorts of different athletic activities.



Now I am a married woman with a kid and I have gotten out of shape in between then and now. I am at my heaviest than I have been since my pregnancy and the year or so after. I am out of shape and feeling further from that woman in my head. I would like to be like her again. I did some mixed martial arts along the way and hope to get back to it sometime but for now all I have in the near future is a gym membership, which is something I am not used to.



I will be working out at the gym wearing all black and sneaking in during the quiet times. No really, coincidentally all my workout gear is black. I will try to motivate myself to post about it occasionally.

*****

Well, I doubt I will post the future entries on this blog here, but if you feel so inclined nothing will stop you from reading Ninja Fitness. Can nnot guarantee that the link will take you there since I do not know if you have to be a registered user to read them or anything.

Militant Stay at Home Motherhood

When I was growing up my mother worked part time. No one ever told me, until I was a teenager that I could not do something because I was a girl. My mother unintentionally raised a feminist. I really hate the word feminist. It seems to imply female superiority. I do understand that basically it just seeks female equality and was coined in a time when women were the down trodden masses while being simultaneously put on a pedestal and told they had the minds of kids with nice tits. Still I dislike the word.


When I was in college I was having a conversation with a girl in a campus Christian group called Ki Alpha. She was engaged to be married, I think. I was talking about my family and chose my words incorrectly. I said: "My mother is just a stay at home mother." (At the time she was not being licensed for dentistry in the US). The girl became very upset with me and felt like I was belittling stay at home mother hood. She explained to me, in a way I recall as hostile that she was intending to be a stay at home mother and how that was in her opinion the greatest job a woman could have. I explained to her that I meant no disrespect and my mother was a great stay at home mother and all that. That it was a perfectly respectable life choice. I never spoke to her personally again.

Since then I have been a stay at home mother for many years by default. For her it was a choice. Raising kids was going to be her career, her goal in life. She got a college education to raise her kids, that is fine. For me it was not a choice. I never dreamed of being a stay at home mom. In fact I was never really was sure I wanted kids.

I have thought since my conversation what got her so upset with the little, miss chosen word just. Many stay at home moms are always on the defensive about it. I wonder if it was that she had been criticizes for her plan before, maybe she thought having job instead of staying at home with the kids was unforgivably selfish for a woman or that she was not entirely confident in her choice. I will never know the answer to that.

I guess I understand her upsetness in a way because once after a Sunday school class in a Baptist church that dealt in successful marriages. It was taught by a couple who had been married a mere nine years and the husband acted like he needed to convince himself that he was the boss of his wife by saying "Christ, church, Christ, church" all the time (when he said Christ he pointed to himself and when he said church he pointed to his wife). If one is the true leader of something one does not need to posture like that, mmmkay. Their basic message was that after marriage a woman should never work and the man should be the primary, and only breadwinner and their way was the only Biblical way to do it. Needless to say I was extremely upset after this class. A girl asked me what I had thought about the class and stupidly I told her the truth. She told me that I had a problem with submission and I was too prideful. I did not reply to her.

I firmly believe in a parent's right to stay at home and care for their kids and not working. I also believe in my right to want to have a dang job. Maybe all those dear mommies and working women need to get the chips off their shoulders so I can talk about my lack of a career freely with the words I choose with out getting a tongue lashing from someone more righteous. It is so hard to trust Christians sometimes.

I have The Internet

So, I have been away. Not a good sentence to start a blog with, it tells you this is going to be boring and I will make excuses and such. Also I might tell you what is going on in my life, which is not what I started this blog for. I started this to talk about my thoughts on various things and that is very different from what I am actually doing. The topic of racism is still at the surface so I think I will write on that.

I thought I had blogged on racism before in my old MySpace blog but after tracing the blog back several years I found that I had not. The main thought of that imaginary blog post was that we evolved for racism. Back in the day when we still lived in caves, huts made of animal skin or what ever. We knew everyone around us and we all looked pretty much alike and there was not a lot of mixing with those other people across the river with the strange customs and odd clothes and those unnatural brownish eyes and what not. Those weird people may even have been enemies so it was safe for primitive ignorant man to stay with his own inbred group and breed a myriad or special genetic diseases only present in Finns (or insert there what ever small group of people). It was a survival trait to be suspicious of anyone who seemed different because they were probably out to get you.

With that sort of a legacy, no wonder we still get uncomfortable when we have to share an elevator or a bus bench with a person that is a different color or nationality. This is a completely inappropriate reaction today. Now we are hampered by our genetics. We have come a long way from those club carrying grunting simpletons that acquired this trait that helped them survive and turn into us. Still we have a long way to go and this trait is in our way.

I don't think there is a simple quick fix. We cannot go and have the racist gene eradicated from our kids to give them an edge in the global community. We cannot just tell ourselves that our feelings are wrong and stop it is not that easy. Still I think we must strive to be better than animals. The difference between animals and humans is that they are at the complete mercy of their genetics and do not even realize it. Humans can realize that they have a problem and struggle against their natural tendencies and better ourselves. Man is where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

I have many friends of different colors, nationalities, cultures and native languages but I still struggle against my tendency to feel uncomfortable with a person who does not look like me. I accept this is a condition that I will never be rid of but I have been struggling against this since my teens, since I was old enough to realize I had a problem. I will keep struggling until I die and am freed from the burden of my outdated genetic tendencies. Best we can do is realize we have a problem and forgive ourselves, but never give into it or believe the lie that natural=good. The second we start equating natural with good we may as well start condoning murder because someone pisses us off, because wanting to kill someone who angers you is perfectly natural.