A Buffet of Topics

Pardon me for this late freestyle post. Last week kicked me in the shins and left me writhing in the gutter afterwards.

Like many others here have expressed, my life hasn’t been particularly remarkable this week, which truth be told is nothing unusual. But that is not the thing that matters right now, what matters is that I’m having a hard time coming up with a coherent freestyle blog entry with a single topic. Funny enough, I kept getting multiple ideas last week. Unfortunately, of course, I didn’t bother to write any of them down. I’m a 21-year-old woman, I should have learned to write things down already, it doesn’t take much when I’m at the computer constantly anyways and have the ability to type things neatly on a little file. But I digress. Instead of one topic, I’ve decided to do a variety of them, stemming from random thoughts.

Time

The other day I came to ponder on the subject of time as a currency. When you think about we treat time almost like a commodity, or currency, and not in a business-worldy “time is money” way. We try to save time in a variety of ways, hoarding it to ourselves with the help of advanced technology and production processes. And when others are willing to spend their time on us, we appreciate it. Hence hand-written letters feel more valuable to us than emails - handwritten messages take longer. When we receive one, we realize that the person who wrote it were willing to spend their valuable time on us despite there being faster ways to go about it, they spent their time thinking about us, doing something for us. It's practically like spending money on us!

For more ponderings on the subject, I recommend reading Moving Cultures: Mobile Communication In Everyday Life by Andre H. Caron. The book discusses, among other things, how new faster technologies give new prestige to the old ones, and it is the reason I came to think about this subject in the first place.

Frankly, discussions on concepts of time have never been particularly interesting to me. I had an archaeology course where the lecturer really clung onto the possible different concepts of time and how it could be possibly seen in paintings and objects and such but, frankly, I think he overanalyzed it and went for too abstract a theory. Sure some of it could well hold true but it still felt a bit too…lofty. It reminded me of an American article, marveling at the fact that the Finnish language doesn’t have a future tense and what that could possibly do to our concept of time. As if we somehow magically live more in the present than the people who do have future tense in their languages do. Nope. We just express it in a different manner, we have our ways. You should always be careful when directly connecting language, culture, material culture and social aspects and even world views. It often simply does not work.

But, anyways, the thought of us treating time as a currency-like entity sort of made pondering on the concepts of time slightly more interesting to me. I, too, recognize the good feeling of receiving something someone poured their time into for me and so on and so forth. I can see the phenomenon.

Adelememe

Now. I’m not a huge fan of Adele. I like a couple of her songs and I‘m glad she has gained popularity in a world where the billboards are filled with club and dance music, most of which I cannot stand at all. That’s about it. But as an internet dweller, I have come to notice Adele’s Set Fire To The Rain has practically become an internet meme, mocking the chorus line about setting rain on fire. I do wonder what is up with that just a bit, the popularity of this mockery I mean, not so much the fact that there is mockery.

Not all lyrics are meant to be taken literally, we all know this, so, why suddenly this one should be any different? Just because it's popular? It seems rather juvenile in this case: “Oh ha ha setting fire to the rain ha ha, that doesn’t work, oh ha ha ha lol face touching!“. To me this sounds like something 10-year-old boys might snicker about after they think they are being oh so very clever. So, yeah, this is a random thing I do not consider particularly funny.

Pest problem

Our apartment building has a serious pest problem. It’s called a karaoke machine. And my upstairs neighbor has one. Together they become an unstoppable horrible-machine. Like some convoluted, and frankly disturbing, Transformer. This man sings alone. And he might sing alone all day long. I wish I was exaggerating, but he really can sing all day. He also might sing at night, say, at 2.30AM. He is singing even as I am typing this. I can hear the lyrics, but it still sounds mainly like a drunken dog, howling. Or possibly a cow. Despite being able to make out words, it still sounds like an inhuman voice. I have started to support my mom’s notion of making karaoke machines illegal in apartment buildings. It is quite possible that it would save the world from destruction. At the moment it is very clear to me.

P.S. Not to nag, but people really need to ask more questions for the theme 6 thing in this document. There are dangerously many people without even a single question. We can't do theme 6 without questions. Should we change the theme to asking about anything you want to know about that person, instead of just about their degree? Would that be easier or more interesting/fun? Then we could maybe try asking at least one question from each person?