I'm teaching a new course this period. It's a CLIL course together with Biology. I thought it starts next week, but no! It starts tomorrow. Oops? Lucky me, lesson one is sort of easy to pull out of thin air.

Listen, flist. I want to make my students read some sci-fi. Hit me with recommendations of good/classic science fiction short stories in English that are available for free online. I've got The Veldt by Ray Bradbury first on my list, but what else? I'd like to make them read Gibson (for no other reason that I like Gibson, to be honest, but I don't have to tell them that) but availability is an issue. 

January Journal questions: 


 

Oh, this one is easy. I was a telemarketer for the first year after I moved to Turku and out of my parents' house. I hadn't gotten into University on my first try (entry into Finnish universities is exclusively by entrance exam), but I didn't want to spend a year at home doing nothing. I wanted to Be an Adult and Live My Own Life. Up until then, my only job had been working during harvest with my parents. Working the harvest includes 12-hour days of physical labour in hot barns while being stung by various insects and itching from the dust and hay. It's grueling, unpredictable, stressful and uncomfortable. I don't like physical labour at all. But I would make it my freaking career at the drop of a hat, rather than ever have to work in telemarketing ever again.  
 

Somewhere between 9 am and noon. It's light outside, and the day is still full of potential. It's when I'm at my smartest, I find. 

 

Metsän äiti (Mother of the Forest) by Anne Leinonen. It's a liminal fantasy novel, and I love it to pieces. When/if translated to English at some point, I urge everyone to pick it up. 

The Captive Prince by C.S Pacat. It's, uhm. It's nice. 

Oh boy, what a week. This weekend has been a shining beacon of hope for the past five days, beckoning with angel choirs and ephemeral light. And now it's here! Just me, my couch, and minimal expectations for a day.

I'm down to just one job now for the next eight weeks, and it is liberating. At the same time, exams are starting up at school, so next week will largely be about me trying to figure out how this school uses the Abitti program, and the week after will be about correcting 92 exams and essays. I'm less than excited, even though it'll be a relief to have this period over and done with.

Anyway, January journal! More catch up!

( Day 16. )
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( Day 17 )
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( Day 18 ) .

( January Journal: Day 11 )

In other news, I'm currently on a train to Helsinki. I'm spening the next 24 hours on a ship, attending a folk music festival. In my nerdy, nerdy life, loving folk music is maybe the nerdiest thing about me. I'll try to cobble together an entry about that after the weekend.

I didn't have a prompt for today, and today's Snowflake challenge didn't tickle my fancy, so I'll just write a regular old little entry. The point is to try and write every day, right? So I'm keeping with the spirit of January journal.

Today was the first day of teaching after Christmas holidays, and all in all it went a lot better than I expected it would. The holiday had clearly been good, since the kids were focused rather than wrung out and restless. I, on the other hand, really could have done with a nap. I must have been nervous about getting back to work on some level because I started the day with only a couple of hours of sleep under my belt. ASMR, Potterless, boring newscast, guided meditation: nothing helped. I'm not at all the insomniac type, so it was a weird night.

The day's highlights include:
- A class of 38 16-year-olds having no idea who Ewan McGregor is. I'd like to try and cobble together some kind of exercise using clips from Moulin Rouge and Trainspotting. It could be fun. Not sure about the educational value, though.
- My Gmail filling with notifications about all the new DW connections I've made in just a few days.
- My corner shop still selling riisipuuro, despite the holidays being technically over.
- Not having to leave the apartment at all today now that I'm home. I miss my dog, but when the weather is like this, I'm really happy he's still at my sister's for another week.

The day's lows:
- I got three extra credit essays handed in, all of which were terrible. I genuinely can't tell if this one kid is really this terrible, or if he didn't read the story and is trying to cover it up. I also have no idea how to ask him which it is without possibly killing his motivation to try and do better in the future. I mean, he voluntarily wrote an extra credit essay. Why would someone try to cheat on something like that? Right?
- The schedule for this week. Thank heaven it really is just this week.
- My Great Marvel Re-watch getting off to a bad start. I can't find Iron Man on Netflix, Viaplay or HBO. Boo.


( My thoughts on Captain America: The First Avenger )

I didn't have a prompt for today's January journal, so I picked one from



( January journal: Day 5 - Promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. )

If anyone wants to help me fill in my January journal, feel free to leave a comment here. I've got a lot of dates left to fill out, and I think it'd be more fun to do those rather than just copy from a generic challenge.

 

Holiday shopping done, and with two days to spare! I'm rather proud of myself this year. Partially it was due to me discovering the gift giving potential of Redbubble. 

Today, I watched John Wick 2 on Netflix instead of packing and cleaning, as any reasonable person would. I don't care for long action sequences, but I really did enjoy the movie. It was like Harry Potter, only instead of a secret wizarding world there was a secret world of assassins. There was bureaucracy, nonsense rules, and quirky characters. I don't know if more dialogue would have made it all worse or better, but I would have liked to see more character interaction. Hopefully, fandom will provide. 

Did I tell you that during our epic trip to the U.S we went to Orlando, Florida? And that while we were in Orlando, Florida, we went to the Universal Studios theme park? Well, we did! And it was awesome! The first day we went to the "Islands of Adventure" part and the next day we went to the studios part. The weather was perfect, the rides were fantastic, and we saw the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. (Fake snow in Florida! Dinosaurs from Jurassic Park! A dragon!) I liked it a whole bunch.

Being a long time comic book geek (i.e, I started collecting the Amazing Spider Man sometime in 1997), I was pretty psyched to go to the Marvel section of the theme park. (I was squealing. It wasn't pretty.) It didn't disappoint. There were dressed-up superheros, and flashy rides in flashy colours and there were stores with merchandise. Hooray! Only, there was one little thing. One little thing that has been driving me a little bit crazy ever since.

I wanted a t-shirt, right? Any little geek would want one, and despite being on a pretty tight budget, I was determined to find one or two superhero tees. One with a Captain America shield, or a Spider-Man one, or - omg, dare I dream? - one with Deadpool or Venom! I'd always wanted one! And, ok, I did find all of them, but not as I'd expected to.

The stores did have a pretty wide range of lady fit tees, which was what I was looking for, but... they all followed a certain theme. The basic tees all had basic superhero images, the shield, the hammer, group images etc. The "women's tees" had little diamonds, or the face of Wonder Woman, or texts like "I only kiss superheroes!", "My boyfriend is Spider-Man!" and "I fight in heels!".

There was not a single t-shirt that was tailored to fit a woman's body and that wouldn't have been somehow... themed around it being worn by a woman. Just. What?

First it was funny, but then I realized that there really wasn't a single exception to the rule, and the funny went away. I don't want to kiss superheros(*), Universal Studios! Don't you get it? I want to be a superhero! Invincible! Have powers! Kick ass! Save the world! Can I not do that if I want to wear the lady cut shirt?

In my un-educated opinion, there's a reason bullied kids love comics. I've daydreamed myself out of countless unpleasant schoolyards, imagining I could scale walls or just fucking fly away (or, ok, beat the shit out of everyone there, but saying that doesn't tug on the ol' heartstrings as much as I want this text to). I didn't daydream about someone coming in to save me. Why does the shirt need to focus on that kind of aspect?

Alright, so I ended up buying the regular cut t-shirt because I really, really, really, really wanted one. But I wasn't happy about it! Universal trampled all over my geek parade! Now mind you, there's plenty of girls who wear regular cut tees, and wear them well. That isn't my point. My point is that it's not fair that the clothes that are targeted to women consumers would revolve around goddamn relationship issues or jewelry or whatever the jackass who designed these things seems to think women are all about.

Regular tees are comfy, I'll give you that. And they can look really good on some. Fact just is, that it isn't a look I can pull off without reverting to my 13-year-old, greasy haired self. A regular cut looks horrible on me (or should I say I feel like I look horrible in them? Whatever. I'm sure you know what I mean!). I'm a size 13 rather than a size 6, and I'm busty like the day is long. I'm ok with that, I know how to dress that, but if you just drape a piece of cloth over me, it'll fall straight down. I might as well wear a balloon. So, there. My superhero t-shirts are now my night shirts. Yay.


Dear flist, if you followed this so far, tell me. I over-react, no? Or I don't? I felt offended, at the end of the day. I want to complain! Am I the only one who thinks this is worth complaining about? I wanted to provide you with links to the store selections, but I'm not finding any at the Universal website.

( * )

Day five of the adventure in Genova. I'll try not to put pressure on myself to make a post about every single day, but since I automatically tend to take notes when I travel, I figured I could might as well jot down some of them here. Elisa is revising her Norwegian, so I have time for this before we head out to conquer one of the many museums that Genova has to offer. Sorry for the weird style. I was listening to The Hunger Games, they influenced my note taking.

(Oh, and to be clear - what I'm writing are the very spontaneous, very subjective reactions of someone from Fenno-Scandia landing in a latin culture context. There are no value judgements here, and I'd hate for anyone to read them as such.)

( Day One )

( Day Two )

There's a Johari thing going around. I like these almost as much as I like memes. Hopefully someone else likes them too, or just feels like indulging me.


The rest of this post will be about TV:


Has anyone else been watching American Horror Story? Scares the socks right off me, but it's a good show, no question about it. I'm not done with the first season yet, so I haven't so much as googled it for fear of being spoiled. I do hope they wrap the season up in a satisfying way somehow, and won't try to drag it out, because there's a lot of potential here.

I picked up Revenge and Grimm as well. The former is fantastic. I wish I hadn't known about it until the end of the season, because it's definitely the kind of show that is good for binge watching. I'm now stuck waiting a week between episodes, and it's unbelievably frustrating. I love a show with a Plan.

Grimm is... a disappointment. Is anyone else watching it? Did you like it? If so, why? It seems too monster-of-the-week for me. I'm a big fantasy/horror show fan, but I'm having trouble buying what they're showing me.

Ah, and finally! I finished the first season of BBC's Sherlock. Yes. Very good. Yes. Definitely. Subtitles were a life-saver. And Sherlock's... face. Is that not just one of the prettiest faces the BBC has ever shown you? Yes, yes it is.