Caleb

09:53 pm: the following is really jumbled up but probably kinda interesting
So Iowa has been on CNN and stuff pretty much constantly for a while as far as I know, and it was all leading up to this caucus deal that just went on. So, yeah, I went to the first caucus that I was allowed to actually vote in, and it was an absolute circus. I went as an observer to the last one in 2004, and there were maybe 150 people there at the most, which everybody was saying was really a lot. Well, there were around 450 people at my precinct's caucus this time. It was totally absurd, and they were having a really hard time establishing any sort of order or control over what was going on.

I stood with the Kucinich group, and as 17 people, we were nowhere near reaching the viability level of 15% of the people in attendance (64 or something like that), but we became an extremely valuable commodity to the other groups who were close to getting another one of the nine delegates. We ended up going with the Edwards group and pushing them to a solid two delegates, in exchange for one of their delegates for Edwards coming from the Kucinich group and them agreeing to use both delegates to push Kucinich's single-payer health care as part of the party's platform at the Johnson County democratic convention. I volunteered to be the delegate for Edwards from the Kucinich group, so I'm going to the county convention. It's kinda exciting, I guess, I'm looking forward to being able to see how this all goes past the local precinct level. It was really cool to not only watch but be an active part of negotiations to select candidates and delegates, and I'm glad I stayed with the Kucinich group because it was so cool to be a very deciding voice in whether Edwards got that second delegate from our precinct or not. I know Kucinich asked us to go to Obama if not for him, and I actually have an Obama sign in my window, but despite that, I'm very happy having gone to Edwards because Obama still got five delegates from our precinct and we couldn't have pushed that up, but Clinton might have gotten a third had we not gone with Edwards, and that would be a lot less desirable to me.

I've been really kinda pissed off at the Clinton campaign lately. They called me one time about a poll and asked which of a list of candidates I was supporting but didn't list Kucinich (or Gravel or Dodd or Biden), and then didn't know what to do when I said I actually liked Kucinich best, then just said, "Paid for by Hillary Clinton for president, bye". And there was this really cocky-looking and -acting guy wearing an observer sticker and a Hillary Clinton staff badge at our precinct and while we who were not for Obama, Edwards, or Clinton were trying to decide what to do he was standing on a table yelling about how we should all go for Clinton and just generally being an asshole.

The poor organizers though had such a hard time. There were well over four hundred registered democrats there to caucus, and last time when it was just over a hundred it was crowded. They ended up sending people from the gym to classrooms, but that split the Obama group into three different classrooms and made it very difficult for them to communicate, and also the groups had no way of seeing or communicating how the whole thing was going down as it was. It even came close a couple times to having to be declared an invalid caucus because of how disorganized it became.

I really only know, obviously, what was happening from where I was. So, I immediately went and stood with the Kucinich group with a plan to later defect to Obama if it was totally not viable to stay with Kucinich. But the seventeen of us soon realized that although we weren't big enough for a delegate by ourselves that we could join forces with another group on the condition that while we voted for their candidate at the county level that they would also agree to push Kucinich's issue of single-payer health care in the county-level party platform. This obviously is good for both camps, and so we went and proposed it to the other groups. I went to the Obama group and started talking about it, but everybody got way confused about what I was saying even though it was pretty simple: we join you, you get another delegate for your candidate (but from our group), and we together push the issue of single-payer health care at the county level. But they didn't seem to understand the process or the idea or something, and in the middle of this big debate where nobody would listen to the few people in the room who really knew what was going on, and then a woman came into the room and told me that there were two other rooms full of Obama supporters and I realized it was turning into a circus so I left and went back to my Kucinich group in the gym. We ended up talking to some people from the Edwards group, who needed 13 people to be assured one more delegate, and they were willing to accept this deal, so we joined them about two minutes before we legally had to make the final count for the proportions of delegates. Edwards ended up with two, Clinton with two, and Obama with five. The Edwards group then picked one delegate and I became the delegate for Edwards from the Kucinich group.

The best part is this though. Every time I have voted, which is three times, I've basically had to fight to get my vote counted. So as I was walking up to Mark Twain Elementary, I made some offhand comment to my mom about this, laughing and saying, I hope they have me registered. So I walk up to check in and they're like, well, you're not on the list. I was just incredulous, and pulled out my driver's license and voter registration card, both with the same address which was within the precinct. I ended up having to fill out some card, I don't even know what it was about but they let me caucus anyway. I'm going to go down to the county auditor's office and give them a piece of my mind tomorrow, holy cow.

So yeah, now it's ten-thirty and I'm kinda exhausted by this whole thing and I'm trying to contact a couple people but I guess nobody's answering so yeah. It was exciting though.

09:52 pm: After seventeen months gone, I'm back in Iowa. I feel like I'm floating. Everything has changed so much, and yet it's all the same. My brother has become a giant with long hair and a beard. He wears a bandana and shouldn't smoke so much pot because it interferes with his medicines. Actually, everyone smokes pot now. I didn't even see grass the whole time I was in Finland and suddenly it's everywhere here. I guess I'm just glad I'm in a different place in my life right now from my friends who are getting each other pot for Christmas. I'm also finding myself bored a lot of times when I'm with old friends. Sitting in someone's living room getting high and watching TV and talking about high school classes that happened like three or four years ago just isn't that interesting to me. Nobody really wants to hear all my stories from the past year and a half, which sucks because a lot of crazy shit happened to me, but every time I start talking about something someone brings up the time Randy Brown this and such or something. And it's so hard to watch these conversations that arise because of some little thing I said, and then people go on for like a half hour debating if the Finnish language is related to Swedish or Russian or some shit like that, and I just sit there basically an authority on the subject as far as this dead-end conversation is concerned but nobody wants to listen to what I have to say. Probably I'm freaking out about it all a little. And, like, the thing with my brother. He's got Tourette's now, and smokes with his friends, and has some sort of compulsion to light fires, and coughs like every ten seconds (from his Tourette's), and takes medicines, and goes to the alternative high school, and hangs out on the ped mall. I dunno, it's all pretty normal stuff, but it's a huge change from the seventh grader he was when I left. And I know it's only a matter of time before I end up high and drunk at some party and realize he's there too, and that's so weird. I also noticed I fell right back into the same patterns with my mom, where she makes me feel guilty about something and then I appease it to win back her love and then I feel shitty about giving in to her at my own expense. I really just want my own place to live...

02:38 am: ich hab es festgestellt, dass ich einiges vorher nicht verstanden habe. über frauen, über das leben, über liebe, ja, über alles. besoffenes livejournal-schreiben ist so gut, haha... kurva. wer bin ich denn? aber die libby und die megan und ich reden jetzt, und est ist so gut. wir reden über sex, über beziehungen, über das leben. und wir verstehen uns, und sie streicheln sich, obwohl sie mit ihrem freund geschlafen hat und ich mit ihr geschlafen habe, und die beide reden freilich über mich und mit mir, und es ist sau gut.

aber ich liebe es, mit der libby sex zu haben. sie ist so eine gute frau, also, ja, was meine ich hier. mit der megan passe ich gar nicht, und das weiss ich schon, aber so etwas, wie das, was ich mit der libby habe, habe ich noch nie erlebt. ja, keine ahnung, aber, kurva. ahoj, jak se máš? kurva kurva. aber ich mag es auch in den einfachen Stellen oder Positionen oder keine ahnung, wie man das auf deutsch sagt weil ich noch nie auf einer anderen sprache als deutsch gefickt habe.

kurva co řikám tady? nevím a kurva kurva kurva. na zítra... ich bin doch besoffen genug

12:17 pm: spatny student
It's very strange sometimes living here in Finland. On Tuesday I saw the sun for the first time in about two weeks. When you can even see the sun at all, it's always really low in the southern sky. It gets dark before 4:00 PM these days, too, which means that by midnight it's already been dark for eight hours and everybody is exhausted just because it's so dark all the time. There has already been snow for a while here. Today I had a little accident on my bike while driving to the university: I was trying to go around a curve and my bike slid out from under me and the chain came off. I ended up just walking the rest of the way to the university, was late to class, and I still have to fix my bike.

But there are some really good things here, too. The other day I went with Thomas, a French guy who was in my Czech class who speaks German, as well as Thomas from Austria and Dan from Finland who speaks German to sauna in French Thomas's building, then to a blues band in a bar nearby. We later drank from a bottle of Russian vodka that Dan's (Russian) girlfriend had and French Thomas got really drunk and we went to some kebab restaurant and just ate from the salad bar without buying anything, it was pretty funny.

I also have been going to sauna a lot. There's a sauna on the lake near Lapinkaari (my building) and you can sit in the literally boiling hot sauna (there's a thermometer on the wall that always says over 100 degrees celsius) and then go outside and go for a swim in the near-freezing lake. On my most recent visit to this sauna it was about minus four celsius out and it was snowing, and the lake was only seven degrees celsius. It's pretty funny being in such a hot and steamy room then going outside and walking around in the snow and swimming in the lake and sharing a beer with your friends, then doing the whole thing again and again. The best part is that after a couple goes you don't really feel the temperature differences so much, like, you sit in the sauna after being in the lake and you think it's cold, and then you go for a swim in the lake and want to go back in because it felt warm kinda. And it leaves you so relaxed and happy and clean, and you can breathe so well. Sauna is one thing I will really really miss about Finland.

I made a group on Facebook called "Caleb needs a place to live" in the morning before class the day before yesterday (because I still don't know where I'll be living this spring), and I was planning to in the evening invite everyone I knew in Iowa City in the hopes that someone would know of a place I could sublet. But that evening I already, without telling anyone about the group, had very kind responses from a few people telling me of friends of theirs that were looking to sublet for the spring. Now I'm waiting on a couple responses, and hopefully I can find a good place to live next semester.

My project for myself now is to learn cyrillic handwriting. I've got the printed alphabet down pretty well, I guess, but today Stasia handed me some notes that she had written in handwriting and I was just like, shit, I can't read this. I also need to learn a lot of vocabulary, instead of just guessing with the Czech word or something. I guess, though, that I'm really not as interested in Russian as I am in, say, Finnish or Czech, which makes it pretty difficult to be in this class. I feel like a dumbass the whole time because I am basically the worst student in there, which has never happened to me before. I try to excuse myself with the fact that I'm one of two people in the class who never learned Russian before, and also about half the class speaks Polish or Slovakian natively or has a Russian parent or something. Eh, luckily they have Czech at the University of Iowa though, so I can take that class.

Okay, time for lunch.

11:50 am: dear mister california man
So, one time there was this dude from California who was planning a year abroad in Finland and was reading blogs of people who are currently studying in Finland to get an idea of what it's like. He was reading mine as well as those of some friends of mine here. Then he saw me write about how I didn't want to have sex with Libby one night because it would be meaningless and another time about how I was kinda upset because Libby and Megan were sitting in the same room as me talking as if I weren't there about things that were kinda personal, which I was probably misinterpreting anyway because I had just finished a bottle of wine with some "apple pies" on top, and he decided I was an asshole and that he needed to warn Libby about me. Somehow in really creepy fashion he decided that he should write Megan an e-mail (no idea how he got her e-mail address) and tell her to tell Libby I'm basically an asswad. So then Megan sent me an instant message telling me that "someone" had been reading my blog and was trying to warn Libby I was an asshole or something. Based on all the information I had at hand, I just assumed that "someone" was Megan herself and, feeling really creeped out that Megan had gone to such weird lengths to find a blog of mine and then to read it (and misunderstand it), I responded with a really mean message to Megan. This message upset Megan pretty badly and I feel really bad about that. And really I don't understand why this whole situation arose or why this dude from California thought he needed to stick his nose in here. Everything just ended up making all three of us feel horrible for no real reason. So, I kinda hope California dude is still reading my blog and will see this and will maybe understand that there is life outside of computers and that what he did is just really absurd. I wish I had harsher words for him, but my harsh words were, unfortunately, all used up on Megan the other day when they really should have been aimed at California dude. I write in here so that I can remember what's been going on in my life and so my friends in Iowa as well as in other parts of the US, many of whom I haven't seen in years, can see what I'm up to. I leave most of it unprotected because I trust people. I'm not going to start protecting all entries now just because of California dude, but I thought about it. So California dude, I hope you think this is all pretty funny, because you've really managed to create a lot of unneccesary stress among people that you really have no reason to have anything to do with. I hope your year in Finland is good. Enjoy the sauna, it's the best thing in the world, and find a wood-burning sauna by a lake if you can, it's so amazing. Enjoy the forests, and the colors, and the strange behavior of the sun. Enjoy the languge, it's really a fascinating and totally different system and yet not so strange or far-off as you might think. Come prepared to spend a lot of money for everything, stuff here is about twice as expensive as it has any business being, and with the dollar dropping so fast against the Euro lately that's extra-bad news for you. Just have a good time in Finland, and moreover, get off your computer, trust that whatever you do in the future will work out, and have a good time now. And leave other people alone, please.

08:07 am: wtf it snowed
Also, my computer's battery is behaving really weirdly lately. Like, starting the day before yesterday it will charge forever and ever and still say it's at only 60%, but then you would disconnect the charging cable and it would stay at 60% for like two and a half hours before it started going below that. And today it only goes to 28%... but I've been sitting in the kitchen using my computer for like two hours now and it's said my battery is at 28% and has only 0:45 remaining the whole time. What the hell.

01:37 am: geh zum teufel
Minulla on huomena testi. Mutta en puhu hyvin suomea... se on huono. Minä pidä tampereen yliopistosta, ja minä pidän Tamperesta, ja minä pidän ihmisestä tässä Lapinkaarissa. Minä opiskelen tässä venäjää, tšekkia, ja suomea, ja opitelen vielä italiaa italialaistasta. En tiedä jos puhun suomea... perkkele.

I'm taking a hint from Heinrich Schliemann, the guy who discovered the historical site of what is now believed to be the ancient city of Troy, on how to learn languages; that is, writing in a journal in the language of the place where you are living. I kinda tried it last year, actually, with that other journal I started, welche_sprache, but that kinda fizzled. The biggest problem here is my Finnish is really bad still. But it's okay, I remember a year ago when I was struggling to learn numbers in Finnish, sitting at the table in my kitchen at Händelheim with all the spice jars we had and moving them around counting them in Finnish and having a really hard time with it. Now I'm able to do what I just did above, not that it's much, but still. I have a Finnish test tomorrow, I don't know how well I do, but I really hope I get 3/5 so I can take the continuation course.

It's really funny here, like, I speak English most of the time to get along with people, but I have Spanish and German lying dormant in my head and Czech, Russian, Finnish, and Italian are slowly creeping their ways in. I really scared Rita (who is from Russia) tonight when she was talking with another Russian girl, and I was just kinda listening for sounds and then all of a sudden I noticed they were saying a bunch of words I knew and she said she didn't understand something and I was like, ne panimaesh? (I don't know how to romanize that... "не панимаешь?") and she just looked at me and said "что?" and I repeated it and she had such a look on her face, haha. Apparently she had been talking about really personal things, and was freaked out and thought I understood everything, but really I just understood a few basic words. And tonight Rita (who is also in my Czech class) and Ilona (Czech) and a Robert (Polish) and I were talking in Czech for a while and it was pretty funny.

Okay, point is, I need to get back to studying or I'm going to die tomorrow. This test might murder me, but I'm going to go in as a freshwater shark with mind-knives and double-action lasers and try to murder it first. The problem is though that my mind-knives won't work if I don't keep studying for like another hour tonight, so.

10:26 am: hahaha
Reading Wikipedia stuff about the Space Shuttle, I found this picture of one of the mounting points on the 747 used to transport the shuttle:



Just in case they forget which way it goes, I guess.

10:40 am: Yesterday I sent an e-mail to the Czech teacher at the University of Iowa asking if I could join the First Year Czech II class in the spring semester. She e-mailed me back, and said of course, we could just have a small conversation to make sure the class was a good fit for me and it would be great. Then she had a P.S. telling me that the book was Basic Czech by Adamovičová. That one kinda caught me by surprise and I had to read it a couple times. The book for my class is called "Basic Czech I", and my teacher, Ana Adamovičová, co-wrote it with another woman called Darina Ivanovová. I'm sorry, but that's kinda unbelievable: I go to Finland to learn Czech and my teacher's book is used in Iowa. What the hell.

08:23 pm: It's finally happened. From learning so many different languages, finally I'm in some weird way seeing deep into the depths of things. Yesterday and today in Finnish lesson we learned about the different inflection types, like how different words that look different change in certain predictable ways in certain contexts. There are four types for words that end in -i and the rule for which one a word belongs to seems complicated but somehow I saw right through it. The thing is, words ending in -i either belong to the "bussi"-type or one of three others. The biggest problem is deciding if something belongs to "bussi"-type or not, and after that there are really easy rules to follow about which of the other three a word belongs to. (Words ending in -si belong to "käsi"-type, words ending in -i with -l-, -r-, -n-, -s-, or -h- before belong to "kieli"-type, and all other words that end in -i that aren't "bussi"-type belong to "ovi"-type.) So basically what I realized is that the "bussi"-type is an inflection derived to deal with loan words that don't fit perfectly into the Finnish language. For example, the word "bussi" itself means bus. "Taksi", meaning taxi, obviously also belongs here, as well as "hotelli" and other such words. But then you get words like "muuri" and "lasi", a (freestanding) wall and a glass. At first these didn't look like anything I had ever seen before. But then I started thinking, and "muuri" is pretty clearly related to German Mauer and Spanish muralla, which have exactly the same meaning. Sure enough, "muuri" is a loan word and belongs to "bussi"-type. And then "lasi", what the hell. But Finnish can't have the sound g come before the sound l so they just left off the g, and then they added -i, a typical Finnish ending, to the word to make it inflectable. So from "glass" or "Glas" or whatever (probably it was from Swedish, but I would guess that Swedish has the same word English and German do) they applied two simple rules of Finnish phonology and got "lasi", a glass. "Meri", the sea, also belongs to "bussi"-type, obviously related to Meer/mer/mar/mare/whatever. I suddenly in the past 32 hours or so have been seeing a lot more loan words in the Finnish language that aren't quite so obvious as "taksi" or "auto" and it's driving me wild.

It's actually funny, the same thing kinda happens in Czech. Most words that end in -e are feminine in Czech, but really old words like "nebe" (sky), "ditě" (child), and "vejce" (egg) are neuter.