Cheesy

What if there was a person who could say just the right things to you.

I miss you.

I don't want to lose you.

Give me a chance.

I ache with every moment you're out of my life.

What if he would be the better in most of the "is it better" scenarios. What if he would fetch the moon for you if you asked. What if you knew your life would never be dull with him. What if he could be everything you ever wanted.

But your heart just doesn't skip a beat for him. What if the remains of your trust in love would hang on to something else. Someone else. What if you had been hurt so many times that you couldn't trust any word of sweet nothings he whispered in your ear. What if he made you even more confused than you already were.

What if you just plainly assumed he could "turn the shadow of things into things and change every lie to truth". What if you were filled with so much doubt that you couldn't trust anyone who says they like you.

I know this is a silly song but the lyrics fit my mood. 

I saw a crappy movie the other day. It was barely watchable and it was utterly cheesy (even for me) but it had one good line that saved the whole movie:

I want to be able to look at you and not be so hurt by you.

Even though I haven't had that many men in my life, I come with baggage. My baggage are the trust issues. I keep thinking "what if I believe him now, how much of a fool will I feel myself when he betrays me?" or "what if this one doesn't treat me well either, what if I waste too many years yet again with a relationship that ends?". Who am I to say to people that they will find someone, that there is someone out there, when I'm not sure about that for myself?

How does one heal a broken heart especially when it's your own?

We're not looking for someone perfect. Not the one who wins several rounds of "is it better". We want someone who makes us giggle and gives us sweaty palms. We want someone we can dream about. We don't want the real thing although we wish for it to be real. We want something magical.

But in the end we just want something. Not anything but something. We need it and we crave for it. And we just have to hope that person dances well with our demons because we can't know that for sure beforehand. We desperately don't want to end up alone.

We're on a small and sinking boat in the middle of the wide ocean with the only choices to either drink the salty water and hope we'll survive or not drink anything at all and hope we can last long enough to be saved.

Wut is luv

What is love? After my last post a guildie asked me if I'm in love. Just couple of days before I'd been wondering it myself too. Am I in love? How can you tell? I think falling in love, being in love and loving someone are not even close of being the same thing. I can love someone without being in love with him, I can fall in love with someone without ever loving him. But what is being in love? Is it the giggly-crush feeling we sometimes get? Is it love when you can't even say the other persons name without smiling? Is it love when you're border to being obsessed with the person? Sometimes for me it's so hard to see the difference between obsession and being in love. Maybe the only difference in those maniacal feelings are the butterflies in the tummy.

Am I in love? How can you tell? I don't want to be. It's not the happy kind of love when you can just dream your life away and at some point the reality then becomes sweeter than your dreams. No, my love would be the obsessive type. No matter what I try, I just can't let go. How I torture myself dreaming of being happy even though I know it's not going to happen. How I sit here and imagine how it would feel like if someone extra-special walked through that door right now.

I don't think he even knows how he tortures me. I don't know if he realises how bat-shit-crazy he makes me. And it's totally okay to tell this to him here because I know he will never read this. Love sees no colour, love is blind. And it is dumb too. Wouldn't it be easier to fall for someone more available, more suited, someone who would read my blog? Someone who would possibly like me back... And here the vicious cycle of dreaming starts again. I dream for a moment, then become angry at myself, then angry at him and then the whole world - and then I decide to forget the whole thing. *determined nod*

It ain't so easy, is it now? Show me a person who has fallen and then forgot about breaking a skull on the impact. And forgetting is the easy part. Even harder is the letting go -part. I thought seeing someone else would help the case, but it didn't. And it's not really fair for the other guy to use him as a threshold for a brighter future. Focusing on something else should help, right? Nope. Try to read something, I dare you. It's just impossible to concentrate. Or the only book that you are able to even open is something that makes you dream of the two of you together. And then you get angry. At yourself first, then him, then the whole world and then you decide to forget the whole thing. You can't focus on reading, you can't focus on work, even in your sleep you're dreaming. Cleaning or sports gives you way too much time to think, so what do?

I have no idea. Sit and whine. It won't help you much but it'll sure make your friends dislike you even more. Wonder why your friends never call you anymore? Because they're all in a relationship and they are so sick and tired of you rambling on and on about the same guy for months. So if you reach the point that there's nothing else you can do about it but to whine then at least whine to strangers. It's good to have some friends left when all this is over. When you two get together and it's all magical and... NO DREAMING! And now I'm mad. Again.

There's nothing I can do. It's the "suffer in silence" kind of thing. It will pass. Time will, so why wouldn't it too? It will fly by as fast as this heatwave.

I think I know hundreds of songs that could fit this feeling but none of them felt just right with this text. So no song today. Suffer in silence. And baby, don't hurt me.

Burn

I sometimes lie on my bed in the middle of the day and just stare at the ceiling. I don't really see the ceiling so I can't tell you how many wrinkles there are in the paint. I just lie there and imagine my life to be different. Sometimes I think how would I spent millions of euros if I ever won the lottery. Sometimes I imagine how would I train a dog if I had one. Sometimes I imagine a warm purring cat on my stomach and how it would feel to pet it. But most of the times I imagine myself being in love.

I imagine myself with someone who would make me happy. So happy and confident, I would come out of my shell and sing and dance and be silly, like I am now when there are not many people around me. I imagine being close to someone and liking it. Like I said earlier, I'm in no means a touchy-feely person. But I do imagine what if there was a person with whom I wanted to be close. You never know...

Sometimes I'm so certain there's someone like that out there for me. I might even have met him already. But then I remember that maybe the person I imagine might not imagine me. Maybe he lies awake and imagines someone else. What if I stumbled upon that person who started this fire in me but it's not the person who I spend my life with? And does the picture suggest the person I spend my life with is not going to light a fire? How many people can there be who can light a fire in me?

So I wrote some crap. It's kind of like a poem, but it's so incomplete that I wouldn't give it that fine title. This is the second version and probably not the last one. I call it "Reach".

We're like homeless on the streets
Turned away from the bonfire,

Scared to be burned
So lonesome and tire
Can't you see we need the warmth
Why are we so scared and turned away

When the fire is right next to us
And all you need to do is reach my way

The light, the heat, so close
I'm cold and you know it
There's no other fire for me
How can I show it
Standing there, backing away from the fire
Turn around and you'll see
Turn around and just reach
Reach for me

Homeless, on the streets
You and I
Turned away from the bonfire
Reaching just for the stars,

Being afraid of the old scars
So lonesome and tire

Still I stand, feeling so alone
In the streets so cold
I know you can feel the fire
I'm tired of reaching for a hand to hold

I stayed for a lesson of love
But only patience can this teach
While my fire fades with you
All you'd need to do
is reach

That's all for the night. Sleep well, my lovelies!

Propaganda

In the deep dark depths of the interwebs I met a guy. He told me he is from Israel. After first bumbs on the road we seemed to get along fine. It was scary to talk to him in Skype and hear him say "Shit, I gotta go" and then hear the headset slam on the table and the sirens on the background. It's so hard to imagine being surrounded by war. Being scared all the time. Not just being scared for yourself but being scared for your family, your friends, your home, everything.

I have no idea what's going on there. I can't say I've ever really even cared about Middle East before this. I've never tried to understand what's going on and why. But when it comes closer to your personal space, someone you know is involved, it makes it more real.

My first thought about the conflict was "Didn't you kinda steal the land from someone?". I thought someone has to be the bad guy in this scenario. So I started to read up on stuff. First stop was of course wikipedia and that gave me some idea what Israel even is. I then watched some videos. Like this one:

And then I saw this one:

And then this letter from a Norwegian doctor and especially the comments. And then I saw crap load of pictures for example these.

Apparently Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli boys and that's how all of this got started this time. It gave Israel a reason to attack back. The casualties are hundreds on Palestinian side and few dozens on Israeli side. I wonder why is it so different? Apparently Israeli houses are build to last through bombing, Isreal have good medical care and the Hamas rockets aren't really up to modern USA standards. Unlike Israeli. The financial aid given to Palestinians have apparently gone to somewhere else than building stern houses and hospitals for the people since they "live in shit and fear" like one of my friends commented the subject.

I like to stay out of political conflicts and to not even think about them much because they are so complicated. Looking at the pictures it's easy to see that this should stop. That Israel shouldn't keep attacking Gaza. But then I hear how Hamas keeps children on the rooftops of their houses to prevent Israeli army bombing them. And I hear some of the pictures are not even close to be taken from this conflict and that pictures from other horrors are just used as propaganda. But then I think about how the nation was found in the first place in the middle of Arabic countries and the decision was made by someone else than the people who lived on the land. But then I remember it was the after math of holocaust. I don't know if there's a genocide happening now and for some reason I'd like something to be done to the circumstances of North Korea more than this but it's easy to see that killing people shouldn't be the answer to anything.

(credit @kmarikat)

The nasty part of a war is that both parties will want to bash the other side. And they will teach this to their children because they can remember the fear that war brings. But we as the outsiders should try to look at the whole thing and try to get past the

So I don't know who is right or wrong. If there even is answer to that. The most important thing is to look at this from both sides, see both sides of the story. And most of all, try to understand. Because there has to be some sense in all of this. There has to be. Right?

Does age really matter?

I've had a hard week. I shouldn't really complain since I have the easiest job in the world, nice people to work with, I have amazing friends and guildies and I have pizza, cola and of course ice cream. Also, I smell like Hubba Bubba again.

But sometimes everything seems... heavy. Lonely. Dark.

I do well with responsibilities, I think, and I have this Plato-like thinking that those should lead who are the best at it, not those who wants to do it. And from time to time I really don't want to do it. It's this vicious cycle of loving it and hating it. And what am I talking about? Guild leading.

I can't say I don't enjoy the... no, it's not respect... not power, I have no authority... I enjoy the feeling of being liked. And needed. We all need the feeling of being needed some way. That's why it's okay to call your dad to come help you set up furniture or your mom to ask about how does a grill work. That's what guild leaders are for too, on some level. They don't call me mommabear for nothing. Would be interesting to hear how other female guild leaders personify, especially those who are further away from the age of the playing masses.

That will be my transition to the topic I wanted to write about. If I could, I would ban the word "teenager". It has the same kind of after taste as "that time of the month". The teenage years are artificially made and it's nowhere near an exact period of time. We all experience youth differently. The time it takes for each individual to grow up and become an adult or fully developed varies; some people never do.

We like to put the blame on the age. "Oh, he can't be serious because he is just a teenager." That's what we're saying when we pull out the t-card. What we mean is that we don't fully recognise the younger people's opinions because they lack experience. To be able to think things truly through we firstly need experience and then we need time to process those experiences and learn from them. What we mean by calling someone a teenager, we mean that we don't trust they have had enough time to process or gather useful experience. We remember how it was like to be a teenager, and we like to think it was full of emotions, hormones and confusion. And looking back we know we've grown so much since then. It was a period of time we struggled through and because we survived, we like to make a little fun of the people who haven't yet seen the other side. We consider teenage years to be some kind of modern rite of passage, a boot camp if you will.

I think what we should do is to stop and ponder why has the word "teenager" become a dysphemism. I remember feeling humiliated when I was dissed because of my age. These days it doesn't bother me so much because I know I still have a lot to learn. Things I can't learn without the time to process my experiences. Still, it doesn't mean I shouldn't be taken seriously. What I feel and think are true and should be taken seriously regardless of my age. One can be mature and still be young. Or one can be old and still act like an instable and hormonal child.

There is a reason why there are legal age limits on voting, buying alcohol and so on. Even though some of the under aged people would be able to make good and mature decisions by themselves, most of them can't in large matters like these. The ones that has the experience and the time has some responsibility to protect those who can't yet have processed decisions. But still, I think when it comes to social interactions, we shouldn't judge the book by its cover (this time I mean age) and we should make the judgement on everyone individually. Those who have more rings on their trunk have a responsibility to take care for those who don't have that yet. But we can only set up the ground rules, the decisions have to be made by everyone themselves. That's the only way to learn and we should all respect that.

To summarise: consider before you use the t-card. When you call someone a teenager are you really referring to age or are you just projecting your own memories and insecurities? Could there be some other way to say what you mean? Could you judge less and listen more, educate more those who don't yet know as much as you do? I always like to solve problems by thinking it from all the sides. I like to look at the black and white and notice the grey areas too. It's always good to talk things through to see the both sides of the story.

But if that doesn't work out, there's always one mommabear to listen to your problems and I promise to help you to solve them. Or at least listen. Because sometimes it's nice just to vent.

/end of rant

Second-handed

Sexuality has always been an interesting subject to me, as you might have noticed. Recently I watched this documentary about virginity and it was mainly about young girls and sex-ed in USA. I think it wasn't at all that bad for a documentary made for American pre-teens. It raised good questions, though many of them are quite old already. But maybe we don't have answers yet so it's good to keep asking.

What is virginity?

Who is a virgin? Do you lose it having anal, oral or intercourse? Can a lesbian lose it with her gf? Can a raped woman be a virgin?

"Does it count?" -question is loaded with society's definitions of virginity. What is chastity?

Do men want to hold on to the image that your female partner is not experienced in the sexual field?

The documentary raised a question about sin and purity and the sanctity of a (woman's) body, provoking to think if any kind of sexual thought makes one a non-virgin. It also asked if virginity as a word has any place in modern society.

For me the most important thing was how it painted a picture of the history of virginity. The documentary takes the viewer back to the ancient times and tells that the word "virgin" comes from the word "virgo" which means a young woman. The root of highly valuated virginity goes way back to the patriarchal world where women had no rights and were considered property. The importance of virginity was to make sure all the children a couple had were the husbands kids and so the heritage would go to the rightful owner. Slaves were considered to be even more property than a wife and thus having sex with a slave wasn't considered a crime. It's like fucking a carrot you've bought; you own it, you can do what ever you wish to it. (But please don't fuck a carrot. I saw this silly show once where a woman died because of a carrot she had used and it had punctured something inside her, leading her to suffer a horrible and painful death because of infection.)

I found the term "second-hand vagina" a nice touch pointing out the problem. The documentary also asks who owns your virginity. For a woman from a Nordic country it's (kinda) obvious that it's my virginity. It's not so everywhere, even in the USA virginity of a girl can belong to a father, to a pastor or the future husband. Virginity is still property these days.

Are those who haven't lost their virginity missing out on something? I think this question is why sexual education is very important.

Does sex connect you to the other person? Do you get a unique bond with your partner? I don't know about that, but I know one thing: sex can complicate things very easily. If you don't have it at all, you wonder what it's like. Is it good, is it bad, is it going to hurt, can you get pregnant, can you get diseases, what's it like to be naked with someone and so on. If you do have sex, you can always wonder was it good for him/her, was it good for you, what becomes of the two of you now, did you do it right - and if that's not enough, you can always feel ashamed afterwards. You know, to add a certain spice to it.

Is having sex something special? Can you compare losing your virginity to not having it in a while and then doing it? Why do we value chastity still?

Does talking or writing about sex openly make you a target or a weirdo?

(source: the documentary is called "How to lose your virginity")

Say my name

I have a very weird and contradictory relationship towards my name. I love it and I hate it. 

I think the hate comes from feeling like a God whose name shouldn't be misused (jk). My name is hard to pronounce, and even the Finns have troubles with it. So I rather hear it not used. Another thing is that because my close family don't use my real first name, my real name always sounds weird in my ears. Like people are not talking about me but someone else. It's a very Finnish name, though it's not that common. I guess I like the exoticism and the identificativeness (is that even a word?), uniqueness of it. But if I could choose, only the very privileged ones could use it to call me. Right now I can come up with only one person who I know can properly conjugate and pronounce it. Everyone else should stick with my middle name or one of the dozens nicknames I have.

For some people - and I understand it's important in the rural areas of the wild wild web - real name is important. I had an interesting conversation with an internetian friend about my name. He wanted to know it and I suggested he would call me Luci even though it's not my real name. Luci is easy, everyone can pronounce it and it's easy to remember. It's also girly as it's supposed to be and you can make several jokes about it. For example "Everybody loves Luci". And they do, trust me ;) Still some people insist using my real name. The name that has double k. And an r. *sigh*

Anyways, names are interesting. Nomen est omen and so on. But what if you can't remember the other persons name? Embarrasiiiing! I've heard stories of dating someone for many weeks, maybe even months and still not knowing the name of their partner. Think about it, how would you ask someone's name in that situation? "Umm... yeah, I'm really NOT that loose, and I know we'd already had sex, but... could you tell me your name again? I can't introduce you to my parents without it."

Good thing about regular names is that you can meet many people with the same name. Like my sister for example, she used to date one guy for years, let's call him Jack. After that relationship my sister found another Jack. When they broke up, I heard Jack went on a date with a girl with the same name as my sister. Easy to remember!

I've called people with nicknames so much that I sometimes forget their real names and that can lead to awkward situations. If I ever would lose my phone and someone kindhearted would find it and wanted to call a person close to me to let me know the phone has been found, he would be in a bit of a trouble. Who would you guess would be the right person to call; Pineapple, Breadcrum, Darkness or Hair? This is the reason btw why we should all use ICE (in case of emergency) before the name in our phones to indicate the correct person we would like to be called when (not if) something bad happens.

In conclusion: when you meet a new person, don't ask for his name. Instead, ask "What would you like me to call you?"