It’s not lost on me that just when I’ve finally, FINALLY, after what, 42 years, learned to establish boundaries and not tolerate people being shitty - when I’ve decided, after a few false starts (*cough cough Vermont), that I’m really truly trying to, and excited to, get my shit together, but for real this time, and not by trying to live some sort of homemade apple sauce/vet fucking Nancy Meyers fantasy. No, no, I’m attempting to be an adult and handle life in a mature way by facing things head-on. And boy if that’s not fantastic….well it should be fantastic if this “new year new me” vibe didn’t somehow come just as we’re on the cusp of World War Fucking III. Those two hour training sessions loose a little luster when you assume that you’ll be reduced to a radioactive husk of charred flesh and puss in a week or two (FYI, don’t google what an A-Bomb does to bodies outside/but close to the blast zone. Trust). But ya know, impending nuclear winter can’t stop this flow - thanks, Wellbutrin! Speaking of, I realized it might be a smart idea to have someone ya know, like a proper Doc, figure out if we should tweak my meds so that this old goat could have a tad more energy and will to get out of bed in the morning. And that friends, is how I ended up on a delicious dose of what is more or less legal speed, binging a Finnish procedural I found on Netflix at 4am.

Look, binging Netflix shows is nothing new to me or anyone else at this point. We’ve all melted into goblin people with scrambled eggs for brains who are one hand-job at Starbucks away from living in “Idiocracy”. But, plowing through 16 episodes of a Finnish show in one day might be a bit much for even for me. What can I say though, the siren song of two mismatched detectives solving extremely Nordic crimes (one involved clean energy wind-turbines and another drugs coming from Estonia via Ferry-smuggling) was just too much for this old hag to resist. The heart wants what the heart wants - and apparently, my heart wanted to watch “Deadwind. Well, that’s what it’s called in the states, in Finland it’s known as “Karppi”, named after the rogue, wild-card lead, Detective Sophia Karppi, a recent widow, come back to Helsinki and her old job, much to the irritation of the team. The other character is a young, handsome, seemingly by the book detective, Sakari Nurmi. He likes driving fast through snow (which stresses me the fuck out), snacking, making espresso, and a backstory that involves a lot of Bolivian nose-candy. You know the drill - opposites who initially butt-heads and then, what is that?? Could it be… .the beginnings of a spark?! Add the drab Winter hellscape and characters that don’t smile and I’m in!!

So, I think it was maybe around episode 4 that I noticed what I first thought was just a tick of the two leads - some sort of Nordic dry humor that I didn’t get - but then realized all the characters did the same thing. There’s this way that everyone says “okay” (“okai “) - it’s very monotone with even women sort of dropping their voices into this lower octave and delivering the most non-emotional “okay” you’ve ever heard. Sometimes it’s so low-energy that you don’t even realize they’ve said it at all. Just a whisper into the cold Finnish air. And this delivery by the way, is used for any situation - You could say “Hey Karppi, your sauna is broken” - okay. “I’m hungry” - okay. “Hey Nurmi, you just ran over a little kid holding a baby bunny - they’re both dead, guts seeping into the snow” - okay. Doesn’t matter what they’re responding to - its just this flat “okay”… and I love it? So I did some digging and in Finnish there’s a concept called “Sisu” - there’s no equivalent in English, but the best I can describe it is a sort of stoic fortitude - guts and gumption despite the circumstances. I feel like the closest we have in the states are New Englanders - they’re the type of people who refuse to say they’re cold even when they are cold as fuck. It’s those grumpy pilgrim genetics - hard to escape. Anyway, I think the “okay” is a manifestation of Sisu. No matter what information is being divulged - be it joyous/life changing/heartbreaking/mundane - you just take it on the chin and quietly, quickly say “okay” and move the fuck on, ya know? I’ve decided to start incorporating it into my own life: “Hey, Morgan - the radiation exposure pills you purchased are on backorder and probably won’t arrive before d-day” - okay. It’s weirdly liberating and I now know how it felt to be my ex-boyfriend who once responded “ok” to me saying I loved him for the first time. It makes you feel VERY powerful and mysterious with minimal effort.

Karppi ja Nurmi ovat suomalaisia Sisun kanssa. Okai. (Karppi and Nurmi are Finns with sisu. Okay)

So, obviously the next step after watching all 2 seasons of Deadwind in one day was to throw myself whole-hog into learning Finnish. You know, an incredibly useful and in demand language here in the States and worldwide, really. And I know what you’re thinking, “Morgan there are like, literally one thousand other hobbies you can take up that don’t involve having a notebook full of fucking umlauts” - well, two things, first NO SHIT and also, newsflash asshole, those aren’t even fucking umlauts - they’re vowel phonemes, fuck-faces. But guess what? If there was a hobby, I fucking dabbled in it while living in Vermont. I got into magic candles and charging crystals. I made whimsical terrariums with little woodland scenes for the old folks home in town that I changed seasonally. I sculpted little critters with children’s air-dry clay. I started collecting records. I got real into birding, which is a super sexy pastime for a single lady of a certain age. I began to hand feed and defend the fucking chipmunks in my yard. I hiked. I read. I painted. I drew. I learned to French-braid my hair and went on long meandering drives through the Green Mountains. I turned taking multiple hot baths a day into a hobby and not a major depressive incident. I taught myself the choreography to Aaliyah’s Rock the Boat video. I learned how to make soup for breakfast. Soup for lunch. Soup for dinner. Trust me, I have tried everything - except - learning Finnish.

A cursory glance told me that Finnish is an extremely hard language to learn for English speakers, so I thought I’d just do the easiest entry point - Duolingo. And truth be told, I assumed that like most hobbies, I’d tire of this after a few days and go back to my normal routine of googling black box flight recordings from plane crashes before bed - I really didn’t have high hopes for this sticking. But the thing is tho, if your timing is juuuuuuuuuuuust right, you can take something that might’ve been a passing fancy and turn it into a full blown fucking obsession pretty quickly! I just so happened to start the Duolingo course on what would be the last week of a job that had been taken as a transition and very quickly revealed itself to not be a good fit in the slightest (the wild thing about boundaries is that once you define yours, you really, truly won’t tolerate shit ever again. Whoops) and that gave me the time to learn with the added bonus of Russia waging war and threatening nuclear attacks, which meant a LOT of pent up anxiety that needed somewhere to go - and it decided to go to Lapland, apparently.

One of the shittiest parts about the outgoing job was that despite the work being 100% able to be done remote, they made us commute in every morning so we could go sit in a little glass closet they rented us in one of those apocalyptic co-work spaces. The amenities of the space were great - never-ending La Croix, various snacks/etc and lots of plants to try and take your mind off being in a giant aquarium - everyones every movement on display for all of the little worker drones. Late Stage Capitalism is a nightmare, baby! Anyway, since I knew the last week of work was going to be slow and painful - my coworker who I actually really liked was set to be out of the office, which meant it would just be me sitting there for 9 hrs per day solo marinating on my impending death, I decided to take the road less traveled and cannonball ass-first into Finnish. For those last days I would go to the office, make a coffee, grab a seltz and fucking go! When I say I was plowing through lessons, I mean I was moving at a truly breakneck pace. I will again remind you that I’m fairly certain I’m on a form of speed, so that might explain how in one day I went through 4 lessons, managed to also complete an expense report for my job and when the clock struck 6pm and I was allowed to leave the office, I could easily call my friends, family and dog a “Wizard” and roast them for having a cold sauna. And that is really something that they force you to say and translate a lot - Velho/Wizard. I have been on multiple forums to try and figure out why this is the seemingly most important word I’ve learned in Finnish (next to Sauna)- but I’m not mad. Like, if anyone would need to know how to say Wizard, it would be me. And while others in the forum might not be able to think of a time that they would need to use that word while visiting Finland, I really can’t think of situations where I wouldn’t want to call someone or something a Wizard. So, it was just me in a glass cube, EarPods in saying, “Tervetuloa” and “Hyvä” over and over for hours, running out the clock on the job while the world started burning. Some people might feel this is an end-times mental break, but I call it living my best life. Because I cannot remember the last time I had to really learn something new and study - and I don’t mean pretending to gyrate on a catamaraln prior to a small plane crash from the safety of my Vermont home while Aaliyah crooned in the background. No, I haven’t used my brain in this way since probably college? I dunno - I wasn’t what you’d call a prize pupil, so it might’ve been high school? The point is, it’s been a long time since I’ve worked my brain in this fashion and my noggin is snorting it up like it’s implied that stoic detective Sakari Nurmi on the hit television show Deadwind snorted up yayo.

I’ve become so invested that I’m taking a Finnish Beginner 2 zoom class that starts in a week. The instructor thinks that since I’ve got some basics under my belt I could probably jump into the 2nd level. Which means I’ve doubled down on studying. I made flashcards. I have sticky notes all over my apartment with the Finnish word stuck to the appliance and door and mirror and I’ve started calling my dog “Olet tuhma pieni velho” - a naughty little wizard! I really do like learning Finnish, but I’m also extremely scared of being the idiot in the class that mispronounces something and then gets roasted by my classmates. I have that coming karmically and I’ve been waiting for my punishment since about 1995. I went to high school in East Texas so our pronunciations and accents are rough at best - I’m putting myself into this category, too. We have a weird nasally Reba-esque way of speaking and it can make a normal mispronunciation absolutely unhinged. The incident that I’ll pay for one day happened in Mrs Giffords honors English class while we were doing presentations for our poetry unit. Each person had to get up, read the poem and then break it down. Normal shit. But then my classmate, name withheld to protect him - but he knows who the fuck he is - goes up to the podium and says, with the confidence that only a wealthy, attractive, white 16 year old boy can: “This poem is called: They Say That 'Time Assuages” - Only that last word? He pronounced it as:

AH-SAUSAGE-ES

AHSAUSAGES!!!! I screeched. I literally screeched like a fucking Vampire having holy water thrown in it’s face. I don’t think I meant to be such an asshole, but I truly couldn’t stop laughing. I was laughing so hard that my friend Hannah also started laughing. The Sausage King of Paris, Texas snapped back asking if I thought I was a genius and I said through tears no, I did not but I also didn’t think that time was a sausage. I’m pretty sure that lead to a stint in the hallway for me to “get it together”. But it didn’t help, every time I thought of it, I’d melt into a fit of church giggles again. To be fair, I think being an asshole about pronunciation is hereditary, because my cousin always tells the story of a guy in her class referring to Poseidon as: POSSE-DON. Bless. Anyway, I fucking roasted the Sausage guy then and I still laugh about it now, almost 27 years later. But my fear is real - and I know that my karmic payback is coming. Sure, maybe I can say Velho….but what about: Lyijytäytekynä (apparently the word for mechanical pencil). I’m gonna be fucked and a bunch of little zoom heads will be church giggling, but ya know, I’ve got it coming.

But until I’m either vaporized by a thermobaric bomb and/or fluent in Finnish, I’ve had to take something into my own hands. See, while you can only stream 2 seasons of Deadwind in the US, there is a 3rd season that aired on Finnish TV but isn’t available here. And season 2 ended on a fucking cliffhanger and I am VERY invested in these stupid detectives and their stupid Nordic crimes and so, I did what anyone would do. I downloaded a VPN on my iPad, changed the location to Finland, figured out what TV network the show aired on, downloaded said app and with it thinking I was based in Finland, was able to watch the 3rd season. But, as you fucking guessed, there was a hitch in my plan as there aren’t English subtitles. I tried using the speaking tool on google translate, but it seems to only catch every few words and that just won’t do, so, I’ve taken to turning on the Finnish subtitles and translating it line by line. Its not a super smooth process but I’m stoked to see how the season ends in like, 2038 when I’m done with the translation. The things we do for love.

Oh, and speaking of timing - I bit the bullet and booked a trip to Helsinki in July and then another trip in December to go up to Lapland to see the Northern lights/reindeer and then to Helsinki for Christmas. Figured I’d put this Finnish to good use and to see if there are any Beefs roaming around (I’ve seen Tom of Finland, okay). Wanna know when I booked those tickets? The morning of February 23rd….like, right before Russia invaded Ukraine. And you know, not sure if traveling to a country whose entire Eastern border is with Russia is going to be in the cards at that point, or if anyone will even still be alive. And those fucking plane tickets aren’t refundable. But what can you do? You just sit back, translate a few sentences about a person getting murdered at an old animal testing facility so you can get to the good parts where the odd couple detectives maybe smooch, you practice saying that “Otso has a small but comfortable sauna”, and you wait for the end of days. Maybe this is all just me rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it’s something. Okay.