Photo contest and a new CV

I have been so busy these last few days that I haven't even had time to cook properly at home. I kind of like this, doing a lot of things and keeping myself occupied, I feel like I'm not totally unproductive, and might be of some help. Then I actually get good notes even when not attending to the lectures, as I'm on the move all the time even without them, and that's fine for me!

The first snow fell down here in Rovaniemi yesterday. It wasn't snowing when I left to meet some friends, and I was totally horrified when I realised I have to drive my bike home in the snow. It is funny how I am afraid of driving a bike, when there's no problem with people throwing me in the air and me doing flips and spinning or something. I have climbed up a rope, put it around me and come spinning down absolutely loving the feeling, but riding a bike scares me. When I have to go past narrow places, my heart starts beating harder almost every time, and the snow is killing me. I didn't even dare to turn the front wheel last night, so I'd just get down and walk the curves. Today I felt just a little more secure, but it was still an awful experience. I mean what's wrong with me, I even know how to drive a one wheeled bike, but still a normal one is the scary one for me! That's what I'm going to say is my weakness in my next work interview: "I might not get to work on time if there's snow on the ground". I apparently need some sleep now :D

I entered a photo contest with this picture today:

I don't know if it's good enough for a competition, but it's one of my favourite pics anyway, taken in Helsinki last December. I like the yellow light of the winter's low sunlight and the environment it creates.

I got so excited about making myself a new curriculum vitae last night that I didn't sleep at all. Here's the result with no valid information, (and the parts I saved are in Finnish):

I have been applying to some more jobs now, but there's one I would really love, would be the chief editor in my university's student' union's magazine. I am such a grammatical nazi that I would actually love to read texts and make them better, and to be able to write and get paid for it, and to be able to be part of the union, and also use my creativity and ooh I just want it so bad! I don't know if there are going to be many applicants, but I hope that at least I'd get to the interview. At the moment, I have so much will and motivation to work that anyone hiring me would gain a hard working and a happy employee.

Finally some pictures again, these are from my summer in Spain, where I was busy being on vacation, and actually used my camera much less than usual. 

The way you make me feel

This awesome video keeps making my day every time I watch it. I love the voice and style of this Kawehi, and even though this song is the first I heard it's still my absolute favourite.

Now to some more serious stuff. I keep getting to know new people all the time, and sometimes I get this amazing feeling with someone I am meeting for the first time - it's as if I would have met an old childhood friend even thought it's not possible we would have known each other before. A certain warmth and comfort and easiness radiates from them to my being. I love that feeling, and I want to be able to spend time with those people and give them the real me to say so in return, being honestly myself and trying to make them feel relaxed in my company too, make them see how easy they make me feel.

I don't exactly know why, but I also have this certain kind of other people I always start getting really interested in. The stupid thing is that I know they are not my kind of people, and that I will not enjoy their company, because they - on the contrary to the first kind of people I tried to describe - make me feel like I have to wear a mask of something different than my comfortable self for making them like me. Then I don't know why in the world I want to make them like me, when I know that I don't like the company of people who make me wear a mask. That is so annoying, and I fall for it too many times even when realising the stupidity of that problem, and that it's fully my own fault.

Neither of those types of people are homogeneous groups, but include people with many different personalities and characters. The one thing uniting all those is just that something that makes me like them. With the first group I feel like home, and with the other one I feel like in a masquerade. I feel so weak sometimes for not being able to resist the urge to impress the second kind of people, and I hate those situations - who would like to feel themselves weak anyway... Then again the first ones make me feel so nice that when I am with someone like it, I feel strong and confident and swear I'll never again make the mistake of wanting to be with people who don't make me feel good. I guess I have some more accepting and learning and gaining more self-confidence to do to get over the second kind of people.

Then one of the most difficult things for me to do is to end a relationship I don't feel comfortable in. Sometimes it's easy to just let it slip away, but now I'm dealing with more than one people with whom I feel like it was a mistake to get so close. It is so hard for me, because I keep thinking that I don't want to hurt anyone by telling them how they make me feel when it's not something positive, and more when I feel like they actually trust me. Normally I try to be honest always (well maybe not 100 % when someone is asking how they look in an outfit or something like that, though even then I try to find the best things to say about it), but these situations make me feel awkward and lost and like I'm made to choose between two rotten options. Those are another situations then, where I need to and want to grow.


Now my back and every muscle is hurting for so much dancing yesterday, but that's how I know I had a great time in a party - not for a hangover or for not remembering anything like some.
And now that the summer is waving its goodbyes, I'll guard it with me in the memories of these pretty flowers from Finland and the warmth of Spain (:

Just a normal post.

Hello everyone! I have no idea if anyone's interested in hearing just normal stuff from my life and what I've been up to, but I want to write something like this anyway.

Doing sports again feels so good. I've been cycling, running and dancing, and I don't want to stop.

I just heard that I didn't get a job where I had had an interview, but I'll have another interview in two weeks and hopefully will get that one, because I would really want it. Not just to have a job, but because I would like to have that job. It's in the nightlife of my city, and as a night person the working hours would suit me. I guess I'll have to start writing more applications anyway just in case, because the chances of getting the place are probably not especially high.

I had a very interesting meeting of an entrepreneurship study unit on Tuesday, and I am thrilled now with all kinds of ideas in my head. I would like to actually start my own company, and I would love for it to be about photography. I don't know if I'm good enough, or if anyone would buy my pictures or whatever I would be offering in the end, but it would be a great opportunity of learning of that field, and getting better with both photography and learning of business life. And you would never even have the chance of succeeding if you never try, right? I am open to any comments about this theme, I would like to hear other people's opinions!

My study motivation isn't very high at the moment, but I seem to get all the school work done easily when I get the sparkle to start. A course I'm attending to about sustainability in tourism is raising a lot of thoughts in my head, and I'll allow them to find their way here soon, when I get some sense into that post I'm preparing.

Tomorrow I will take part in a ten kilometers'"ruska" hike that my university is organising, and I am hoping I will get some pretty pictures of Lappish nature in its colours of autumn. There is no word in English for the Finnish word "ruska", but it means the period of autumn, when the leaves of the trees and other plants change their green to red, yellow, orange and brown. Here in Lapland it is amazingly beautiful, because the nature is very special and unique. We have a lot more of small plants on the ground, such as moss and twigs like blueberries, lingonberries and heathers, and less big forests of deciduous trees, so it's the ground changing colour in many areas instead of the tops of the trees. Hopefully my shots will speak for me.

Oh, well, I haven't been doing that much of anything it seems, because I ran out of things to write already. I might as well go to dance some more then. Here I have some pictures from June of a beautiful Nova scotia retriever in a traditional Finnish scenery: lakes and forests. Cheers!

I dream

I dream of a better world, because I'm such a hopeful person. I dream that if I make the world better action by action, maybe other people will notice how nice it is and start doing good actions too. I dream that it might be possible that everyone eventually would be peaceful like buddhas if everyone thought like I do, even though I know it's practically never happening.

I dream of living a life with no chemicals. I dream of a world with clean and fresh food, no polluted waters, no accumulation of poisons in food chains - a life where everyone at least has the chance to choose. I dream of a healthy world.

I dream of being able to live without thinking what how others see me. I dream of dancing as if no one is watching, and never being ashamed of my opinions, clothes or anything where I'm swimming against the stream of majority. I dream of being confident.

I dream of living in the middle of a forest. I dream of having my own house, garden, chicken, to be able to be as self-sufficient as possible. I dream of living with nature.

I dream of having horses. I dream of understanding them, receiving and giving unconditional love from and to them, and every other animal I will ever have. I dream of being able to give the animals staying with me the best possible life, and to have life-long friends of other species. I dream of earning their trust.

I dream of getting really good with photography. I dream of showing my thinking to the world with my pictures. I dream of touching, moving or changing someone's mind with only an image I took. I dream of creating emotions, changes, smiles, laughters and tears with the moments captured on paper. I dream of showing people something they never would see without my camera.

I dream of seeing many different cultures and learning from them. I dream of sharing it all and and teaching it to other people with the help of my camera and words. I dream of teaching.

I dream of being able to change people's ways of thinking, so that my dream of a better world might come true one day. I dream of changing the world with the power of pictures, and the power of words, and the power of love.

I dream of loving someone unconditionally with all my heart, and expecting nothing in return. I dream of being unconditionally loved by that same person. I dream of a family that I can share my dreams with.

I dream of never to stop learning. I dream of never to stop questioning. I dream of never to stop teaching. I dream of never to stop finding happiness inside me. I dream of never to stop seeing the beauty all around me. I dram of never to stop loving. I dream of never to stop dreaming.

Laziness and money

I just found these pictures from last spring that I forgot to post here then, and they happen to be the oldest pics not published so I was wrong about the northern light pics coming only later on. Now that I have learnt a great deal more about how to capture this amazing phenomenon, these seem like such practise pictures now. You can see with your own eyes later and compare the quality between these and the ones taken two nights ago. I am happy I have improved though!

Northen lights are really something you have to experience yourself to understand the magic in them. I can watch fire like hypnotised for a very long time, and the aurora has the same effect on me. The constantly moving, appearing and disappearing rivers and pillars of green light live me wordless. I can see why there are so many legends and myths involving these 'fires of the fox' as we call them in Finnish. Imagine if you didn't know what is going on, but every now and then it just happens to seem like the sky is on green fire - no wonder people have had most imaginative explications to it. To be able to admire this is one of my favourite things in living this north.

I feel weird now for having done absolutely nothing today. It was hard, I almost started to clean up and wash the dishes, but I thought that this is my day of total vacation aka laziness, and tomorrow I will start doing things again. I didn't even have any school work to do to entertain myself. My body and mind are praying for me to do sports, so I will start tomorrow hoping that I'm recovered fully enough from the cold. If not - well, I might be screwed then, I feel like I simply can't stand still one second longer. We'll see tomorrow what happens, cheers everyone until then!

I want to get a job so bad. I have had an interview, and they were first supposed to tell me last week if I got the place or not, then this week, and now it is Sunday and I still haven't heard of it. So I started writing applications again, sent just one at first somewhere where I'd really like to work, and they sent me an interview invitation right away, so I'm hoping it will work out well. I want a job to keep myself busy, I have too much free time now. Maybe I am too quick to finish all the school assignments. Also economic problems are one of my least favourite things ever in this world, I hate how today everything orbits around money. It changes people. 

The problem with money as we know it, is that there have to be more things to buy all the time, or the system won't work. It is more convenient then to sell low quality products so that people will have to buy them often, instead of making one that would last a lifetime. And when there are no more things to invent for the consumers to spend their money, it will simply collapse. Or that's how I see it. I would more like to live in a society that would be based on sharing and kindness. No, I don't have perfect recipe for it, nor do I know if it would really work. If I think about it, that's how people used to live when we still lived in tribes and smaller groups. Maybe it wouldn't even work in a city, because it would be too many people, but in smaller communities I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. 

I think with so many things you can buy in the world, people have gone blind for their real wants and needs. For example if sometimes there were three different yogurt flavours in the closest supermarket, and you could taste all of them and know for sure which one is your favourite. Now it's not reasonably possible to taste every yogurt on the market, so you can always be left wondering, if the one next to the one you chose would have been tastier or healthier or just better. People are constantly unsatisfied, because there are so many things, so many false needs media and advertisements create, that it is not possible to get everything, not even a fracture of what you think you want or need. And that leaves you unhappy, if you don't realise it and make yourself simply not rely on material things. I have noticed that it really doesn't matter, I've learnt to let go of most of the stupid material desires I used to have. Now the material things I grave for are something that can get me closer to my goals in life that are not material, for example to have money to be able to buy plane tickets to travel around the world and get to take pictures of different cultures and places. Or to have money to buy a horse or few and a place where to have them. Goals in a shorter term would be to get a sewing machine so that I could make clothes and things myself instead of buying everything with the stupid world ruling money, or to have money to be able to actually take dance classes to learn to be a better dancer. And to buy different lenses to my camera, so that I could become a better photographer. It's like you can't do anything in the normal world if you don't have enough money. (I say "normal world", because of course you can sleep under the bridge and hitch hike everywhere and eat food the supermarkets throw away and go nowhere and do nothing that requires money. For me it wouldn't be the way I'd like to live, and to meet my goals and passions and just hanging out with friends and exaggerating practically not-living-in-a-box costs money.) Even eating healthy food is too expensive for a person who doesn't have much extra wealth, at least here in Finland. I would really like to eat healthy, so there the job would help me too. 

I hope you can get something out of my night-time thoughts flow, now good night for me and for you too if you read this before bed time :D