Sorry about the extreme mundanity of the subject, but today, whilst doing my business at the university ladies' room I was wondering about toilet communication. Namely, scribblings in the toilet booths. At the university, the current subjects in the ladies' toilet seem to be religion (evangelicals arguing with atheists, with plain old lutherans having a word in between (I think)); men and relationships; children; with a bit on pets. I recall some years ago there was some quite heated debate about the Swedish language in Finland (Swedish is the 2nd official language in Finland, since about 6% speak it as home language; every Finnish-speaker has to learn it as school, like every Swedish-speaker has to learn Finnish). Methinks this would be an interesting subject of social study. Do the subjects of toilet discussion vary according to the place and what sort of people mainly are present in the place? Why toilets especially? And are toilets universally THE place for such communication, or is it selected places?
I went to a concert today, a free record store gig of an alt rock band called Risto (myspace, if you're interested: http://www.myspace.com/ristoristo - they sing in Finnish only though). Immensely good live band. Their lyrics are about a character called Risto whose life is in a REALLY bad way all around. I tested recording on my IPhone (program called iTalk). Surprisingly good quality though of course not state of the art sound! I love the IPhone. One thing that has happened is I've started using ITunes more to check out new music, because it's so easy: just tap the iTunes icon on the phone and buy & download straight to the phone. And not too long ago I was declaring how I hate ITunes and their format policy! Hm...
A friend of mine has made his way to Helsinki, so after the show I went out for a coffee with him. We have VERY different world views (him being an evangelical of the fundamentalist sort) but he is a nice guy so I enjoyed it.
Still busy with work. I'm trying to get the article done by the 10th day, at the latest by 15th, so there'll be enough time for proofreading. Not much left, thankfully, just the conclusion chapter and a bit. Very much doable in a handful of days.
Now to finish, here is a picture of a wintery beach. It's so quiet, completely separated from everything to do with beaches really. Makes me long for the summer really: the sound of the waves, the sun, the warmth, the merry splashing of children in the water.
2 comments:
Ooh I've been a busy bee lately and haven't seen these latest posts. I like your toilet story Maria. The only thing is that we don't have such communication at our uni toilets..they are all totally scribble free, so I couldn't make an analysis here...elsewhere, toilet scribble is of the usually inane or unrepeatable type, such as who loves who and who wants to do things to who....which as I said I won't repeat. Nice to hear of such intelllectual subjects forming your discussions while on the throne ;-)
As for the photo...beautiful! I particularly like the trees.
The best one I've seen in this genre of "Toilet communication" was one I saw at a restaurant here in town a long time ago; when sitting down on the toilet I after a while noticed a very small text on the inside of the door, opposite to my face and some few feet up, the text was so small I couldn't read it when seated so I finally and out of curiousity had to lift my butt from the seat and get a little closer and there I read the following (in Finnish) warning: "For heavens sake, remain seated while you are taking a dump!"
The common advice to us swedish-speakers to swim back to Sweden &c has nowadays moved from the toilets into the Internet and made a toilet out the most common Finnish intenet chat-boards
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