Degrees of separation

Repeated immigration is an effective way to mark the passage of time. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing in November, 2001, September, 2003, August, 2007, and so on, and gauge everything else by those markers -- including how long it's been since I, say, watched a Eurovision Song Contest live on television. Caught up like the rest of Finland in the worldwide phenomenon that was Lordi, I had even gone so far as to break my moratorium on freelancing (copywriting is overpaid and makes you lazy) and pitch the continental explosion of unabashed nationalistic fervour and bad taste to a magazine back home (they didn't bite).

So I'm ashamed to say that what with all the recent excitement, I entirely forgot about Euroviisut (as the Finns say) until I cracked open my copy of the New Yorker (shut up) this morning to find a fucking hilarious article on this year's contest by Anthony Lane. A taste:

"A deranged Estonian pianist smacked his keyboard with one raised fist, like a butcher flattening an escalope of veal. A pair of ice-white blondes, one with a squeezebox, decided to revive the moribund tradition of oompah-pah--or presumably, because they were Finnish, oom-päa-päa [sic]. A Belgian boy came on to croon 'Me and My Guitar,' otherwise known as 'Him and His Crippling Delusion....A smirking Serb of indeterminate gender, wearing a tailcoat, sang flat, hiccupping now and then for dramatic effect. Order was at first restored by Marcin Mrozinski, from Poland, who was backed by five demure women in national dress, and then destroyed as two of the women tore the white blouse off the third, to reveal a sort of peasant boob tube. An old Eurovision trick, this: the mid-song strip, timed to coincide with musical fatigue."

I could go on. Of course, Lane is British, and states this from the outset, because while people there feel about it much like I imagine Americans feel about, say, White Castle, a disgusting yet irresistible part of their national landscape, it is absolutely verboten for anybody outside the EU to diss Eurovision. All the same, the Brits are EV snobs, and, oh, never mind. The whole point of this (just typed "pint") is to say that I'm realizing how this move to the U.S. feels like I'm one step farther away from Finland, where, by the time I left, I'd spent as much time as in my precious Toronto. Adding to the uncanny effect is the media buyout of this (June 28) issue of the New Yorker by Canadian advertisers, to draw attention north to the G8, an event that is, IMHO, even more ridiculous than Eurovision.

One of the things people ask when they learn I lived in a foreign-speaking country for that long is, How is your Finnish these days? While based in sheer interest (or politesse), surely, for me it's a humiliating question: given that I have occasion to use Finnish outside Finland approximately once a year, when addressing Christmas cards to family there, "my Finnish" is suffering. I've resorted to carrying around my Finnish-English dictionaries, each of which weighs approximately as much as a two-year-old human child, from apartment to apartment as penance, in hopes of maybe coming across a word that needs translating.

Even Mr. O is losing the Finnish fever that attacked him so near-fatally in our first years in Toronto (to be fair, he did admit he would rather have made such a move as a younger man, before he was so set in his ways). Over the last few months, with New York on the horizon, he made overtures to our future return to Toronto, or Canada in general, a permanent settlement which he once in an argument accused me of holding behind my back like a secret plot or an ace of spades. I offered to put it in writing that such plot did not exist, and that Finland was certainly a first choice should we ever have kids that needed to be educated, for instance. I mean, who could deny a child such a cultural cornucopia as the lyrics to Latvia's 2010 entry "What For?":

I've asked my Uncle Joe
But he can't speak
Why does the wind still blow?
And blood still leaks?
So many questions now
With no reply
What for do people live until they die?
...
Only Mr. God knows why
(But) His phone today is out of range.

In closing I'd like to announce that Mr. O got his SSN card yesterday, which brings with it many happy things including a paycheck and a large dose of relief that somehow motivated me to start up this blog again after thinking about it for weeks. We're going to celebrate by getting blasted on vodka and eating meatballs and herring with a good Finnish friend at a Nordic restaurant tomorrow night, in honour of Juhannus or midsummer, an unforgettable Finnish holiday. Kippis.

Beaten to a pulp

Canadian forestry industry realizes it's getting its ass kicked by Finnish forestry industry. Details on this and other interesting non-World Cup hockey related Canada vs. Finland facts laid out by the excellent Konrad Yakabuski in ROB online.

Approaching normal

As moving madness blurs into holiday madness, I can feel a shift to a new stage in our little immi experiment. We're mastering the morning rush, we know which shops have which stuff (we even made rye bread and squeaky cheese), we have our brunch place and a few well-kept secrets, our friends are used to our being in the same area code. I've even been back to Edmonton twice already, with another trip coming soon. And if Mr. O gets this job, which is (dare I say) likely, then things will be different/improving/almost normal.
Okay, so Mr. O is still judging Finland vs. Canada matches in his head on a daily basis, but he's also starting to see that both places have both advantages and disadvantages. A woman I know who moved here from Denmark more than 40 years ago told me the other day that the thing that appealed to her about this place was that nobody was going to carry you through, you really had to make your own way. And it's true. While I'll never stop believing in the basic social net that the Nordic countries have so perfected, and you'll never convince me that free universal daycare and post-secondary education are anything but pretty damn sweet, I can see a point there. Living in Finland, you start to expect that the government will clean up every mess - the rampant alcoholism that spread its ugly all over our old neighbourhood comes to mind - and so the individual need not ever stick his neck out. Canadians, with their head-up-ass time-waste of a government, suffer from no such illusions. Even in Toronto, which is the quintessential every-man-for-himself city, people still help each other out. It's a ultra-thin lining, but there it is all the same.
A week ago, we were seriously talking about picking up and heading back to Stockholm, where Mr. O would have a sweet job and I'd take a Swedish course, make meatballs. In a way, it feels like the easy option. On the other hand, the thought of packing alone gives me vertigo. And Mr. O, fed up as he was, couldn't give up on the few plans we've already made on this continent next summer: a trip down south for a family wedding, a weekend at the Folk Fest with my sibs. There are still things we need to do here, and so Stockholm will have to wait. So will Berlin, and Helsinki, and all the other places we still want to go. Now that things have calmed down a bit move-wise, we can take a bit of time to have a good time, or just do nothing at all.

Last out of the gate...and yet

I have held off from starting a blog for so long, I'm almost blushing. I'm a late adopter to start with, and on top of that the kind who babbles on and then regrets it all afterwards. And I'll rework a sentence to death.

And yet here I am, a few years after the fact, jumping into the pool. This is more than anything a personal record of our strange adventure, moving home with my Finnish partner after six years abroad. You would think this would be a relatively simple thing. It's not. So I will also post any resources I find along the way that might be of use to anyone reading.

When I moved to Helsinki my fancy new employer handled the paperwork, it cost me nothing (or next to nothing) and it took two months. I figured I'd be here for a year, maybe two. The plan was to hang out and travel around Europe, maybe Asia. Long story short my boyfriend is now my husband, and we're thinking if we want to move back to Canada, it's sort of now or never. I'm getting comfy here in Helsinki, I love my friends, and we have good jobs etc. But Mr. O has always wanted to live in Toronto and I would also love to move back. It's been so long that I can't claim to know it the way I used to, and it will be interesting to see where we end up. I have all kinds of anxieties and at the same time big plans for starting over.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we have to get there...and this is the reason I started this blog. While our "plan" all along has been to move back, neither of us really realized just what was involved in this - the amount of time, money, and patience. Canada is built on immigration and yet I wonder how many people living there have really experienced the fearsome foe that is the Canadian immigration bureaucracy. One look at the maze of vagaries on the CIC website is enough to discourage many potential new Canadians, I'm sure. Not to rag on public servants - it's obvious the system is overloaded - but the site is light on the kind of details that a good immigration lawyer will tell you for free. Our little case file (now just a zygote, really) will be one of many and relatively straightforward, no refugee claims or extended family members to consider. And yet we're looking at 9 months before Mr. O gets his permanent residence via in-country family class spousal sponsorship. Did I say daunting?