My new favorite blogger

You might not have guessed it from reading this blog, but I have a few unusual habits. (Stop it with the snorting. Please.) No, really, I do.

For one thing, I like Finnish folk music. Twelve years ago, living in DC for the summer while interning at a stuffy magazine that is usually seen in stacks in people's attics, I heard an interview with Varttina on NPR. I went to Tower Records the next day and bought two CDs. (Very unlike me. I am too cheap to buy music.) I listened to those CDs all summer long, only turning them off when my roommate got home. (She was too polite to complain--instead, she would suddenly invent urgent errands if those CDs went in the player, and I figured it out fairly quickly.) At the end of the summer, we (roommate and I) had a friendly chat about how even though we were very unlike each other and would never have become friends, we had been perfect together as roommates (which was true). She then paused. "Except for that song." What song? "That Finnish song that you played over and over and over. You know, that one track that kept repeating. I thought I would lose my mind." That song? That was two whole CDs, twelve songs on each! To her, they all sounded the same, and equally irritating.

Well, I liked them. Sing it with me, now:

Miun sisoini somaiset,
neijot nuoret naapurista.
see-e-ee-linni-koi,
see-e-ee-laja...

How could you not like that? How??

Beats me. Moving on...

Today, one of my coworkers stopped by my desk to ask for something. He is from Uganda. We both speak English, but just for fun, I greeted him in Swahili, and ran through the whole greeting exchange in Swahili. How are you? How is your work? How is your home? How is your family? etc. (The answer to all of these questions is always, "Fine." If the honest answer is that things are un-fine, you say, "Fine, but..." So, if you are asked, "How is your family?" you might reply, "Fine, but my wife was eaten by a mountain lion last night.")

I know this little tidbit of Swahili because a friend studied in Kenya for a semester and taught me when he got back. Thirteen years ago. I remember it. I also can spout strange tidbits of Mandarin, Kikuyu, Japanese, Polish, Lithuanian, and a bunch of other languages, along with the four or five or six languages I can more or less speak. I like languages.

I also like knitting. So when I was reading the latest issue of knitty, and followed a link to a knitter's blog, and started reading said blog of said fellow knitter, it did not strike me as strange that there was someone else who liked to knit. I mean, there are a lot of us these days (even though I WAS KNITTING LONG LONG LONG BEFORE IT WAS COOL. In fact, I knitted in the days when it was downright geeky to knit. And I revelled in my geekiness, and am slightly irritated that knitting is now cool. I mean, really, what's next? Will everyone else be drop-spinning on the bus too? Pfff.)

But this knitter also likes languages. Preferably strange ones. I realized I was onto something when I found that she also listens to Finnish music. That was enough for a bookmark on my computer's browser, right there. But then I read on, and discovered that this person had also been pregnant in an environment where being pregnant was considered about as socially acceptable as walking around with visible nose hair coated in big goopy boogers. And she probably has a collection of reference books at least as big as mine. Because she... writes the dictionary.

Swoon.

Okay, so, my new favorite blog is here. But I'd start by reading this post.