Road to Steemfest: 3 Random Facts About Me

Ok, so I'm now preparing my bicycling trip and there's a bit of a chaos going on – in my head and in the real world.

And I should be doing my fiction for the Writers' Block contest too, yet I'm just collecting mushrooms.

^{I don't actually know what species these were so left them there.}

Right, I actually collected mushrooms on the same go when I decided to take a little video for this week's theme: 3 facts about me.

So, number one is that I can throat sing.

There's a meme about Finns having the "purest white genes in Europe" SPOILER: quotation marks because the latter was irony because we're really just Mongolians. Well not entirely, perhaps, but I might actually be making the meme into reality.

I'm not any kind of pro at it, and my technique still isn't perfect, but it's fun to do. Also, you can't help but just kinda feel epic while doing that in the middle of the woods. There's a trans-like state you can easily get into while performing the act.

^{Number two is something that some people know already, but most aren't still aware of it so might as well tell.}

I used to have dreadlocks.

Once upon a time I decided to grow my hair out like a proper metal head. Then I decided to leave it dread by itself. Then I didn't like them anymore and I cut them. Though I did it with style; You see, in Finnish high schools there's a tradition with the senior students who are getting ready for matriculation examinations to hop on trucks with a costume and throw candy all around the city at schools and kindergartens. So, what I did was to cut my dreads away the day before and come to school dressed up like this:

^{The casual morning school look.}

You can guess that people's reactions were quite priceless when I suddenly came to school like that. Some had even problems recognizing me. I still remember my friend's face who came to pick me up at the morning. It was an amusing day. Change always shocks people.

I almost got into Philosophy Olympics

This is kind of a random fact indeed. In high school my philosophy teacher asked if I wanted to participate in this contest called 'Baltic Sea Philosophy Essay Event' (BSPEE). The name is bit misleading though everyone around the world can participate in it. I asked my friend to it too as I knew he knows a thing or two about philosophy. The task on the contest was to make a text based on a one quotation from the given options. There was no aim of "do this or that", which was pretty good I'd say, I liked it.

As it happened, the people who succeeded the best in the BSPEE were also chosen for the Finnish coaching team for the Philosophy Olympiad (high school age class). We had few training sessions that were to be preparation for the Olympiad which is an another essay writing contest. We were taught how to write a good essay, composition, how to reason, specification of notions, think about the audience etc.

It was a good experience even though me nor my friend didn't get into the Olympiad in Netherlands – there was a last entrance examination, by writing an essay of course, where only 2 out of 8 or so people from the training team got into the Olympiad, and my writing was completely dry so I barely got anything written.

But the best part of it all was probably the first training session, which was in Tallinn, Estonia. It was kind of a reward for getting into the team. Spoiler: the real reward was free food – also after other training sessions. If I could get free food every time after philosophizing, I'd be a content man.

Oh! One thing I just realized that kinda nicely ties the previous fact and the current one together: When I cut my dreads away it was at the same time when we had this philosophy training going on, and when I suddenly appeared without my dreads to the last training session, guess what, nobody even talked about my hair. "OMG, you cut your dreads." "Why, when how?" No such comments, at all. To me it tells about a certain quality of a mind to not get too caught up in such detail. There's nothing wrong with it, but I quite preferred that as I didn't want it to be any big deal, perhaps they realized it too. Anyhow, we were all wanna-be-philosophers – that I got along with quite well – so I guess that correlates.

My video is at DLive